On a Friday afternoon in March of 2021, I (Carrie) received an inquiry from a reporter. The request was familiar. She wanted my insight about the latest public fall from grace prompted by digital evidence of a past indiscretion. In this case, a young rising star and impending editor in chief at Teen Vogue was compelled to resign before she even started. The offenses: racist and homophobic tweets from a decade ago.1
Flash back to the summer of 2017. We received an email from Harvard’s Office of Admissions seeking guidance. It was just a few months after that office had rescinded offers of admission from ten accepted students for content posted in a “closed” (semi-private) Facebook group.2 The group, dubbed “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens,” contained disturbing memes shared by the new admits. The memes trivialized pedophilia, sexual violence, and genocide and featured explicit racist and anti-Semitic language. It was just the latest incident where digital evidence had called admissions decisions into question.
When we met their team, the admissions officers struck us as uniformly thoughtful, even if not all on the same page about how best to navigate such cases. They were genuinely perplexed by a core dilemma for competitive admissions in the digital era: How (if at all) should they be thinking about a young person’s online presence as part of the admissions process? And what should they do when digital evidence is at odds with the character strengths they’ve tried so hard to assess through an applicant’s recommendation letters, essays, and interview?
In this chapter, we dig into dilemmas of digital footprints, which arise in job decisions, admissions decisions, and more. Digital footprints are trails of content and information about each of us that exist and persist online. Because so much of teens’ social lives and interactions is digital, there are enduring artifacts that document everything from casual banter and offhand remarks to momentary lapses of judgment and major missteps. Sometimes those major missteps feature language that veers into moral and ethical territory, as in the Harvard examples.
Digital artifacts of speech and behavior—transgressive and otherwise—are readily shareable with others. Posts can persist on the web for long periods of time. Screenshots of Instagram Stories, snaps, or text exchanges can be stored on others’ phones indefinitely. In truth, no one knows whether, when, or how teens’ digital posts will come back to haunt them. But the ever-present possibility looms large.
Regardless of the soul searching we saw underway at Harvard’s Office of Admissions, news outlets came to their own conclusions about the 2017 scandal and its upshot. The most cautionary of them was headlined: “Meet the 10 Harvard Students Who Just Ruined Their Lives: The lessons? Don’t say racist, sexist, misogynistic stuff—and especially don’t say it on the Internet.”3
The possibility of such dire consequences is a key reason why adults give digital footprints so much airtime when they talk with teens. The potential of a revoked offer of admission to a prestigious college or “ruined lives,” as that headline put it, hovers. It’s obvious why we need to address the moral gravity of hate speech. But also important is the question of whether and how we, as a society, navigate digitally documented transgressions from the adolescent years.
This was one of our most difficult chapters to write because nearly every stance has implications that feel unsatisfying, if not unsettling on some level. To that end, we make this acknowledgment up front: we don’t provide decisive answers so much as what we hope will be a useful reframe of digital footprint dilemmas grounded, once more, in teens’ perspectives.
More and more, children begin to hear about digital footprints starting in elementary school. As they move up through middle school and into high school, adults’ messages become more pointed, even panicky. In the classroom, many of the strongest messages educators share about digital life emphasize the long and pernicious shadow of digital footprints. Just a few examples that we’ve captured in our research with teachers:
What you do online CANNOT BE ERASED.
Posting comments online is like shouting them on the town square, except that they NEVER go away.
You are what you post; now, tomorrow, and in the future.
These well-intentioned cautions are echoed at home by parents who double down on the warnings. Parents may relate to the mom who told us she emphasizes to her son that “he can get in HUGE trouble and ruin his entire reputation and future with one inappropriate text.”
A core belief that is often behind these messages is that young people are oblivious or apathetic about the risks of their online posts. Ideas abound that “kids these days” have no concept of privacy, no understanding that their actions might have future impacts, and no sense of responsibility. In our own research, we hear adults lament that teens “don’t think of the permanence” and “do not care about the future—they live in the now!”
Some adults blame themselves when teens misstep; it’s seen as a sign that adults haven’t been clear, loud, or forceful enough. And because digital misfires can be so very consequential, doubling down on messages about risks and repercussions therefore feels both rational and “right.”
Such warnings are rooted in good intentions: above all, to protect young people. But good intentions are destined to fail when based on flawed assumptions. In this case, it’s a house of cards built on the faulty belief that teens would act differently if only they truly understood the stakes.
