The inevitable consequence of one-button publishing is accidental publication. Messages can be distributed to millions on a whim. This isn’t new; people have been sending unprofessional, revealing, or otherwise incriminating e-mails since the advent of internet communication.
Web 2.0 serves to amplify these mistakes. Damage control on the social web is almost impossible with retweets, Google cache, and blogs that instantly blare your worst secrets on an internet loudspeaker.
This is not to make a victim out of the guy who posts incriminating things that were intended for friends only but instead ended up on Openbook. Or Glenn Beck.
Beck is in hot water after it was discovered that he or someone with access to his Twitter account had favorited a tweet showcasing a white power forum.
Dedicated critic “Stop Beck” picked up the tip and instantly levied accusations of racism and white nationalism against Beck. This generated significant buzz, leading Tommy Christopher to point out on Mediaite that “the appearance of this tweet on Beck’s favorites list does not denote an endorsement of it.”
Beck or his staff probably did inadvertently click the little star that, when clicked, adds a tweet to a user’s list of favorites. However, the racist content of that tweet is not inconsistent with a popular perception of Beck’s ideology. If favoring that tweet were completely inconsistent with his character, the story would mean much less.
But how does Beck, a media personality who plays the spin game, screw up so badly? The real answer is that we all screw up. Social media sites like Twitter are casual, intended for personal use. There is no way that people can comfortably act as if they are being watched by 265,000+ people at all times. Few people in the public eye have remained that way while making no mistakes whatsoever.
This means that it’s probably too risky to even log in to a Twitter account with more than X followers. Don’t log in to various sites unless you have to. Functions like searching can usually be done without having to sign in. Disable cookies. Put as many things as reasonably possible between you and your status updates in case you have a few too many.
The internet is not going to create more barriers to prevent you from embarrassing yourself (I lied, Google offers a service that prevents people from sending drunken e-mails), so those barriers have to be created on one’s own. Political actors should protect their accounts not just from hackers, but from themselves and their teams. Plenty of politicians “misspeak,” but I suspect that many, many more will “misclick” as we further adopt social media.
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