Ooops I don't want to do it again - how to avoid social media blunders

In autumn 2015, as Leicester City’s Premier League title tilt was gathering momentum, some of star striker Jamie Vardy’s old Facebook and Twitter posts were uncovered. The most famous of these simply read, “Chat shit get banged”.

These words, though absurd in some ways, caught the public imagination for being so suggestive of Vardy’s character. They were unpolished, very English, with a directness and raw aggression born of countless long afternoons on windswept training pitches.

When relatively few people were interested in Vardy, these posts were effectively private. When they surfaced a year into his Premier League career — he had suddenly become a huge star — they became an important supporting document, capturing the character of a public figure that we had come to know and love.

It’s probably fair to say Kevin McNamara, Antony Calvert, Ian Byrne, Zarah Sultana and Kate Osborne don’t feel well-loved at the moment. These parliamentary candidates have all been criticised in recent days for old social media posts. McNamara, a Lib Dem and Calvert, a Conservative, have both stood down, while Byrne, Sultana and Osborne, representing the Labour party, have come under pressure to withdraw their candidacies.

These posts were all published years ago — in Calvert’s case, they are over a decade old. Like Vardy’s, the posts were made when these politicians were relatively unknown, with a fraction of the following and media attention they have now. Screenshots of Kevin McNamara’s offensive posts from 2010, show that none of them had any likes or retweets.

A current parliamentary candidate expressed relief that they didn’t have access to these platforms when they were younger, saying, “God knows what stuff I would have put out on social media if it had been around.” The social media strategist Jessica Riches went further, adding that “there’s a real danger that… the only people brave enough to risk the limelight are career politicians who have been trained for this since their teenage years.”

But why don’t politicians just delete their old posts? There are various services, including TweetDelete and TweetEraser, that do this automatically.

Nate Bethea, host of the Trashfuture podcast and a prominent left-wing Twitter personality, explained his reason for using one of these autodelete services. He said of Twitter that “If you’re making fun of someone and a tweet goes viral, it’s funny in the moment but maybe less funny months or years later.”

However, the autodeleters aren’t a total failsafe. Richard West, the founder of TweetDelete, has noted that tweets by public figures are likely to remain preserved in the records of search engines.

And then there are services such as Politwoops, a website run by the Open State Foundation, an NGO that promotes digital transparency. Politwoops automatically records all tweets that any politician deletes, and makes them available in real time. Jules Mattsson, who runs the UK version of the site, told the Guardian in 2015 that “politicians are all too happy to use social media to campaign but if we lose the ability for this to be properly preserved, it becomes a one way tool.”

In other words, our politicians all employ people to make them seem more likeable and relatable, and use social media to disseminate this image as widely as possible. Think of Boris Johnson recently talking about his fondness for “steak and oven chips”, or Jeremy Corbyn appearing on stage at Glastonbury, both of which were widely shared on social media by their respective parties.

And if politicians are content to parade their authenticity on social media, why shouldn’t we see all their public posts when contemplating our electoral choices?

While we may feel sympathy with those who are publicly embarrassed by their old social media activity, isn’t it more important that the voters of Thurrock know that a parliamentary candidate thought at one point it was funny to make jokes using the n-word? Or that people in West Derby are aware that someone who wants to represent them in Westminster once made light of domestic violence — even if they don’t feel the same now? As Breyten Ersting at Politwoops commented: “everybody makes mistakes, but not everybody has political power.”

The lesson is that social media isn’t a private diary, however much it may seem that way when no one is paying attention. Jodie Cook, founder of the social media consultancy JC Social Media Agency, said that “the responsibility lies in education. Education that your social media posts are there, for all to see, forever, and that it’s better to not post than risk doing something your future self might be harmed by.”

As we discovered with Jamie Vardy, an old social media post made when no one was watching can add a great deal to the public perception of a person’s character.When it comes to politicians, it’s all the more important that the public hears about them.