The Problem of Online Regret
! Introduction: The Problem of Online Regret
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?
Journalist Alexandra Samuel says you need to think about deleting
things you’ve posted as curation.
''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.
!! Key Advice: To Delete or Not to Delete?
''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.
!! Future-Proofing Your Online Presence
''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.
!! How to Survive Regret in the Moment
''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.