Blood in the Social Media Water

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 25, 2010

I’m jobless. That gives me a lot of time to surf the net and seek out job hunting advice. In the past year, I’ve probably seen a dozen or so articles about how people need to be careful about what they post on their social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The warning is, someone is going to see it. Your drunken photos; your posts about hating your boss; the “free” supplies you told the world about getting from the office.

It’s out there for the whole world to see, including potential employers. Even if you have your privacy settings set right, it’s still possible the supervisor or hr person at the company you want to work for is connected to you through a friend of a friend.

Luckily for me, most of my posts are about my boring life – like going grocery shopping. No everyone fares so well.

If there is any cautionary tale this week that best exemplifies why you need to be careful, it’s the Jennifer Wilbanks story. In case you don’t remember – it has been five years since she hit the news – Wilbanks was the runaway bride who faked her own kidnapping to avoid her wedding back in 2005.

So if I’m Jennifer Wilbanks, I’m thinking five years is plenty of time for people to forget about me. I can go about my business and post on Facebook about my life like any other normal person.

She had to have been feeling pretty safe that her five minutes of infamy were over, because she posted on Facebook about finding love.

How do I know this? Because someone in the “news” profession noticed and wrote a story about it that made it onto MSNBC’s online news page. I can’t even imagine how they got wind of it.

Is there someone in a newsroom out there whose job is to troll these social media sites looking for stuff like this? They’re like sharks, just waiting for that little drop of blood they can hone in on.

Or worse yet, could one of her own friends have tipped off the media?

Her friend Bob sees the post and turns to his cubicle mate at work and says, “You wanna hear something funny? I’m friends with that runaway bride chick and now she’s got a new man she says she’s in love with. She just posted about it online – I’ll believe it when she actually makes it down the aisle.”

Then Bob’s cubicle mate sends out an e-mail to his friends, and it circulates until it hits the desk of some news guy who finds a way to check it out on Facebook and write his little story. Then I write a little blog about it, because it’s just crazy that anybody even cares still.

So the moral is you’re never safe. Go ahead and post your crazy life updates and dramas, but be warned that you don’t know who out there is actually reading it. And be especially warned if you are or have ever been the subject of national/international news – they’re watching and waiting for you to do something stupid.

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Tags: privacy, social media

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