In chapter 2, we revealed that teens’ worries about digital habits and device dependence can sound surprisingly like adults’ concerns. The same is true when we consider fears about digital footprints. Again and again, teens in our research articulated concerns about the digital afterlife4 of their online posts:
If you post one thing on social media, you can’t get it back. If you mess up, you can’t get it back. (sixteen-year-old)
Once something is said, posted, etc, it NEVER goes away. Even if you think it does. (twelve-year-old)
If you make one wrong move, u could destroy your life. (fourteen-year-old)
We couldn’t help but wonder: is it just a few exceptional teens who happen to be alert to their digital footprints? We had amassed more than two hundred similar comments across our dataset. Still, we found ourselves wondering whether the teens who voiced this worry were qualitatively different from those who misstep. Is the young person who shared “If you post one thing on social media, you can’t get it back” certain to avoid their own digital misstep?
We don’t think so. As we dug deeper into the issue of digital footprints with teens, we started to grasp why even awareness about the permanence of posts and anxiety about misposts won’t inoculate them from risks. Powerful forces are at play and often in tension. Teens are changing and the world is changing. Yet their online posts are poised to linger in ways that are often out of their hands.
What will today’s teens think later in life, when they are confronted with digital artifacts of their teen years? Researchers Brady Robards and Siân Lincoln were curious about this very question.5 They interviewed twenty-somethings who were part of the first generation of young adults to grow up with a single social media site (Facebook) archiving their individual journeys coming of age. In each of these forty-one interviews, Robards and Lincoln used an original “scroll-back method” whereby young adults scrolled back through their Facebook timelines and narrated their reactions as they rediscovered old posts and tags.
Chief reactions included a sense of “panic,” “urgency,” and/or “anxiety” as people found that posts they had long forgotten (like pictures from nights out drinking) remained public or otherwise viewable to others. Scrolling back also at times resurfaced painful memories of traumas or difficult events. Yet for some participants, the process was profoundly positive—even “therapeutic”—as old posts created “memory ‘sparks’” for revisiting joy or milestones.
It was evident that Facebook timelines served as important personal archives. Robards and Lincoln also came to appreciate how expectations that young people should take care of their digital histories by untagging and considering future ramifications can generate “intense pressure . . . and an implicit call to erase and sterilise normative youthful experiences of experimentation, celebration, rebellion, and figuring out their own boundaries.”6
Even before they are adults scrolling back through artifacts of their adolescent years, teens describe a sense of stress about inevitable mistakes they’ve made in the past or are destined to make in the future. A high school senior lamented to us: “Things I’ve said in the past don’t define who I am now.” Another, younger teen (thirteen years old) voiced more anticipatory regret: “I might say something accidentally ignorant and that will carry into my future.”
The collision of past, present, and future selves feels to teens both likely and worrisome. Imagine being a fourteen-year-old grappling with this reality: “If someone posted something like three years ago and it gets pulled up—and the person gets blamed but is a whole new improved person—they get judged for something they did when they were younger [even though they] had no idea what they were doing at that age.”
Or consider feeling, like another thirteen-year-old does, that you are coming of age in a world where documentation is a given and development is itself a liability: “If you are young and make a post that the older you would regret, it’s too late. Especially if that post contains sensitive information. Someone or something has already saved it and stored it so that you have no way of deleting it.”
Teens acknowledge people’s beliefs, values, and identities evolve over time. But they also recognize that one-off remarks or illicit photos leave lasting impressions. This engenders a fear that “you will be remembered in a bad way forever.” The notion that life gets better after high school and painful experiences will be left behind seems implausible in this kind of digital world.
On one level, it may be comforting to hear that at least some teens have internalized adults’ cautions about digital footprints. And yet, we know that teens still post things online that they shouldn’t. How can teens be so clearly aware of risks and yet so vulnerable to taking them?
Part of the answer lies in the ubiquity of ongoing, rapid-fire exchanges on digital platforms. Reliable stats are hard to come by, in part since messages are exchanged across multiple platforms. But anecdotally, we hear that teens routinely send one hundred or more messages each day, many sent with immediacy because they are part of real-time conversations. With that many messages, it’s just impractical to assume that every text will be carefully evaluated for all the ways it could be interpreted by anyone, anywhere, anytime. This kind of reflection is a high bar for anyone, but especially for adolescents who are primed to prioritize the chance for immediate peer connection over longer-term potentialities.
Plus, the opportunities for self-expression online meet the developmental impulse toward identity exploration.7 As we’ve discussed in prior chapters, identity formation is a primary job of adolescence.8 Sorting out who one is, could be, and wants to be happens through trial and error, by fits and starts. Since long before tweets and snaps, teens have found ways to openly express their emerging ideas about all things from pop culture to fashion to politics. Now, social media apps offer choice venues.
