Ha You Are Too Kind
The move from public to private is not a neutral event.
In April of 2022, I replied to a tweet from Eric Swalwell. It was not a loaded comment or a critique. It was the kind of thing people used to say all day long on that platform, a passing observation—”perhaps your best tweet.” It didn’t carry a lot of weight. It didn’t ask for a response. It certainly didn’t invite one. It was a throwaway comment.
At the time, Swalwell was a sitting congressman who had built a particular kind of public persona around accessibility and irreverence—the hot takes, the shitposting, the TikTok presence, the swagger of a politician who wanted you to believe he was just a guy online. A very good guy. One who looked out for women. That performance is worth naming, because it is the context in which the exchange happened.
A few hours later, he replied. Not in the thread, where the exchange began and where it would have made perfect sense, but in my direct messages. “Ha you are too kind.” If that same sentence had appeared publicly beneath the original tweet, I wouldn’t remember it. It would have been proportionate, visible, and complete in the context where it belonged. It would long since be forgotten.
Instead, it was moved to my DMs.
At the time, I didn’t have language for why it skeeved me out, only that it did. There was nothing inappropriate in the content, nothing that crossed a clear line, and nothing I could point to as a problem. But the interaction had shifted in a way that felt unnecessary. The proportion changed. What had been ambient became directed, and directed contact from a sitting congressman is not the same thing, even when the words are identical.
When I mentioned it yesterday on Threads, the response was immediate and familiar. There was an assumption that I must have done something to prompt it, that interactions like this don't simply happen without cause. That reflex assigns responsibility to the recipient to stabilize ambiguity. If something feels off, the explanation must lie in what you said, how you said it, what you were wearing, or what you inadvertently signaled.
That explanation doesn’t hold up. Public figures initiate private contact all the time now, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the specific content of a comment and everything to do with access, proximity, and the informal ways influence circulates. The ecosystem encourages it—and as a publicist, I know that accessibility and exposure share the same doorway. I have more conversations with clients about boundaries on these platforms than I should have to. Social platforms blur the line between public engagement and private outreach so thoroughly that we’ve stopped interrogating the moment where one becomes the other.
That moment is what this is about.
A public interaction moved into a private channel without a clear reason for doing so. Not for logistics, not for sensitive information, not for anything that couldn’t have been handled in the open. The move itself becomes the only meaningful variable.
Reading the recent reporting about Eric Swalwell, including the allegations that have been made and his denial of them, I was struck less by the specifics and more by the repeated presence of private channels in the accounts, the MO. Messages, exchanges, conversations that exist outside of public visibility are not incidental to how these interactions unfold. They are often where they begin, the gateway.
That doesn’t make every private message suspect, and it doesn’t retroactively assign meaning to every benign interaction. It does, however, point to a structural reality we tend to minimize: when an interaction moves out of public view, it also moves out of the set of shared expectations that govern public behavior. The norms change, even if the content does not.
There is no clear violation, no definable misconduct, and no obvious intent that can be named with any degree of confidence. What remains is a shift in context that introduces ambiguity without announcing itself as a problem. The content remains innocuous. The setting does not.
If that same message had remained in the public thread, it would have been entirely unremarkable. In a direct message, it becomes something that has to be interpreted. The interaction is no longer self-contained.
That is where the burden moves. Not in the message itself, but in the expectation that the recipient will either ignore the shift or explain why it registered at all. The question becomes not why the interaction was taken private, but why you noticed that it was. What’s the big deal?
That inversion is doing a lot of heavy lifting today.
We tend to think of power as something that asserts itself in visible ways, through statements, positions, and public actions that can be evaluated collectively. Increasingly, it operates through smaller decisions about access and visibility, and through the ability to move a conversation from one context to another without explanation or accountability. Who is engaged publicly, who is contacted privately, and when those lines are crossed are not neutral choices, even when the content of the interaction appears to be.
This is not an argument about intent, nor an attempt to draw a straight line between a single benign message and far more serious allegations. It is an attempt to take seriously the conditions under which interactions take shape, and to recognize that those conditions matter even when nothing overtly inappropriate occurs.
What moves out of public view moves out of accountability. That is not a side effect. That is the point.