It’s no accident that the president’s change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words “Same-sex couples should be able to get married,” to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama — the president’s not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account — was announcing “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.” As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

And just like that, what had been a fuzzy campaign issue for Obama just a week ago became a defiant stance – and an easily forwarded post. The president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts wasted no time issuing a photo of Obama with his statement, under the heading, “history.” The campaign’s main page itself immediately splashed up the quote, along with the ABC News clip and the invitation to “stand up with the president.” And the campaign’s colorful, friendly-looking poster stating that “Every single American/Gay Straight Lesbian Bisexual Transgender/Deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society/It’s a pretty simple proposition” popped into a place of honor on the Obama Pinterest and Instagram pages.

Elections can turn on a few provocative words – from “Read my lips” to “It’s the economy, stupid” to, simply, “Hope.” But there’s never been a time when a single sentiment could be parroted across so many different platforms. The Obama campaign knows this, and has shrewdly seized upon the immediate, visceral reaction that one sentence can inspire with impressive immediacy. Watch and learn, Romney. Though we’ve yet to see how the president’s “evolved” stance will shake out into real votes in November, for now, it sure makes for a whole lot of likes and pins. Whatever happens next, Obama’s won Twitter.

But the most wildly out-of-touch element to the whole affair was what Cowley did next. He shut down his Twitter account. It’s a classic response to an online attack of verbal diarrhea — the old waving of the magic delete wand to make all the bad stuff disappear. Too bad it doesn’t work.

We’ve recently seen a surge of hopeful deletions in the aftermath of stupid tweets. Last week, Mitt Romney spokesman Richard Grenell quietly eradicated his tweets suggesting that Rachel Maddow resembles Justin Bieber and ought to “take a breath and put on a necklace,” along with other gems. According to the Associated Press, Grenell, who’s also taken pot shots on the appearance of Hillary Clinton, Calista Gingrich and Michelle Obama, scrubbed more than 800 tweets from his feed. And last month, actress and conservative windbag Patricia Heaton went on a Sandra Fluke tear, saying “you’ve given yer folks great gift for Mother’s/Father’s Day! Got up in front of whole world & said I’m having tons of sex- pay 4 it!” and suggesting that if Fluke’s followers sent her “one condom, her parents wouldn’t have to cancel basic cable, & she would never reproduce—sound good?” At least Heaton had the sense to acknowledge that she purged the tweets after she removed them, saying, “I apologized to Ms Fluke last week. I may not agree with her views but I didn’t treat her with respect and I’m sorry. I was wrong. Mea culpa.”

The hastily issued, immediately regretted tweet is part of what makes online interaction the entertaining train wreck it so often is. After this year’s Grammys, Chris Brown sent an expletive-laced message to the haters — and promptly removed it. And by now, Kanye West is almost as well known for the tweets he’s withdrawn as the ones that inspired a Josh Groban musical interlude. In a world of handlers and publicists and artfully crated personae, human beings – professional human beings who ought to know better, even — still find a way to make utter boobs of themselves. But what makes the likes of Grenell and Cowley look particularly foolish, isn’t just the inanity of their initial tweetstorms. It’s the cowardly, immature way they ran from them.

Here’s a tip: They’re called screen grabs. When you say something offensive or idiotic, or both, to the entire world, people are going to archive it. You can post it for an amount of time so brief you believe Olympic scorekeepers could not measure it. It doesn’t matter. It’s out there. And if you call yourself a journalist, you in particular should be familiar with a little something known as a correction. That way, when you mess up, you don’t come off looking like you have all the wherewithal of a toddler covering her eyes and boasting, “You can’t see me!” Yeah, we can still see you. That’s how we know how many tweets Grenell deleted. That’s how we know what Cowley said.

People screw up and say dumb things all the time. Sometimes they type them and then impulsively hit the send button. Impulse control: always a losing battle. The best people can do afterward is learn from their mistakes, apologize for them, and move on. And there’s certainly a case to be made for removing words that would cause hurt or offense. The delete button can be your friend. But it’s worthless to try to slink off and do a stealth revision of the past. What you do in public is seen in public. More significantly, it is remembered. Forever.

