In modern communications, emails can be the digital equivalents of scribbled notes – all lower case and poor punctuation – or pedantic official documents, depending on context and recipients. But the key thing is that the prose is always deathless.
That’s a rule that Tucker Carlson, a major Donald Trump supporter, is probably reckoning with at the moment. Disclosures of his emails in Dominion Voting Systems’s $1.6bn (£1.33bn) suit against Fox show the TV presenter admitting “I hate him [Trump] passionately”. Other emails show that Fox executives knew that Trump’s claims about a stolen election were false but still aired them as if they were legitimate. Awkward.
Jes Staley, the former CEO of Barclays Bank, is being sued by his former employers JPMorgan Chase, asked to repay $80m in compensation and held liable for any financial penalties the bank may incur in two cases relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s exploitation of girls and young women.
Staley exchanged more than 1,000 emails with Epstein between 2008 and 2012, including ones in which the names of Disney princesses allegedly refer to women trafficked by Epstein.
The problem is it’s hard always to remember the possibility of future scrutiny before hitting send.
The temptation to believe that no one’s watching, and never will be, is even greater with texts and messaging apps.
On its website, WhatsApp has a reassuring note: “Only you and the person you’re communicating with can read or listen to what is sent.” That is a technical statement of fact. However, many users of the app are beginning to realise that end-to-end encryption does not prevent wall-to-wall media coverage.
Matt Hancock, the former reality TV star and one-time health secretary, learned that vital 21st-century lesson in communications technology when the Daily Telegraph published a selection of his most embarrassing WhatsApp messages, introducing a man forced to resign for breaching his own Covid social distancing rules to new depths of public ridicule.
The real issue is whether one should ever commit off-the-cuff thoughts and feelings to imperishable databases.
Rebekah Vardy, wife of the Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, must have regretted the electronic record of her description of Coleen Rooney, wife of the former Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, as a “nasty bitch” and worse. It was her WhatsApp messages that almost certainly led to the hugely expensive loss of her libel case against Rooney. Not just the ones that were preserved but also those deleted, by accident or design.
That’s the inescapable nature of electronic communication: it leaves data tracks and efforts to cover them can be just as damaging as the information itself. Everything we write has the potential to come back to haunt us. That may be good for the cause of justice, but it doesn’t do a lot for spontaneous expression. Perhaps the moral is if you’re going to voice an opinion you don’t want others to know, save it for the phone – except, of course, if it’s tapped.
• Andrew Anthony is an Observer columnist
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