Phone calls can have more than one person, for example, so those laws could still apply cleanly. IMO - anything with a bound and mutual audience is "Direct Mes

Phone calls can have more than one person, for example, so those laws could still apply cleanly. IMO - anything with a bound and mutual audience is "Direct Messaging". Eg. a private FB account posting to ONLY its followers (who had to be manually "friend request accepted") is a private message. A public twitter feed that anyone can view is a public broadcast. A private message with the permissions changed by the creator to become a public is - wait for it - public. The grey area here in my view is FB groups (which can have 10s of thousands of members). I would say its public since its not universally mutual with each pair. that said, if you IRL went to AA or church or something and shared something for a group, you'd consider it a private conversation. I think this is where the vagueness of law would say something like "could the speaker have consented to this audience with the expectation that it would be private."