The Boundaries of Private

Nir Rosen, a former New York University fellow, resigned today over an offensive tweet he made regarding the sexual assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo on Tuesday.

The Logan story has been repeated ad nauseum by this point, so I'll spare you the gory details. What I'm more interested in is Rosen's understanding (or lack thereof) of the boundaries between private and public comments on the Internet.

Rosen seemed to suggest over his Twitter account that Logan would enjoy the attention she would get over such an incident, perhaps even showing up touted newsman Anderson Cooper. When he was called out on his offensive statements, he remarked that "it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too".

Rosen deleted both tweets, but to no avail; his comments were saved for posterity via the ubiquity of the Internet, and presumably saved in the Library of Congress.

Rosen later apologized, saying he "forgot that Twitter is not exactly private".

This seems like a 'well duh' moment. However, the quick pace of Twitter bears special notice. Facebook posts are somewhat different; although someone could take a screenshot of a status update and share it, Twitter has the unique capacity through its retweet function to make a post go viral almost instantaneously.

Sysomos has published that Twitter users are generally connected by five degrees of separation; the average US adult stands, on average, six degrees from another given individual. This speaks volumes of the reach that a single tweet can have in a very, very short amount of time. As seen today, this capacity can have devastating effects on lives and careers.

I am not trying to condemn Mr. Rosin; there is no doubt in my mind that similar (or worse) jokes were made in frat houses, living rooms, and on more anonymous message boards over the course of the past twenty four hours. We all make mistakes and say things that we probably shouldn't, myself included. However, we must utilize extra caution when posting things to networks such as Twitter. A seemingly harmless post meant only for our friends and family can quickly rocket out of control.

Thanks to Mashable for providing information for this story.

--Taylor

let it warm us from within