What Is Public?

July 27, 2014 12:40 AM

Anil Dash reflects on the changing meaning of public content online.
posted by ellieBOA (32 comments total)

Nice. MeFi's own, a'course.
posted by XMLicious at 12:58 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mod note: A couple of comments deleted; let's skip the white background derail, please?
posted by taz (staff) at 1:14 AM on July 27, 2014 [7 favorites]

Join most web forum and you'll be tracked, many companies and organizations set up their own forums, which they may or may not disclose as being run by them. How do you know that that gay site you signed up for isn't run by the Westboro lot who are caching your email and IP address? What about an insurance company that is making decisions based on what you reveal online through a facebook group they set up. That is already happening forum and FB group memberships are being sold by data brokers and App makers daily.
posted by lilburne at 3:00 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

What's that old standard response - free speech doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of your speech, something like that?

There are various forms of private messaging such as Twitter DMs and the old SMTP e-mail system which can be used to share messages and content non-publicly.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 3:24 AM on July 27, 2014

I hope that we can move away from the idea of "It's in public so you don't get to complain about whatever somebody else does." When a company searches your tweets so they can advertise to you - a friend recently tweeted "Ugh, I'm going to have to get cable" about some new show, and a cable company replied to the post to advertise to her - it feels creepy, as if you were hanging out at a bar with your friends and someone came up to advertise their product. If the only alternatives are "don't get creeped out by that" and "do everything in private," I can't help but think the public internet is going to be immeasurably weakened.

I don't know what kind of technological solutions exist, but I think social norms can evolve to deal with the situations where everybody can see what you say but it's more like a bar conversation or subway conversation than publishing an article in the New Yorker.
posted by Jeanne at 4:53 AM on July 27, 2014 [11 favorites]

I get what Dash is saying intellectually. And yet, when it comes to Twitter, I can't make myself feel it. Tweeting doesn't feel like talking with my friends at a bar; it feels like broadcasting. Maybe because in a bar conversation there's a norm against a stranger responding to what you say, and on Twitter there's no such norm. At least not in my sphere of Twitter. So you're constantly reminded that a Twitter conversation is a very different thing from a subway conversation.

OK, thinking about it a little more, I'm not really disagreeing with Dash at all. He's not saying Twitter is the same as a bar conversation. He's saying there's a continuum, with a conversation at home with your spouse at one end, and a bar conversation a ways towards the other end, and Twitter further still towards the other end, and posting on Metafilter still further, and then going on the Daily Show all the way at the other end. I agree with that.
posted by escabeche at 5:18 AM on July 27, 2014 [7 favorites]

Kristina Busse has written about research ethics and the continuum of private and public spaces online in Attention Economy, Layered Publics, and Research Ethics
posted by wrabbit at 5:23 AM on July 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

There are various forms of private messaging such as Twitter DMs and the old SMTP e-mail system which can be used to share messages and content non-publicly.

I take one of Dash's main points to be that there are big problems with the idea that it's the sole responsibility of anyone who wants to communicate something to make absolutely certain that it's technically or legally impossible for it to be accessed and broadcast in ways they don't like. It seems fairly crucial to a healthy society that I can have an intimate conversation with a friend in a cafe without having to scrutinize and keep tabs on the activities of every person at nearby tables who could in theory overhear us.

It certainly doesn't follow that, say, all tweets should be treated as private. It just means that it's not necessarily ethically OK for you to turn my tweet into a global viral sensation without my permission, simply because it's technically possible and legal for you to do so.
posted by oliverburkeman at 5:39 AM on July 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

Maybe because in a bar conversation there's a norm against a stranger responding to what you say

Not even that, really -- there's a complicated fluidity to bar conversations, where people alternate between pretending the conversations are private and treating them as fully public. But I agree that with twitter it becomes fully public, without even the pretense of privacy the people around you in a bar might choose to offer.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:49 AM on July 27, 2014 [4 favorites]

The conventional wisdom is “Don’t publish anything on social media that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper.” But this is an absurd and impossible standard.

I disagree. People don't use it this way but it is certianly possible to not announce every bowel movement to your twitter feed.

The same tools are being used for person-to-person conversations and for making grand pronouncements to the world, often by the same person at different times.

Ya, and they shouldn't be. Even email for person to person conversions instead of a publishing model like facebook or twitter (Twitter!) would greatly reduce your exposure to redistribution. Even here we have several back channels that don't publish private conversations to the front page.

We've let these big companies take over the internet instead of maintaining the self publishing and user maintained serviced model and so of course practically no one knows how much information they are unintentionally bleeding into the public sphere. And users want the free for all that allows anyone to join in on a conversation that things like hash tags enable. Railing that that outsiders are "exploiting" that without the consent of the creators is nonsensical. Consent was given when one chose to tag a conversation on Twitter. Complaining that people are hijacking the tags is like complaining that your pickup allows you to haul things.