In the Internet’s early days, chat rooms and forums lacked slick design features but offered opportune spaces for identity experimentation. They were also largely anonymous. As Sherry Turkle wrote in Life on the Screen in the 1990s, such “virtual communities . . . offer permission to play, to try things out.”9 In such spaces, young people could experiment with more assertive, flirtatious, or even offensive selves with no enduring consequences or trails.10
Today’s apps (perhaps especially Snapchat and TikTok) similarly offer compelling and fun outlets for self-expression. Among the very best parts of growing up with today’s technologies, teens say: “being able to express yourself more, you have more of a voice”; “You can show your feelings through social media”; “We get to express ourselves to a world of people who may have the same interests.”
But the stakes have changed. Online anonymity is largely a thing of the past. As our colleague Katie Davis and I (Emily) have written about, the free-wheeling nature and low stakes of the 1990s Internet no longer exist in the same way.11 For better and for worse, the current digital context is largely identifiable: online posts are now typically tied to one’s “real life” name and identity.12 To be sure, some people take pains to try and set up accounts anonymously, whether for positive reasons (like staying behind the scenes of a “Random Acts of Kindness” account) or malicious intent (like wanting to troll another person’s Instagram posts with mean comments). Yet there’s no guarantee that such accounts will stay anonymous: “people know that it’s so easy to find whoever started an account now.”
Even when teens are offline, there is an ever-present possibility that their behavior will be digitally captured by a peer with a smartphone. The result is a major shift. The inevitable ups and downs, awkward and even regrettable moments of development are documented with unprecedented thoroughness. Periodic changes to the design of social media platforms can make old posts even more readily searchable. On Facebook, for example, the shift to timelines made it easier to access old posts that would have previously required more time and “digging.”13
Importantly, risks associated with identifiability aren’t equitably distributed. The rise in “social media policing” and disproportionate surveillance of social media posts of Black and Brown people has been described as a digital version of racial profiling.14 Although teens from all racial backgrounds may experience risks associated with their digital footprints, systemic racism amplifies threats for teens of color.
As teens try to balance the opportunities for self-expression with the risks of networked publics, some find ways to fly below the radar. We wrote in chapter 4 about danah boyd’s concept of “social steganography” or teens “hiding in plain sight” by posting public messages with layered meanings.15 To illustrate the concept, boyd shared the story of a teen who posted lyrics from an upbeat song. The lyrics were interpreted by her mother and broader Facebook audience as a sign that all was well. But the teen’s close friends grasped the hidden meaning: she had broken up with her boyfriend. Such coded language can be protective. It facilitates audience segmentation (making posts interpretable to one’s target audience but not to others).16
Teens hide out of plain sight online, too, with duplicate accounts and stratified audiences they use for self-expression. Not so long ago, teens talked often about Finstas. Short for “fake Instagram,” Finstas are pseudonymous, secondary Instagram accounts. (To be clear: Finstas are not a formal feature of the platform as U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal suggested during a 2021 congressional hearing. His question to Facebook’s Head of Global Safety—“Will you commit to ending Finsta?”—was seen as a sign that politicians are woefully out of touch with the tech platforms they may well need to regulate. It quickly became fodder for memes.) A teen might set up a Finsta for the purpose of evading adult oversight and scrutiny. Or, a Finsta may be a space to post more freely for a circumscribed group of close friends, thus avoiding the judgment of a wider peer group. It can even be used to vet potential posts with a preliminary round of feedback before posting more widely on “main stage” accounts.
Adults can misinterpret any efforts to fly below the radar as a sign that teens are necessarily up to no good. But these practices aren’t just about creating ways for inappropriate or problematic sharing. As in the song lyrics example, there are times when teens want to update only their closest friends. They recognize, as these examples showcase, that audience and privacy matter. Some teens use Finstas to share more playful and less performative slices of life with a trusted circle. Some have aspects of their identities that they share only with certain audiences or friends, and segmenting can help them differentiate self-expression. In 2016, I (Emily) interviewed fifteen-year-old Lily for my dissertation research. Lily described her Finsta as a place where she could “express myself more” because there was “definitely less judging.” While she took care about what she posted on her “real” account, her Finsta offered “a safe place to rant about life ’cause it’s all your friends.”
We heard about the same kinds of tactics from teens in our most recent research. But they talked mostly about strategic uses of Private Stories on Instagram and Snapchat. In these tightly curated inner circles (see chapter 3), teens similarly create a semblance of privacy and space for more authentic self-expression than feels possible in view of a larger peer group. Private Stories are thus the latest tools for creating a “judgment free zone” where teens can vent to friends or share random musings like “how much I liked the taco I just ate.” Some sharing is benign but limited to close friends out of a desire to avoid “polluting” others’ feeds with minutiae. The opportunity to share with close friends can also embolden more rant-y expressions that can cross a line. So, the featured content (and its consequences) may vary. But the overriding purpose—to speak to and with a circle of friends—is a constant. Even so, the privacy of private Stories is always tenuous given the ever-present possibility that any audience member screen-records or screenshots the content.
