Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is the first millennial, born between 1981 and 1996, to run in a presidential ticket. Last week, he experienced a millennial’s worst nightmare: Somebody found his public Venmo, old blog and tagged Facebook photos.
The Venmo account showed connections to tech executives, fellow Yale graduates and Amalia Halikias, a director at the conservative think tank that laid out the controversial political plan Project 2025, Wired reported. Then, people dug up Vance’s old blog.
“I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will,” Vance wrote after what he described as an “incredibly emotional” day. Meanwhile, one tagged photo, linked to a Facebook account that appears to belong to Vance, shows a man the poster claims is Vance “passed out in a corner.” One reply from an account named “JD Vance” with 13,000 followers and friends including Vance’s dog, Casper, said that “this might be my first official blackout.” People online were quick to pile on, and this was after a week of accounts falsely claiming that Vance described an odd sex act in his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Most of us won’t run for office, but Vance’s old posts are a reminder that none of us is safe from our own digital footprints. A hiring manager or bitter enemy could dig up something embarrassing from the hundreds of past posts sitting on your social media profiles, or a new crush could browse those unflattering tagged photos from your friend’s birthday party. Millennials in particular are dealing with the detritus of growing up online — many got social media profiles and internet-connected phones before anyone had a clear idea what the internet would bring.
Tech companies like holding onto your data — now they’re even using your posts to train AI — but that doesn’t mean you have to follow suit. Here’s what you can do today to make sure your digital footprint doesn’t humiliate you decades from now.
Delete as you go
We often talk online the same way we talk in person: off the cuff, thinking as we go. But the things we say online live can live forever. That post that starts with “let me just say” or “sorry if this is rude but” could still be sitting in a searchable database in 15 years. Consider paring down what you post.
Either that or start deleting as you go. With the tool TweetDelete you can delete your X posts en masse — you can even search for keywords such as profanities and delete only those. If you’re not using your Facebook account any more, deactivate or delete it. Just like you get onto new platforms when they interest you, it’s fine to purge the old ones as you go.
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