Career killing, mindless rants run rampant on social media

If only they had hesitated. Sobered up. Calmed down. Assessed the consequences. Turned off their computers. Pocketed their smartphones. Waited, at least till morning, before spewing ill-considered rants across social media.

Maybe they’d still have their jobs. Or avoided viral shaming on Facebook and Twitter. “Losing my career was not the worst part of this. Not the hardest part. The worst part of this was being painted as this monster on social media,” said fired Fox Sports sideline reporter Emily Austen on a Sports Spectrum podcast, recalling her dreadful attempt at jock humor last year on a Facebook Live video.

The Florida Atlantic University grad had descended into some imprudent, unfunny remarks about Mexican immigrants and Boca Raton Jews. So much for her career, though she has since been invited to lecture athletes at Florida State and the University of Alabama on the hazards of social media.

Austen is hardly alone. It’s a phenomenon of the digital age: career-wrecking, self-sabotaging remarks and photos, posted in a headlong rush, no thought of the ramifications, desperate for followers to notice our soupçon of dazzling wit. As if we all suffer the affliction novelist David Foster Wallace described in Infinite Jest: “I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen.”

Which might explain the selfie Pinellas County Deputy Sheriff Austen Callus posted on Snapchat last summer, adding the disturbing caption: “Nothing like almost shooting someone to set your head right lol.” Yeah, that cost him his job. But he just had to share.

Surely social media provocateurs realize that there’ll be hell to pay. Orange County Assistant State Attorney Kenneth Lewis, for example, had already been disciplined after a 2014 Facebook post wishing “Happy Mother’s Day to all you crack hoes out there. It’s never too late to tie your tubes, clean up your life.”

Yet, after the Orlando Pulse nightclub mass murder last year, the prosecutor couldn’t stop himself, taking to Facebook to declare Orlando “a melting pot of third world miscreants and ghetto thugs,” notable for “utter cesspools of debauchery.” He was fired.

Same outcome for two maternity ward nurses at the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, but their photos went wild on Facebook and Snapchat after they used newborns as props, including one shot in which the nurses flipped off a baby. With the caption. “How do I currently feel about these mini-Satans?” But so what if they were fired? Their post delivered 180,000 shares on Facebook.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department, along with other South Florida law enforcement agencies, have found their community outreach efforts thwarted time and again by racist posts by obstreperous cops. Despite the threat of termination.

University of Tampa visiting professor Kenneth Storey told the Orlando Sentinel he made a “heartbreaking” mistake when he posted an “extremely poorly worded” tweet in August suggesting that climate deniers in Texas had been visited by karma along with the Hurricane Harvey flooding. He was fired. He lamented, “It’s so easy to type something and hit send.”

Storey is not alone with his Twitter regrets. Google the phrase “apologizes for tweet” and up pops 8.4 million hits. From Kathy Griffin to Oprah to Jemele Hill to Kevin Durant to Geraldo Rivera to Rose McGowan. Celebrities, politicians, corporate execs, a legion of unthinking pro athletes. On and on. (Yet, no apologies have come from tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump, despite his penchant for mean and often mendacious posts.)

Even sorrier for their social media addictions are criminal miscreants who just couldn’t resist giving the cops a heads up.

On Dec. 10, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission busted three boaters who had provided the videotaped evidence, via Snapchat, of their boat cruelly dragging a live shark through the waters off Hillsborough County.

Then there was the Palm Beach County kid who posted videos of himself brandishing stolen firearms. And the Clay County mother who made international news — and got herself arrested — with a Facebook photo of her 11-month-old baby sucking on a bong. And three young Miami-Dade burglars, who posted a celebratory video on Facebook: them waving stolen loot and chanting, “We got a safe.” Which should have been followed by, “We got ourselves busted.”

And the Lakeland woman who live-streamed herself on Periscope as she drove home, saying, “I’m driving home drunk, let’s see if I get a DUI. I don’t think I will.” Except the police were able to trace her whereabouts via that same the live video.

And South Miami’s infamous Facebook killer, Derek Medina, now serving a life sentence after posting a photo of his wife’s lifeless body, with the caption: “I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife.” He added. “Take care Facebook people. You will see me in the news.”

Apparently, in the digital age, the phrase “you will see me” is all that matters.

Fred Grimm