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What My Landlord Learned About Me from Twitter

• a3n 11y ago
  Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account? (Actually I think I have three Twitter accounts, never used, and no idea what their names are.) Or might they believe me, and think I'm too odd-stream to rent their apartment or work in their office?
  • joshuapants 11y ago
    > Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account? I'm in a similar situation. The only social media I have is a private Twitter account that I used for about 2 days and posted basically nothing to. People in general seem to understand my choice, though that might just be my social circle. I haven't yet been in a position where I've been asked to provide social media accounts for someone to check my credibility.
  • Amorymeltzer 11y ago
    Probably depends on your age and other characteristics. If you can be called a millennial, a 2013 study (http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?R=1009748 http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?R=1009748) found that there's over an 80% chance you use social media. That goes down each previous generation, so a baby-boomer should be expected NOT to have such things. Also, other factors are probably relevant. "No twitter" is very different from "No twitter, because I'm married with twins."
    • pluma 11y ago
      It's important to remember that "80% chance you do X" also means "20% chance you DON'T do X". And "20%" means "1 in 5". We like to conflate large percentages as "practically 100%" but even ".1%" just means "1 in 1000". For large groups even low percentages can represent a significant quantity.
  • throwaway12309 11y ago
    I have no twitter, no fb, no reddit, no g+, Github, and my account here is a throwaway which I regularly abandon and create a new one. I was never asked for any of this (well, except github on job applications in the past which never been a problem when I explain them I don't have one) and if in the future I am, I probably will drop the deal (whatever it is) on the spot.
    • personlurking 11y ago
      And how are you getting on? Any problems, ie not being invited to friends' events because they're only announced on FB?
      • jimbobimbo 11y ago
        If the only way your friends reach out to you is FB, then they're probably not so much of friends. My real friends know my email, phone, IM, etc. There're plenty of ways to get in touch, if you value the person you're trying to reach.
      • throwaway12309 11y ago
        No problems to be honest. I use email/phone if I want to do something with someone (mostly phone). There may be events like a house warming party that only gets posted to FB, but somehow that tends to reach me through someone, and if they don't, well.. not much is lost to be honest. To be fair, most of the people I hang out with aren't that into Facebook/other or even if they are, they know I'm not there so they reach out to me/my wife over the phone. I'm in my early 30's if it it counts for anything.
        • a3n 11y ago
          Sorta me too, except I'm in my late 50s. I'm not really friends with "a group." I'm friends with individuals, many of whom know each other or don't, and they contact me. It's a solved problem, since before the web, and even before the internet.
          • 11y ago
  • VLM 11y ago
    Make some dead accounts. I have FB, twitter, linkedin, haven't logged into any of them in months, maybe years now. I've made three tweets in my life, all employer acceptable, one in Sept 2008 stating this is pretty boring, another a year or so ago reporting a software bug (seriously WTF this is how they accept reports?) and one more recently verifying my keybase key. The growth rate seems to be accelerating over the past seven years. It never fails to amaze me I have 11 followers none of whom I can identify (spammers I think). They are legitimately my accounts, I just don't use their services. I have a paper list somewhere with over 220 accounts, many defunct of course. Most accounts across the entire internet are, of course, unused or empty, its not going to be unusual.
• ianstallings 11y ago
  I've sanitized all of my social media because, as a startup founder, the magnifying glass of "due diligence" is hovering over me at all times. The last thing I need is a problem because of something trivial. In fact, regarding twitter, my policy is to never use it except to link to other things or retweet someone else's post. Because a 140 character statement on a complex topic is a recipe for disaster.
  • leereeves 11y ago
    I find it worrying that the only people who feel safe speaking publicly on so many issues are people who profit from controversy and people with nothing to lose.
    • VLM 11y ago
      Its the soft dictatorship concept. If you want to eliminate free speech you can do with with secret police and firing squads, but a more advanced, civilized, and more importantly, cheaper, way to do it is implement intensive self censorship. Sure, you can say anything you want, as long as it offends no one on the entire internet. What little is left is no threat to those in power. How bout the weather out there? Its like the old problem of how does an aristocracy keep itself in power? Well the expensive, crude, and unreliable method is lots of soldiers and aggressive top down force, but a more advanced, cheaper, reliable method is to propose two identical figurehead leaders with wildly varying PR campaigns and convince the public that selecting between the identical figureheads is the definition of freedom.