Both self-expression and peer connection are crucial to the process of identity development. Interactions with friends and peers aren’t just a distraction or sideshow. They are central to healthy development, and adolescents are primed to seek them out. The possibility of gaining peer acceptance makes risky decisions more likely, which presents in the ways adolescents evaluate choices ranging from unsafe sex to cheating to stealing to reckless driving.17 Research confirms a neural basis for this tendency, which is supremely relevant to digital contexts too. The sense of peer validation behind likes shows up in neural activity: specifically, the “reward circuitry” in the brain is activated when adolescents view social media posts with numerous likes.18
Adults often advise young people to look beyond the present moment and think about the future. A parent tells her teen, “Protecting your future is more important than a temporary ‘like’ on social media.” This may seem like wise counsel. Yet, it trivializes what is more immediately meaningful to teens on a developmental and even neural level. Recall, too, that the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that handles self-regulation and thinking about the future) is still developing throughout adolescence.19
In sum: we know that peer influence plus normal brain development can fuel risk-taking. Add to this the expressive tools that social apps offer for sharing with an audience of peers and online misposts are to be expected. The chance to be seen as funny or to share something that might gain praise from peers is a strong pull. Even when teens are well aware of long-term risks, the power of peers is mighty. But we also need to face down a further complexity of networked life: teens’ digital trails are not strictly of their own creation. This is another way in which adult warnings that focus strictly on personal vigilance miss the mark.
In their book-length exploration of Instagram, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, and Crystal Abidin emphasize the fundamental co-creation of digital footprints by other social media users.20 A reality for adolescents today is that other people are coauthoring their digital footprints. As hard as a teen tries to project a certain image to the world (whether it be sarcastic, serious, or sexy) their friends and peers are ever poised to post a comment, picture, or video that portrays them in an entirely different light. This further complicates the task of managing one’s digital footprint, as we heard from teens in our own research:
If someone posts something bad on my instagram, then it’s there forever, even if i take it down. (twelve-year-old)
Someone would post something annoying and never delete it. (thirteen-year-old)
I could post something I don’t want on the internet. Or a friend of mine could and I just don’t like when things that have to do with me as a person are on the internet. (twelve-year-old)
Indeed, monitoring peers’ posts for content about them is a key reason why some teens keep notifications switched on and devices within arm’s reach.
Close friends may create codes, implicit agreements, or explicit pacts related to posting and tagging. These range from formal policies (“My friend group has a policy where we always ask each other before you post a photo with somebody else in it”) to unspoken expectations that friends should know what their close friends would or wouldn’t want shared. Such codes reflect sensitivity to the co-constructed nature of online identities. They also reflect a mindset that privacy is a deeply social matter in a networked world. Trust is key, but also fragile. When friendships go south, precarious pacts can be broken courtesy of leaked screenshots.
To be sure, the roles of friends and peers in co-constructing a teen’s digital footprint are not always unwanted. Friends post pictures that can contribute to a desirable public image. And some teens proactively lean on their friends to project an image they want on view. Sharing embarrassing content may even be welcomed, as long as it’s limited to a trusted audience (e.g., via Stories). “I love to laugh at myself,” one high school senior explained, “and I trust my friends enough . . . where, like, they can post [embarrassing] stuff of me and I can post stuff of them.” Our impression from years of interviews and observations is that this “love to laugh at myself” mindset emerges in the later teen years rather than in earlier adolescence. Though our data haven’t enabled a formal assessment of age-related differences, well-placed trust in friends’ judgments also seems to coincide with later high school years.
With the very best of intentions, adults contribute to their children’s growing digital footprints as they share both everyday moments and meaningful milestones. Parents may share ultrasound photos before babies are even born, like I (Carrie) did when I changed my Facebook profile picture to an ultrasound image of my second child. In one analysis of 289 #ultrasound images shared on social media, roughly one-third (34 percent) included visible information such as the mother’s full name, baby due date, and location of scan. These personally identifiable details enable prenatal, identity-linked digital footprints.21 Visual, digital personas thus start to form before a baby’s first breath. Footprints are also co-constructed even past a person’s last breath as others increasingly mourn by sharing stories, posts, and pictures on social media.22
In the interim, group affiliations can also produce an inevitable corresponding digital imprint. Adults from school and extracurricular groups participate in co-construction (typically with some form of parental permission). Sixteen-year-old Mary was frustrated when her school’s account posted an embarrassing group photo of her and classmates in their costumes for a school play: “My eyes are half closed and I was, like, half smiling. It was just so awkward and everybody else also was really awkward looking, you know, like eyes half closed. And they still posted it. And everybody was just like ‘oh my goodness, please take this down’ and they wouldn’t. So definitely adults don’t think about how those kinds of posts, you know, can influence kids and it’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was so embarrassing.’ It’s still up on Instagram to this day.”
