Originally posted on March 22, 2021. Reposted with very minor edits.
To recapitulate – in early March of 2021, Teen Vogue announced the appointment of one Alexi McCammond to the post of editor-in-chief. Shortly thereafter, a scandal erupted regarding a series of Twitter posts made by McCammond in 2011-2012, when she was at university, in which she denigrated Asians. At least one news source points out that the offending postings had been public knowledge since at least 20191, which ties the scandal directly to McCammond’s appointment. As well, it was especially to McCammond’s detriment that her anti-Asian postings resurfaced precisely at a moment when mainstream media attention was fixed on anti-Asian violence around the country. After several days of scandal and at least one cancelled corporate ad buy, McCammond was fired, or, rather, resigned from her post.
The point here is not to defend Alexi McCammond. Quite frankly, one does not much care whether an Alexi McCammond exists at all – or Teen Vogue, for that matter. Nor is this a post regarding the triumph of “Cancel Culture”, with the additional irony being that McCammond herself is an ethnic minority. Instead, the whole episode brings up a bundle of issues that, quite frankly, has not previously come up in modern society.
Consider. Social media in its current form is a relatively new phenomenon, while omnipresent smartphones are a newer one still. Put differently, neither Twitter nor the iPhone existed when I went to school, or even to my first university, and I have not yet reached middle-age. If twenty years ago a classmate of mine cracked, say, a racist or homophobic joke – and I am not saying that anyone did, mind – there would be no way for anyone today to know this unless either the episode ended up being reported in some contemporary publication such as a school newspaper, or else I myself testified to the event. Our indiscretions, faults, mistakes, prejudices, literally everything about us was an unknown to anyone who did not know us directly – assuming, of course, one avoided the media spotlight. As such, the possibility of an individual being denied a job today for something they said – to their friends, presumably – as a teenager would be rather less than remote.
This changes completely with modern social media. Anything that one says “out loud” – whether on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or even a humble blog such as this one – exists potentially forever in the public domain, trackable, searchable, reviewable. Even “deleted” postings might not actually be erased but rather simply flagged as “non-viewable”, as was recently made apparent with the right-wing social network Parler. And, as the McCammond case more than amply demonstrates, one’s posts can easily cost one a job a full decade after the fact, and might yet continue to haunt her for the remainder of her journalistic career.
There are multiple questions that stem from this. The most obvious one concerns the fact that McCammond was around 18 years old when she made the posts in question. Without defending her specifically, it can generally be taken as an axiom that many teenagers, on occasion, say or do stupid things. And now, these can follow them well into middle age, assuming our civilisation survives that long. Is it right, or even useful, to hold something one posts on Facebook at, for example, age 15 over their head for, potentially, the rest of their adult life?
And what about those social mores – they do change over time. Obama himself, as a for instance, opposed gay marriage in 2008, as did many other democrats. An average democratic voter making social media posts against gay marriage would be mainstream then, relative to his party – but those very same posts would likely be viewed as homophobic today, perhaps even illegal under the strictest version of anti-hate crime legislative proposals. Should this voter indeed be denied a job as a “homophobe” now for being “mainstream” a dozen years ago?
Finally, and most pertinently, one must introduce the political angle into the equation. It is one thing to condemn social media posts that are racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or otherwise offensive to this or that identity group. But what if one tweets, whether as a teenager or as an adult, a statement like “I like socialism”? What if they praise China’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic on their Facebook page? Fast forward a decade, and during the next version of the Red Scare – one as likely as not to be aimed at China, this time – the new HUAC won’t even need to hold any hearings, simply run a social media search. What if a person were to fill their Twitter feed with pro-labour union commentaries – and a decade later, a vigorously anti-union corporation not unlike Amazon denies them a job? What if one, say, starts a Facebook page to organise their friends into an Extinction Rebellion-like protest at their school, and some years later, after the British government finally succeeds in getting the group outlawed – they are, at the moment, apparently, being very keen on painting Extinction Rebellion as “criminals” – the security services place this individual under surveillance or even arrest them outright as a sort of “extremist organiser”?
By potentially recording everything we say and do – and allowing these records, in future potentially decades old, to be used against us by employers, governments, security services, et cetera, we will, of course, catch out some bad people doing bad things, not to mention idiot teenagers being idiots2. But in a broader context, the prospect of spending our entire lives in a social media panopticon is more than a little disconcerting.
- “Anti-Asian Tweets From 2011 Surface After Teen Vogue Hires New Editor-in-Chief”, NextShark, March 8, 2021, retrieved March 22, 2021.[↩]
- One wonders, in fact, how McCammond’s offending tweets from 2011 stack up against those of her friends right around that point in time. Clearly she was tweeting at them, and not at society as a whole, and, one presumes, expecting some sort of positive feedback and reinforcement in return…[↩]