On Monday, a Manhattan judge ruled that writer, Occupy Wall Street participant and prankster (and, for the purpose of full disclosure, my good friend) Malcolm Harris will not be able to block a subpoena on his Twitter account, including “any and all user information including email addresses” tied to it because, according to the judge, our tweets are not ours at all.

Harris, like me and more than 700 others, was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge roadway last October in one of Occupy Wall Street’s most headline-grabbing days of action. He, like most of the bridge arrestees, was charged with disorderly conduct (a violation equivalent in legal terms to a traffic ticket) but, refusing to plea out, is taking the charge to trial. In January, the Manhattan D.A.’s office sent Twitter a subpoena. Twitter promptly informed Harris, who decided to fight the subpoena with his lawyer, Martin Stolar of the National Lawyers Guild.

In his decision Monday to deny the motion to quash the subpoena, Criminal Court judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. revealed some potentially worrisome issues about how the law views our relationship with our tweets, which raise further questions about speech, privacy and self-representation. As Stolar explained to me, the judge decided that Harris has “no standing” to fight the subpoena in the first place — because his tweets (including direct messages, which are not publicly published) are not his, but belong to Twitter. The judge also rejected Stolar’s claim that Harris has a privacy interest in quashing the subpoena.

The question whether an individual has the standing to intervene on their own behalf to fight a subpoena served to a third party (in this case Twitter) is an interesting one. It should come as no shock that our tweets actually belong to the social media company; we agree to as much when we join Twitter and accept its terms of use. However, as Stolar points out, there’s long legal precedent for individuals intervening in subpoenas relating to, but not served to, them. For example, patients often intervene to quash subpoenas served to doctors regarding their medical records. Stolar plans to argue that Harris should have a standing in whether the government can (without a warrant) go through his accumulated, even in some parts deleted, Twitter history. Indeed, as the laywer also noted, the subpoena is both so broad and so vague that it’s hard to know how much access it would grant to Harris’ private messages and communications related to his Twitter account.

Which moves us on to the issue of privacy. It’s true that our Twitter behavior is in the public domain. But does this mean there’s no privacy interest when it comes to handing over the accumulated records of all our Twitter behavior to the authorities? Stolar offers this helpful but striking comparison: Say you have car — all your actions, driving around, parking, etc., are in public. However, the government would still need a warrant to track your car using a GPS to get an accumulated record of all your driving activity. Stolar argues that our accumulated Twitter activity should be equally considered in terms of privacy and what the authorities can or cannot demand access to.

“It’s very annoying that the judge said that no one has a privacy interest in their own communications here, their own speech,” said Stolar. I’d say it’s more than annoying — it’s downright worrisome. It should have long been obvious that Twitter is a powerful but limited tool for radical political organizing and agitating — the social media leviathan readily admits it will turn over information to legal authorities. (To its credit, Twitter has rejected gag orders in order to inform Wikileaks followers that the government had requested their Twitter information.) However, the fact that we as users are (legally) considered to have no standing or privacy interest when it comes to our own Twitter histories should serve as a chilling reminder that the nuggets of tweeted speech we send out — our very social media identities — are very distinct entities from our legal selves and the protections those selves are granted.

Of course, the lesson to take away is to tweet with caution. It’s also worth keeping in mind that, although throwing up some important insights, this court battle began over a charge for marching on a bridge. As Stolar puts it, “It’s prosecutorial overkill; using a sledgehammer to squash a gnat.” Harris agrees. He is (as he tends to be) disappointed in the state and surprised that a Harvard Law-trained ADA’s time is being used to pursue his minor charge. The precedent set, however, should give pause to those of us who live (perhaps too much of) our lives through Twitter.

Granted, Ms. Love has never been the traditional SUV-driving, cookie-baking kind of mom who posts incredibly detailed stuff about her baby’s poops.  But her recent slew of attention-getting Twitter insanity — and her 19-year-old daughter Frances Bean’s mortified response – suggests we are entering a new era of fail, one in which a parent’s awkward behavior isn’t of the adorable “What’s this button do?” variety. Instead, it may be more like “S#&% My Dad Said At Burning Man.”

