A local bakery in my town got slammed online for a 2014 tweet the owner forgot about

I saw the whole thing go down on Facebook last week. Someone dug up a really dumb, off color joke the owner posted eight years ago when he was like 22. The online pile on was huge, people calling for a boycott. The bakery ended up closing for two days. It made me think, how far back should we be digging for stuff to hold against people? Has anyone else seen a small business get hit for old social media like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

quinn_reed172mo ago

That part about the bakery closing for two days is wild. It's like we're all supposed to have been born perfectly wise and never said a single dumb thing in our early twenties. I guess the new rule is to hire a social media archaeologist before you open a business, just to make sure you didn't make a bad joke during the Obama administration.

grant4782mo ago

Remember when people used to just post dumb stuff without it being a permanent record? Quinn_reed17, your point about the Obama era jokes hits hard. I had a friend who tweeted something stupid about a movie in 2012 and it almost cost him a job last year. The company said it showed "poor judgment," like he was running for office instead of applying to be a graphic designer. It feels like we're all being held to a standard that didn't even exist when we posted that stuff. Where does it end, digging up middle school AIM conversations?

claire8722mo ago

Honestly, I'm just glad my MySpace page got lost in a server crash. Quinn_reed17 is right, we're all supposed to have been born with perfect judgment. My old tweets are a mess of bad takes on TV finales and cringe song lyrics. If someone dug that up, I'd have to move towns. It's scary how a joke from when you were basically a kid can follow you forever now.

shane_clark1mo ago

That line about "poor judgment" for a tweet from 2012 really gets me. My buddy Dave applied for a job at a local car dealership last year and they pulled up his old Twitter where he made a dumb joke about a celebrity from like 2010. He was 19 at the time, working at a pizza place, and they acted like he was a serial killer. @grant478 you're right that it didn't even exist as a standard back then. Dave didn't get the job and now he's extra careful about everything he posts. It's like you have to have a lawyer read over every dumb thing you say now.