In today’s world, the past is present always
If young people — and many older adults — do not realize that the life span of a tweet, comment on Instagram or Facebook post is, well, forever, just look at what is happening in the sports world.
Baseball players are finding out that the dumb things they espoused years ago are haunting their adult careers. Milwaukee Brewers player Josh Hader, Sean Newcomb of the Atlanta Braves and Trea Turner of the Washington Nationals all are having to apologize for their online past. Entertainers, too, have learned that what they said in the past can hurt them in the present — James Gunn won’t be directing Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, because of old tweets.
For parents, this is an opportunity to remind their children that social media lives on even after views have changed. College admissions counselors will scour the internet. A racist or homophobic tweet could stop a promising entrant from winning admission to that dream college. A new boss will do research, and a job offer that was expected won’t occur. And what young woman would want to date a guy whose social media profile is full of rants against women?
Everyone with a past on social media should do some investigating to see whether they, too, were once young and stupid. They can, at the least, attempt to scrub the ugly sayings or photos, as well as strategize with PR folks about what to do when the posts go public. Hader’s embarrassment — the uncovering of racist tweets — happened as he was playing the All Star Game. The other players, also caught by surprise, should have been better prepared.
But their embarrassment could save others. Young people have to understand that online pasts do not vanish quietly. Even scrubbed-away Instagram photos can be recovered. Tweets can be captured with screenshots, as can Facebook posts.
Cubs pitcher Jon Lester — at a wizened 34 — had smart advice for younger players on Twitter: “If you’re on Twitter, please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn’t want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper. Better yet, don’t say stupid things in the first place. Too many young guys getting burned. #themoreyouknow.” That’s the best advice yet. A bigger question for baseball is whether these players have changed or whether they truly hold racist and homophobic views. Does baseball have bigger problems than bad PR? For the rest of us, it’s worth asking why young people, men in particular, seem so at ease with racist, homophobic and misogynistic language — that’s true even for people who don’t hold those views.
Don’t just clean up language online. Clean up attitudes. Clean up the language that we use so casually. Then, no panicked adult will have to scrub a social media past — because the ugly tweets won’t be there in the first place.