The rise of snitch culture
Partners:
Snitch, rat, squealer, tout, telltale, betrayer – breaching someone’s privacy used to be an immoral act. But in an era of WhatsApp groups, screenshots and the potential for things to go ‘viral’, keeping prying eyes at bay has become an impossible task. Snitching is no longer seen as a breach of trust. Instead, it is often given the honourable description of ‘whistleblowing’.
In the past, snitching would have to be done with a hidden tape recorder or a glass to a wall. But smartphones have enabled countless kinds of private conversations to be made public – often with serious ramifications. Parents have been visited by the police for criticising their children’s school on what they thought was a private parents’ WhatsApp group, and university students have been excommunicated for making tasteless jokes within what they thought were private chats. Social media sites like X are awash with eavesdroppers and snitches reporting on private conversations between people on buses, in pubs, in campus bars. Even former prime minister Boris Johnson’s private arguments with his wife made it to national news thanks to eavesdropping neighbours.
Some fear this snitch culture mirrors and fuels a broader societal mistrust of other people. We are all encouraged to be so hypersensitive to others’ offensive or harmful comments or banter that we will betray confidences to the authorities with the click of screenshot. Why do people now feel so little loyalty to each other that they share private communications?
Sometimes the line between public and private can feel hard to maintain when it comes to issues of wider importance. When someone leaked the private ‘rape chat’ amongst her male course mates to a female student at Warwick University, many believed it was right to expose such misogynist attitudes that led to expulsions and suspensions. When police officers made vile comments about victims on private WhatsApp groups, was this simply letting off steam among colleagues, or expressing behaviour that should be of public concern? Should Isabel Oakeshott have leaked Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to the press, or should she have respected his privacy?
Then there is the morality of friends or colleagues happy to cut and paste messages and make them public, sometimes weaponising whistleblowing as malicious acts of public bullying. More broadly, what are the consequences if academics, politicians, heads of companies and even families are denied the space to make mistakes, thrash out ideas and think aloud, fearful that their words may be posted online, even reported to the police?
Where should we draw the line between what’s said in private and what matters for public attention? In a world where people’s intimate lives and thoughts can be shared worldwide at the touch of a button, is it possible to maintain these two lives – private and public – anymore? How can we encourage the young to trust each other if snitch culture is normalised?
