It was only yesterday that the Labour Party decided to suspend Jared O'Mara. The first-time MP, who famously ousted Nick Clegg from his seat in Sheffield Hallam, was found to have used sexist, racist and homophobic language on social media and an Internet forum on more than one occasion. On music site Drowned in Sound, he asked a girl group to "come have an orgy". He wrote that fat women "don't deserve respect" and accused gay people of being "bitter and resentful about being homosexual". The list goes on.
O'Mara claims that he has changed a lot since he made those comments around 2004. It's possible--people's views, however extreme, can change over time. If that's the situation, then his old comments have come back to haunt him in the worst way. They've cost him his place on the Women and Equalities Committee and now, pending an investigation, possibly his place in the Labour Party.
There are many of us (you know who you are) who have skeletons they would not like to be discovered. They may not be as shocking as Jared O'Mara's selection but that doesn't mean you aren't ashamed of them or embarrassed by them. And I think most people would be sympathetic if I said that, within reason, it isn't right that a good person should be held to hostage by the mistakes of their past.
I'm in the reputation management game. I have been for decades. Most people think that involves looking ahead to the future--and it does. But it also involves diving into the past and rummaging around a bit. It isn't the most pleasant thing for anyone, but for the CEOs, entrepreneurs and philanthropists I deal with on a daily basis, it needs to be done.
So how to begin? It's simple: search for yourself. Type your name into Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other major search engines and don't just look at the first page--any old material attached to your name might by now have slipped to the later pages. Check to see whether you've deleted your old social media accounts. If you haven't, consider doing so. Tom Hardy can tell you what happens if you don't. And it isn't just social media that you should keep at the front of your mind. Message boards, forums, and anywhere else where you might have left an embarrassing post--even under a nickname--are worth investigating (and while you're at it, you can think long and hard about what led you to choose that nickname.)
The nuclear option is to take the legal route. EU citizens have the "right to be forgotten", which means that news stories and old social media posts can be hidden from search results. The ethics of this are still being debated--some people claim that criminals and those involved in serious scandals are able to "censor" search results--but regardless, the option exists to ask Google and other search engines to remove certain results. In addition, from May next year we'll all have more control over the data we share over the Internet. The General Data Protection Regulation allows users to order websites and social networks to delete embarrassing old posts. Those websites can reject the request, but only if the data in question has historical or scientific importance.
I tell my clients that the first rule of crisis communication is that prevention is better than cure. This is true of your online profile as well. Remember that nothing you share on the internet is truly private. So next time you're about to click post, think.