A writer reflects on past mistakes and current complexities.
In 2014, the website Gawker published an essay entitled "Twitter Is Public," in response to several controversies over the practice of using "private" tweets in news stories or other editorial aggregations. Some of the tweeters who'd been quoted saw this as an invasion of their privacy, especially around sensitive conversations. The response to this objection was, as the essay's headline states, simple: Twitter (now called X) is public. |
The heart of the Gawker essay's argument is this: "Most things that you write on Twitter will be seen only by your followers. Most things that you write on Twitter will not be read by the public at large. But that is only because the public at large does not care about most things that you have to say." This sentiment hints at an inherent conundrum of social media. Certainly, the world could be watching, but most of the time, for most people, it absolutely is not. Only your friends and followers are watching, which means that social media doesn't always, or even typically, feel public. |
So while someone might not have logical recourse to complain when anyone quotes, retweets, amplifies, mocks or otherwise responds to something she's posted online, she might be excused for feeling slightly surprised or even distressed. |
If you don't have any sympathy for people who post things publicly and then are upset to find the whole world responding to them, maybe ask yourself this: Do you believe it's OK to post a private text from a friend or a partner to a public forum? Do you think it's ethical to publicly share messages posted in a privately accessible group chat? The fact is that the plethora of communication venues available in the digital age — texts, DMs, emails, group chats, TikToks, the posts formerly known as tweets, threads, online forums, Slacks and so on — have complicated the boundaries between private and public. And not everyone is able to intuitively navigate them. |
Lux Alptraum takes up the issue for Times Opinion in a new guest essay. She has sympathy for people — especially teenagers — who can't quite conceptualize how public the internet can be. She was once one of those teens. Yes, the internet is public. That's an incontrovertible fact. But, as Alptraum writes in her essay, that doesn't make it OK to behave toward teens online in ways we would not accept in any other context. |
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