Paranoid of my internet footprint

December 19, 2014 7:22 PM

I have a future plan which includes working in an ivory tower then sliding into the political scene after I rub elbows with those who hold the power and money. I wish to participate in online discussions, but am worried about future foes using my words out of context or my attempts at humour winding up being offensive. Do I just continue to watch conversations from the sideline or should I just try to be careful with my commentary?

I've deleted many traces of my online involvement in controversial issues and have scrubbed quite a bit of my social media sites clean before privacy became a major concern. I have been on and off of meta since the mid-noughties having trashed a previous account in the middle of a manic breakdown. Since then I have used it mainly to find viewpoints in answers to questions similiar to my own (Like a way better Yahoo Answers of life) and to just browse interesting topics About a year ago I decided to join again but have kept pretty (completely) silent until yesterday. Before I continue in adding to the book of meta I was wondering if I'm paranoid, over thinking the situation, or have some reasonable concerns.


(talking out philosophical views with others helps me hone my own more than just reading other's discourse)

Thank you.

posted by This is the decision I made. to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Is "this is the decision I made" the name on your birth certificate? If not, you may be worrying a bit more than is necessary.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:30 PM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Keep in mind that, in the future, everyone will have an internet past. We are rapidly sliding out of the period where the web is some kind of sketchy cesspool where weirdos congregate, and anyone associated with that sort of thing is suspect by association.

Be mindful of what you post, your privacy settings, and how easily connected usernames and accounts are to your real identity. Have good boundaries and think critically about what types of sharing you're willing to do, where.

If you would not want to be associated with a given viewpoint or activity in the future, do not post it online under any circumstances.

I wouldn't worry too much about this if this is all a "someday" notion of what your future might be. When I was 23 I had similar "work in academia, maybe go into politics in some capacity eventually" plans. At 33 I work in the entertainment industry and aside from gross impropriety or violating an NDA it really doesn't matter what I do online.
posted by Sara C. at 7:31 PM on December 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

I think it's worth thinking about. High-profile people have had old Internet posts dug up to their great embarrassment (Mark Driscoll comes to mind in recent memory). If you are serious about a life in politics, think about what sort of impression you'd want people to get if they dug through your history. If you're open to personal feedback, you had a comment on the blue just today that seemed to endorse childhood mortality as a method of population control. I might avoid saying stuff like that.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:39 PM on December 19, 2014 [13 favorites]

If you engage with people in a public forum in a meaningful way - that is, you ask questions (these reveal ignorance), or make statements with any passion or certainty, like the one ThePinkSuperhero picked up above (there will always be someone who disagrees with you), or reveal personal details (hard to establish a sense of rapport with people without exchanging stories and vulnerabilities) - you are going to have a kink somewhere in your armour. OTOH, while those who are motivated to find it will, most people have short memories and are pretty forgiving if you keep them happy somehow. (Nothing else can explain some of our Canadian politicians' endurance.)

I guess you could try to make it a habit to e.g. wait a full five (5) minutes before posting anything, and do your best to ensure your contributions are well-reasoned, polished, etc., and steer clear of 'hot' topics. (Just fyi, I took this username with the firm intention to be opaque and oblique and cautious and all that. Not sure I've succeeded. I mean, you're not me, obviously.)

I suppose if you can actually manage this, maybe you do have some of what it takes to survive whatever goes with public office. (I think if Obama were coming of age today, he could probably do it.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:56 PM on December 19, 2014

There's really no advice that anyone can give you on this because it's totally uncharted territory. At this point in history, we're only just starting to see people who are young enough to have any kind of online footprint be old enough to run for office. What those footprints will mean for people running for office is a great big unknown, but we're gonna have some really interesting few years ahead of us until we by and large figure it out.

At this point, all you can really do is keep your online presence as squeaky as possible. Honestly, probably the only really safe choice is to delete all your accounts and avoid posting anything to the Internet completely.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:26 PM on December 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: some kind of sketchy cesspool where weirdos congregate

(sorry)

If you use pseudonyms, then you'll have to change them every six months or someone can build up a profile based on your postings. You just told us you had a manic breakdown, for example.

Also, nobody in academia has any power, so good luck with that elbow rubbing thing.
posted by mecran01 at 8:28 PM on December 19, 2014 [12 favorites]

Yeah - this doesn't really address your question, but if you're interested in politics then going in to law, finance, or consulting is a waaaaay better choice than academia. As this list points out, currently 5 congressmen and 0 senators hold PhDs.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:34 PM on December 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think the way internet gotchas work is that the people on your side say its no big deal and the people on the other side say it means you're a bad person and unfit for whatever you're doing. It isn't so much what you're saying/posting as making sure you have enough people on your side to go to bat for you. So worry less about what someone will be able to dig up on you (unless you have Gian Ghomeshi-type skeletons) and more about building positive relationships with enough people to have whatever gets dug up get brushed away and forgotten about.

Hell, most people who voted for Rob Ford the first time around voted for him (well his less charismatic brother) the second time as well.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 9:28 PM on December 19, 2014 [6 favorites]

"If you use pseudonyms, then you'll have to change them every six months or someone can build up a profile based on your postings."

