I’ve read two stories in the past 24 hours about people sending out tweets and being asked by those in positions of authority to recant their statements, apologize, shut down their twitter accounts, or otherwise feel bad about vocalizing their opinions on an issue. And I think it’s ridiculous.

The first involves eighteen-year-old Emma Sullivan, who attended a Youth in Government retreat in her home state of Kansas last week. While she listened to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback welcome the crowd, she tweeted: “Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot.” Like most carefully constructed public figures, the governor employs people to track how he is talked about by the media and the public. In this case, the governor’s office found Sullivan’s tweet and alerted the Youth in Government program as to the negative comment. Sullivan was told by her high school principal to apologize to the governor and was allegedly given talking points to include in the written apology.  

This didn’t sit well with Sullivan or her older sister, who presumably used social media to spread the word about Brownback’s reaction and who generated a lot more publicity for the governor than Sullivan’s tweet would have initially accomplished. The governor’s office responded with a paternal tone: in order to “really have a constructive dialogue,” his spokesperson noted, conversations between politicians and their publics need to be respectful, and Sullivan’s tweet was anything but.

The second Twitter-based debacle involves Melissa Kellerman, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, who was tackled at the sidelines by Cowboys tight end Jason Witten. She rallied through the accidental tackle and tweeted twice about the incident in a light-hearted way. She wrote first, “Not hurtin’ today, like some of y’all thought I would be! Our [tight end] isn’t as tough as he looks…That or I’m WAY tougher than I look. ;)”  Then she wrote, “I’m not the best at Jason Witten trust falls. ;)”

Yahoo! Sports reporter Chris Chase writes that Kellerman, the cheerleaders, and the Dallas Cowboys team all looked like collegial and fun-loving team members to fans. That is, until the NFL allegedly forced her to shut down her Twitter account. Her account became inactive three days after the tackle, leading Internet denizens to speculate as to the reasons why.

These stories are also reminiscent of another tweet that recently rocked the boat, so to speak. This past spring, Seattle-based media organization Reel Grrls, which teaches media justice and literacy values alongside media production skills to teenage girls, tweeted this spring about the transfer of FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker to Comcast shortly after the FCC approved a highly controversial merger between Comcast and NBC: “OMG! @FCC Commissioner Baker voted 2 approve Comcast/NBC merger & is now lving FCC for A JOB AT COMCAST?!?”

So what was the problem here? Reel Grrls was receiving funding for its summer workshops from Comcast. In a purely reactionary response to the tweet, the local Comcast corporate sponsorship representative, Steve Kipp, emailed the organization and retracted all funding from the program. “I hope you can respect that this Tweet has put me in an indefensible position with my bosses,” Kipp said in his email. “I cannot continue to ask them to approve funding for Reel Grrls, knowing that the digital footprint your organization has created about Comcast is a negative one.” After a media blitz to publicize Comcast’s regrettable and unforgivable reaction, the corporation naturally backpedaled. It was, after all, on the losing end of a tweet, the impact of which it tried (and failed) to control.

Is there any coincidence that these instances all involve women or girls? Or that these instances involve people under the age of 25? How are women supposed to understand these stories, where the voices of other women are forcibly removed by men in positions of power who aim to restrict dialogue to favorable topics? Melissa Kellerman, for example, is not allowed to tweet on her own, and is instead reduced to sharing fun facts and swimsuit calendar photos on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders website. She is allowed very little leeway to cultivate or demonstrate dimension that might detract from her position as a sexy cheerleader. If she wants her job, she must comply.

Emma Silverman is only just growing into adulthood and it seems that Governor Brownback is taking it upon himself to educate her on the ways the world works. She is learning quickly that she doesn’t like the way Brownback’s world works, and continues to speak up.

Reel Grrls has been a model for helping its students find their voices in the face of corporate consolidation and the restriction of dissent. They raised money to replace Comcast’s funding and focused their summer workshops on issues of corporate control over media.

It may not (necessarily) be a gender thing – there are likely many instances of men’s voices being suppressed when they make statements that challenge institutionalized structures – but it certainly is a power thing. Those in positions of authority, deeply concerned with controlling messages and public opinion, exploit their positions and access to resources in order to protect that authority, to suppress dissent, to divert attention away from the problems that plague us on a daily basis.

As we have seen in recent news stories about the Arab Spring, for example, Twitter and other social networking sites have enabled the powerless to bring their voices together for a common purpose, to fight oppression and to shift the balance of power to the many, not the few. Americans tend to wholeheartedly support this change, support the spread of democracy, etc. etc. But here, on our own turf in the U.S., it seems that there are, increasingly, instances where shifting that balance of power is not something with which some people are totally comfortable. We’re finding institutions that are not quite ready to relinquish their total influence over the messages that impact them, so accustomed to control they have become – and so in control they have been allowed to become.

Responses to tweets like these reveal a lot about the organizations in power and the processes behind them. This certainly should not be construed as a lesson in how corporations should not respond to dissenting tweets – the lesson here is that average citizens need to continue to bolster their voices with louder and louder methods, to challenge, question, motivate, act, and participate. Even more so, women need to vocalize their positions and opinions, and to fight every step of the way to creating a more just society where every individual’s voice is heard and given equal weight, not just those voices that have carefully orchestrated public relations teams to back them up.

It’s clear that some are listening, and we need to tell them what we think. Uncontrolled messages are the scariest thing to those in positions of authority, but they are the backbone to a truly participatory and active society.