It is drawing a massive false equivalence to conflate a tweet with an overheard conversation in a public place. The former is obviously an explicit publishing model. Geez it's like those companies that serve data on port 80 and then get pissed that people are reading their stuff.
posted by Mitheral at 6:07 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

i see this come up a lot in feminist/black twitter - they get harassed and attacked for every little thing they say, and doing things like sharing news of a cancer test with friends becomes something to collect so trolls can harass them harder in the future. the advice these people are given time and again, often by the trolls and harassers, is that these spaces are public and if you don't like it, get off twitter, off facebook, off reddit, in fact, just get offline - except in many fields, not having an active social media presence or not participating in geek/hacker spaces is a detriment to your career or finding solidarity among other people who suffer under things like this. i don't think it's absurd to try to think about ways to do it better, to support the marginalized, and not give in to the trolls.
posted by nadawi at 6:18 AM on July 27, 2014 [23 favorites]

This was supposed to be the big "add" that Google+ provided--Circles allow a very fine grain of control over who you publish to. Then they went and fucked it up with the Real Name Policy (recently repealed), and anyway people interpreted the lack of fresh content to mean that nobody was using Google+ when in fact people just weren't talking to *you*. I guess it's hard to admit you're unpopular.

Diaspora had this feature first. It's called "aspects" there. Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
posted by LogicalDash at 6:27 AM on July 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

Diaspora had this feature first.

Livejournal had this feature first.
posted by asterix at 6:38 AM on July 27, 2014 [10 favorites]

So publishing this essay on "Medium"...is that ironic? I'm never sure any more.

I would love to see users of social media take a more active stance against junk like this. If every single time a social media weasel or troll chirped up on Twitter they unceremoniously got the block button, I bet that behavior would change. Trolls would find something else to do and businesses would cease their yucky behavior.

Or, really more likely, Twitter would just remove the block button.
posted by device55 at 6:40 AM on July 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

For my money, Dreamwidth has the finest-grained privacy controls of any of the blogging services; you can subscribe to someone's posts without also giving access to them (which you couldn't on Livejournal) and you can created tons of custom filters, and choose access on a post-by-post basis.

Maybe nobody would want to choose a custom filter for every single one of their tweets, but Twitter's "everyone has access to all posts, or all posts are locked down" model is clunky for people who want to have public conversations and also occasionally gripe about their jobs.
posted by Jeanne at 7:00 AM on July 27, 2014 [6 favorites]

If every single time a social media weasel or troll chirped up on Twitter they unceremoniously got the block button, I bet that behavior would change.

i bet you're wrong. i think you underestimate how many new accounts are created solely for harassing people. many people do block immediately, and many have taken it a step further and block people who they see aggressively interacting with some they follow. but, it doesn't stop because sometimes that person, or group of people (who are organized offsite sometimes), will start filling up the mentions of anyone who interacts with the person who blocked them. it's a neverending game of whack a mole. and that doesn't even get into all the "your slip is showing" nonsense where people (usually men) are mimicking what "the other side" (usually women, and often women of color) are saying so they can get ridiculous shit trending like #banfathersday and then all of the ire from that gets directed back to the original target about arguments they have never made.

if you think the solution is simple, especially in situations about harassment or abuse, it's likely you haven't actually seen the whole problem.
posted by nadawi at 7:12 AM on July 27, 2014 [10 favorites]

but I think social norms can evolve to deal with the situations where everybody can see what you say but it's more like a bar conversation or subway conversation than publishing an article in the New Yorker.

Its entirely possible the social norm will become 'Hey tough, no real privacy any more'. In a scenario where Google Glass and similar tech take-off then this seems even more likely to happen.

The other side of this is degrees of privacy, who has what information about you (and secondarily, what value do you get from it)? I have been giving this some thought as regards smart metering. In some places the network company will get it, it has real value for them and may have direct personal benefits and wider social benefits in terms of running the system but cuts into your privacy to some degree. in some places a supplier may have the data, it has value for them, you may or may not see much of this passed to you as consumer. Other companies (aggregators, market comparison sites, etc) will get value from it if they get it and this will vary depending on how much time and geographical data stays attached to it. You may not get anything from this. Each step may mean less privacy for you but some steps may mean you can save on energy costs. There will at least initially tend to be some protections in some places but I suspect that eventually most people will give the data away without really thinking about it.
posted by biffa at 7:13 AM on July 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

if you think the solution is simple, especially in situations about harassment or abuse, it's likely you haven't actually seen the whole problem.

I'm thinking of the one-off asshole, not the sort of systematic abuse that you're describing. I agree that sort of mass-organized trolling is a harder problem to solve. The block button is not an effective weapon in that fight. What are the options? Create a "block things like this" button that algorithmically matches abusive content like spam filter?

If Twitter created fine-grained privacy rules (which I don't believe they would ever do, they're a broadcast medium), does that become the same game of whack-a-mole?

Does Twitter have to take an active role in moderating their "community"?

