A few months ago, a photo surfaced of Elon Musk wearing an eccentric leather outfit for a party. The photo was posted on Reddit, with the caption “It’s been 9 years since Elon Musk had this photo permanently removed from the internet forever”[1]. When looking for the source, you find that the tweet is actually deleted. However, as we all know, once you post something on the internet, you will never be able to delete it completely.
At first something like this seems innocent, until you realize that Elon Musk’s worst years were probably way before the existence of social media. He even posted the photo himself in 2012[2]. Musk is also in a privileged situation; he gets away with things that other people could easily get cancelled for: a dozen of illegal tweets, blocking union organizing, calling a rescue worker a pedophile, securities fraud and spreading COVID-19 disinformation[3].
In a few years, there will be a whole generation of managers, directors and officials with embarrassing and offensive Snapchats, Instagram photos and tweets. This will be a huge problem. Especially with cancel culture, our future leaders will constantly need to worry, not only about their social media presence in the present, but also about their social media history resurfacing. At the same time, a lot of businesses are already aware of the potential power a good social media branding has. There are even special consultancy agencies training senior management to ‘establish thought leadership’ and ‘articulate company vision’ on social media [4]. After all, the senior management members are the most prominent and recognizable employees of a company.
The New York Times interviewed [5] teenagers and discussed a few interesting aspects of cancel culture. First of all, cancel culture is unpredictable: Chris Brown is still hugely popular after being accused of abusing multiple women[6], but on the other hand false allegations play a huge part. Besides, the rise of Artificial Intelligence gives people the power to create extremely realistic fake videos. How do we prove we did not say something, while we there is a video of it? This technology is already considered dangerous; imagine what will be possible in ten years.
One teenager highlights the core problem that relates to our future leaders very well: “You can do something stupid when you’re fifteen, say one thing and ten years later that shapes how people perceive you” [5] . Almost everyone can think of a post or video they rather not see being spread around. Also, your social media presence goes far beyond just your accounts, which makes it impossible to control your presence and to some extent your reputation. Social media has the strength to throw not just individuals but entire organizations off balance. The question we need to ask ourselves is ‘how do we control cancel culture, so that in ten years we will not need a new prime minister every few months?’
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TIHI/comments/onemxt/thanks_i_hate_elon/
[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/214636339474345984?s=20
[3] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/elon-musk-had-many-scandals-200656981.html
[4] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/social-media-strategies-for-the-c-suite-and-senior-management-that-actually/565823/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/style/cancel-culture.html
[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/chris-brown-told-world-who-he-was-rihanna-we-didn-ncna1272430
