4 ms·

Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?

by mdoms 5y ago

AdrianB1 5y ago
That is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram, etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting anything.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  This is why I purge my old tweets automatically. Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.
  - berniemadoff69 5y ago
    archive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi
    - thereare5lights 5y ago
      Do those archive let you search for tweets?
      - berniemadoff69 5y ago
        sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/ http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      Deleting edgy stuff at least gives plausible deniability. "I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.
- notJim 5y ago
  The pseudonymous alt is the way to go for this, unless you're mostly using twitter for things related to work. I bet some of your colleagues have alts :)
dionidium 5y ago
I tweet and I really enjoy it. I get a ton of value out of it. But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.
ruined 5y ago
tweets can't ruin your life any more than talking out loud anywhere else. the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Easy to find "bad tweets", easy to immediately publicize the "bad tweets" to the entire planet almost instantly, easy to have it trusted that the bad thing was said as the twitter timestamp exists and a bunch of trusted people talking about a screenshot if you delete it confirms it's genuine, not to mention most people don't use twitter imaging themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation, the dynamic is pretty different.
  - ruined 5y ago
    >most people don't use twitter [imagining?] themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation and there's the problem. like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.
    - salt-thrower 5y ago
      Yup. I mentioned this in another comment but one of the key problems is the discrepancy between the impact tweets really have, and the ease with which Twitter allows you to post them. Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button. In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  The searchable digital record is the key difference. Statements out loud to one or more people are often: A) tailored to that audience, B) carry much more context than a piece of text on a screen, and C) are a way of growing and exploring new ideas without the commitment of recording them to an easily searchable record for the rest of time. The long-term ramifications of saying something stupid in a conversation that isn't recorded are far less severe than they would be if every word you said was recorded and searchable forever. A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.
salt-thrower 5y ago
You're being downvoted, presumably because of the idea that "if you don't say anything stupid, you'll be fine." And yet acceptably edgy jokes from 10 years ago can easily become dumpster fires of controversy today. There's simply no reason to engage in it unless you treat every social media post as something you would say to all future employers. Including private chats. EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.
stalfosknight 5y ago
This right here is why I just lurk on social media. There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today. Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there. With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  Completely agree. The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook. A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing. Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...
px43 5y ago
Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a single tweet, and who didn't deserve it. Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".
- telotortium 5y ago
  David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a black academic) that argued that violent protests following the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic support in the following presidential election, while non-violent protests increase Democratic support: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow.... David Shor is a committed socialist and Democratic data scientist, but that was not enough to protect him from accusations of racism in the post-George-Floyd period. I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.
  - px43 5y ago
    In the responses I read through on twitter, no one accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you said, he's doing fine now. The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.
    - salt-thrower 5y ago
      Perhaps "life ruining" is an exaggeration but losing your job for discussing the effectiveness of different protest tactics is an insane knee-jerk reaction made by the people who fired him. He clearly agreed with the movement and ostensibly wanted to help it be as effective as possible. > in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.

Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?

by mdoms 5y ago

Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?

That is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram, etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting anything.

theshrike79 5y ago
This is why I purge my old tweets automatically. Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.
- berniemadoff69 5y ago
  archive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi
  - thereare5lights 5y ago
    Do those archive let you search for tweets?
    - berniemadoff69 5y ago
      sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/ http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Deleting edgy stuff at least gives plausible deniability. "I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.
notJim 5y ago
The pseudonymous alt is the way to go for this, unless you're mostly using twitter for things related to work. I bet some of your colleagues have alts :)

dionidium 5y ago

I tweet and I really enjoy it. I get a ton of value out of it. But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.

ruined 5y ago

tweets can't ruin your life any more than talking out loud anywhere else. the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.

fullshark 5y ago
Easy to find "bad tweets", easy to immediately publicize the "bad tweets" to the entire planet almost instantly, easy to have it trusted that the bad thing was said as the twitter timestamp exists and a bunch of trusted people talking about a screenshot if you delete it confirms it's genuine, not to mention most people don't use twitter imaging themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation, the dynamic is pretty different.
- ruined 5y ago
  >most people don't use twitter [imagining?] themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation and there's the problem. like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    Yup. I mentioned this in another comment but one of the key problems is the discrepancy between the impact tweets really have, and the ease with which Twitter allows you to post them. Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button. In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.
salt-thrower 5y ago
The searchable digital record is the key difference. Statements out loud to one or more people are often: A) tailored to that audience, B) carry much more context than a piece of text on a screen, and C) are a way of growing and exploring new ideas without the commitment of recording them to an easily searchable record for the rest of time. The long-term ramifications of saying something stupid in a conversation that isn't recorded are far less severe than they would be if every word you said was recorded and searchable forever. A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.

salt-thrower 5y ago

You're being downvoted, presumably because of the idea that "if you don't say anything stupid, you'll be fine." And yet acceptably edgy jokes from 10 years ago can easily become dumpster fires of controversy today. There's simply no reason to engage in it unless you treat every social media post as something you would say to all future employers. Including private chats. EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.

stalfosknight 5y ago

This right here is why I just lurk on social media. There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today. Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there. With social media, the only way to win is not to play.

josephorjoe 5y ago
Completely agree. The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook. A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing. Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...

px43 5y ago

Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a single tweet, and who didn't deserve it. Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".

telotortium 5y ago
David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a black academic) that argued that violent protests following the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic support in the following presidential election, while non-violent protests increase Democratic support: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow.... David Shor is a committed socialist and Democratic data scientist, but that was not enough to protect him from accusations of racism in the post-George-Floyd period. I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.
- px43 5y ago
  In the responses I read through on twitter, no one accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you said, he's doing fine now. The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    Perhaps "life ruining" is an exaggeration but losing your job for discussing the effectiveness of different protest tactics is an insane knee-jerk reaction made by the people who fired him. He clearly agreed with the movement and ostensibly wanted to help it be as effective as possible. > in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.