If you stumble upon an old social media post made by someone you know and it might prove embarrassing or harmful, should you alert them to your discovery?
Frequently over the past 20 years, when I’ve come across a Facebook post made by someone I know that might wreak havoc on their job search as they are about to enter the market, I’ve let them know.
Perhaps it was a relative who was a rising college senior who once thought it amusing to post a photo of herself chugging back alcohol at a party, but forgot the photo was there or didn’t give it much thought. My email might remind them that potential employers can scour the internet for anything about a prospective employee that might give them pause. Did they really want the chugging photo to be among the first things potential employers found when they did a search?
On other occasions, a friend might have thought it cool to post a profile photo of them pointing a handgun at the camera after having just taken a shooting lesson. When that same person was quite vocal about gun control on their social media feed, I might email to ask if they thought some viewers might not find the humor in their pose.
In such cases, the recipient of my emails could decide to keep the photos up. My goal wasn’t to police anyone’s activity on social media. They were just meant as a heads up in case they had forgotten they made the post.
When we post something on social media, we often post and forget about it. But what we post stays there, often for years and remains available for anyone who wants to find it.
I raise this issue now because over the past several months, I’ve had more queries from readers, former associates, family members or former students about how concerned they are about past posts somehow coming back to haunt them. There appears to be a warranted anxiety given some high-profile cases of graduate students in the United States on an international visa being targeted because of posts in their social media feeds or an op-ed they might have co-written for their campus newspaper. International students may be most vulnerable to repercussions. Nevertheless, the breadth of heightened anxiety seems wide.
The responsibility for what gets posted lies with the person who posted it. But if we come across something posted by someone we know that seems particularly incendiary, I believe the right thing is to alert that person.
When we see something, it’s not meddling to alert a friend. If someone reminds us what’s out there, the appropriate response is to thank them and to decide whether the post accomplishes what we intended or whether it’s time to take it down.
As long as we are not trying to harm someone, each of us should be free to post comments or to write pieces on issues about which we are passionate. But too many of us have been cavalier about what we post without being thoughtful or remembering that the Internet has a long memory.
effrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
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