Last week, a story about two strangers getting to know each other on a plane was dubbed “the greatest love story ever told on social media,” but the tide quickly turned, and now it has people questioning whether our use of social media is making us forget common decency.
The story started on a flight from New York to Dallas when a woman named Rosey Blair asked another woman if she could switch seats with her so Blair could sit with her boyfriend. When the woman agreed, Blair joked that maybe the woman’s new seat partner, later dubbed “Plane Bae,” would turn out to be the love of her life, but the joke didn’t end there. Blair began to live post on Instagram and Twitter as the two strangers interacted on the flight. She framed the story as if they had a budding romance.
https://twitter.com/roseybeeme/status/1014123110134665216
Hundreds of thousands of twitter users followed along with Blair’s more than 50-tweet thread and soaked up every word — and photo. Blair began to document everything the pair did, from what they talked about, to when their elbows touched, to when they went to the bathroom.
https://twitter.com/roseybeeme/status/1014123609038737410
Next, media outlets like the BBC, USA Today and the Washington Post swooned over the story — especially after the identities and social media accounts of the pair were revealed.
Miracles *can* happen! 💕https://t.co/Cjl4mhEobi
— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) July 8, 2018
❤️✈️ Is #PlaneBae the greatest love story ever told on social media?📱 https://t.co/zuFiYFYHgQ
— BBC Trending (@BBCtrending) July 4, 2018
Romantics even started basically demanding that the pair get together.
Hey have you asked her for a date already? Are you planning on making a couple yt channel? You have all of us waiting for an answer!!! #planebae pic.twitter.com/rPFovUStdZ
— indrahmil (@GIndrah) July 4, 2018
You start the day with proposing to the girl and invite all of Twitter for the wedding! #PlaneBae https://t.co/ZPB3jMbSSO
— Ranta (@RanaaSays) July 4, 2018
But then … people started feeling uneasy. Many who originally saw Blair’s posts as a cute Internet love story got a social media hangover and now view it as an invasion of privacy, just for the sake of going viral.
This isn’t the first time, and probably won’t be the last, that someone has inadvertently gone viral without their immediate knowledge. Take Alex from Target, the Target worker who went viral in 2015 after a Twitter user posted a photo of him, or Dani Mathers, the former Playboy model who was sentenced to three years’ probation after posting Snapchat photos of a naked 71-year-old woman in an LA Fitness locker room.
So the #PlaneBae story is really just the latest incident to spark soul searching about privacy on social media. The woman who was involved allegedly deleted her social media accounts (there are even reports that she got harassed too), while the man, Euan Holden, has embraced the attention and conducted TV interviews about the encounter.
https://twitter.com/JareenAI/status/1014856358842261505
Then came the backlash, in the form of not only critical tweets but also articles like “#PlaneBae Proves Technology Has Turned Us All Into Stalkers and Glory Hounds.” All serving up food for thought about what happens when the internet’s need for happy content collides with actual human beings’ privacy.
So what do you think now? Was it a meet-cute tale that went viral because we’re all starved for a good story these days, or was it a gross bit of exploitation?
https://twitter.com/Pickman934/status/1016055155282726912
https://twitter.com/Pickman934/status/1016055165571362816
At first I thought that #PlaneBae story was cute, but it's actually pretty gross, and I just saw a video where the woman who started it is basically encouraging her followers to doxx the woman involved. Ugh.
— first of all, bitch, … (Yeah Mo!) (@thejournalista) July 8, 2018
https://twitter.com/AlexontheMic/status/1015234214088753152
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1015329613445304321
"It's a gross invasion of privacy" – @TaylorLorenz on the #PlaneBae fiasco pic.twitter.com/bEHg5gRzfo
— AM2DM by BuzzFeed News (@AM2DM) July 9, 2018
According to Vox writer Alex Abad-Santos, the big takeaway from this story is that we all should be more considerate of what we post and how it impacts others — and of what we “like” on social media, too. After all, we got here thanks to tens of thousands of likes and retweets, by people like you and me.