My good friend Mr George Kokoris had this to say about people and social media earlier. Go read it. He has some very valid concerns, especially in light of Facebook’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards personal privacy.

I used to like Facebook. I used to like it because it wasn’t like MySpace – I remember saying this to several people. I tried MySpace and didn’t really get it. It seemed to be a friend-collecting competition with some of the most hideous web design you can possibly imagine. Facebook used to be different, though. It used to limit you to people you actually know. In fact, you used to have to say how you knew the person you were adding as a friend, much like immensely boring but practical professional networking site LinkedIn still does. As a result, it became a great way for keeping in touch with family and friends. Everyone felt confident and secure in the fact that your information was yours, and that the only people you were sharing it with were people you had specifically approved. In short, it felt like a secure means of communication. I liked it for this.

As time passed, we all know the story. Groups. Applications. Pages. A dwindling sense of security. Employers using employees photographs of drunken nights out as grounds to mistreat them. Until we reach today, when a large number of people I know are seriously considering ditching their Facebook accounts altogether in favour of alternative, more secure means of communication. Or, ironically, Twitter, one of the most open and public means of communication there is.

But at least on Twitter it never claims to be anything other than public. Your profile on Twitter consists of your avatar, your username and 140 characters of “bio”. Your conversations are public (unless you specifically choose to protect your tweets, which kind of defeats one of the main objects of the service) and anyone can chip in at any time. It’s a simple, effective means of asynchronous communication which means that people speak frankly, briefly and candidly.

This gets people in trouble. Sometimes, a lot of trouble. Paul Chambers found this out the hard way.

“Robin Hood airport is closed,” he tweeted as his trip to Ireland to meet a girl he’d been talking to on Twitter looked threatened by the UK’s complete inability to deal with a bit of snow. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

A flippant, offhand remark. But a flippant, offhand remark that recently landed him with a thousand-pound fine and a criminal record on the grounds that his message was “grossly offensive, or of indecent, obscene, or menacing character”. A flippant, offhand remark that gave him the dubious honour of being the first person ever to be convicted of a “crime” (and I use the term loosely) in connection with remarks made on a social networking site.

I mean seriously. His comments weren’t in the best taste. But by successfully prosecuting this case, it sets a dangerous precedent that has made everyone rather more conscious of what they say. In effect, it’s stifling free speech, a concept the Internet is built upon – not to mention the fact that the life of Chambers, who was training to be an accountant, has now been devastated.

See also: Gizmodo’s behaviour with regard to the new iPhone that was left in a bar. Gray Powell, the engineer who misplaced the phone, lost his job, perhaps understandably, given that he left an immensely valuable trade secret just lying around. Gizmodo reported on the new iPhone. They ripped it open and looked inside it. Perhaps not the best thing to do when Apple were already pissed off. Then they ripped open Gray Powell’s life, using information from his entire Internet presence to make him a global laughingstock. Was it not enough that the guy fucked up and lost his job because of it? Apparently not.

George points out that there are people out there who hate success and will do anything to destroy the efforts of people with ambition. It makes me sad to think that in a world where our exchange of information should be free and open that incidents like the above can happen. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. The fact that we can communicate instantaneously with anyone in the world should be a wonderful, life-affirming thing that brings the global community closer together, builds bridges and draws us closer to a peaceful sci-fi utopia. But instead, shit like this just gets people paranoid and worried, until we’re going to find ourselves even more closed off and isolated than we were before the whole social media thing started. And that’s sad.

Is it just human nature to use things that should be positive for evil, deceitful purposes?