If you're running for election I'm guessing you're old-ish? (From the point of an 18-year-old, where old-ish is 28+?) In high school I worked with a bunch of teachers on Internet-related stuff, and I found that there's a disconnect in how people across the gap view privacy.
For people 18 year old and younger, there's never not been an Internet. When I was 8 I had already been told a bunch of horrifying "keep your security" stories. I was probably younger than 15 when I first heard about sites like 4chan terrorizing people for years on-end. The result, though, isn't that you hide yourself (which is the reaction I see in my father especially). It's that you decide exactly how you'll let yourself be seen online, you avoid things that'll get you in trouble, and you don't take the Internet too seriously. Most harassment things won't happen if you sound reasonable, don't botch up spelling, avoid fanfiction, and don't actively taunt Anonymous. Similarly, a lot of stuff online is less serious than you can let yourself believe: if you get threatening calls, they almost never mean a thing. People troll. It's easy, and it's become a part of society.
In the end, the sheer amount of information means that almost nobody gets targeted. You're a small bubble in a vast ocean. We young brats see it like that, anyway: now, everything is considered public information but still under your control. (I was called into a teacher's office for something I said on Facebook: I said that it was my private space, that the teacher had no right accessing my information, and that the person who took my stuff off of Facebook was violating terms and against the law. She couldn't do anything after that.) So it doesn't become a matter of privacy or not: it becomes a matter of just what is most public.
I agree with you about Twitter, though. Constraints aren't particularly useful in its case.
For this particular office, the min age is 18 (the other 2 quals are to be registered to vote and live in the district). But yes, I'm more than 2x that, and the guy who won is even older than I am.
For people 18 year old and younger, there's never not been an Internet. When I was 8 I had already been told a bunch of horrifying "keep your security" stories. I was probably younger than 15 when I first heard about sites like 4chan terrorizing people for years on-end. The result, though, isn't that you hide yourself (which is the reaction I see in my father especially). It's that you decide exactly how you'll let yourself be seen online, you avoid things that'll get you in trouble, and you don't take the Internet too seriously. Most harassment things won't happen if you sound reasonable, don't botch up spelling, avoid fanfiction, and don't actively taunt Anonymous. Similarly, a lot of stuff online is less serious than you can let yourself believe: if you get threatening calls, they almost never mean a thing. People troll. It's easy, and it's become a part of society.
In the end, the sheer amount of information means that almost nobody gets targeted. You're a small bubble in a vast ocean. We young brats see it like that, anyway: now, everything is considered public information but still under your control. (I was called into a teacher's office for something I said on Facebook: I said that it was my private space, that the teacher had no right accessing my information, and that the person who took my stuff off of Facebook was violating terms and against the law. She couldn't do anything after that.) So it doesn't become a matter of privacy or not: it becomes a matter of just what is most public.
I agree with you about Twitter, though. Constraints aren't particularly useful in its case.