CHARLIE SHEEN hasn’t exactly built his “winning” reputation by keeping his thoughts to himself. So when he announced last week that he was quitting Twitter, the gossip media may have lost what had seemed like a bottomless trough of premium material.

And Mr. Sheen wasn’t alone. Just this month, Alec Baldwin and the British singer Lily Allen also made headlines by abandoning their personal Twitter accounts, at least for a while.

It raises the question: Are savvy celebrities deciding Twitter is becoming too much of a liability?

Celebrities have traditionally used handlers and publicists to protect them from fans and from themselves. But Twitter’s ability to connect them directly to their audiences has made it the garbage dump of choice for their every opinion and non sequitur.

In other words, it’s a public gaffe waiting to happen.

“Sharing so much often backfires and invites negative feedback, which is difficult for most celebrities to take in,” Seth Meyers, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist who counts several celebrities among his patients, wrote in an e-mail. “They quit Twitter, or their publicist tells them they need to quit for the sake of their career.”