FixablePlatforms & social life
Social media as a permanent record
Old posts, tags by other people, and photos that never really go away.
Understand it
Anything you’ve posted - and plenty others have posted about you - tends to outlive the moment: old accounts, cached pages, screenshots, and tags you didn’t choose. Employers, strangers and the platforms themselves can piece together a long history from it, and “delete” rarely means gone everywhere.
How to spot it
Search your own name and old usernames; look at what’s public on accounts you’ve forgotten.
Close the gap
- Set existing accounts to private, and review who can see old posts.
- Prune or archive old posts, and close accounts you no longer use.
- Turn off tagging without review, so others can’t add you freely.
- Assume anything posted could resurface - think before, not only after.
What to do about it
This is part of your plan at the High-risk level - Compartmentalise your identities. Work through it there and you’ll close this off along with everything else it covers.