By Amanda Knox
 
Back in 2007, it seemed only people like me were using social media. College students. We were staying in touch with our friends from high school. We were finding out who was taking Math 221 with us next quarter. We were organizing study groups and house parties. We were socializing in a whole new environment catered to just us barely-adults. Real adults didn’t have Facebook profiles. Real adults had resumes. Social media was where we defined ourselves. It was the clubhouse where Mom and Dad weren’t allowed, where kids could be kids.
 
I was twenty years old, and just starting my junior year of college, when I arrived in Perugia to study Italian. Because the cottage I lived in didn’t have internet access, I stayed in touch with my family and friends back home by frequenting Internet cafes to use Skype and Gmail. Social media wasn’t really a part of the scene in Perugia yet. We kept in touch with our new classmates by exchanging phone numbers and loitering on the steps of the Duomo in the main square. Even so, I posted pics of the sites I had visited in Germany and Italy—smiling shots of my sister and me, my new roommates and me; silly shots of me pretending to fire a machine gun in a museum, or bashfully pointing my finger at the Statue of David’s business bits. And when I was struck with bouts of homesickness, I looked back at old pics I had posted of family gatherings, of dressing up with my college friends last Halloween. This was the new normal.
 
A social media platform succeeds when it facilitates what best resembles real-life human interaction. As Data Scientist Nick Berry pointed out to me when I visited the Facebook Seattle office earlier this week, MySpace couldn’t compete with Facebook because Facebook’s users had real names and real faces, which meant social accountability. We demand authenticity from each other on these platforms, and in turn, we withhold condemnation of our friends when they post an embarrassing or silly photo. Social media is just a digital upgrade for old-fashioned community.
 
We don’t treat public figures the same way. Politicians and celebrities, we assume, are equipped with PR teams to address the pros and cons of a lifestyle of overwhelming scrutiny. Every tweet is vetted. Every Instagram photo carefully cropped. We demand authenticity from them—we reject celebrity profiles that are too white-washed—but we also hurl judgment at the slightest indiscretion. But that’s the life of a celebrity, right? It’s convenient to think that there are two kinds of people—public figures and the rest of us. But it isn’t that simple. Social media has blurred the line between public and private, peer and stranger.
 
The line between normalcy and public-figure-hood is ever-narrowing. Whether we know it or not, all of us are all teetering at the edge of public-figure-hood, the slightest push could plunge us into the spotlight, and we don’t have PR teams to hide behind. I know because it happened to me.
 
At the heart of both a wrongful conviction and a tabloid article is tunnel vision: the journalist or investigator targets a suspect, draws a conclusion about them, and looks only for evidence to support that conclusion. What causes tunnel vision? Profit, pride, pressure and sometimes just ignorance, laziness, or lack of resources. Reliable evidence is cherry picked and re-contextualized so that it no longer resembles itself. Unreliable evidence is treated as reliable. They opt for a false, but compelling conclusion. The truth is often too complex or boring to make a clickbait headline.
 
There are individuals like me who occupy the intersection between normalcy and public-figure-hood. I want to be myself on social media, but I’ve learned I have to be very careful about what I post, because the tabloids make their living by taking things out of context. This is why my Facebook and Instagram profiles are private. Even so, I have to worry about the pictures my friends and family post, because the tabloids also dredge their profiles for anything that could be twisted into a lurid headline.
 
When we click on those headlines, we contribute to the dehumanization of another person, who may have been, moments ago, just as anonymous as the rest of us. Our social-media-enhanced society is still in its adolescence. We have yet to establish robust ethics and etiquette. This limbo between normalcy and public-figure-hood highlights how we need to mature. Could and should Facebook auto-copyright all the photos we post under our own names? Would that protect us? I don’t have the answer. But if my only option to be safe from tabloid tunnel vision is to opt out of social media entirely, then our social media is fundamentally flawed. This is because all of us are a moment away from being unwittingly and unwillingly pitched into public-figure-hood, at risk of being condemned for whatever narrative can be created out of our public selves.