If Apple really cared about us, it would be as easy to delete a text as it is to send one. It takes a full 20 seconds to melodramatically backspace until the 1,000-word brick you wrote your ex-boyfriend disappears. Isn’t it so much easier to breathe in and, on the “out” breath, click Send and release the hounds?
Recently I was teed up to send an angsty block of text to my boyfriend. Garden State angsty. I was one glass of wine past civilized and primed to rage-text. I have historically been prone to these provocative missives: “Hey would you say you’re dating other people?” (9:18 p.m., after months in a relationship). But this time I paused over Send, remembering several high-profile incidents.
In 2022, West Elm Caleb became the locus of discontent for single women everywhere after a series of TikToks revealed he was using the same flirty tactics on—and sending very similar texts to—a parade of women. And then, in 2023, millions of digital rubberneckers pored over texts from Jonah Hill after his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady shared screen shots of some he’d allegedly sent her during their relationship.
Earlier this summer, Katherine Asplundh, a hopeful influencer who had recently married into a Pennsylvania family worth billions, was skewered online after sending a string of aggressive, entitled messages to a woman on Instagram who had claimed the @katherineasplundh name, demanding that she sell the handle, even accusing the woman of falsifying her identity. (“The family I just married into is the only Asplundh family in the U.S.,” she wrote. “I’m not American,” the other Katherine replied.) Asplundh apparently assumed the messages would stay private. When you assume, you make an Aspl out of u-n-dh.
Once, only public figures were victims of the leaked text. But now even private citizens’ messages and voice memos are shared freely on TikTok and beyond. Dating-related communiqués, in which we tend to be more vulnerable and our reactions more extreme, are particularly popular fodder for entertainment online. Some receive positive commentary: in one video, a woman played musical voice memos she’d exchanged with a man on Tinder. “So when’s the wedding?,” Tinder commented. But most are posted to be roasted. “That soft giggle is CRIMINAL,” one commenter declared of another TikTok, featuring voice memos from a Hinge match.
Social-media users are quick to unearth the identities of those involved in more outrageous examples. (After the recent release of the Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, a mini-series based on a true story about a woman who stalks a bartender, it took audiences just days to identify the woman on whom the character was based.) The wrong message can make any of us stars, for better or for worse. And it’s usually for worse.
“We’ve all sent texts to our significant others or even our friends that, taken in a vacuum, do not make us look good,” said Andrew Brettler, a Los Angeles attorney who works with many high-profile figures. “When you’re angry, you put stupid stuff in a text message. And it’s not just public figures. If you send a text out, it’s public. It’s all about reasonable expectation of privacy, and there is none when you’re texting and tweeting.”
Posts containing spicy exchanges quickly buoy to virality on Instagram, TikTok, X, and beyond. It’s tempting to wave a hand and attribute their popularity to “the algorithm,” but algorithms are informed by consumer habits. I’d speculate that our lust for this particular genre of drama is not voyeurism or Schadenfreude so much as human recognition. Like zombies catching a whiff of life, we swarm to anything that feels real or intimate.
The wrong message can make any of us stars, for better or for worse. And it’s usually for worse.
These pile-ons are often followed by a backlash. After West Elm Caleb’s ordeal, Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who specializes in Internet culture, called the response “a kind of doxing” in a TikTok, noting that private people on dating apps are as vulnerable as public figures. One of the women who had posted a video about West Elm Caleb deleted it and apologized as the furor around his behavior metastasized. “If someone does something obscene on the Internet, you can post that. Or you can show your friends a guy,” she told me. “But there’s something very intimate and personal about a dating profile. It’s like, I’m putting myself out here for judgment in pursuit of sex or love or whatever. So I decided to take it down.”
YouTube video essayist Sarah Zamponi, who made a video calling for mercy for Caleb at the time, pointed out that while we may regret how our actions online affected someone, we don’t tend to correct those actions. (And, Zamponi observed, social-media companies seem to benefit from, and incentivize, the sharing of posts like these, which create rabid engagement.)
As wary as I may be of the practice of sharing private messages online, I still click on and even sometimes send these posts to friends when they bubble up in my newsfeeds. In other words, I understand the impulse. When I’m seeking validation for my own actions or reactions, dropping a screenshot in the group chat has the same soothing effect as putting a scary book in the freezer before bed.
The impulse to share exchanges that include harassment and abuse has been crucial in bringing perpetrators to light, particularly since the beginning of the #MeToo movement. This is the justification for “Are We Dating the Same Guy?,” a national network of Facebook groups in which women share stories about men they have dated or are dating, leveling both serious accusations and petty ones, and often identifying the men by their full names.
These communities have surely helped women escape and avoid harmful situations, but they also enable public venting about the ordinary, minor disappointments of dating. A former moderator for one of the groups told me she’d felt concerned that group members treated all offenses with the same gravity.
Even in what can seem like a contained community, a post can spiral out of control. A man who spoke on the condition of anonymity described the mortification of a former partner who shared intimate texts he’d sent her in one of the Facebook groups. “It wasn’t like I was into scat or anything,” he said, and the messages did not allude to any illegal behavior. But having them dissected by a community of strangers, with his name attached, felt like a violation. “When movie stars have their nudes leaked on the Internet or something like that, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Now I know how they feel.’”
I asked Andrew Brettler how public figures date when the specter of betrayal and humiliation is always lurking. I assumed he would reveal a shocking statistic about non-disclosure agreements. He told me that NDAs actually aren’t that effective: they don’t prevent someone from discussing private interactions, he explained; they just create penalties for doing so. Instead, he recommends something boring: exercising judgment. “I counsel my clients all the time that the best way to prevent a sex tape from leaking—the best way to prevent embarrassing texts from leaking—is not to make them, not to send them,” he said.
It’s hard to metabolize that when your finger is hovering over the Send button next to a text you’ve been composing for two days, momentum building, rage cresting, eye twitching. Instead, perhaps it’s always best to text like everyone’s watching.
Lauren Larson is an Austin, Texas–based writer and editor. Her work has appeared in GQ, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, and New York magazine
