You're being downvoted, presumably because of the idea that "if you don't say anything stupid, you'll be fine." And yet acceptably edgy jokes from 10 years ago can easily become dumpster fires of controversy today. There's simply no reason to engage in it unless you treat every social media post as something you would say to all future employers. Including private chats.
EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.
This right here is why I just lurk on social media.
There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today.
Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.
With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook.
A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.
Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...
That is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram, etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting anything.
The pseudonymous alt is the way to go for this, unless you're mostly using twitter for things related to work. I bet some of your colleagues have alts :)
sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing
The searchable digital record is the key difference. Statements out loud to one or more people are often: A) tailored to that audience, B) carry much more context than a piece of text on a screen, and C) are a way of growing and exploring new ideas without the commitment of recording them to an easily searchable record for the rest of time. The long-term ramifications of saying something stupid in a conversation that isn't recorded are far less severe than they would be if every word you said was recorded and searchable forever.
A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.
Easy to find "bad tweets", easy to immediately publicize the "bad tweets" to the entire planet almost instantly, easy to have it trusted that the bad thing was said as the twitter timestamp exists and a bunch of trusted people talking about a screenshot if you delete it confirms it's genuine, not to mention most people don't use twitter imaging themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation, the dynamic is pretty different.
>most people don't use twitter [imagining?] themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for some immediate validation
and there's the problem.
like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.
Yup. I mentioned this in another comment but one of the key problems is the discrepancy between the impact tweets really have, and the ease with which Twitter allows you to post them.
Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button.
In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.
your first point (tweeting is as safe as talking) is entirely invalidated by your second (long searchable record helps find statements to criticize people for)
as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is vastly different from creating public documents (anything on the open internet).
Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a single tweet, and who didn't deserve it.
Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".
David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a black academic) that argued that violent protests following the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic support in the following presidential election, while non-violent protests increase Democratic support: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow.... David Shor is a committed socialist and Democratic data scientist, but that was not enough to protect him from accusations of racism in the post-George-Floyd period.
I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.
I do agree your example appears wild. Any sort of repercussions no less losing your job is crazy for that. However, that isn’t life ruining if he’s fine after the firing. The OP and others before were talking about life ruining.
A mean spirited yet relatively insignificant video berating a low level employee for the company/owners bigoted views. The guy ends up losing his job and allegedly can’t get another job for years.
Chik-Filla or whatever is a shit company, but a well paid CFO filming themselves being a shithead to some minimum wage employee is pretty god damn horrific.
Dude outed himself as a massive shitbag, so I'm going to lean on the side of "he deserved it". What has he done to redeem himself since then? The name makes it pretty hard to search for updates.
Don’t know. The point of bringing that up is that his life got ruined or close to it. Not the examples being brought up where “cancelling” was a minor life event.
In the responses I read through on twitter, no one accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you said, he's doing fine now.
The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.
Perhaps "life ruining" is an exaggeration but losing your job for discussing the effectiveness of different protest tactics is an insane knee-jerk reaction made by the people who fired him. He clearly agreed with the movement and ostensibly wanted to help it be as effective as possible.
> in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes
That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.
