After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, thousands of people posted videos of themselves crying, yelling, even making threats. The emotions were natural, and posting them carried consequences most of those people didn’t consider until it was too late.
I’ve got no quarrel with anybody who cried after an election. Grief and anger are human, and I’d worry about a person who felt nothing about things that matter to them. The camera is the danger. Somebody at their lowest hands a permanent record of that moment to millions of strangers who don’t know them and don’t care, and the person who pays for it years later is the one who hit post.
Is what you post online permanent?
Once something is on the internet, it’s effectively permanent protecting your digital life. Even if you delete a post, someone may have saved a screenshot or downloaded a video. Years from now, this content can resurface and affect your personal and professional life in ways you never anticipated.
That’s the part that scares me for people. A screenshot outlives the feeling that produced it, and it’ll still be sitting on somebody’s hard drive long after you’ve grown into a different person.Share on X
According to a CareerBuilder study, 70% of employers screen applicants’ social media profiles before hiring. A video where you’re crying or yelling could be taken out of context by a potential employer. What felt cathartic in the moment reads as volatility on a screen.
Jon Ronson explores this phenomenon in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Small actions online lead to major, often uncontrollable consequences. People who posted impulsive reactions to news events have lost jobs, relationships, and reputations over content they forgot they’d created.
Stories like these make me sad more than anything else. The people in them are ordinary. They posted one impulsive thing, and a crowd of strangers decided that single moment was the whole person. I think that’s cruel, and I don’t expect the crowd to get kinder, so the only protection you control is what you give it to work with.
Find “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” here.
Can You Control How Posts Are Interpreted?
When you share emotional content online, you can’t control how others interpret it. An emotional reaction to an election result might feel honest to you and look irrational to someone who doesn’t share your views. This leads to backlash, and the internet’s scale makes that backlash brutal.
Psychologist John Suler calls this the “online disinhibition effect”: people feel freer to express extreme views online than they’d in person. This effect cuts both ways. It influences what you share and how others respond to it.
When emotions run high, posts become targets for criticism, ridicule, and harassment. According to the Pew Research Center, 73% of adults have witnessed online harassment. Sharing raw emotional responses makes you more vulnerable to this behavior, because trolls see personal vulnerability as an invitation.
But the damage isn’t limited to strangers. Publicly sharing strong reactions to political events strains relationships with friends and family. Psychologist Dr. Guy Winch points out that people tend to forget that words have consequences and that public declarations can damage relationships. What feels like an honest expression of emotion to you could alienate people you care about.
This is the cost that worries me most, because it falls on people you’ll still need at the next family dinner. A stranger’s insult fades in a week. A cousin who watched you scream into your phone about something she believes may never mention it, and she may never quite look at you the same way again.
Safety and Control
Putting personal reactions and life details online can jeopardize your safety. When people know your beliefs, location, and personal struggles, it makes you vulnerable to harassment, doxxing, and other forms of targeting.
Kevin Mitnick explains in The Art of Invisibility how easy it’s for personal information to be misused. “Privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect.” Caution is less about secrecy and more about safeguarding yourself.
Mitnick’s line is the smartest thing anyone has said on this subject, and I wish more people kept it taped to their monitor. Privacy has nothing to do with guilt. The folks who insist they’ve got nothing to hide are usually the easiest ones to find, with their home address and vacation dates sitting in public posts for anyone patient enough to look.
Beyond safety, you lose control over your story. Others can screenshot, edit, or share your posts out of context, spreading a version of your narrative that you didn’t intend. Daniel Solove writes in The Future of Reputation, “The Internet is a place where people can reveal their darkest secrets and fears, yet it’s also a place where these secrets can follow them forever.”
Find “The Art of Invisibility” here.
Find “The Future of Reputation” here.
What Is the Social Media Validation Trap?
Social media can become a source of validation for emotional experiences. When people post personal reactions and receive likes, comments, and shares, it creates a cycle where they feel encouraged to continue sharing emotional moments online. According to a study in Computers in Human Behavior, excessive social media use negatively impacts mental health, creating a need for approval that’s hard to break. Instead of helping you work through emotions, sharing online creates a temporary fix that demands repetition.
Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: the platforms are designed to manipulate your emotions. The impulse to share fades with time. The post doesn’t. Lanier’s right about the design, and the design is vile. The platforms pay engineers to make you feel the itch to post, then drip out just enough likes that you’ll do it again tomorrow. You’re the product they’re tuning, and the people tuning you won’t be anywhere around when a five-year-old post costs you an interview.
Find “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” here.
Think Before You Post
Before hitting “post,” ask yourself if you’d feel comfortable with this content resurfacing five years from now. If the answer is no, keep the moment private. Share with a close friend. Write in a journal. Talk to people in person, where conversation provides more meaningful support than online reactions ever will.
Expressing yourself doesn’t always require an audience. Often, the most meaningful connections happen offline. And when you do want to share your story publicly, doing it with intention, through a book, a carefully written essay, or a considered public statement, gives you control over the narrative that an impulsive post never will.
Keep the raw stuff for the people who love you, in person or on paper, and save the public for words you’ve had time to stand behind. The internet shows no mercy for a bad night, and I don’t want to see anyone lose a career over ten angry seconds in front of a phone.
For guidance on telling your story with intention, contact us here.
