![]() The glaring cultural blindspot here is that not many people are acknowledging the context. However, social media was not always this intelligent, especially when we weren’t. Social media has become a learning tool, a syllabus of key terms and debates from safe spaces to microaggressions. Back then, it was a space to spout nonsense to your mates, internet culture was not “woke” and unfortunately the more outrageous your posts, the more attention you got. We monitor our language now, and the language of others – almost to a fault some may say. We’re becoming increasingly politically active, more aware of the systems of oppression stacked against minorities. However, if you dare to look back at your old Myspace, Piczo, Bebo, Facebook pre-2011, Twitter before you had any followers – you might discover that you or those around you sound like ignorant little weirdos. If you’ve not come to these realisations already then you’re late. You don’t get a prize for pointing out that racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism and body shaming are definitely bad. Everyone should be allowed to grow up and distance themselves from their mistakes, once they have genuinely changed for the better. These ages and years are important – there are huge changes in how you act when you have youth and ignorance on your side. But, even sickly sweet Zoella once tweeted about “fat chavs” and mused that she found it funny “when gay men spit” in 2010. ![]() He was 25 – maybe he should have known better. Understandably, his past tweets undermined his recent work. ![]() There’s barely any demographic on this earth that was spared from his tirades, which is ironic, as he was appointed as the mag’s first BME editor and had been extremely vocal in championing diversity and differences. Gay Times followed suit sacking their new editor, Josh Rivers, before his first issue launch after Buzzfeed unearthed some generally horrific tweets from 2010-2015. Logan Sama was due to start a new grime slot on 1Xtra, but when sexist and racist tweets from 2011 surfaced BBC swiftly cancelled the show. This month, the ‘archive police’ have also taken more people out of I’m a Celeb than the exotic animals or humiliating tasks, since people discovered that 22-year-old Jack Maynard said awful words like “nigger” and “retard” in 2011. But this new and, quite frankly, lazy journalistic trope means that words written in a split second at the start of this decade, by the younger and more foolish versions of celebrities we now know, have come under heavy public scrutiny. Trial-by-timeline means public figures have lost the jobs and the respect they worked to gain. It’s almost as if people have only just discovered how to do a keyword search for a particular Twitter handle (I actually only learned this week). The Attitude article included three homophobic slurs from as far back as when the rapper was 17. Stormzy was the most recent target of a media trend targeting public figures and searching their old tweets for slurs and keywords.
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