Opinion | Teens Are Going to Make Mistakes Online. What’s Next Is Up to Us.

Ms. Coppola’s daughter, for example, deleted her video shortly after it began to go viral. It lived on only because adults, ranging from private citizens to legitimate news organizations, saved it, reuploaded it, shared it, wrote about it and mocked it. After all, the internet is public, right? That glib caveat may have started as a well-intentioned reminder for vulnerable users, but it has become a blanket justification for amplifying anything people find online, even if it’s been created by, or about, a child.

A kid clumsily practicing lightsaber moves? If you saw it in person, it would barely be worth paying attention to, let alone alerting your friends, and pointing and laughing would seem obviously cruel and gross. Yet when a video like this was uploaded in 2003 — around the time I was baring my soul to the world online — it quickly became one of the most viewed, and widely mocked, videos on the internet. If a politician’s daughter turns up at an in-person L.G.B.T.Q. youth group to discuss her sexuality, broadcasting it to the world would be a blatantly harmful act. But if she mentions it online in an unguarded moment, many people think nothing of amplifying that disclosure. In real life, we understand that teenagers deserve the space and privacy to be teenagers, free from mockery or public disdain. Why don’t we extend the same courtesy or display the same decency online?

The nonfamous among us can take a cue from the way celebrities approach this conundrum — after all, they have much more experience with the potentially scathing nature of the spotlight. Making a big deal of giving your child access to social media will, at the very least, help the kid understand that it’s a big step. One day that kid may make a public misstep. But the ultimate responsibility now lies with us, the people these kids encounter online, to give teenagers the space to explore their identities, to even make mistakes and mess up, without being party to their humiliation. We should be examples to them online, not perils lurking to pounce.

I’m fortunate that my own teenage mistakes happened when the internet was still relatively new. I never went truly viral, and the worst of the damage I experienced was confined to a relatively small blast radius. Yet 20 years later, I believe more than ever that we need to develop a new internet etiquette, one with a more nuanced understanding about what it means for anyone to post something in this “public” space. Teenagers especially deserve our consideration and our protection. If they post something mortifying, don’t repost. Don’t favorite. And definitely don’t download and repost. If you see it online, ask yourself what you’d do if you saw it in person. As we say to kids all the time: Make a better choice.

Lux Alptraum is a podcaster and the author of “Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — and the Truths They Reveal.”