We Can Do This the Easy Way or the Hard Way

by Kim Niemi

Someday people are going to learn that there is no privacy on the Internet (Rule One), and that the Internet is forever (let’s call this Rule Two). Until then, we’re going to share their foibles with you in the hopes that you will make one less gaffe yourself by reading about their pain. 

This week’s spotlight on social sabotage features Colleen Cudney, who drank alcohol this past St. Patrick’s Day, even though she was on probation after a drunk-driving conviction. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Cudney passed a random breathalyzer the following day, she posted this on Facebook:

•  “Buzz killer for me, I had to breatalyze this morning and I drank yesterday but I passed thank god lol my dumba**." 
  

Can you hear us all sighing here at DMG from wherever you are?

If Cudney thought her Facebook page was a safe haven for sharing her thoughts, she was mistaken. A local police officer saw the post and alerted the probation office.

“Getting in trouble over a post on Facebook has become pretty common, I’d say, these days.” Devin Scillian of WDIV Local News in Detroit remarked just before covering the story. Sadly, this is the truth, but it doesn’t need to be.

Everyone, but young people in particular (this includes Millennials), should learn to take a beat before sharing every moment of their lives as if social media were the confessional portion of their own reality show. Here are a few things to keep in mind whenever posting to social media:

• Nothing is private. Even if your settings are set to “friends only,” your friends can copy text, download images, etc. and then share them wherever and however they like.
• Six degrees of separation isn’t just a fun game about guessing who’s been in movies with Kevin Bacon – it’s a real thing. Stick around the Internet long enough and you’ll be amazed at the people you know from seemingly opposite poles of your life who somehow know each other. 
• Nothing is ever gone from the Internet. If you put it out there, it’s out there. Even if you delete it… if it was remotely provocative, odds are someone saved it before you removed it. 
  

We all make mistakes, but social media mistakes can create such a backlash that you want to avoid them at all costs. So take a moment, remember our advice, and hopefully you can avoid learning the hard way.

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Image by Haje Jan Kamps