Who hasn't been a fool on social media? Why 'Tweet shaming' has to stop

In the past week, Stormzy, Jack Maynard and Zoella have all fallen victim to the power of their own words.

Posts containing controversial terms or opinions they had shared on social media – often six or seven years old – have resurfaced in the press, and have been widely criticised for their racist, homophobic and sexist content.

The tweets, which have been trawled through and brought back into the collective consciousness make for uncomfortable reading: YouTuber (and I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! contestant) Jack Maynard was forced to leave the show after a day because he had tweeted words including “faggot” disparagingly way between 2011 and 2013.

Chart-topping grime star Stormzy used similar homophobic language at least 19 times between 2011 and 2014. And Zoe “Zoella” Sugg, one of the world’s most famous YouTubers, was lambasted for insulting gay men and “fat chavs” in tweets dating back to 2010.

Though trawling through celebrities’ old tweets in order to find incriminating evidence of wrongdoing is currently all the rage among the tabloid press, it’s nothing new. People have been hoisted by their own petard thanks to social media for years.

In 2013 Paris Brown, then a 17-year-old from Sheerness, Kent, was appointed as Kent’s youth police and crime commissioner, a role that would pay her a salary of ￡15,000 per year. She was forced to step down from the job after The Daily Mail uncovered tweets she had posted between the ages of 14 and 16, referencing underage drinking, drug taking, and her sex life.

The backlash to Brown’s tweets was one of the first examples of the ghosts of social media past coming back to haunt those who had entered public life, but wasn’t the last. The latest raft of celebrities include those who have come to fame on the back of a major social media following. Although we tend to view YouTubers are more "authentic" than traditional celebrities, they still hold a position of power – and as a result the press and public often feel the need to try and tear them down.

There are several reasons why this is happening now. For one, we have a relatively new group of celebrities, newly minted through sites like YouTube. People who would – 10 years ago – never have dreamed of the possibility of being in the public eye are now finding themselves thrust into the limelight.

And the form that limelight takes has also changed. Social media – including YouTube – has established a closer connection between these newly-minted celebrities and their fans than the traditional Hollywood apparatus has previously provided. 

“The idea with the social media star is that there’s not that level of control,” says Alice E Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. But that unfiltered power can come back to bite them.

Secondly, social media provides the ordinary person with enormous power: a giant global soapbox from which they could broadcast their views, which has never previously existed. 

We have been conditioned by social media (think Facebook’s prompt on its status bar, “What’s on your mind?”) to spill out our thoughts into small text boxes on the internet that are then shared with thousands of others and then stored forevermore - a readily accessible index of our hopes, our fears, our loves and our hates. Often, in the heat of the moment, those thoughts can be something that we might later regret.

A fifth of British children aged 10 to 18 admit they have said something unkind about or rude to someone on social media, according to a 2016 ComRes survey for the BBC. And a significant number of them now tell pollsters they want to become professional YouTubers when they grow up – a job that will open them up to public scrutiny in much the same way Zoella and Jack Maynard have been today.

“People don’t know how to maintain privacy,” says Anthony D’Angelo, a YouTuber who has been exploring issues around the site and digital media since 2007. Another YouTuber, Taha Khan, agrees. “It’s one of those things just taken as a given,” he says. “The default is you share your life online. A lot of people jump into sharing their life online and then have to grapple with that, post-oversharing, rather than pre-empting it.”

Like many social media platforms, Twitter was also used differently in its infancy. “When we first saw celebrities using Twitter, a lot of them were very candid about their lives,” explains Marwick.

“They would get into arguments with other celebrities and reveal things about themselves their publicist would probably rather they didn’t. I think Twitter is now much more sanitised.”

Protect your online identity

The reality is that we all grow and change – as does society. Our teenage thoughts, when we are learning about the world, are not necessarily the best representation of us as adults. Research shows that teenage brains are more willing to take risks, and think less about the dangers and long-term consequences of actions. That can be justification for why teenagers drink to excess, try drugs or put themselves in physically dangerous situations. But increasingly, it also explains some of the more reckless tweets.

“We know that [traditional] child stars don’t have the easiest lives later on,” explains Marwick. “I think that goes double for these young people that are becoming stars through other media.”

All of which is not to excuse the kind of things these celebrities have tweeted in the past. Racist speech has always been racist, and sexism has always been unacceptable, whether it is 2012 or 2017. But society was more forgiving of what should have been inutterable phrases back when these things were said. Thankfully, we've recognised that what we once thought of as "pushing the envelope" or "controversial" was just in fact plain sexist, racist or homophobic. 

When Jack Maynard was tweeting the n-word, Matt Lucas was appearing in blackface at 9pm on BBC One in Little Britain. When Zoella was tweeting about fat people, ITV were showing a prime time television programme where overweight celebrities were shouted at by a bootcamp trainer for our entertainment. When Stormzy was calling people gay, gay was being used by the nation to mean anything from annoying to stupid.

This isn’t an issue contained to celebrities. Politicians and business people are just some of those who have been caught up in the complications of oversharing on social media. It doesn’t just extend to verbal missteps, either. As social media consultant Jessica Riches told The New Statesman earlier this year after another child of social media, Labour MP Jared O’Mara, was brought down due to offensive comments he’d made online, “the t___ of the prime minister of 2030 are already on someone’s phone.”

This problem will continue as successive generations grow up online. Half of 10- to 12-year-olds have a Facebook or YouTube account (below the official minimum acceptable age to use either site), while nearly three-quarters of those under 18 have a Facebook profile. 

We are seeing a great reckoning on social media, and certainly present generations are – seemingly – a little more savvy than the first of us who used social media. Teenagers nowadays take precautions: they ramp up the safety settings on their accounts so all but a few people can access their most personal posts; they even run parallel accounts, called Finstas on Instagram, where they can share their real (often less sanitised) selves away from the public gaze.

But ultimately, only one rule will prevent anyone from being caught out online. It’s a maxim almost as old as Twitter itself: “Never tweet.”