This may not seem like a big deal. But to teens, adults posting without their permission (even if it’s just an unflattering photo) feels hypocritical. Adults often tell teens to take care about what is posted online, and to respect others’ wishes about what is and isn’t shared. When we promptly disregard their wishes in our own posting and sharing, it sends a mixed message. Echo, also sixteen years old, had plenty of experiences like Mary’s: “I’ve had like many, many instances of adults or my school post pictures of me that I would never post myself.” The irony isn’t lost on her: “I just think it’s really funny when adults say, like, ‘Be careful what you post’ because like they’re the ones who are posting the stuff that I don’t want the world to see. Because I always think about, like, ‘If I post this—is it going to hurt anyone?,’ and ‘Is it going to make anything worse for anyone?’ And I just don’t think the school or like the adults really consider that as much, in my experience. Other adults are posting stuff that I might not want online.”
Digital footprints can be co-constructed in other unwanted ways too. Consider a teen who rants to a small circle of friends or classmates in a group chat or Private Story. The rant might be about a peer, a teacher, or a political issue. It might contain language that is passionate but also offensive and hateful. It might be a “joke”—at least to the person sharing it. And it might be a source of immediate regret. Regardless, a small audience has seen it. Any one of them stands poised to leak it to a much larger, or at least unintended audience. Sometimes the stakes are considerable.
We touched in chapter 4 on the idea of receipts. Graham explained it like this: receipts are “proof screenshots, screen recordings, [or] messages saved on Snap[chat]” that provide evidence of an indiscretion. Digital affordances make such receipts possible. Routine screenshotting and recording make their collection likely. As one teen shared: “Once you post something or do something, there’s no going back. Usually there is one person who captures it, and then once it is online it can never be taken [back from] the hundreds of people who have possibly screenshotted it.” Another teen put it bluntly: “Everything gets recorded.”
Consider fourteen-year-old Sarah’s impulse to create a receipt of a peer’s hateful speech and her hesitation share it, which are detailed in the “When Peers Hold the Cards” box. Both instincts are worthy of consideration. Digital technologies afford the creation of a persistent record of speech and behavior, both good and bad. This creates new opportunities for accountability following offenses but also new dilemmas. Indeed, the “right” course of action is subject to considerable debate—especially in cases involving adolescents.
Both teens and adults are often divided among themselves about the ethics of holding someone accountable for online posts created at a young age. We studied this very topic, including through survey questions that tap knee-jerk reactions to different issues.
In our research, we often ask people to signal agreement, uncertainty, or disagreement about statements like “It’s fair for college admissions to consider applicants’ social media posts” and “It’s reasonable for people to face consequences later in life for posts shared in middle or high school.” In 2018–2019, teens we surveyed were polarized; on both statements, there was no majority stance. We also asked about the statement “If someone makes an offensive comment on social media, people have the right to call them out—even if it hurts their reputation.” In this case, a majority of youth (63 percent) tended to agree.24
Such scenarios surface questions about accountability and privacy rights, and tensions between them. Sarah was weighing this very tension: where and when is a right to privacy forsaken based on appalling speech or behavior? And who gets to decide?
Teens’ experiences with digital footprints today are shaped by threats that include and go beyond loss of jobs or school admissions. In chapter 6, we described how cancel culture is firmly on teens’ radars as they observe celebrities, political leaders, and other influencers being publicly shamed for inappropriate behavior, past or present, and “deplatformed” via mass unfollowing that undercuts their audiences.25 Although cancellations are often directed at public figures, the phenomenon trickles down to the experiences of everyday teens and more mundane causes.
Diego told us about meeting up with a group of friends after school. Noticing the group was missing one of its usual members, he asked, “Where’s Vera?” His friend replied, “Oh, she’s canceled.” Apparently, Vera was “being fake” to another person, was called out for it, and was now shunned. Diego was puzzled by the apparent cancellation for what felt like passing drama: “Why does that make her canceled? Like, are you going to talk to her or are you just gonna put a label on her and then never speak to her again?” Diego’s reaction taps into the question of whether cancellations are permanent or temporary. Teens’ stories suggest that the intensity of social sanctions often wane over time—though just how much time seems to vary considerably. Diego’s friends may reopen lines of communication with Vera within days. But, in some cases, stigma lingers in a peer group’s collective memory (“that kid got canceled in eighth grade for ___”).
