A philosopher in California sent me this funny essay by Hamilton Nolan from several years ago:
In light of certain arguments currently taking place on the internet, we would like to issue a gentle reminder of a fact: Twitter is public.
The things you write on Twitter are public. They are published on the world wide web. They can be read almost instantly by anyone with an internet connection on the planet Earth. This is not a bug in Twitter; it is a feature. Twitter is a thing that allows you to publish things, quickly, to the public.
Most things that you write on Twitter will be seen only by your followers. Most things that you write on Twitter will not be read by the public at large. But that is only because the public at large does not care about most things that you have to say. It is not because the public does not have "a right" to read your Twitter. Indeed, they do. They can do so simply by typing Twitter dot com slash [your name] into their web browser. There, they will find a complete list of everything that you have chosen to publish on Twitter, which is a public forum.
If you do not want your Twitter to be public, you can make it private. Then it will not be public. If you do not make it private, it will be public....
Just because you wish that someone would not quote [or link] something that you said in public does not mean that that person does not have the right to quote [or link] something that you said in public. When we choose to say something in public, we choose to broadcast it to the world. The world is then able to talk about it. That is how it works. Anyone who has ever publicly spoken or written something dumb (hello), only to have that thing quoted and insulted by others, has probably wished that the thing that they said or wrote was not public. That feeling, while understandable, is only a wish. It does not mean that the thing they said or wrote was not, in fact, public....
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