This past Sunday night most people were celebrating the victory of New Orléans Saints over the Colts in this years super bowl. Well according to my Twitter feed and the noises coming from the apartments around me that’s what they were doing. I not being a sports fan was playing on the internet and occasionally checking out links on Twitter.
One particular link caught my eye so I clicked.
What I was rewarded with was a Twitpic of two completely naked girls, a full frontal shot you could say. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The tweet was normal sounding enough, I though maybe some drunken debauchery would be shown but there was no hint that there would be nudity in it. I immediately got Sean’s attention and showed it to him. We joked about it for a minute or two and then let it go.
*Black bar was added to the picture by us
A few minutes later more tweets from this user started flowing in, along with them came more naked pictures. This time they had a clear explanation:
*Black bars added to the picture by us
Again, I was surprized but didn’t think much of it. I am not the kind of girl who shy’s away from nudity. I have no problem with out of the ordinary things that may cross my path. However the next day this got me thinking. What about the people who are not so casual about these things? I wonder what their reaction to seeing these pictures would be? Better yet, what about the teens that are supposedly on Twitter, are they coming across this kind of material?
The first thing to consider would be the user that was putting this info out there. It was Olivia Munn, one of the hosts of “Attack of the Show” on the G4 network. I follow her because we watch the show and I am a fan, probably much like the other 114,647 people that follow her. (Which I would have to assume includes young men). I have seen her tweet about her Maxim pics and heard her talk about her Playboy spread but up until that moment I had never seen Twitpics of a totally naked girls coming from her links. I didn’t expect these kinds of pictures from her account.
I went back to the pictures a few days later and found that over $20,000 people had viewed the first full frontal nude one, and 53 accounts had re-tweeted the two pictures. I honesly thought they would have been taken down by now, considering the network she works for is fairly conservative.
With all the tools we currently have available that allow us to instantly share our experiences and feelings, when and where do we draw the line and decide, maybe I shouldn’t share that? Should Twitpic have some responsibility for hosting the nude pictures? Should Twitter be monitoring what’s out there? Or should we as adults monitor ourselves and know that some things just shouldn’t be shared. What about the women in the photos? Yes they are strippers but that doesn’t mean they want naked pictures of themselves floating around the internet.
Who decides when we have crossed the over sharing line and invaded other peoples privacy? Do we need someone to tell us or can we be responsible enough?