In cancel culture, social media plays a dual role: people spread the word of an indiscretion via Instagram or Snapchat (“Like they expose you. And then in real life, you get canceled”) and digital posts and comments are sites for discrediting the person and their reputation. Adults’ persistent warnings about the risks of social media posts convey a strong message to youth, essentially normalizing a culture of surveillance26 where “the whole world is watching.”27 In a context where cancellation is an added threat, the stakes of missteps can feel even higher.
Whether it’s directed at peers, school communities, or cultural influencers, teens are polarized on the place and value of cancellation. To seventeen-year-old Jade, the civic intentions behind many cancellations make it a net positive: “Cancelling is just like holding accountable and taking away a person’s platform. In that respect, I think it’s positive. . . . Like there’s a TikToker, Lil Huddy, who said the N word and a lot of people canceled him and said, ‘We’re not going to support him anymore.’ . . . And I think that cancel culture works if we all can agree to de-platform someone. . . . We shouldn’t be like idolizing people who are racist and doing things like that.” Similarly, for Maeve (fifteen years old), “Cancel culture is about not letting hate speech and systems of oppression get passed on to the next generation.”
Other teens acknowledge the intentions behind cancellation but question its efficacy. Michelle (seventeen years old) offered: “There’s a lot of emphasis on, like, punishing those people, on taking away their platform . . . and that can be a good thing if they’ve done something absolutely terrible. . . . But I think it’s so much more useful to be like, ‘Oh, hey. Why would you say that? Why would you do that? What were the intentions there?’ Like, just like getting context for it.”
Nanaa was even stronger on this point: “We’re holding people . . . at a standard that’s like inhumane. Because we are imperfect. It doesn’t really solve anything. . . . That one moment or that one post is being defined [as] someone’s whole entire character.” And she worries about efficacy. “It denies them of those other steps. By canceling them, you’re limiting them to that access of education. And also you’re continuing to close their mind. . . . You never want to dilute it or, like, minimize it. Like, ‘What you said was wrong. But you aren’t a bad person. So I’m going to take the time to educate you on this.’” In a similar vein, Diego fears that cancel culture is “just avoiding the problem.”
Mistakes are inevitable and today’s world doesn’t readily forget. As one parent put it bluntly, “The digital footprint is, by design, unforgiving and everlasting.” The cases of the would-be Teen Vogue editor and the ten Harvard hopefuls who lost their admissions offers are part of a growing repository of high-profile incidents where digital posts (past or present) go viral, leading to mockery, humiliation, and public shaming.
Efforts to support erasure of digital content have been discussed and, in some cases, codified into law. The “Right to Be Forgotten” was embedded in the European Union’s (EU) 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, requiring companies to delete personally identifiable data about private citizens when those citizens request it.28 But the logistics are complicated, as Kate Eichhorn thoughtfully unpacks in her book, The End of Forgetting.29 Who is a private citizen and who is not? Or, rather, when is one a private individual versus a public figure? Let’s say a teen’s publicly available TikToks go viral and she accumulates two million followers. Does she forsake her right to have her footprint erased if she comes to regret her social media celebrity in two, three, or four years’ time? What about old online photos of a person who was a “private citizen” during adolescence and later becomes a public figure: are their decades-old posts fair game for scrutiny? What if someone becomes a public figure as a child, but for something they did not choose? (Eichhorn cites the case of the “Star Wars Kid” who is often referenced as the first meme, an important part of Internet history.)
Practically, what are the geographic boundaries of the EU’s policy, given the Internet’s global reach? A 2019 court decision went in Google’s favor on one such question, ruling that even in cases when a company is required to remove online content in response to a citizen’s request, the “delisted links” can still legally show up in search engine results outside of the EU.30
Beyond the EU, the for-profit world is getting in on the game. Acknowledging that persistent content is profitable, Eichhorn explores an emerging industry around the idea of “paying to delete.” Indeed, digital reputation management has ballooned in recent years—and become riddled with corruption. Shady businesses that purport to remove slanderous or unwanted content gouge victims after contributing to the spread of this content in the first place.31
In an era when content can persist indefinitely and resurface unpredictably (at least outside of the EU), the question of what to do with it is consequential. Probing teens’ perspectives on cancel culture surfaces fundamental puzzles about character, growth, learning, and forgiveness. Shifting social norms and sensitivities add to the complexity: it’s not just teens who are learning and changing but the world too. Views have evolved over time on topics ranging from the acceptability (and legality) of smoking marijuana to views about gay marriage to the degree of impropriety and harm of cultural appropriation. Yet digital artifacts can be wrenched out of context and travel across space and time toward new meanings and interpretations.
