The Josh Hader of NFL writers

[dirtybird]

That's what always stuns me about these instances. Eight years, presumably thousands of tweets in between, and probably not a current pattern of similar tweets, so how and why do people unearth these things?
Why would anyone even be looking for them? Do the posts pop up in your timeline as a reminder of something you did on that date, like Facebook occasionally does?
If someone was mad at them and wanted to drop the hammer, have they been sitting on these things for a decade? And if so, why now instead of at any point along the way?
Is there an army of folks whose job it is to comb Twitter for potentially offensive tweets from every semi-public person?
It boggles the mind.

Find someone you want to discredit. Use the search function mentioned above.

The giveaway is usually the offending words. The more esoteric, the harder someone had to look.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

I'm pretty dumb on Twitter, but search results suggest not ruin-my-life dumb. Hurrah.

That statement is not intended as a challenge, by the way.

 

[JimmyHoward33]

If you’re thinking about Twitter slurs enough to criticize someone else, you’d think it would pop into your mind to scrub your own account

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

Another way to approach it is to just not be an asshole, and you won't have that problem.

If you can't handle that, then that really is who you are.

 

[cjericho]

Another way to approach it is to just not be an asshole, and you won't have that problem.

If you can't handle that, then that really is who you are.

Lot of teenagers are assholes or act and sound like assholes. Not excusing what this girl tweeted, but as others said, if you start tweeting or posting stuff on social media while in high school you probably should go back and reread it when you start working full time.

 

[JimmyHoward33]

Or at least run the searches you have to assume busted the people you’re reading about / piling on. Its not a big leap to go from “wow someone caught this guy with old stuff” to “sheeeeet I still have the same account I had in high school/ college.”

If I was a player agent I’d be having my underlings run the searches on all my clients now-ish, really as soon as Hader broke even though I dont think he was first, I’m drawing a blank on other examples for now

 

[dirtybird]

I think back to when the woman in Charlotte got blown up with this around the Cam Newton thing. The words that got here were not the first I’d think of.

“*****” in a song lyric. I might get to that at a point, but it’s probably not in my first 12.

“Racist,” which I’d likely never think to back search for. I’m not sure if that was found by someone intentionally sleuthing or just looking for tweets calling her a racist.

At the time I marveled that tweets with those two words got her just becuase you’ve gotta dig pretty deep in the trove of offensive words to end up there.

 

[tapintoamerica]

If I were an agent today, I'd look for anything political on Twitter and get it stricken from the record. When the client is a more established player, free speech carries less peril. But in the NFL in particular, in which a relatively small portion of total contractual amount is truly guaranteed, most players are expendable. NFL teams don't need many reasons to jettison a 28-year-old running back. Twitter gives them another.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

If I were an agent today, I'd look for anything political on Twitter and get it stricken from the record. When the client is a more established player, free speech carries less peril. But in the NFL in particular, in which a relatively small portion of total contractual amount is truly guaranteed, most players are expendable. NFL teams don't need many reasons to jettison a 28-year-old running back. Twitter gives them another.

That's also true for 28-year-old journalists, teachers, lawyers, ditch diggers and aspiring Methodist preachers. Doesn't take an agent to go scrub scrub.

 

[Mwilliams685]

There's a site you can go to and upload your entire twitter archive to. When I decided to get into the industry, I deleted 5 years of tweets in about 15 minutes.

 

[Craig Sagers Tailor]

When everyone's Google search history is made public, we'll all be unemployable.

 

[Steak Snabler]

Someone on one of the podcasts I listen to made a good point a while back ...

You know how back in the 1980s and 1990s they started declaring "amnesty" for politicians who smoked pot when they were in college in the 1960s?

We might have to start doing that for social media history.

 

[TrooperBari]

Someone on one of the podcasts I listen to made a good point a while back ...

You know how back in the 1980s and 1990s they started declaring "amnesty" for politicians who smoked pot when they were in college in the 1960s?

We might have to start doing that for social media history.

That might be a big ask if the amnesty includes sexting. Passing up a chance for a good, Puritanical freakout over something sex-related would be out of character for this country.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

I see it as natural selection. If someone is too stupid and/or lazy to scrub bad stuff from their social media past when they arrive in the professional working world, they don't deserve to get/keep a decent job.

 

[Tweener]

I was one of three finalists for a job that I didn't get a few years ago, and decided out of curiosity to see if the person who was hired had some of these kinds of tweets from back in the day. The result? Let's just say the employer didn't check, or did and didn't care about the result.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

My wife is the HR director for a large nonprofit. With every single hire they make, she does a very basic social media search, looking at candidate's public profiles for anything amiss.

She said about 25 percent of the time, she has to DQ a candidate for very sought-after and well-paying jobs because they have been stupid online.

Typically, if they ask, she will tell them why, and the reply includes, "That's my personal page," "That's not legal, you can't do that" and "You're a ****ing *****."

It's the age old story - Give someone a legitimate reason not to hire you, and they will do that.

 

[georgealfano]

What would be more likely to disqualify a candidate for a writing position, a stupid Twitter post or a poorly-written story if both were from four years ago?

 

[Moderator1]

Three things with any job candidate: I Google the name, I check Twitter, I check Facebook.

Had an interesting candidate one time, at least on paper. A friend of our EE's sent it to the EE, who passed it on to me. I'd usually take a look and if I liked someone, would pass it on to my deputy to see what he thought. If he agreed with me, we'd move forward. With this candidate, I had to get something done so I asked him to take the first look.

It took him like five seconds on Google to find out this guy had been nailed in one of those "why don't you take a seat over there" stings. Explained the five-year gap.

You ain't hiding **** these days, so don't even try.

 

[YankeeFan]

Three things with any job candidate: I Google the name, I check Twitter, I check Facebook.

Had an interesting candidate one time, at least on paper. A friend of our EE's sent it to the EE, who passed it on to me. I'd usually take a look and if I liked someone, would pass it on to my deputy to see what he thought. If he agreed with me, we'd move forward. With this candidate, I had to get something done so I asked him to take the first look.

It took him like five seconds on Google to find out this guy had been nailed in one of those "why don't you take a seat over there" stings. Explained the five-year gap.

You ain't hiding **** these days, so don't even try.

Holy crap -- like he was actually on one of those NBC stings, or something similar?

 

[Moderator1]

Actually on it - did five years.