• pluma 11y ago
  How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
  • TodPunk 11y ago
    "I don't like X unenforceable thing" is the mark of our generation. Every tweet is public, and if anyone thinks they've protected them somehow, that is both unlikely to be true in all cases and definitely is missing the point that making your tweets private is a different statement entirely. This isn't even anything new. We used to ask for references, and we'd follow up further if the stakes were high enough. I got interviewed by a police officer from another city because my neighbor had applied to the department. Said neighbor didn't know that everyone in his life they could get a hold of would be asked questions about him, but it makes sense. Privacy is so rarely what we think it is, and the new generations (of which I'm a part) have so very little shared understanding of the consequences of doing something publically in a world where all of it is likely recorded and shared in a nicely indexed format. The answer to this is not regulation or other bullshit feel-good answers. The answer, as it so often is, is education. I realize that is going to help very few people, but then again, regulation on something as ambiguous as this will help 0.
    • pluma 11y ago
      Except this kind of behaviour is very likely to be illegal in Germany. Sure, violation is hard to prove if it isn't blatant but this kind of regulation prevents the behaviour from becoming socially acceptable. Case in point: try asking an employee in Germany to give you a urine sample. There are very few jobs where a legal case can be made for mandatory drug testing and even fewer where the employer is allowed to receive medical information. It is my understanding that in the US photos on resumes are generally frowned upon and often sufficient grounds for rejection because of the high risk of anti-discrimination litigation. How can it then be acceptable for a landlord to take your social media accounts into consideration before making a decision? Yes, public social media content is public, but the same argument can be made about anything you do in public. Yet nobody would think it acceptable to follow you around in public and take careful note of everything you do or say in the open. That the Internet makes the digital equivalent of this behaviour easier doesn't mean it becomes more appropriate. But such ideas of basic decency and common courtesy appear to be lost on the generation that made "doxing" and revenge porn a thing.
• imgabe 11y ago
  Unfortunately supply and demand in a place like NY is such that people will probably have to put up with nonsense like this. In other areas there would probably be a market opportunity for landlords who are only going to focus on things that are actually relevant to whether someone is going to be a good tenant or not.
  • pluma 11y ago
    Frankly I don't see what asking for someone's Twitter handle adds except for a high risk of (intentional or un) discrimination. Who are you trying to filter out? Credit checks are likely already required so you already know their financial situation. If they're lying about anything critical, the contract likely already has that covered. If anything, it's a tone-deaf sociopathic attempt to "get to know each other".
    • VLM 11y ago
      I've noticed the theme of "twitter as customer support" and I suspect that would be incredibly unappealing to a landlord. Being known as "that landlord on twitter with the dripping faucet" is probably not a major career goal for most landlords. Then there's people who post pictures of property damage "So drunk I puked all over the carpet last night", perhaps with an attached pix of vodka and blue kool aide, is not going to sell well to a guy who just paid for new carpet in his rental. And then there's pets, cat owners can't avoid posting cat pix, although "in the olden days" a quiet although banned pet might have been tolerated under a "no problem for me, no problem for you" doctrine but if half your posts are cat pix its kind of hard to consider that "keeping quiet". At the complex I lived in during my bachelor years there was some variation between what corporate thought one onsite manager would do and enforce, and what one onsite manager physically could do and enforce, and given 200 hours of theoretical work per week the manager was very libertarian WRT no complaints = not a high priority for him. But he can't CYA with corporate if some tenant insists on posting daily (banned) cat pictures. Not to mention if it came to eviction time having to explain to a judge why documented misbehavior was tolerated for months or only enforced against some pet owners (here's three twitter accounts of kittens, why is my hyperactive Shetland Sheepdog the only pet the rule is enforced against, surely its because I'm a minority)
• DanAndersen 11y ago
  It's a shame to see the actual outcome of the false promises of social media. So much talking about how social networks would bring people together and help people connect and interact and give people a voice, but in the end it seems that the biggest results are that large companies have a new outlet to get eyeballs on their PR, online troughs for people to get their feed, and people have to build up even more false layers of "personal branding" around themselves, curating their eternal public record to avoid hurting their future career prospects.