To be clear, public condemnation and censure for past atrocities is arguably warranted on many fronts. But when it comes to living individuals who are or were adolescents when they misstepped, how far should condemnation go? In response to the takedown of the future Teen Vogue editor, one journalist commented: “I suppose a magazine aimed at teens and preteens would strain to acknowledge what every adult knows, which is that the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life.”32
With stories like this reifying a larger cancel culture, the stark reality of an unforgiving, make-no-mistakes world seems clear. But is there actually no way forward? Can we collectively own the unacceptability of certain speech and still create contexts where teens can own their missteps, take responsibility, and move on in some manner?
Carol Dweck’s work on growth versus fixed mindsets is especially relevant in a world in which mistakes linger.33 In a nutshell, people who approach errors as learning or growth opportunities are poised to recover from mistakes and do better going forward. By contrast, those who tend toward a fixed mindset attribute mistakes to identity or character flaws. It’s not hard to see how such a mindset can prevent one from moving on. Doing so almost always requires self-forgiveness as well as some form of apology (public or semi-public) to an affected individual or group.
Getting to an authentic and accepted apology may be no small feat.34 This is further complicated by the perspective (common to cancel culture) that no apology is good enough. As Genevieve (fifteen years old) shared, “Apology videos are so hard to make without getting further canceled. . . . Like, if there’s one comment that points out [criticizes] one tiny thing they said, you’ll see a whole chain of comments off that comment that are like, ‘oh wait, yeah.’ And then more comments start popping up. Like Every. Single. Person. has to be like, ‘This was good. This was good.’”
Pulling back from the individual transgressor’s redemption (when that’s even possible), it’s also fair to ask about our collective responsibility. Naturally, people who have behaved despicably aren’t always committed to growth. But in our zeal to hold people accountable for lapses through cancellation and deplatforming, are we overcorrecting? What would a collective growth mindset look like?
Loretta Ross has some ideas. A Black feminist, scholar, and activist, Ross is an advocate of “call in culture.” As she describes it, “Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. . . . Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect.”35 Echoing the voices of several teens quoted earlier, Ross prioritizes learning and growth as a more effective path to accountability and restorative justice: “We can work together to ascertain harm and achieve justice without seeing anyone as disposable people and violating their human rights or right to due process.”
In short: antidotes to cancel culture are circulating—even as efforts to cancel those proposed antidotes follow. It remains to be seen whether the future will bring more opportunities to forgive and recover. Until then, teens sit with a considerable dose of anxiety about the certainty that they will stumble and the limited control they rightly feel.
Digital footprints are just one in a larger set of worries teens feel about online privacy. As we recounted in the introduction, the initial data that inspired the idea for this book came from teens’ responses to the question: What worries you most about today’s digital world? We first asked respondents to choose from a list of different options that spanned issues like screen time, cyberbullying and drama, and being asked for inappropriate pictures, or to write in their own reply.
We have generally shied away from statements about prevalence because most seem misleading or inappropriate as characterizations of the data. For example, we don’t make claims like “60 percent of teens are worried about X topic” because we actually only asked teens to describe their biggest worry. Teens may be indeed quite worried about topics they didn’t select—or not. We just don’t know.
Still, we couldn’t ignore that the #1 most common worry—selected by 786 youth or more than one in five of our respondents—was “risks to private information.”36 This took us by surprise in some ways. For one, many teens seemingly opt for publicity over privacy on social media (e.g., when they choose not to use privacy settings because they want peers to find them or their content to be viewed more widely). Often, teens quite intentionally post what adults might consider “personal” information about their inner lives and thoughts. We’ve encountered enough of these posts personally and professionally to share the common wonder about whether privacy norms have changed.
At the same time, research has for a number of years revealed that networked teens think a lot about privacy, even if in different ways from what adults might expect.37 What we heard from teens includes fears about dramatic consequences, often perpetrated by unknown ‘bad actors’ (e.g., hackers, stalkers). We also heard a vivid sense that damage was hard or impossible to control, as the following comments show.
Strangers on the internet could find out who exactly I am, where I live, or even my SSN. This worries me because I could be at risk of having my identity stolen, being kidnapped, constantly watched, or even murdered. (twelve-year-old)
People can steal your identity and money which is really hard to clear up. (thirteen-year-old)
I’ve seen stories about hackers who blackmail people when they didn’t do anything wrong. (fifteen-year-old)
If someone hated me they could find my personal information and spread it around. (fourteen-year-old)
I don’t trust those people in the Government. (fifteen-year-old)
Google and Facebook are Ad based services that inherently don’t give a fuck about your privacy and just try and sell you stuff through targeted advertising. (seventeen-year-old)
These quotes point to a range of privacy concerns on teens’ radars. They also beg the question of what teens feel they can do to manage them. We take up this question in earnest in our concluding chapter on the “agency argument.”
Rewind to 2012. I (Carrie) was analyzing transcripts from interviews with teens and young adults for my book in progress, Disconnected (published in 2014). I was trying to understand: How do youth think about the reality that their actions could, at any moment, be made public to an unanticipated audience and persist online forever after?
