Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

A less subtle way of navigating the relationship between the public and the obscure is found in subtweeting (subliminal tweets) or vaguebooking (vague facebooking), the art of posting elliptically about a social situation without naming names. Posting a song lyric has plausible deniability: it could just mean you enjoy that song and it’s stuck in your head. But if someone posts, “I just don’t have time for this nonsense,” it’s obvious even to the completely uninitiated that some kind of drama is going on; it’s just that only certain people are going to already have the right context to interpret it. Asking what’s going on is like interrupting an arguing couple at a restaurant to ask for a detailed relationship history: a definite faux pas. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself or resign yourself to not knowing. A study of subtweets among college students found indirect posts were indeed considered a more socially acceptable way of conveying negative information than directly mentioning the person in question. (For example, “Thanks to a certain person for backstabbing and completely ruining my day. People like that are pathetic.” While people recognized the passive aggression, they preferred it to a version that named and shamed the specific person involved.) The inverse was the case for positive posts—it was considered better to tag someone directly in a post like “Thanks @RyanS for completely making my day. You’re awesome.”