A newly hired black magazine editor is outed as having made rude remarks about Asians on social media when she was a teen. The staff member who outed her has Asian ancestry. The new editor was then fired.

Then, it is discovered the staffer with Asian ancestry has made rude remarks about Blacks on social media. She disappears off social media but no one is, as of yet, demanding she be fired. Why is that?

What a mess. We can see that social media reveals much, not just ad targeting preferences to Facebook.

Christine Davitt has come under fire for resurfaced tweets as Alexi McCammond steps away from her editor-in-chief role.

Source: Christine Davitt, Teen Vogue Staffer Who Urged Alexi McCammond Firing, Tweeted Racial Slur

We’ve seen this play out many times now.

Update March 30: Another example – the US Special Forces Command just hired a new spokesperson last week but he has been “reassigned” this week after his old social media posts were seen.

Social media seems to come back and haunt many. It’s not even enough to do your best to be neutral in your comment since how things are viewed today may be different in the future. It’s almost as if we should not post anything on social media, or if we do, we should routinely delete all past comments. In fact, it has been said that the half life of a Tweet is 15 minutes. That means half of the views it will ever receive occur in the first 15 minutes. There is little point in leaving Tweets online forever – may as well delete them after a week since they won’t be further seen – except by people looking to find a “gotcha”.