Furious 7 has now became the fifth highest grossing film of all time. Only James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar, Marvel’s The Avengers, and the final Harry Potter film stand in its way. So a lot of people have gone to see Paul Walker’s final movie. I have also seen the action film, but took a long time to do so.

In the three weeks between the films release and getting to see it, I was on social media constantly, and if anyone had mentioned parts of the film, well that’s my own darn fault for one, not seeing the film soon enough, and two, being stupid enough to go on sites that may reveal things about the plot when I hadn’t seen it yet. Luckily I wasn’t spoiled, and I was able to enjoy the film for what it was, but recent events have got me thinking: have we lost track of what a spoiler really means?

To me a spoiler is when something is revealed about a television show or movie ahead of it’s release date. I’ll use my beloved reality show Survivor as an example (yes, Survivor is still on TV. Fifteen years strong!). Survivor films it’s seasons well in advance, sometimes taking up to eight months to air after the events actually happened in some deserted South Pacific island. In the past the order of when people are voted out have been released before the season even starts. That is a spoiler! When I see tweets about the episode after it has aired in Australia, that is not a spoiler, as I can’t expect the world to stop for me. Even though it does suck when I have been stupid enough to go on Twitter straight after the episode aired on the East Coast of the United States, it’s nobodies fault but mine.

The incident much like the second example I explained happened to my sister when she posted about the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Instagram, a good 48 hours after the episode had aired. Half a dozen people screamed “spoiler” and that she “ruined it”, but what was she meant to do? Wait a week? A month? A year? That’s ridiculous!

As I said, stay away from social media if you actually care about seeing something before you hear it from someone else. It’s called social media for a reason. People are always going to be talking. So if you don’t want to spoil shows for yourself, and you don’t see it straight away, it might be best to stay offline.