  • drcross 11y ago
    Or just leave your phone at home and go outside, in which case you don't need to worry about it at all.
• r3bl 11y ago
  The title is highly misleading. It says nothing about what her landlord actually learned from her Twitter feed. It should be titled something like this: What I learned about myself when my landlord asked me for my Twitter account
• jqm 11y ago
  Cycling twitter posts at top of article were very annoying and not at all what I wanted to see early in the morning. My brain is still trying to recover two minutes later. Horrible.
  • leereeves 11y ago
    It's the third animation like this I've seen today, with text cycling far too fast to read. I hope it's not a new trend.
  • coldcode 11y ago
    I thought my browser was screwing up for about a minute before I realized it was a stupid animation.
  • allenp 11y ago
    I'm probably in the minority and actually liked the animation - I think it represents the spastic, thoughtless, throw-away nature of (most) twitter messages.
• MarketingJason 11y ago
  Unless I missed something, it doesn't seem like the landlords were demanding this information. Is the worry that they might not consider you if you don't answer every question?
• vkb 11y ago
  The author writes, "Before I started looking for an apartment, I never gave much thought to the cumulative identity I had been presenting, or even performing, on the Internet. " This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard. I've written a post about this feeling [1], but I don't have any solution. As someone who enjoys sharing ideas through writing and meeting people online, but is also very aware of how mob-happy our online civic society has become, it is a hard position to be in. [1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2014/01/the-snarling-crowd-in-the-shadows-watching-us/ http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2014/01/the-snarling-crowd-in-th...
  • austenallred 11y ago
    I occasionally long for an anonymous/ephemeral social network that is not completely full of garbage (I.e. 4chan). I have enough Twitter followers that everything I say is subject to intense scrutiny, and that's kind of annoying. I'm tempted to throw together a quick, anonymous network targeted for tech people, but I wouldn't have time to moderate it.
  • theseatoms 11y ago
    I very much feel this, and it's kept me from sharing online. It's easy to imagine worst case scenario, a la Justine Sacco. My online writing has become riddled with caveats and disclaimers, pandering to the least charitable readers. Poor style, I know.
  • Nicholas_C 11y ago
    I would say about a quarter of the things I type out on social media and elsewhere on the Internet don't get posted because I think about their implications and scrap the post.
    • WDCDev 11y ago
      Self censorship is one of social media's greatest accomplishments.
• tjsix 11y ago
  While it seems, at least through what the author reveals, that they were in fact requesting her twitter handle for background info purposes, requests like these may not always be what they appear to be. As an example, my wife and I recently enrolled our son into an early start program. One of the initial questions in the parent info section was twitter handle. As it struck me as quite odd that a publicly funded program would request this info, I asked why and for what purpose they would need this info for. I was surprised at their response - it's their primary means of notifying parents in the event of a closure, emergency, schedule change, etc. and for misc communications. They request the parents twitter handle and follow those who have children actively enrolled (via opt-in) to enable DM's.
  • lentil_soup 11y ago
    Why not a phone number or an email? It's way simpler ...
• wil421 11y ago
  I dont think a lot of millennials understand the implications of posting personal thoughts or information on public websites. I've never had any known repercussions from my posts but I know of 3 instances where people I knew have. Perhaps I dont know of an instance where I was looked over because of Social Media. One was a person failed a class for saying "the final was so easy it was like I cheated." Another person was denied a house to rent because they told the Landlord they didnt have dogs. Landlord checked their facebook and saw pics of his two large pitbulls. The last person had a pic of them uploaded on Instagram while they were eating at work in uniform with their middle finger up (we worked at a restaurant). There was an investigation and person was suspended until it was finished. Luckily he didnt loose his job and was allowed to come back. Be care what you post for!