Stop Taking Photos of the Flight Crew, It Is Terrible Behavior
The general rule is that you should not take pictures of strangers in public, and that rule applies doubly to workers.
The digital era has changed social norms. Phones are out on the dinner table. People stop to take selfies in the middle of the sidewalk. You don't just go on vacation—you film it too. A lot of this might chafe those who want to be more in the moment and disconnected from the online world, but there isn't anything wrong with taking a quick snap of your food or a little short video of the beautiful ocean you're standing in front of.
But one type of content is absolutely off-limits: taking photos of strangers, especially strangers just trying to do their jobs. In a recent viral Reddit thread on the r/FlightAttendants subreddit, one Redditor posted about a woman who took a photo of a Delta flight attendant and posted it to her Instagram account with more than 50,000 followers on July 7.
The photo shows a young person wearing a Palestine pin, and the post has nearly 5,000 likes and hundreds of comments. The woman who posted the photo, Samantha Ettus, is a self-described "accidental activist," among other things. Many of the comments immediately commented on how inappropriate it was to take a photo of the flight attendant, but others tagged Delta in the comments, asking for the flight attendant's firing.
In the Reddit post detailing Ettus's post, it was lamented: "These people need to 👏🏼 STOP 👏🏼 TAKING 👏🏼 PICS 👏🏼 OF 👏🏼 FLIGHT ATTENDANTS! 👏🏼.” Everyone in the thread shared the sentiment.
"It is so terrifying to me that at any moment I could be photographed, recorded, and go viral on the internet without my knowledge/consent when I'm just trying to do my job and make it to the next paycheck," one person wrote. "This is sad."
Another person on the thread wrote: "My crews are great but I always tell them to be mindful of everything because people are LOOKING for situations/reasons to post us on the internet. It's honestly a safety issue because people are such extremists, they'll dox someone."
While Ettus was politically motivated to post the photo of the flight attendant—a quick perusal of her other posts makes it clear that she's built a following off of being antagonistic. She followed up with a video encouraging her followers to contact Delta to complain about the worker, repeatedly showing the photo she had already shared.
This woman's belief that she has the right to police the political significance of other people's attire aside, the practice of taking photos of flight attendants is not exclusive to those with political agendas. The trend of photographing people without their knowledge or consent for engagement online has grown increasingly common, especially on airplanes.
There's the "Is This Your Man" style post that recently went viral, where a woman filmed a man she didn't know from Adam and asked the internet to help find his wife to "catch him cheating." While the man wasn't a flight attendant, and yeah, maybe he was cheating, it was WEIRD that this woman spent an entire flight eavesdropping and secretly filming a man she didn't know. This massive invasion of privacy can open up people to real problems in their professional and personal lives. What right do you (or any of us) have to turn a public space like an airplane into a hunting ground for viral online moments?
"When I think about the idea of an office worker being photographed while at their job at the office, the whole concept sounds very, very creepy," one Redditor commented on the thread. "No different for flight attendants, except that people don't think about it like this."