The Daily Post: “Conceal”

Conceal

Source: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/conceal/

Something that I always found funny is people’s dedication to going back and concealing stuff they’ve al­ready put on the Internet.

On multiple occasions, I’ve seen people I know apply for a job, and hide or delete as much content on their social medias as possible so their prospective employer can’t figure out information from their past. This prac­tice has become so common that I expect people with hidden social media histories to automatically have a disadvantage, simply because their employer would probably assume they went back and hid every­thing, because they had something to hide.

I’ve actually personally chosen not to hire people almost solely based off their lack of social media history. Not only is it a bit suspicious, but in the Internet and entertainment industry, a solid social media presence (or at least a solid understanding of social media) is pretty important.

I personally have never really had a problem with concealing stuff I’ve put on the Internet. Apart from going back and deleting accounts off gaming fansites that I made when I was 10 years old and acted like an imbecile, I’ve never really regretted anything I’ve posted, simply because I’m such a cautious and calculated person.

It might just be that I started taking the Internet very seriously starting from a very young age, and I became familiar with reputation management when I was first starting to produce content. Every time I post something online, I think about how people will react to it, and how I will react to it in a few years, and this process seemed to help me quite a bit.

The problem for me actually goes the other way around – I’m not trying to hide anything that I posted in the past, but rather, stuff that other people might post about me that is false or misleading. Although I haven’t really had this problem go out of control, there have still been multiple attempts in the past for people to make things up about me, or impersonate me and pretend like they’re me making a statement.

Having an official website as a central hub to all my content has helped mitigate any damage that might’ve possibly caused. I tag in the URL to my website pretty much everywhere I post, and it’s very clear that my own website is important enough to me that I would post anything important or official directly on here. This has also become clear to most of the people who know me, so if there’s anything with questionable validity, they usually come here to check for the facts.

Overall, reputation management can be a difficult thing, especially if you haven’t really been thinking about it, something bad already happened, and you’re trying to backtrack and fix things. However, if you always keep it in the back of your mind and change your approach to posting on the Internet, it really isn’t that difficult, and with time, it comes naturally.

 

—§—

 

 

—§—