This may sound like a rant but please bear with me. I have been at the forefront of increasing access to the internet for nearly the entire span of my career. From working on ad campaigns driving mobile data while on the agency side to developing bite sized data offers for young people on the client side in a Telco no less. I’m not and never will be a luddite.
The internet is good and should be available for all — this is a hill to die on right? I agree. I am just currently perplexed with some things it has spawned. When you share an update on your social media account, no matter the kinds of restriction you have set to who can view it or comment on it, the prevailing canon seems to be that your posts are now fair game for anyone who cares to conscript it into their content calendar.
With the proliferation of blogs on social media (a different discussion entirely — blogs jumped the chasm of living on websites to proliferating on social media) the fight for attention has become incredibly fierce. Every platform is hungry to have content that is liked, shared, commented on and best of all become viral.
In this nuclear arms race for content, it is now not enough to come up with unique takes on the world or develop custom posts reflecting their own views. These blogs scour the internet for posts made by celebrities on their twitter pages, IG/Snap stories, comments on other people’s pages or wherever an expression has been made. It’s all fair game.
This scavenger behavior is however not only limited to celebrities as the social media posts of regular everyday citizens is also considered fair game. That your random post on your IG story about the funny way your neighbor parks her car, intended for just your 236 followers? Yes that one, can easily be picked up by a blog and shared without context to 57m people who follow the blog. All the nuance you intended as context for who should be able to see it goes straight out of the window.
Context is dead online.
It’s all fun and games until something you may consider harmless and safe to share but didn’t intend for a mass audience is the thing that is picked up. You can live with the bedlam that comes from those posts being picked up. This cocktail becomes deadly when it’s something that will change in its’ perception of innocence and elicit nasty commentary because it’s being viewed by people you never intended to see it.
Enter the existence of ‘online in — laws’, armchair economists and other online beer parlour connoisseurs who will form and share very definite opinions about something they were not meant to see in the first place.
This issue borders on mental health safety as people become bullied, harried, and hounded by these opinions by random people on the internet. Just last week, Tom Holland of Spider-Man fame decided he had had enough of social media and deleted his accounts.
Context is dead online.
How about physical safety? Celebrities being targeted by robbers based on what they have unwittingly shared online about their possessions or movements has become a thing locally and internationally. Again, even non celebrities are at risk to this trend. That post intended for a certain audience can be picked up and become newsworthy content for any number of random blogs online, thus arming criminally minded people with new targets.
If context is dead online, what can you do to limit your exposure to becoming an item in someone’s content calendar?
The obvious one is being more guarded in what you post online. Settle it in your mind that every harmless post can become weaponized if picked up and served as trending news to millions of strangers. That’s the first guard rail and wholly within your power to do. No doubt it goes against a human instinct to share which social media has tapped in to but it stands as the lowest hanging fruit available to most people.
The next extreme step is to log off all social media and this isn’t recommended. We live in a very online-first world now, having no social presence is almost synonymous to not being alive. People now run online background checks on applicants, new hires and intending business partners and having no presence can itself be seen as a red flag in some situations while it may be a plus in others.
Err on the side of having a controlled presence.
Some publications are making attempts to regulate themselves by including a disclaimer on their posts, stating they do not infringe on the rights of the original poster. Sadly, this is mostly cosmetic as they never ask for permission to use content that doesn’t belong to them, they simply use and include a boiler plate disclaimer. Not cool.
So where do we go next? I don’t know. I totally hate the idea of social media regulation by government fiat however having effective legal recourse available is something that needs to be an option. Should all else fail, laws are meant to be safeguards.
Hopefully, online publications can moderate the source behavior that is killing the innocence of most people’s social media expressions.
Oh, the joy of being able to post cute photos of your feet without the fear of ‘Lagos Big Girl shows off the size of her dirty toenails’’.
Le Sigh.
