Taking Social Media to the Cleaners

By Charles Lindquist

You have a job interview, but two years ago you tweeted something that in hindsight might be regrettable. Should you worry? Employers never check that stuff, right? Wrong. According to Business News Daily, "70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, and about 43 percent of employers use social media to check on current employees."* If employers check social media for both hiring and monitoring employees, what are you supposed to do about posts before you knew better? That doesn't seem fair.

There is a soon-to-be-released app that can solve this problem. Safe Social, the app from developers Social Metrics, actually cleans your social media history. Safe Social scours all of your social media accounts, past and present, searching for toxic posts. Safe Social finds every toxic post (words, symbols, pictures, even likes, tags and forwards of other posts) and deletes them, forever. Your online social history is now squeaky clean, leaving you worry-free.

Safe Social uses algorithms to identify posts relating to politics, graphic images, profanities, and harmful or derogatory language, or any posts that may be perceived as offensive. These standards are also applied to other posts you've liked, or questionable likes you might have received. Who decides what is toxic? You do. The standards, or parameters, of toxicity, are negotiable, the app can search on its own, or you decide how lenient or stringent the search will be. You can also run searches with different toxicity criteria. Once a search is complete, the app shows you its discoveries and gives you the power to let them remain posted or to delete them.

Too good to be true? You haven't heard the best part. Safe Social is a dual-purpose app. Not only does it scrub toxicity from your history, but it also prevents you from posting anything toxic in real-time. Every time you go to post, Safe Social captures and scans your post. If it's clean, your content will be posted instantaneously without anyone, including the platform on which you're posting, knowing Safe Social has verified your message. If your post is deemed toxic, the app returns it to you with the objectionable content highlighted, giving you the option to correct, delete, or allow the post. 

The app is available for organizations as well. If you're part of an organization using the Safe Social app, all posts are captured and the organization would have the final decision to release objectionable content, protecting their brand and employees from both malicious and inadvertently offensive posts.

Of course, if you’ve never made any regrettable posts or likes, then this app may not be for you. If you are anything like the rest of us, you will need Safe Social, or you’d better think twice before your next post.

Charles Lindquist is a journalism student at University of Oregon, in Eugene. 

* https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2377-social-media-hiring.html