Shoutout to the professor who got fired over a 2010 blog post, it made me rethink my own old tweets

There was this case at a state college in Oregon last month. A tenured history professor got let go because someone dug up a personal blog he wrote over a decade ago, before he even started teaching there. The posts were pretty edgy, making fun of political figures from that time. The college said it violated their 'values' now. I used to think my old social media was just dumb kid stuff, but after seeing that, I spent a Sunday afternoon going through my own tweets from like 2012. Deleted about 300 of them. It's not even about being 'problematic,' it's about context disappearing. Has anyone else done a deep clean after a specific cancellation story hit close to home?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.eric20d ago

Yep, I ran my old username through a tweet-deleting tool. It was the only way to handle the volume.

wendy82020d ago

Ugh, that whole process is such a nightmare. I read a blog post where someone wrote a script to find and delete anything with old slang from like 2012. They had to target words like "epic fail" and "YOLO" specifically. What kind of keywords did you end up searching for?

craig.alex20d ago

Man, that's rough. I did the same thing a while back. My method was to search my old handles for specific trigger words, stuff I knew I joked about when I was younger. It's tedious, but you gotta scrub by keyword, not just scroll.