I still think that douchey business-tweets are best blocked on sight. Their motivations are not to silence, but to "engage". So behavior that hurts their "brand" (whatever that is) are likelier to have an effect.
posted by device55 at 7:25 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

i think part of fixing the overall issue is changing the way that we, the non-abusers, think of things, and one of the ways we can do that is to realize that abusers and harassers use the argument of "well it's public, you broadcasted it!" and wonder if we're helping things along by also supporting that stance.
posted by nadawi at 7:33 AM on July 27, 2014 [8 favorites]

Related to that, I like Dash's pointing out that public and private may be a false dichotomy. It's more like there's public and private, and then there's 'personal' somewhere between the two on the spectrum.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 7:50 AM on July 27, 2014 [5 favorites]

Outstanding, you have companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google data mining your life for their profit. You have insurance companies linking up web forums and facebook groups to gather information about your family medical history and your social activities (likes snowboarding hmm maybe does other dangerous sports increase price of life insurance), likes real ale probably a drunkard don't employ him. etc etc And what you all focus on are trolls?
posted by lilburne at 8:32 AM on July 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Great discussion points. One thing that had always bothered me is that your trash can't be considered your private property until it gets to the dump, and is therefore subject to whoever wants to go through it.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:36 AM on July 27, 2014

And then there's this: writer tweets overheard restaurant conversation (specifying workplace of people conversing but not identifying them), gets tons of crap for it.

I gotta admit, I've tweeted wacky things I overheard somebody say in the coffeeshop.
posted by escabeche at 8:40 AM on July 27, 2014

And then there's this: writer tweets overheard restaurant conversation (specifying workplace of people conversing but not identifying them), gets tons of crap for it.

This is an interesting example of public interest versus the expectation of privacy, isn't it? On the one hand, someone having a quote-unquote private conversation, in the sense that they are speaking to one other person, probably has a general expectation that people who are able to overhear their conversation will either take pains not to pay attention, or behave as if they could not. That's social ethics, essentially. If you are having a messy breakup by phone, it seems to me less than great for someone to live-tweet that conversation for the entertainment of their followers - especially if they are a so-called public person. Things get trickier if, for example, I am an Apple manager talking about the new iPhone - even if I have an expectation of privacy, I cannot have an expectation that everyone around me will observe that. Other drives - peer status, potential saleable value of that information, hits to a website - may override that expectation. Which is one reason why Apple employees get fired for talking about work in public.

On the other hand, if a manager at IBM with hiring powers is saying in public that they are not going to hire young women, that feels like a relatively rare case of something actually passing the public interest test - not in the weak sense that this is something the public might be interested in, but in the strong sense of being genuinely in the interest of the public to know.
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:29 AM on July 27, 2014 [4 favorites]

Social media was made exactly for this purpose. If you think otherwise, you're naive. Certain forms of electronic communication (e.g. e-mail) are assumed to be private or operate socially with an anticipation of privacy (e.g. closed forums or IRC chats where logging is prohibited but not impossible); Twitter is not one of those.
posted by koavf at 9:49 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Apparently this article isn't public since it merely makes my cursor spin in the rainbow beach ball.

On the modern internet, you don't have to make something private, you just have to make it inconvenient.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:14 AM on July 27, 2014

Which is one reason why Apple employees get fired for talking about work in public.

I would assume they're also under NDA about most of their work, which makes that a different kettle of fish. But the reason they're under NDA is that the lawyers understand that no legal reason not to publish overheard conversations exists. Part of Dash's point here is the differences between legality and ethics.
posted by immlass at 10:15 AM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't think you can look at all the people using Tumblr, Twitter, Livejournal, and so on for talking about personal stuff in public and say they're being naive or stupid. They place a little bit of trust in security by obscurity, and in people not being assholes, and they change that level of trust if it turns out to be misplaced.

And because of these conversations, I've learned a lot about the day to day realities of living with mental illness, living as a caregiver, living as a person who is marginalized--speaking selfishly, a world where everyone has to lock their tweets down for privacy would be sadder and colder, I think.
posted by Jeanne at 10:20 AM on July 27, 2014 [6 favorites]

On the modern internet, you don't have to make something private, you just have to make it inconvenient.

Right - which is why there is a sort of quote-unquote privacy layer built into Twitter - it's privacy on the level of a privacy screen on a laptop - you can get past it, but you have to do more than glance over to do so - you need to manoeuvre a bit.

It's definitely not privacy the way Tor or heavy file crypto, or even email or IM, offers privacy - but it's designed to be distinct from the content of the public timeline. It's sort of like MetaFilter profile information, maybe? It's visible, but it's considered poor form to reproduce it on the blue or the grey.
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:46 AM on July 27, 2014

Related to that, I like Dash's pointing out that public and private may be a false dichotomy. It's more like there's public and private, and then there's 'personal' somewhere between the two on the spectrum.

You might be interested in the concept of the parochial realm where 'the dominating relational form found in some physical space is communal'.
posted by ersatz at 3:05 PM on July 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

nadawi articulates ally points better than I could. Consider those comments normative. Thanks to all who took the time to read the piece, and for those who think the solution is more complicated technological controls or somehow educating a billion people about the potential complexity of using privacy controls, I'd suggest reflecting on what such suggestions really imply.
posted by anildash at 6:12 PM on July 27, 2014 [5 favorites]

Well the implied solution is to moderate the internet. That's going to take a while to implement.
posted by happyroach at 8:50 AM on July 28, 2014