Don’t! You’ll Regret Posting That!

A Texas teen, named Justin Carter, has spent four months in jail after posting a Facebook message in which he threatened, apparently in jest, to stage a school shooting. Such episodes show the potentially lasting and disastrous consequences of off-the-cuff comments on social media sites, especially when users forget three big things: 1) how large their (often unintended) audience is, 2) to check their network's privacy settings, and 3) when they fail to take the consequences of their actions into account. The law of unintended consequences, when you are online, often looms much larger than in the “real” world. For more, take a look at a 2011 study called "I Regretted the Minute I Pressed Share," by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. By the way, the study's title came from a respondent who posted a regrettable negative thought about a job interview.