It does seem like people ought to just think more about the permanence of what we put online and act accordingly. There is no way to guarantee ephemerality for anything you send to another person online. They can always record or whatever in some way. We have to act like this stuff is entered into the permanent record and be OK with that. There is nothing we can do to 100% prevent stuff being recorded somewhere.

I agree we’d all be better off not judged on our younger attempts at “edginess” and stuff we said while figuring out who we are in our teens. But at a certain point we have to accept that posting anything online anywhere is _publishing_ and if you _published_ a racist letter to the editor at 19, instead of said something offensive at a party, there is a different judgement there & it’s justified.

I do think in time the answer “I’ve grown a lot since that time and regret those tweets” is going to become more acceptable & people will be judged more on recent stuff they say and do.