We live in a world today and have for about the last decade, where anything you post online is saved forever, somewhere. Even if it is just in a database archive somewhere, 99% of the time you can never get rid of it. In a world where every politician, famous person or just someone with a high up role in a company, has access to a twitter, facebook, ect, social media can be very dangerous. For many of the people who rant about certain things online, the job of a PR manager these days is keeping them from saying something stupid and killing their own careers.
When sometimes tweets ultimately get heated or personal problems get aired out online like a personal therapist, fights break out. It is very easy to find yourself in a fight with random people if you are not careful and to the people who lose their temper and say something stupid in the heat of the moment, there is no going back. Once a tweet or facebook post is out there, its out there FOREVER. People not raised in the generations before the internet and even some who were, continuously fail to realize this. They believe that if they put something up and delete it 20 seconds later, there won’t be a record, but services have already captured the data.
If you say something stupid and then whitewash the evidence and try to hide it, you not only look stupid, but you look weak. If you say something offensive, you can apologize but don’t try to hide that you said it, because people will hit you harder for doing it. People love to get into a good online witch hunt and those who try and tap out will just continue to get pulled back in. The best thing you can do for yourself is stick by what you said and take the heat for saying it. If it was stupid admit it was stupid and move on.
We have seen people in the bitcoin and crypto communities whitewashing their posts the second they get a new job that completely contradicts their statements in the past. People collect the tweets of prominent names in bitcoin to use against them later on. We saw this happen immensely when people pivoted away from the word bitcoin, towards the word blockchain. Thousands of tweets were deleted on accounts from companies and individuals alike. This is how you can tell which people are buzzword surfers and which people actually stick with their ideology.
Don’t make the same mistake that thousands in this space and beyond have made by whitewashing their accounts. If you are the type of person who might think about doing it down the line, don’t make claims or say things that may get you into trouble later on. Even if you don’t think so, someone is watching and sometimes, for whatever reason, looking at you to mess up. Think hard about what you post because it will most likely be with you until you die.