How many times last week did you hear someone say, "What the heck was he thinking?" when the latest update about New York Rep. Anthony Weiner came out?

I don't want to know what, or if, he was thinking. But as the news became increasingly graphic this week about the photographs he tweeted and shared, I started thinking about the illusion of privacy online and our community search for truth.

Twitter and Facebook may look far different from the morning newspaper or the evening news, but tweets and posts can be just as public. That's intentional.

Facebook allows us one profile – our personal and work relationships are all mashed up under the heading of "friends." That's sometimes an uncomfortable place to be for my generation; not so much for my sons and their peers.

Their generation has been influenced by the privacy philosophy of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder. In the book "The Facebook Effect," author David Kirkpatrick quotes a 2009 interview with Zuckerberg that sounds prescient given last week's news.

"The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly," Zuckerberg said.

He told Kirkpatrick that "having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

"The level of transparency the world has now won't support having two identities for a person," he said.

At the rate politicians and others have been caught – very publicly – in a lie, I'd say we're already well past a time in which any of us can cultivate a public face different from our private behavior.

Think about it. It took about two years, during which the Washington Post and others aggressively covered the story, before President Richard Nixon was forced to resign for his role in Watergate. Given today's Internet onslaught of news, with everyday citizens sometimes working as fast as journalists to obtain information, how long would it take?

Not nearly that long.

I'd worry about our collective, insatiable appetite for the salacious and scandalous except for this: It's really more a community search for truth.

We still have many sources who tip journalists to wrongdoing that needs to be thoroughly reported. That's how The Bee's Robert Lewis and Charles Piller started investigating "hard money" lending fraud in Nevada County. They reported last week that the Nevada County district attorney became financially beholden to a hard money lender under investigation for bilking investors. Traditional reporting also led to the Los Angeles Times story about former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "love child."

Weiner's online indiscretions were discovered and first publicized by self-described conservatives – not traditional journalists – who monitored his behavior on Twitter, according to news reports. Intense media coverage then forced him to admit his behavior.

We need both. Whistle-blowers and concerned citizens or experts always will play a necessary role in our search for truth. Journalists will work to ensure that we get there.

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Reach Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar at (916) 321-1004.

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