Is it ever OK to drag people’s dating profiles on social media?

It’s hard to know how to conduct oneself online when you know you’re constantly running the risk of those conversations being made public

By now, you’ll be familiar with the messages. You know, the ones that have spawned hundreds of memes and deep dives on TikTok. Perhaps you’ve discussed them ad nauseum in your WhatsApp groups, and compared notes over similar ones you have either sent or received. Maybe you’ve even spoken about them to some of your female friends who are in “unstable places and from your wild recent past”.

Yes, I’m talking about Jonah Hill and the texts shared by his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Brady. The professional surfer began sharing screenshots of her conversations with the actor last weekend. The duo dated for around a year in 2021 before parting ways, with Hill moving on to date Olivia Millar, with whom he has just welcomed a child.

Now, Brady has accused Hill of emotionally abusing her during their relationship, calling him a “misogynist” and a “narcissist” in a series of Instagram stories in which she shared screenshots of several private texts in which Hill appears to be policing her behaviour, asking her not to surf with men, model, or post “sexual pictures” on social media, among other things.

At this point, there have been all sorts of conversations about these messages. Hill, 39, has been accused of weaponising therapy-speak (because of the way he cloaked his demands by asserting his “boundaries”). There has been talk of manipulation. Coercive control. Predation. And plenty more. But the one thing few are discussing are how Brady’s actions tap into a wider social media trend: sharing screenshots of private messages.

Taking a screenshot is something that has become integral to modern-day communication. So much so, that iPhones even put them in a separate folder for you. But, as Brady’s actions have shown, things get complicated when we start sharing those screenshots publicly. Despite her allegations against Hill, some people have criticised her decision to share private texts.

“It’s gross to post your ex’s private texts unless you have a really solid reason to do so,” tweeted New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum in reference to the messages. “And this holds true even if your ex was a thin-skinned, manipulative weasel. That used to be a given, but it clearly isn’t anymore.”

It’s a controversial take given the allegations in Brady’s messages. But it raises an important question about privacy – and what we choose to share on a public forum and why. Perhaps, as in Brady’s case, it’s to hold someone accountable for their actions, or to expose wrongdoing. It might be to elicit support where you’ve had very little. Or it’s to validate some sort of emotional response you’ve been made to feel is somehow invalid.

This is often the case with another type of screenshot-sharing that has become increasingly common on social media: dating app profiles. And it conjures up the same sort of questions about how we decide what is and is not okay to share. Regardless, it has become an entire internet sub-culture of its own, populated by single men and women sharing the worst dating app profiles and snippets of conversations with matches in the hope of finding some sort of solidarity.

For a while, there was Tories of Bumble, which focused on sharing screenshots of blatantly Conservative-voting users (think photos of top hats, references to “supper”, and a lot of shooting weekends). There’s also the hugely popular Beam Me Up Softboi, which shared a wide range of messages from so-called “softbois” (a man who is a “player” but without the aggressive masculinity) across various dating apps – think a lot of men putting women down, making smug cultural references, and interweaving insults with literary quotes. And more recently, there was the Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, which encourages members to post photos of profiles of men they’ve seen on apps and discuss any red flags among people who have dated them.

How did we get here? And is any of this actually helpful? That’s a difficult question to answer, but what is clear is that this kind of over-sharing raises concerns about the privacy of online communications. After all, one person’s screenshot will always be different to another’s, particularly when it’s taken out of a conversation. Without context, it’s easy to paint a certain narrative that suits your agenda. And that can quite easily create further problems.

It’s hard to know how to conduct oneself online when you know you’re constantly running the risk of those conversations being made public. The last thing anybody wants is to be entered into a trial by social media.

Should we all navigate with caution? Or simply try to do better in the hope that, if anything we say is made public, at least we know we’ve maintained a modicum of morality? The latter sounds like the better option to me.