The internet is an archive of so many different versions of ourselves. If you’re Gen Z or a millennial, there’s a good chance you preserved almost every stage of your life online: old fandoms, old friends, old opinions. And with that comes an inevitable cringe.
So what do you do when you see something embarrassing you posted years ago? You may be tempted to go scorched earth, but journalist and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel says that’s not necessarily the best course of action. “I think that you need to think about deleting things you’ve posted as curation,” she told Vox.
“The Internet Archive keeps snapshots of all kinds of things on the internet, so you need to be aware that when you delete something, it might be deleted for you,” Samuel said. “That doesn’t mean it’s deleted from the internet. I think when you delete things, it’s always a good idea to back them up before you delete them.”
What other options do you have when you look back on an old post and cringe? And how should we be thinking about our life’s digital archive? We answer these questions on Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Samuel, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Was there a moment when online regret and shame first grabbed your attention?
Absolutely. In June 2011, Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup to Boston, and people went nuts. There was this riot in the streets, and what made that riot notable is that for the first time, it was captured in real time on social media. It was the heyday of Twitter. People were tweeting photos. People were making videos and posting them on YouTube. There was initially a lot of excitement about the idea that like, “We’re going to be able to catch the people who are flipping cars and breaking into store windows.”
I saw this unfolding literally that evening, online. And I thought, “This is not a good plan.” History teaches us that when we start narcing on our fellow citizens and stepping into that quasi-surveillance role, it tends to go very, very badly. I wrote a piece that evening for the Harvard Business Review about why this phenomenon of citizen surveillance through social media was so problematic. And I got a lot of pushback.
It’s interesting that so many people’s gut reactions were like, “Okay, but what if I snitched?”
I think there’s something really delightful about outrage as a subjective experience. We live in a really complicated world. There’s a lot of gray. There’s a lot of nuance. It’s really hard to feel like a morally upright person if you shop on Amazon and put gas in your car. And these moments where we’re shaming people online give us a little moment of moral superiority.
What’s the argument for not deleting old posts?
Imagine a scenario where you’ve posted something on Instagram or TikTok. You realize afterwards that you were kind of an idiot, and you wish you hadn’t said what you said. Maybe you even had a back-and-forth in the comment thread where someone pointed out why what you said was insensitive and you showed some capacity for learning. If you delete it without archiving it [and] it comes back to haunt you, you don’t have that evidence of you learning. It’s much better to take the screenshots, archive the thread, and back up all that context so that if it does still come back to haunt you or even if you just want to reflect on it, [you can].
I don’t know if you’ve ever gone back and read old journals, but I have. And every time I think, “What old me thought is none of my business.”
It’s funny you said that. I’ve literally had that exact experience of rereading old journals. We just all need to realize that by definition, anything that is a snapshot is a two-dimensional image of something that we experienced. Whether you’re looking at your own history of something that you did, or if you’re looking at something someone else said, I just wish we could have a little more tenderness and empathy and focus on what people learn and how we grow rather than judging everyone by their most awful moment.
Do you have any advice for best practices when it comes to having a social media presence you won’t be ashamed of in 10 or 20 years?
Trying to have a social media presence where you never regret anything is a recipe for having a completely meaningless and stupid social media presence. Conversely, I think it’s important to resist the lure of the hot take. What you need to do is try and chart that middle ground where you don’t court controversy for its own sake. When you’re deliberately pushing people’s buttons, that’s when you end up saying things that don’t reflect what you truly believe. But if your goal is to have a social media presence where you never regret anything, then truly don’t be online. I actually think it’s a really, really good option now. If I were not a journalist for whom part of the job is showing up online, I do not know if I would use social media anymore.
It sounds like if you’re going to share anything online, that feeling of regret may be inevitable. How do you survive it?
The first thing to do is take yourself out of it, depersonalize it, and think, “If this were happening to a friend, what would I think here?” Don’t hesitate to admit if you think you were wrong, but don’t rush to respond either. You need to close the computer, put the phone down, walk away. Talk to somebody with good judgment and ask what they think. The internet moves quickly, but unless you are a celebrity and you’re getting a hundred thousand responses an hour, there’s actually no reason that three crappy comments can’t wait to be addressed the next day.
And then you absolutely can say you’re wrong. I actually think one of the most powerful things that we can do as humans, as professionals, and as internet users: Show that you can be wrong and you can even be wrong on the internet, and it doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t destroy your value as a human.
