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Our Digital Pasts Weren’t Supposed to Be Weaponized Like This
A recent firing at The Associated Press is the latest example of the way in which our digital pasts are never far from the present, despite what early internet evangelists thought.
By Kashmir Hill
May 29, 2021
The internet is a fossil machine. It preserves our thoughts, our political positions, our jokes, our photos, our triumphs and our mistakes in silicon amber, just waiting to be dug up. And that has led to a kind of modern sport: Find an outrageous piece of a person’s past that can be weaponized, put it on display for all to see and hope for the worst.
The most surprising thing, though, is that this is still happening.
The latest target of adversarial archaeologists is Emily Wilder, 22, who was fired by The Associated Press just three weeks into the job after the Stanford College Republicans surfaced her pro-Palestine activism and social media posts while in college. Though she was based in Arizona, her old posts caught the attention of national political figures from the right who amplified them, arguing that her views compromised her employer’s ability to accurately cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The A.P. contends that the firing was for social media conduct while Ms. Wilder worked for the media outlet, but it seemed to Ms. Wilder and her supporters that the incident was triggered by the years-old Facebook posts.
We’ve been living with social media — and its powers of preservation — for nearly two decades now, since Facebook came into existence in 2004 and gradually convinced a billion of us that it was a good idea to leave a digital trail online attached to our real names. This is a cycle so familiar that the progression from unearthed post to contrition or firing feels lockstep. It almost makes you forget that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. As more and more people documented their lives online, so that our whole selves, past and present, were visible, society was predicted to become more empathetic and forgiving. But instead the opposite has happened.
People were thinking about this a lot a decade ago. During an August 2010 interview, it was on the mind of Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, the creator of the best fossil-digging equipment out there. Mr. Schmidt predicted, “apparently seriously,” according to The Wall Street Journal, that young people would change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to escape their digital pasts. The prediction was widely mocked for its impossibility.
The same month, another prominent data scientist, Jeff Jonas, offered a more utopian prediction: “I hope for a highly tolerant society in the future,” he wrote on a legal blog called Concurring Opinions. “A place where it is widely known I am four or five standard deviations off center, and despite such deviance, my personal and professional relationships carry on, unaffected.”