Love, always a reliable train wreck and nowhere more in her wheelhouse of crazy than on Twitter, ramped it up last week when she accused Dave Grohl of hitting on her daughter in a lengthy series of tweets on her private account. She ranted freely about how angry she’d be “if frances slept with” him, going on about whether “the actual sex” was a rumor and adding that “dave tried to fuck me alot.” It was a display that Grohl’s publicist described as “Crazy Woman Says Insane Shit No One In Their Right Mind Would Believe.” And the young Miss Cobain, unsurprisingly, felt compelled to retort with her own variation on the classic, “Stop it, Mom, you’re embarrassing me.” Cobain issued a tart statement about “my biological mother,” saying that “her recent tirade has taken a gross turn” and adding, “Twitter should ban my mother.” She may be the most high-profile person to say it, but I’d wager Cobain is far from the only teenager who wishes Twitter could block her parents.

If you’ve never Tweeted your conviction that one of the Foo Fighters banged your teenager, congratulations, you’re not Courtney Love. But her tirade does represent an emerging dynamic that plays out in subtler ways across social media platforms. I’ve seen it with my own wincing eyes from parents who include their teenagers among their Facebook friends – and who post freely of their hangovers, their dating disasters, and their overall rock ‘n’ roll excesses. Those incriminating, spring break-like photos of the half-drunk lady from the party? Yeah, college kid, that’s YOUR MOM. It’s not that children are likely to be blithely unaware of their hipster parents’ lifestyles. But there’s a new blurring of the once easy-to-maintain tactful distance between parents and their young adult offspring, one complicated by the fact that many of us are cavorting on the road of excess a mere few steps ahead of our children.

Love has, in her typical fashion, attempted to kiss and make up with her daughter in the same format in which she originally speculated about her sex life – on Twitter. On Saturday, she posted, “Bean, sorry I believed the gossip. Mommy loves you.”

Mommy no doubt does. But the Gen-X parents who never quite settled down, who grapple with their own varying levels of maturity, now share the Internet with their teenagers. And the children whose shaky first steps and lost teeth have been documented all over Flickr and Twitter and Facebook are now turning into grown-ups themselves, with their own online lives. And while it’s our right as adults to party and to have sex and enjoy life, it’s also our job as parents to not be stupid. If your kid is old enough to read, your kid is old enough to be embarrassed by your Twitter stream. That’s why Love’s meltdown is a cautionary – if extreme – reminder that a typical Old Person Fail may no longer be an adorable “reply all” goof. Instead, it’s something that involves more ranting and thoughtlessness and way too much information. In other words, it looks an awful lot like a Young Person Fail.

But Carroll insists his more recent Twitter tirade — which Indiana News Center colorfully quotes as “BEEP is one of those BEEP words you can BEEP use in any BEEP sentence and it still BEEP make sense” – was banged out from his personal account on his home computer. The school district says the post came from a school-issued device or the school’s network. (Both Carroll and the district seem to agree that the post was not directed at any individual or the school itself.)

But students at Carroll’s school are expected to sign a Respectable Use Policy that requires them to “consider the information and images that I post online,” to not “flame, bully, harass or stalk people” or visit sites “that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate.” There’s no specific limit on word choice, which suggests that the school has now granted itself considerable leeway in interpreting its own rules.

Adding an invasively chilling element to the whole affair is the recent tweet from the Garrett School District’s IT director, who said, “Freedom of speech is our right, but it doesn’t (always) make it appropriate. Think before you type people. #austincarroll.” Because your school is watching you, kids.

It’s true that if more people thought before they typed, the Internet would be a markedly saner place. It’s easy to forget your teachers or your parents might see the words you’re banging out in what feels like perfect solitude. But Carroll wasn’t threatening anyone or deploying hate speech. He was just using some naughty words. He may even have been doing it on his own computer on his own time. And his school appears to have never issued a specific policy on the words in question anyway. So we are left with a kid who will now have to finish out his senior year at a nearby “alternative” school, where at least he can ostensibly wear a kilt and curse on Twitter and nobody will care.

Freedom of speech comes with a price, but the price tag should be appropriate. It’s a school’s job to encourage conversation, to spur kids to question the impact of their language and the effect their actions have, not to scurry away, blushing, from harder questions about expression, personal privacy and the limits of authority. In its Respectable Use Policy, the Garrett school says, with a stunning apparent lack of self-awareness, that “The primary priority of the technology is to improve student learning.” But Carroll and his fellow seniors must be wondering today how attainable that goal really is, when what could have been an authentic teachable moment has been so abruptly shut down.