30 years from now: How past social media presence will affect future elections

One of the most interesting facets of any election, in my opinion, is watching candidates grappling to destroy the moral and ethical platform of their opposition. In the 2016 election, we have seen this come to a head, with candidates and members of the media seemingly traveling back in time and speculating as to who their opposition really was 15, 20 or 30 years ago.

Retrieving evidence from a person’s political or social history has been a common platform for ad hominem attacks since early presidential and lower elections.

In the current election itself, speculation has been made about the past political stances of many of the candidates, namely Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The key word to note there is “speculation”, which can be a blessing to many of those under fire. Information on the affiliations of current candidates 30 years ago is hard to find and even harder to be sure of, especially if they were not involved in politics at the time.

However, we are starting to see a change in the way politicians, or people in general, “dig up dirt” on each other.

Social media has become a major tool for candidates to spread word of the change they are going to make in office, as well a medium for the public to dissect their personalities and intentions.

Each election cycle, platforms like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube become more heavily relied on for disseminating and gathering information. However, the advantage of candidates running now is that these platforms are still relatively new to them.

The youngest candidate of the 2016 election would have been 35-years-old when Twitter was invented; the oldest would have been 65-years-old. This means that by the time they had access to social media, the candidate in question would likely have already started his/her political career.

Looking forward 30 years, to when our generation is in our 40s and running for president, elections will look dramatically different.  

For this generation, our entire lives have been documented much more clearly than candidates we see now. It is likely that much of that documentation would not be appreciated if it reared its head in the future.

On a small scale, we see this happen with job and college application. We hear horror stories of students getting rejected because of the inappropriate or less than intelligent content of their accounts.

Imagine a future where the treasure trove of mistakes an adolescent made in his/her past was rediscovered and used against him/her in something as large scale as a presidential election.

In the presidential debates of 2040, they may be references to candidates’ questionable Tweets or retweets from when they were younger.

Coppell High School junior Aparna Bejoy is an aspiring politician and, unlike many others, is very sure of where she wants to be in the future. She is also not generally very active on social media.  

“As this generation will be part of the political scene 20 or 30 years from now, we have to be aware of what we post as children and teenagers because that might affect us later on,” Bejoy said. “Obviously, politicians can pull stuff up from your past and use that against you so if you’re thinking about going into a political career, you should probably think about that.”

Teens in general, though, are notorious for not giving thought to the future and not everyone plans to run for office when they are older.

We are so comfortable with our online platform that sometimes we do not realize how vulnerable it makes us. Everything we do is much more easily accessible to the world that what our predecessors have done.

In short, we may make the same mistakes now as a young Bernie Sanders or a young Ted Cruz did. The difference is, our mistakes are largely on record, ready for the taking.

When putting out personal information or political views, we must think about who could read it in the future. Obviously, no one knows where they will end up. Many students do not even know their major until junior year of high school.

General social media conduct is always advisable, since you never know when you will be in the hot seat, being asked about your sketchy Tweet from 2016.