What the Ancients Knew About Posting Well

We're bad at social media because social media encourages us to be that way. I don't mean bad in the sense of "not effective," because plenty of us are plenty effective in getting likes and reposts and replies. Rather, we're bad in the sense that the way we write and respond on social media isn't all that ethical. From the standpoint of "speaking well," we are what we might call unskillful.

Fortunately, there's an ancient ethical text that can help. Its name is a mouthful— the Abhayarājakumārasutta —and it comes to us from ancient India.

It's a dialogue between the Buddha and a young prince named Abhaya. Abhaya has been sent by a rival school of philosophers to put a trick question to the famous teacher: does the Buddha ever say things others dislike? Either answer should embarrass him. If yes, he's no different from any cranky stranger. If no, why did he so harshly condemn his cousin for repeatedly trying to murder him? The Buddha refuses the trap. The framework he offers Abhaya in response is portable. It doesn't require taking on any particular metaphysics, and it works as a test for speech regardless of whether you have any interest in the rest of what the Buddha has to say.

The Buddha lays out three criteria. Speech he knows to be "untrue, false, and pointless" he doesn't say, whether others like it or not. Speech he knows to be "true and correct, but which is harmful" he also doesn't say, whether others like it or not. Speech he knows to be "true, correct, and beneficial" he speaks at the right time, whether others like it or not.

Three of the six combinations the Buddha lays out are speech he refuses entirely. Two of those refusals are easy: pointless lies, regardless of audience. The third is harder. The Buddha refuses to say things that are true and correct but harmful. Truth, on this account, is necessary but not sufficient. The accuracy of a statement does not license the speaking of it. Skill in speech is more demanding than getting the facts right.

The Buddha tells Abhaya why he speaks this way, and the reason matters more than the criteria themselves. He does it because he has sympathy for sentient beings. Earlier in the exchange he illustrates the point: if your child swallows a stone, you take it out even if it draws blood, because you have sympathy for the child. Hard speech is allowed, but only from that posture. Speech that draws blood for its own sake is not.

Run this against the typical online post.

The dunk economy fails on harm. Most ratios and pile-ons are factual enough. They fail because the point is humiliation, not anything you could call care for the person being humiliated. The framework rules them out flat, not because they are untrue, but because the speaker's relationship to the person spoken about is the wrong one.

The screenshot-and-mock genre fails the same way. Someone, often a stranger, has said something dumb or ugly online, and a poster captures it for their own followers, not to engage with the person but to display them. The display is the speech act. The stranger in the screenshot is, in a real sense, not part of the conversation at all. They're material. There is no listener whose good is being served. There is only an audience, brought together to share in contempt.

The bad-faith question move fails earlier in the test. "I'm just asking questions" speech is usually pointless or dishonest, often both. It dresses itself as inquiry and functions as attack. The framework refuses speech of this kind whether or not the audience likes it.

What the framework allows is more interesting than what it rules out. Disliked speech can be the right speech. The Buddha permits hard truths to people who don't want to hear them, and blunt disagreement, and criticism that has a real edge. He just requires that the speaker mean them for the listener rather than for an audience or a feeling of triumph. Two posts can have identical content, with the same claim, same target. One is offered to a person, hoping to reach them. The other is offered to an audience, hoping to dominate. The framework permits the first and refuses the second, and any reader can usually tell, from tone alone, which one a given post is.

The right-time clause is the third condition, and it's the one social media is built to defeat. The framework assumes the speaker can wait. Real speech happens with timing. You can sit on something true and beneficial because the moment isn't right, and the waiting matters as much as the words. Platforms erase the wait. Everything is immediate. Everything is searchable later, decontextualized, recoverable as ammunition. There's no proper time, only the next post.

Part of why discourse on these platforms looks the way it does isn't the truth value of what gets said. It's the absence of wait. There's no place on the platform for the speaker to pause, and no incentive to develop the kind of judgment that pausing allows.

A simple test, before posting:

The honest answer in most cases is that the post fails at least two. The point isn't to stop posting. It's to know what you're doing when you do. Skillful speech, the kind the Buddha was trying to teach Abhaya, is something we can develop. And the texture of a feed changes when even a few people in it post from sympathy instead of performance.