Do you currently maintain a Facebook or Twitter account? Do you have an old MySpace page somewhere out there? Did you ever post comments on online forums under your own name? If you’ve ever done any of these things, you’ve left behind all kinds of person information that could come back to bite you when you start running for political office.
Young people are more willing to put personal information online, simply because they’ve been exposed to social media earlier in life. Free-wheeling kids who started publishing online only a few years ago can find themselves today older, wiser, and now dealing with the consequences of their online social lives. More and more candidates running for office today are dealing with the issue of old digital records coming back to haunt them.
Racy photos, crazy party shots, video clips, and off-the-cuff comments on social media profiles can exist for years online. Often when these digital artifacts are ‘discovered’, a political opponent can use the quotes or photos out of context (or even in context, as the case may be). This can leave candidates confronting a sticky issue.
No amount of detergent can provide a digital scrubbing
Deleting online pages or accounts won’t make the information go away. A saved screen shot, a digital photograph on a hard drive or even an archived page on Wayback.org can still exist somewhere, waiting to be pop up again. Trying to delete profiles and files after they are discovered can only inflame the issue and make it seem like a candidate is trying to hide something.
Users can have a false sense of control by relying too much on privacy controls within their accounts. Consider using this rule of thumb: Consider anything posted online will eventually be made public and could potentially be used against you by a political opponent. If you are not comfortable with anyone now or in the future seeing certain material about you, then do not post it online.
Of course, that doesn’t prevent other people from posting about you online. In this age of viral video, you will want to keep the same rule of thumb about anything you do or say in public. After all, you don’t want to have a ‘Maccaca Moment‘.
Confront and move on
Our advice to political candidates is that there’s no sense in becoming paranoid about what information exists about you online. What’s out there is out there, and there’s no getting around it. Anything you post going forward should be reflective of you as a candidate. That might mean cleaning up slang or colloquial phrasing on posts, or updating your profile images to something more dignified. You don’t have to change who you are, but be aware of how you could be presenting yourself to a potential voter.
If there is embarrassing material about you online, it will probably be discovered. In the end it’s best to simply confront the material and move on with more important issues.
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