Please Don’t Social Media Snitch Tags
There is a certain freedom that gives you to share your opinion on the Internet, sitting at the computer, protected by the warm embrace of anonymity. It also means the meager consequences of public neglect of other people, that is, until the person you are making fun of learns from the intruder who tags them.
This phenomenon is known as “snitch tagging” and exists only to thwart the pot, like childish chatter roaming the hellish landscape of social media with the sole purpose of tossing the kindling on the fire.
If you’ve ever been this person, know that you can do better. You can curb the impulse of the snitch, if only for the simple reason that you leave the water calm, and understand that it is more productive to add your voice to the topic than to lazily poke into a hornet’s nest.
What are snitch tags?
For those who are completely unfamiliar with Twitter, Snitch Tags have a simple but maddening definition outlined here in 2018 by @therealhorse :
It has turned into a fake that does not deserve any respect and friends because it is largely seen as an act of cowardice. Sometimes, however, it can take on a more innocent form when an uninformed tweeter crosses the line.
Here’s an example courtesy of The Daily Dot :
When it comes to the example above, the writer wanted her tweets about the Captain Marvel soundtrack not to reach the film’s composers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Should a film composer know when someone on the Internet has an indifferent opinion about his work? The answer is definitely no, so writer Jessica Ellis acted a bit in disbelief when some faceless account burst from the periphery and tagged the composer Pinar Toprak for no practical reason.
Why are snitch tags bad?
Unintentionally or on purpose, you are bloating an already fluid and annoyingly repetitive website. Twitter, in particular, thrives on condemnation and conflict that permeates the broader media ecosystem and even seeps into mainstream political issues. However, there are users – be they writers, intellectuals, entertainers, or just plain keyboardists – who don’t need public sparring. And it’s not even worth every mild criticism or criticism earning a reaction that could potentially become a toxic bulk.
In any case, social media is a limited vehicle for promoting constructive dialogue. If you want to disagree with someone else’s opinion of a celebrity, or even direct a public figure to an avalanche of tweets or comments poking them mercilessly, there are cooler ways to do it.
Write your post instead of snitch tags
Social media is an echo chamber, which means anyone can throw their thoughts into the void in pursuit of fleeting confirmation and attention. So use this to your advantage. If you see a tweet that slanders someone and you have an opinion, express it in your own message using your own voice. And if you can’t calm down the obsessive desire to tell a certain person about it, mark it in your message.
It’s a simple workaround, but using it in everyday social media etiquette can do everyone a small favor by simply stripping them of some of the vitriol they use as their daily fuel. What’s more, some celebrities and public figures are known to engage with their fans on Twitter, so you can potentially earn cool and memorable communication simply by breaking the website’s toxic cycle.