(Picture: Getty Images/Metro.co.uk)

Social media has finally been around long enough to catch people out for things they said when they were young.

Congratulations internet.

YouTuber Zoella called out ‘fat chavs’, labelled someone ‘a tramp’ and mocked gay men in 2010. MP Jared O’Mara’s Labour whip has been removed for talking about a Girls Aloud orgy, being xenophobic, sexist and using a number of other derogatory comments made between 10 and 15 years ago.

Not for a second are those comments ok. Not for a second should those comments go without an apology and, with Jared O’Mara, more recent and more troubling allegations have since come to light.

But the idea that something somebody says while growing up can ruin their entire life is preposterous.

Search for ‘fat sl*g’ in Twitter and dozens of things posted in the last day would get someone fired from their job/suspended from school if attention was brought to it. Search for incest, search for countless other horrific things and the same thing happens.

We’ve chosen not to include them here, for obvious reasons.

People say terrible things when they believe they have privacy and that’s what young people believe Twitter, Snapchat and Whatsapp offers them.

But everyone is only one or two screengrabs away from catastrophe.

And this is why Alphabet (Google) Chairman Eric Schmidt argued in 2010 that everyone should change their name when they reach adulthood.

‘I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,’ Schmidt said.

He predicted, according to The Wall Street Journal, ‘apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.’

I was one of the few people to agree with him at the time and I agree with him now.

What’s changed since then is that it’s already happening: people aren’t changing their name, just deleting all their posts.

I know people who go back and delete all tweets every few months. I know people who archive Facebook posts, save old photos locally then delete them from social media. It means there’s nothing to catch them out, if there was anything in the first place.

This is a more realistic echo of real life 15 years ago: the worst/most embarrassing bits of someone will still be remembered but few will remember that one offensive comment made at university when a few tears were shed.

It wasn’t recorded indefinitely and it won’t lead to them being fired.

What anyone thought 10 years ago is not the same as they think now, or at least it shouldn’t be. Having strong views loosely held is a great mantra and something that shouldn’t punish every error made.

Reading back social media posts from over a decade ago is like burrowing into somebody’s teenage diary.

Nobody deserves to be judged by whether or not they managed to kiss that boy/girl they liked in the same way that no-one deserves to be judged by crass or offensive language they used one time when growing up, unless they’re still using that language.

Deleting everything is the most efficient way to remove anything you may not think any more or anything you don’t want to remember.

Everyone has said offensive, sexist, racist things when they were young. Everyone has crossed lines of what is and is not appropriate and that is part of the learning process.

If they haven’t then they are probably incredibly boring and all the geese near them never ran the risk of being said ‘boo’ to.

I’m sure there’s plenty of things I don’t think any more in my 14,000 tweets, in my 10 years of posting on Facebook, in my few years of Snapchat and Whatsapp.

But I’m just old enough to have been ‘adult’ enough to understand that, by the time social media became huge, nothing on there was every really going to be private.

Zoella’s unearthed tweets caused major controversy (Picture: YouTube)

People deserve to be judged by how they’ve grown up, the sort of person they’ve become, not how well they managed their privacy settings.

Whether this ‘awakening’ happens as an eight-year-old, an 18-year-old or an 80-year-old depends on the person along with their environment and it is the reaction to being told something is offensive that matters more than the comment itself.

That said, people shouldn’t be allowed to duck the things they said, they just have to be able to explain them.

But there are many downsides.

Serious abuse and long-term issues with racism, sexism and homophobia may be lost in time rather than lead to meaningful action.

Some things, even said many years ago, are difficult to explain.

The new editor of Gay Times Josh Rivers spent years messaging ‘racist, misogynistic, and ableist tweets’, Buzzfeed reports, and his job is now to represent the LGBT+ community,

Using the phrase tra*** derogatively to describe transexual people doesn’t bode well for the inclusivity of an inclusive magazine.

His reaction to the unearthing of these messages was a monosyllabic ‘wow’ at first but he went on to say that it shows that he ‘has grown’.

He has since been suspended from his job, only a month into the role.

it’s a horrible case and there are a lot of questions still to be answered there but growth is vital to people become more rounded, more aware of their prejudices and more thorough in their understanding of tough issues.

Growth is not just censoring what you say online as an act of self-preservation because you know it may come back to haunt you.

For better or worse, we will get used to people deleting their entire digital life as they become ‘an adult’, whenever it is they develop ‘responsibility’.

They shouldn’t need to, except in the most offensive examples, but this will become the new normal for as long as headlines are written about how hypocritical, how offensive and how unnecessary a message they sent 10 years ago was.

People may have short memories but the internet never forgets.

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