Killed by the ghosts of Social Media Past
I’m sure many of you can picture the medieval pillory. Placed in the town square, the wooden frame was used to hold people’s head and arms as they were hit with various disgusting and painful objects. Fast forward a few hundred years, and various celebrities, politicians and public figures have found themselves bound at the neck and wrists, squirming before the court of the internet, as hate-filled tweets, articles and posts are hurled at them.
These are the not-so-innocent victims of our internet ‘callout’ or ‘cancel culture’, in which words have consequences. But what if we are all destined for the pillory? What if we had already secured our own hands into its virtual locks, pinned down by brazen and arrogant social media posts of the past?
For some such as film director James Gunn, comedian Kevin Hart or election candidate Luke Creasey, it’s too late. Fired from his Marvel movie, dropped as Oscars host and disowned by his party, Gunn’s 10 year old pedophilia jokes on Twitter, Hart’s decade old homophopbic Twitter jokes and Creasey’s 7 year old sexual assault Facebook jokes, have all cost them.
This is not to say current purveyors of discriminatory, hate-filled content don’t deserve to be called out such as Roseanne Barr, Israel Folau, or many of the other politicians disendorsed by parties in the recent Australian federal election. Those are not old posts, nor changed people. However, when decade-old content is dug up and people chastised, often you are punishing a former version of a person.
Previously, the fossilised skeletons of people’s evolving personality and views would blow away with the winds of time, callout culture and social media shaming have changed this. Social media cleanly preserves older, outdated forms of ourselves, offensive warts and all. Forms of ourselves that, if we were to hear them preaching loudly at a bar, we would likely cringe or tell to shut up.
For most people, their views, sense of humour and overall personality is an ever-evolving form, moulded by the forces of society, friends, family and geography. None of these influential variables are static or stationary over the years. A 2016 review of adolescent research cited a ‘fragmentation hypothesis’ or confused identity expression online, as resulting from the several conflicting displays of personality required by adolescents. Similarly, the review found that individuals unsure of their identity were more inclined to experiment with it online. Backlash from old social media fails to consider any of this.
Our online personas often do not reflect who we are as rounded people. Instead presenting small, scattered, decontextualized ‘fragments’ of our ever-evolving puzzle-like identities preserved online. If these shapes no longer fit within a person’s identity, then judging a piece from years past fails to consider the wider set.
This phenomenon is referred to as ‘context collapse’, by researcher and scholar Danah Boyd. Platforms such as Twitter collapse various social contexts into a singular environment, failing to recognise the contextual influences of time, humour, geography and societal views of the time, in its past posts.
Often what we posted to social media in the past were in-the-moment thoughts, snapshots of our former identities, rather than well-developed or ground-breaking fact. Social media was once treated as a public toilet wall of aimless observation and thought for small groups of friends. With the blurring of online and offline realms over the past decade, the dangers of posting controversial or unsavoury content are now widely known. ‘Be careful what you post’ has now become ‘be careful what you’ve already posted’. Resurfacing these antiquated statements is the equivalent of digging up a person’s bones to yell at them.
Yet, the social media task force continues to serve up swift keyboard justice in 280 words or less. Acting as judge, jury and executioner, the social media ‘hammer of justice’ swings fast and doesn’t leave room for appeals, offer an end to your sentence or allow you to learn from mistakes. Even punishments for real life crimes have expiration dates. For those imprisoned, rehabilitation is undergone, reparations paid, apologies made, and time is served. Live’s can be transformed and moved on. But for many online, once your name or career is tarnished by ‘cancel culture’, the stain is permanent.
Some, like Kevin Hart and James Gunn have survived being hit by the social media ‘cancel’ wave for past Tweets, yet their careers suffered for it. While Hart remains extremely popular, he lost the opportunity to host the Oscars. With initial internet pitchforks and knives drawn for Gunn’s tweets, followed by a counter backlash from fans and actors, the firing-and-rehiring saga only demonstrated that the motives behind Disney’s actions were based only on which offended group can yell the loudest.
Everyone at some point in their lives has said something worthy of being ‘called out’ by the twitter brigade of moral police. To those who are keen to jump on the old social media of changed people I ask:
Would you pass judgement on someone’s fashion sense after seeing their outfit in a picture from 10 years ago? What about someone’s taste in music, according to what they listened to in 2009? Given that in my case that was made up of Pitbull and LMFAO, while counting rage comics and sexualising another’s mother on Call of Duty as the pinnacle of humour, I know for sure my judgement would be measured. My Facebook world has changed — overly attached girlfriend, bad luck brian memes and childish jokes now sit alongside potential employers, colleagues and networking opportunities.
People change, but their social media archives don’t. Blaming 2019-you for your 2009 posts, doesn’t consider the complex contexts and progression of internet and personality. The internet is a museum or a showcase of a person’s life. When looking back on artefacts of someone’s history in the glass display boxes of a timeline or tweet, sometimes walking through to today in the hallway of their online identity, rather than smashing the glass labelled 2009, might be the better thing to do.
