Due to the imprecision of these controls and the new levels of inference possible with aggregated social information, however, it is often impossible to avoid drama in a community where social life exists both on and offline, and where information sharing is a normative behavior. Further, while the Web 2.0 culture may frame this sharing within a discourse of freedom and democracy, we must remember that the profit models of social media depend on user-contributed information. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the models of openness idealized by Web 2.0 both ignore the negative consequences of transparency and promote a particular type of transparency that privileges the kinds of information sharing that benefit corporations more than individuals.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 640