I noticed that there were three distinct ways young people viewed online privacy issues. These mindsets weren’t fixed or even developmental, so far as the data could reveal; rather, they seemed to shift based on different contexts and considerations.
The first way of thinking was captured by Jess, a young adult, who said, “There isn’t much privacy on Facebook, but it kind of is in your own hands.” The mindset that privacy is in your hands parrots the top messages that adults and Internet safety programs typically promote: youth must take responsibility for protecting their own privacy by creating strong passwords, managing privacy settings, and generally avoiding reckless sharing.
A second mindset that privacy is social reflected the realities of co-construction. This mindset holds that privacy is forged with one’s social ties through compacts. This is akin to what we heard most recently from teens who vet photos with friends before posting and tagging, or who agree to avoid forwarding content shared in a semi-private chat. Such agreements were sometimes explicit but more often tacit.
Another mindset also took on board the harsh reality that individual strategies only take you so far in a networked world. But, in this third point of view, privacy is forsaken: once content is posted online, it’s seen as out there and up for grabs. This “eyes wide open” perspective was arguably adaptive. Yet, it also at times contributed to an “anything goes” mentality. If privacy infractions are expected, why not post, tag, and forward with abandon?
From today’s teens, we hear that privacy is forsaken in further ways. When someone engages in reprehensible speech or behavior—even in a private chat—their privacy rights can be forfeited (canceled) in service of a larger public good. Teens are ambivalent and often polarized about this reality. Accountability matters and yet some wonder: are we also forsaking learning, growth, and forgiveness?
The view that privacy is forsaken also connects to a more global concern that risks abound, whatever you do. Teens recognize that even if they do not post or leak information themselves, others may nonetheless share or access it. In their words:
Even though I am very careful about it, it could still get out. (eleven-year-old)
As a programmer myself, I know how easy it can be to obtain people’s passwords, or mess with a Wi-Fi network. (thirteen-year-old)
It’s terrible to know that anyone can get your information and ever year it gets easier for people to take it. (fourteen-year-old)
Safety, reputation, security—there’s a sense among teens that these are all in jeopardy in today’s digital world. Digital affordances in the hands of peers or strangers add to this vulnerability. Documentation of the good and the bad feels unavoidable. Teens vary in how actively they try to manage these risks, and in how alert they are to longer-term potentialities. But even those who undertake intentional efforts can feel rightly out of control. Researchers have called this “networked defeatism”: “personal privacy management in itself seems pointless, [and] constructs a false sense of security.”38
Adults often assume that teens can control their digital footprints, if only they try harder or act more responsibly. Teens want adults to recognize that they cannot be solely, perfectly in control of their privacy or their digital footprints (“Sometimes we don’t have control over social media”). Friends or peers can post pictures they do not want online and it’s complicated, socially, to ask them to take them down. Plus (as adults are often quick to remind teens) once a picture has been shared, it’s already out there in some form. This can add to a sense of stress as teens grapple with the reality that “there’s a lot of pictures [posted by friends/peers] that I just would never post. And that’s like out of my control, obviously.”
They also shared more pointed messages for adults—specifically about our roles in creating teens’ footprints: “Adults really need to start asking us permission before posting photos of us. Even if they think you look fine, it might be super embarrassing for us.”
When adults double down on messages like “one post can ruin your future” it can amp up anxiety about past posts that are already out there, leading teens to wonder whether it’s already too late. Former friends hold cards that may jeopardize their prospects in the near term or further down the line. Cancel culture can add another layer of anxiety, even as some teens acknowledge commendable and civic purposes of high-profile cancellations. The threat of cancellation feels real for teens who see it spill over from social media influencers into teens’ everyday lives.
It is important, teens acknowledge, to be vigilant about things like “good passwords.” And they do crave actionable information about risks that may not be on their radars, like unintentional consequences of location-sharing features (e.g., geotags and Snap maps). But personal vigilance is insufficient protection for the array of risks that networked life presents. Teens navigate proximal and more distant threats to their safety, reputations, and futures. They face risks that secure passwords, privacy settings, and even “thinking before posting” can’t reliably eliminate. For all the reasons we unpacked in this chapter—developmental, digital, social—teens’ alertness does not readily convert to control.
We need to teach teens about risks related to digital footprints. But we should also expect and anticipate missteps. We need to talk about careful posting. But we should also talk about apologies, accountability, and learning from mistakes. Crucially, all stakeholders need to take on board the precarious position we’ve put adolescents in by providing them with tools that document their lives and development.
This is an apt lead-in to our concluding chapter, where we tackle a looming question: What will it take to meaningfully support youth in this landscape?