Last week Dr. Paul Gates came to my Social Media Strategies class to talk about social media and privacy nowadays.
He reviewed a few cases in which digital platforms change the way the world works today versus how it used to be.
Now, you can search anyone's name and find out all kinds of information about them. There are even many ways that deleted social media can be recovered.
This makes me reflect on my own social media presence. I have been on Facebook and Twitter since I was twelve, and I joined Instagram at the age of 15.
We all have pasts. Anyone's history can quickly be discovered and explored with a Google search.
I deleted all my tweets from my Twitter account when I had to use it for the same social media class. I figured it would make more sense to continue using the profile I already had, instead of trying to create a new one.
This is the truth about my Twitter. I created it because I was a big fan of Justin Bieber. In case you don’t remember, he was the most followed person in that social media until Katy Perry dethroned him about a year ago.
He had a really solid fan base of twelve year old girls that were obsessed with him. I can say it because I was one of them. That’s how I got a lot of followers. I had almost six hundred followers around 2014.
The thing that concerns me is that my account was basically based on defaming Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber’s on and off girlfriend around that time. I would never call her the b word, but I did say pretty bad things about her singing and acting.
Now, I even have some of her songs in Spotify. But that doesn’t mean anything. I said bad things about her, and anyone could see it if they could recover those tweets.
The question is, if it is ok to judge me because of something that I did when I was twelve and immature? Our pasts are just a couple of clicks away, and they can haunt us.
In the event that some of my old content would resurface, I wouldn't be proud of everything I've said, but I take comfort in knowing that I wasn't posting a hate speech that was racist or xenophobic.