Graduation season is winding down and thousands of Millennials in Central Ohio are searching for jobs that are often hard to come by. Many of these kids have been taught over and over again by parents and teachers to watch what they post on social media, for an unwise status update or a wayward tweet can cost them prime job opportunities. One young man in Gahanna is learning that the hard way.
26-year-old Joseph Gergley is currently applying for the position of mayor of Gahanna. He did very well on the preliminary interview, winning last Tuesday’s primary election with 34 percent of the vote. But then, as employers have a tendency to do, people began examining Gergley’s social media history.
On Thursday, the Columbus Dispatch published some of Gergley’s old tweets, including such insights as, “Why are Sesame Street characters all of a sudden speaking ebonics? Did I miss something?”, “The hungover girls on college campuses who go to planned parenthood are really just getting their breasts examined. Thank God for Komen!” and “If I saw Kurt from Glee in real life I would bully and tell him ‘It gets worse…’ ”
Things are certainly getting worse for Gergley as many are now calling for him to withdraw from the race. It’s one thing when a potential employer rejects you in favor of another candidates, but quite another when they ask you to please quit applying for the position.
On Saturday, Gergley took another, more professional stab at this whole Internet thing, posting a ten-paragraph apology on his campaign’s Facebook page (Gergley’s Twitter account has, for obvious reasons, been deleted). Gergley did apologize… in the fourth paragraph. But of interest is what he had to say to his fellow job-seeking twenty-somethings out there about the mystical Twitter machine.
“Whether you have 50 followers or 5,000, your posts on social media can reach inadvertent audiences and have very unintended consequences for decades to come,” wrote Gergley. “Whether said in jest or not, some things just shouldn’t be said at all.”
And perhaps therein lies the top reason for why Gergley will probably not be employed with the City of Gahanna. He does not appear to understand that sexist, racist, homophobic tweets are not the problem; sexist, racist, homophobic thoughts are the problem.
Gergley promised in his apology that, “these social media posts don’t at all represent who I am,” a common refrain in the midst of a social media scandal that suggests the Internet is an alternate universe in which people are never themselves. More often than not, however, posts on social media work like smoke and fire; offensive tweets have a tendency to indicate offensive ideologies, and offensive ideologies have a tendency to indicate offensive actions.
That’s not to say that none of us are capable of growing out of the mindsets reflected by old social media posts. An individual’s sexism, racism or homophobia is often remedied simply by growing up and learning more about the world. But Joseph Gergley was cracking jokes on Twitter about Ferguson less than a year ago.
Joseph Gergley has not grown up.
Gergley also won’t be the only one to use this incident as a lesson for young job seekers. One can already hear the admonishments from Baby Boomers to Millennials; “For goodness sake, be careful what you post on the Internet!” But should that really be the lesson here? Shouldn’t we in fact be teaching young people the exact opposite lesson?
Instead of teaching kids to simply appear as decent people online, shouldn’t we teach them to actually be decent people?
So by all means, continue to be yourselves on the Internet, but make sure that yourself is a good person, because it’s never been easier to tell naughty from nice. If you are concerned about how your social media past will affect your job search, go ahead and look through your posts and get rid of the things that don’t represent who you’ve become. If what you’ve become is an adult who knows how to treat all people with respect, you’ll see your mistakes and clean them up. If you haven’t grown up, you won’t spot your mistakes, you may miss out on certain job opportunities and you most likely will not be the mayor of anything.
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