Bad online judgment shouldn’t haunt us forever
Every person who didn’t grow up with the Internet has at some point turned to a friend and said “I’m so glad (insert social media network) wasn’t around when I was in high school.”
No such luck for Ala Buzreba, the 21-year-old Liberal candidate from Calgary who pulled out of the federal election last week after her teenage tweets were re-circulated by a selfdescribed “staunch conservative.” Granted, this was not breakup poetry. The 17-year-old sent out tweets about how her new haircut made her “look like a flipping lesbian!!” and more troubling, used violent language to express her politics. “Your mother should have used that coat hanger,” she wrote to a pro-Israel account that expressed anti-Palestine sentiments. “Go blow your brains out you waste of sperm. #racist #asshole #bigot,” she wrote to a Twitter account that has now been deleted.
After the tweets surfaced, Buzreba apologized on social media and stepped down. I in no way condone Buzreba’s views. But I don’t think her online teenage behaviour should haunt her adult life.
Policy-makers have recently sought to regulate the long shadow cast by social media slipups. In Europe and California, laws now exist that enable people to take digital erasers to their online activity. But rather than empower individuals to purify their online personas, our culture needs to become more tolerant of a generation’s habit to air its flaws online.
The fact that teenagers aren’t known for sound judgment is why youth offences are often scrubbed from criminal records. Policymakers are starting to apply that logic to the digital world. UK ministers have backed a campaign called iRights that calls for anyone under 18 to be able to edit, delete and ask others to delete any online content that contains “errors of judgment, unhappy experiences and attitudes that were the product of immaturity.” This year, California passed a similar law for minors known as the “eraser button.” And, of course, the European Union passed the creepily named “right to be forgotten” law last year, which allows anyone to ask a search engine to remove links that contain inaccurate or irrelevant info about themselves (the pages, however, are not removed from the Internet). So far, there are no such policies in Canada.
While the principle behind these laws is admirable — that you shouldn’t pay for a stupid tweet for your entire life — the ability to revise one’s online history is problematic. There’s the obvious critique that these privacy measures infringe on freedom of information. But the biggest issue with these laws is that they run counter to how young people behave on the Internet today. A recent study by Ask. fm found that 79 per cent of teens rarely regret what they post online, despite the fact that many probably should. I cringe when I look back at some of my more candid Facebook statuses, but for today’s teens, social media platforms are pages in their public journal. The newer platforms such as Snapchat, where posts disappear in 10 seconds (unless they are screengrabbed) tempt users to divulge even more. As young people become comfortable online, they likely won’t have the foresight or desire to erase their more risky moments of self-expression.
Rather than giving young people the tools to censor themselves, our culture should become more permissive of their digital mishaps. That doesn’t mean Buzreba shouldn’t have pulled out of the election — given the severity of her tweets, she probably had to. But when she applies for jobs down the line, employers should not assume she’s a foul-mouthed antiSemite.
During an age in which babies play with iPads before they learn to walk, we shouldn’t be surprised or put off when a person’s social media history reflects their growing pains. As more people who understand what it’s like to regret a hormone-fuelled tweet rise to positions of power, work culture will hopefully become more tolerant of social media gaffes. There will be no point in digging up someone’s social history to shame them, because chances are they could just as easily shame you right back.