Let's You and Him Fight

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Now comes snitch-tagging

Digital confrontation turns up a notch with Twitter tattletaling

By JESSICA ROY

Los Angeles Times

First came Twitter.

Then came Twitter fights.

Then came Twitter passive aggression: Insults that don’t explicitly identify the person being criticized are so pervasive they have a name, the subtweet.

Now that subtlety is being punctured by a rising Twitter behavior — snitchtagging.

A snitch-tagger is essentially a Twitter tattletale. He or she sees a tweet criticizing another user and chimes in with that person’s Twitter handle — flagging the insult for the target to see.

It’s a move that pulls both the critic and the criticized into a digital confrontation that neither of them asked for.

It reminds Mark Marino, an associate professor of writing and the director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab at USC, of drama-hungry kids egging on a schoolyard fight. “It’s hard not to think of the middle-school version where you’re waiting for the sparks to fly.”

Social media opens everyone up to criticism. For anyone, famous or otherwise, social media can turn into an onslaught of unsolicited reviews and judgments. As one might imagine, those are not ideal circumstances for good mental health.

A Pew study published in 2017 found that being subjected to severe harassing behavior on the internet was bad for people’s mental health, and that the effect could be similar to experiencing a traumatic event.

- Published in the (West Lebanon) Valley News 3/17/19