A Twitter PSA

Twitter is intuitive in most ways, and many of its social norms are not all that different from other forms of social media (for example, don’t be this guy). But there’s one Twitter rule that is not remotely intuitive, yet goes to the heart of the purpose of Twitter and is seemingly unknown to many people who tweet, even those who tweet a lot. Since so many law profs tweet, herewith this brief PSA. I'll return to substantive blogging in short order.

Many, many tweets begin with the @ sign, e.g.:

@SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! [Yay!/Boo!] #ACA

This tweet will show up in the timelines (or Twitter “feeds”) of only those people who follow both you and @SCOTUSblog. That’s presumably not the result you want in this case, since anyone following @SCOTUSblog already knows that they’re reporting the outcome of the ACA case.

If you want your tweet to appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you, all you have to do is begin your tweet with any character other than the @ sign. This is why you’ll see so many tweets beginning with periods that look like typos, e.g.:

. @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #ACA #RobertsIsA[Hero/Traitor]

Of course, this works, too:

Big #ACA news: @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #TheWorldIs[Redeemed/Over]

Once you know about it, this is actually a feature rather than a bug of Twitter. Twitter offers three levels of publicity/privacy, each appropriate to different tweets:

1. Private DMs (direct messages): These are exactly like Facebook’s message feature, i.e., they’re private messages between you and the recipient (and the FDA, if you're an FDA whistleblower or someone who communicates with them, apparently with the approval of FDA counsel).
2. Less public tweets that begin with the @ sign (sometimes called @replies): These will only appear in the timelines of those who follow both the sender and the recipient, so often relatively few people will see them. However, anyone with an internet connection can look at your Twitter profile page, e.g., https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog, which shows every tweet you’ve sent, whether it begins with the @ sign or not.
3. Fully public tweets that don’t begin with the @ sign (tweets, proper): These appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you. In addition, as above, anyone with an internet connection (whether they have a Twitter account or not) can navigate to your profile page and see all of your tweets.

As an aside, when we’re through with the NFIB postmortem and return to discussing the actual law that that case upheld, can we please go back to calling it PPACA, rather than the ACA? Puh-PACK-uh is so much more fun to say.

Comments

[juicy couture outlet]

Although I would’ve preferred if you went into a little bit more detail, I still got the gist of what you meant. I agree with it. It might not be a popular idea, but it makes sense. Will definitely come back for more of this. Great work.Good work, wonderful blog… really enjoy it and added it into my social bookmarks. Keep up the good work.