Nowhere is safe. Not a cafe, not a train and not a plane.
Unwittingly and without your consent, at any moment you could become social media’s main character of the day — not the good kind.
Such was the case for two people this week, when a woman posted several videos to TikTok of a man and a woman on a flight from Houston to New York City, claiming that they were having an affair and calling them out by name. (The videos have since been deleted.)
The man, she said in the videos, was wearing a wedding ring while the pair flirted and drank throughout the flight. She said they were talking loudly enough that she could hear their first names, which she included in the video’s caption. In the one video, she included an image of the pair’s empty seats. “They were making out and ended up in the bathroom,” she wrote in a caption.
Some TikTok users applauded the original poster, leaving comments that praised her for helping another woman learn what they believed to be the truth about her husband. Others were more skeptical, and many took issue with what appeared to be a growing trend in the way people use social media.
“All of us are not just being thrust under a high-powered microscope through these different platforms,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communications at Cornell University who researches social media. “But we’re also turning the camera on other people as we mine not just our own lives for content, but the lives of those around us.”
Tamika Turner, a content creator in Brooklyn, posted a rebuttal to the plane video on TikTok, criticizing those who were cheering on the videos and digging for personal details about the man and his family.