There's an asymmetry. Someone going over my posting history could, if they really wanted, figure out my real name. On the other hand, it seems more or less impossible to start with my real name and google up my pseudonym. Nothing about my everyday life indicates that I have a metafilter account.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:42 PM on December 19, 2014

Best answer: At the very least subscribe to a VPN service and read/post your more sketchy things via them. Make an administration for your accounts on paper, so you know which handles you use where. Avoid "typical" use of language or punctuation, because that can be matched. Be sure you don't go on in the internet for this kind of use other than on your VPN'ed home computer. Don't use the internet when you are drunk or otherwise less reliable; that's when sloppiness occurs. And still all of this could be filling every crack in the room with putty while leaving the door wide open if you have other stupid habits. So best train yourself to not post immediately but give it a minute of thought: do I really need to post this, or am I just venting something instead of which it would be better to go running for half an hour or meditate? That kind of thing. Good luck with the career!
posted by hz37 at 4:01 AM on December 20, 2014

TPS mentioned your child mortality comment, but it's the kind of attitude with which you approach something that can cause you more trouble than the comment itself, like this comment you made: (I believe I'm cynical/trollish in my humour not generally misanthropic)

Politicians who try to spin crappy things they say as "just a joke" generally have those crappy things remembered much longer than if they just acknowledge they said a crappy thing and then apologize. If you're going to have a public career and participate in online life in some meaningful way, kill your trollish tendencies - what good are they doing you anyway?
posted by rtha at 8:09 AM on December 20, 2014 [6 favorites]

Previously. My answer in that ask says a lot of what I would say here.

Additionally: One thing you need to keep in mind is that if you do anything publicly, there will always be critics and detractors. There is absolutely nothing you can do in public that won't have someone, somewhere willing to talk trash about you. The more power you have, the more of that you will attract. Every single president the U.S. has had in my living memory had folks talking trash about them.

So what you need to figure out is what kinds of trash talk are seriously problematic for you/your reputation and what kinds of responses to that are constructive and move your agenda forward. Ignoring it entirely can be a problem, but focusing overly much on it can just be a case of putting out the fire with gasoline. However, when handled well, friction in public can sometimes help you shine.

One of the things I will suggest is that your overzealous desire to scrub your past implies "guilt" and that will be a problem in its own right. I have some firsthand experience with trying to reform my public image. I will suggest that figuring out what you have been doing wrong and finding a better way to do things will matter to people more than whatever crazy-assed thing you did or said in the past. So work on whatever underlying issues led to you "trashing" a previous account in the middle of a manic breakdown. If the manic episodes cannot be resolved, then at least figure out some best practices for not sharing that crap publicly or, at a bare minimum, for sharing it in a way that will be viewed more sympathetically than whatever you did to "trash" that account (which usually involves attacking and disrespecting other people, in essence).

I can't find the specific Ask I am looking for, but you might find it interesting to go looking for previous AskMes where people ask about things like past drug use and security clearances. Some of those answers boil down to "If it is really and truly in the past, just be 100% honest about it." Honesty is the best policy. If you want a political career, I suggest you work on getting your act together such that you feel comfortable being honest with people about your life.

Also, while I do not think spin-doctoring per se is a good idea, there are ways to reframe a situation that can be both honest and constructive in terms of improving both how you feel about it and how other people will feel about it. As one example, if it is well and truly in the past and something you have stopped doing, "youthful indiscretion" is a much nicer way to frame something than some of the guilt-ridden "I know I was a bad person doing bad things" that some people say about themselves. None of us comes into the world with all of the answers. If you learn from your mistakes, it's often more okay to admit to having made them than many people seem to think. It's when you just never seem to learn and keep doing the same stupid stuff that it becomes a real problem in terms of reputation and trustworthiness.
posted by Michele in California at 11:30 AM on December 20, 2014

One answer might be to just stop doing trollish online behavior.

When I was in my early 20s, I had that kind of attitude online, and I even had a few specific accounts at certain sites set up to just sort of be a bombshell dropping devil's advocating bad faith trollish personality. Luckily this grew tiresome after a while (I'm not a naturally cold or aggressive person), because if anyone ever found that account and associated it with me, I would look like a massive asshole.

I would especially avoid trolling/"devil's advocate" type online discourse where you advocate controversial points of view. Especially anything where any reasonable person would immediately recognize your line of argument as making you look morally like a bad person.

Just don't do that stuff online, and you're good.
posted by Sara C. at 11:39 AM on December 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

You marked hz37's comment as a best answer, but I really don't think you should trust any approach that relies upon you, personally, formulating and employing concealment techniques. There's no way to be certain that they're future-proof, which is essentially the question you're asking.

Assume that the corpus of your online speech and activities is being assembled and searched by your future-adversary from a record of 100% of the traffic that passes through the internet and a good deal of what goes over private networks, that quantum computers have been successfully developed rendering all contemporary encryption ineffective—so that VPNs don't provide any concealment value—and that the thing doing the compilation and searching is a software agent like IBM's "Watson" that won Jeopardy except entirely focused on answering questions about you and running on a quantum computer. (Such a scenario would probably also mean that all of the things you think you've "scrubbed" are still in play, btw.)

Heck, for all we know at some point in the future there'll be enough computing power sloshing around and enough leaks from NSA archives will have happened for the search results of a public Google-equivalent to provide all that, and thus it wouldn't just be something turned on high-value political targets by powerful actors.

So it seems to me you ought to choose from the approaches suggested here that don't rely upon concealment, and/or have backup plans for a more humble life if you're forced to retreat from political prominence. I think if Machiavelli were alive today he wouldn't be engaging in any candid conversations on the internet, if at all.
posted by XMLicious at 1:27 PM on December 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

You will be judged and found guilty and tracked down about everything you ever say in your entire life online, now. If I were you, I would completely and utterly stop having conversations on the Internet and never doing anything you wouldn't want broadcast across every single TV network for the rest of your life. What Itaxpica said, basically. Politics is a live by the sword, die by the sword, you must be PERFECT field. (Go catch up on this season's Good Wife, particularly the "Oppo Research" episode, as to what you are in for.) I flat out think you need to shut up online on "trolling" or "having discussions," whatever, but you'd be better off scrubbing yourself off the net except for whatever professional stuff you have to put online.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:16 AM on December 21, 2014