Public tweets are public. This
is a fact, not a value judgement.
Twitter gives users the option to “protect” their accounts, only
granting access to those a user chooses, but most folks voluntarily
keep accounts open—which means that anything they post can be seen
by anyone else on the Internet. It can also be re-tweeted,
screenshotted, or even linked to from an outside site.
If it seems like I’m overexplaining a pretty basic concept here:
yes. And I’m really only paraphrasing what Hamilton Nolan has
said better before. But this idea—that public tweets are
public, can be viewed by the public, and can be shared in public—is
apparently rather controversial in some circles. Twice in the past
few months, journalists linking to public tweets have been targeted
by folks hellbent on making the concept of violence so broad as to
be meaningless and ignoring the forest for the (preferably posted
with trigger warnings) trees.
The latest incident stems from an Amber A’Lee Frost piece in
Jacobin, “Bro Bash.” After
seeing Thomas Piketty and journalist Doug Henwood referred
to as “broconomists”, Frost criticized what she perceives as a
nouveau left tendency to lower the bar for what’s considered
“outlandish masculinity.”
Much like the hipster, Frost writes, “nearly any characteristic
can be conveniently attributed to the bro,” and nearly
anyone—including a “chichi French economist” and a
“poetry-loving Brooklyn dad on lefty radio”—can be labeled as such.
The main thrust of Frost’s piece seems to be that there’s a
resurgent tendency to view data as suspect, and this stems from
both anti-elitism and “the reduction of feminist critique to the
Fear of The Bro and His Insidious Patriarchal
Methodologies.”
Make of that what you will—but no one engaging with the essay
cared to. Instead, most of the attention has been focused on a
link, now removed, to a public tweet from Al Jazeera journalist
Sarah Kendzior. It was offered as an example of someone applying
“the diminutive label of bro” to “violent aggression like rape
threats,” of which Frost disapproved. For this, Frost,
Jacobin, and its editor, Megan Erickson, were accused
of “endangering (Kendzior’s) life.” Anyone who disagreed was
“defending
misogyny” and probably “part of
the pro-rape left.”
If you’re thinking are you fucking kidding
me?, then
join the
club.
But there were also a significant number of people chiming in
against Frost for linking without
consent.
The last time Twitter erupted over this was March, when a
Buzzfeed reporter compiled
some Tweets about what women were wearing when sexually
assaulted. “Twitter is full of people who are here to talk to each
other. Not the world,” wrote
activist Mikki Kendall at the time. A Change.org petition called
for “journalists, media companies and social media platforms like
Twitter … to outline the ethical and moral obligations
journalists have to not engage in violence toward marginalized
people, survivors of sexual violence and others when engaging in
online discussions.” Here, not engaging in
violence includes not linking to and/or quoting public
tweets.
That controversy
eventually evolved into debate on whether quoting rape
survivors’ tweets, even with their permission (which the Buzzfeed
reporter had), was ethical for journalists. In this case, the
argument is more explicitly that writers should treat public tweets
like they’re not public, for some reason, and doing otherwise may
be a form of HTML terrorism.
If I spoke at a public panel, tacked a paper to a public
bulletin board with my name on it, or stood ranting on a street
corner, any of these statements could be quoted by journalists with
legal impunity—and I highly doubt most people would find this
ethically problematic, either. Under what possible rationale does
someone have a reasonable expectation of privacy when
speaking/writing/ranting on a worldwide platform?
Nolan got to the crux of the issue at Gawker:
Just because you wish that someone would not quote something
that you said in public does not mean that that person does not
have the right to quote something that you said in public.
Anyone who has ever publicly spoken or written something dumb
(hello), only to have that thing quoted and insulted by others, has
probably wished that the thing that they said or wrote was not
public. That feeling, while understandable, is only a wish. It does
not mean that the thing they said or wrote was not, in fact,
public.
Whether and when public tweets are public—answers: yes, and
always—is not up for debate. It’s a fact, and one that dealing in
reality requires acknowledging. If you don’t want people to link to
or quote your Tweets, then privatize your account or shut your
virtual mouth. It really is that simple.
I’ll let New York Times media columnist David
Carr sum it up. A whopping two years ago—that’s about a
century in meme and outrage cycles—
Carr told Poytner he saw Twitter as a “village common”
and anything posted there as fair game. “Everything said there,
however considered or not, is public,” Carr said. “I assume that if
someone is saying something on Twitter, they want it to be
known.”