The Nation published an editorial this past week entitled “Be more alert, but less judgmental” which made a plausible argument for placing some responsibility on the social media audience to not rush to judgment when first receiving information. They cited that this can be especially damaging when the chatter on the Internet becomes very negative and presumptuous, making it incredibly difficult to turn the conversation back in a positive direction. In the political arena, the life cycle of a “scandal” (whether or not one truly exists) can be breathtakingly short due to the mob-like rush to judgment. In one recent case, this cycle lasted less than a day: on November 20th, Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general of Great Britain, tweeted a photo of a house covered with three English (St. George) flags she saw in her travels on the campaign trail. By the end of November 20th, she had resigned. Although Thornberry initially said she was just tweeting images in her travels and was especially impressed by this house, much of the public thought that she was being a snob towards the working class with her tweet. Because the appearance of snobbery reflected poorly on her boss, Ed Milliband of the Labour Party, during a difficult election season, the pressure from the public’s rush to judgment was too great too quickly. Just as the audience bears responsibility not to rush to judgment, the political actors need to exercise greater judgment before casually tweeting, or engaging on any social media platforms for that matter. It is a sad state of affairs that the public complains that politicians have become too cautious and rehearsed, but the negative, collective voices on social media lie in wait for any missteps. Therefore, it is understandable that politicians would need to exhibit caution. Politicians need to be discerning about the messages they want to convey with a full understanding of how social media platforms work. Honestly, this is true of any medium of communication. Before the Internet, people used telephone conversations differently than they would letter writing. I can remember as a child, my mother told me not to write anything down in a note that I passed to a friend that I wouldn’t want shared with a larger circle of people. Sensitive information was saved for telephone calls or face-to-face conversations – even I knew that as a young child. Like the rest of us, politicians need to understand that if we just blather on incessantly on social media without exercising the deliberation required to communicate the important messages to the public, mistakes will happen. Sometimes in our own private lives, these mistakes are small and we can breathe a sigh of relief when they slip past the notice of our social circles. But when you are in the public eye, these mistakes will inevitably be caught, and you could wake up one morning a shadow attorney general and go to sleep that very evening, out of a job.