When intimacy becomes a weapon, Albania caught in the spectacle trap

By Kujtim Halili

In Albania, a scandal involving the publication and circulation of intimate material has rapidly become one of the most discussed topics in the public sphere. It has brought to light not only a story about the private lives of several individuals, but also a much broader problem: how Albanian society consumes information, how the media construct news, and how technology has changed the boundary between what belongs to the individual and what ends up in the public square.

Police have launched an investigation into the circulation of intimate videos on online platforms and social media, while recent reports describe questioning and checks as part of the investigation. At the same time, the names of people drawn into the speculation have circulated publicly, prompting some of them to respond and deny appearing in the material.

Yet the more this story fills our screens, the more necessary it becomes to step back and ask what this episode is really telling us. The most important issue is not the intimate content of the material, but the fact that part of someone’s private life has been taken out of context and placed in a public arena where people can be judged, named and exposed without any ability to control their own image.

American sociologist Erving Goffman, in his analysis of social interaction, describes everyday life as a space in which individuals move between different roles and situations, maintaining an important distinction between what they present to others and what remains backstage. This division is not merely a moral convention; it is one of the conditions that allow individuals to build an identity and retain control over how they are perceived.

Digital technology has made that boundary far less secure. A conversation, photograph or video created within a private circle can be removed from its original circumstances and travel into a space where the initial boundaries of the relationship no longer exist. Something intended for one person can reach hundreds, thousands or millions of others.

At that point, the problem is no longer merely individual. It becomes social. When private material becomes public, the person who appears in it loses control over how they are presented, while the public gains a kind of power over a story that does not belong to it.

One characteristic of contemporary media is that they do not simply report events; they organize them into narratives. The headline, the photograph, the order of stories, the selection of details and the language used all influence how the public understands an episode.

This relates to the concept of framing, developed in Goffman’s sociological tradition and later widely used in communication studies: an event does not enter public consciousness in its raw form, but through a frame that determines which elements are seen as important.

In the case of the latest scandal, there is a risk that the story will be built around the question “Who is in the video?” when the question of greater social importance is “How was private material able to enter public circulation, and what responsibilities arise from that?”

These are two entirely different ways of looking at the same event.

The first generates curiosity.

The second generates debate.

In the age of social media, the boundary between producers and consumers of information has become increasingly blurred. The public no longer merely waits for the news; it comments on it, adapts it, republishes it and gives the original material a second life, often a much longer one.

This is where the attention economy comes into play: content that provokes an emotional response is more likely to spread quickly. A story that arouses curiosity, outrage or scandal becomes more visible than a lengthy analysis of a structural problem, not necessarily because it is more important, but because it is better able to prompt an immediate reaction.

McCombs and Shaw described this mechanism through agenda-setting theory, according to which the media influence which issues come to be seen as important by the public. In the digital environment, algorithms and user behavior have been added to this mechanism, creating a system in which whatever attracts more engagement can gain even more exposure.

This creates a paradox: a society can have far more information than before and yet have less room to think about it.

In the 1960s, Guy Debord described modernity through the concept of the society of the spectacle, in which social relationships are increasingly mediated through images. Today, that idea takes on a new dimension in the digital sphere, where an image can become more powerful than its context and a fragment detached from reality can generate an entire story.

An intimate scandal is particularly susceptible to this mechanism because private content carries a strong emotional and moral charge. For that very reason, it can easily be turned into a spectacle. But spectacle has a particular effect: it shifts attention from the structures at work to the people involved.

Instead of questions about technology, education, institutional responsibility or media ethics, the debate can be reduced to identifying individuals and judging their private lives.

This story also has a gender dimension that cannot be overlooked. In public discussions of the case, sociologists and other commentators have raised issues concerning victimization, the moral judgment of women and the lack of sex education, shifting the discussion away from gossip and toward the social consequences of exposure.

In societies where sexual reputation remains closely tied to public morality, the exposure of a woman can bring social punishment far greater than that faced for the initial act of publication. Here, shame functions as a disciplinary mechanism: the individual is judged not only for what she has done, but also for having become visible.

This explains why, in such cases, the question “Why did she do it?” arises so quickly, while “Who published it, and why?” often remains secondary. This reversal lies at the heart of one of the deepest problems in a culture of exposure: responsibility risks shifting from the person who violated a boundary to the person whose boundary was violated.

The metaphor of a “smokescreen,” or “cortina de humo,” is useful here, but it must be used carefully. There is not enough public evidence to say that this scandal was orchestrated or deliberately manufactured to divert attention from another political issue. Such a conclusion would be speculative. But an event does not need to be orchestrated to have the effect of a smokescreen.

In a public sphere where people have limited capacity to follow many issues at once, an emotionally charged story can displace other events without a hidden hand directing it. This is a sociological mechanism, not necessarily a political conspiracy. In this sense, the “smokescreen” can be understood as a consequence of the way public attention is organized: one story becomes central and, in doing so, pushes the rest of the landscape into the shadows.

Jürgen Habermas built his concept of the public sphere on the idea that citizens should be able to discuss shared concerns through argument and reason. Today’s media reality is far more chaotic. Instead of a space where arguments clash, we often have a marketplace where emotions clash. In that marketplace, news that provokes an immediate reaction can receive more attention than a problem that takes time to understand. A video can become more widely discussed than a report. A name caught up in rumors can receive more attention than a verified fact. A personal conflict can overshadow an institutional debate. This does not mean that every sensational event is unimportant. It means its importance must be distinguished from the intensity of the attention it receives.

They are two different things.

When the noise dies down and this story is replaced by the next one, what will remain important is not curiosity about the intimate content, but how institutions, the media and society responded to the violation of privacy.

The question will remain of how well prepared we are to protect individuals in a reality where material can be copied endlessly and distributed within minutes. So will the question of how much responsibility the media assumes when reporting on people’s intimate lives. And the more uncomfortable question will remain: what role do we, as an audience, play in creating this reality?

Technology does not distribute material by itself; behind every act of sharing is a human choice. Perhaps this is where a different media culture should begin: not with the question of how far we can go to see, but with the question of where we should stop.

A society that turns every violated boundary into entertainment risks losing the very meaning of boundaries. A society that learns to distinguish information in the public interest from curiosity about private lives gains something more important than a sensational story: a more responsible public sphere.

And it is precisely here that the “smokescreen” takes on its deeper meaning: not as an invisible hand that necessarily controls the scene, but as the fog created when spectacle, curiosity and the relentless pace of social media make it difficult to distinguish what is merely interesting from what truly matters.