by Adedayo Ademuwagun

A British MP named Emily Thornberry was made to resign recently after she tweeted a photo of a citizen’s home that had England flags hanging down the window and a van parked in front. The tweet offended many people on social media, and it caused an uproar in the nation.

To understand why the issue was such a big deal in the UK, someone outside the UK would need some tutorial on British politics and society. But to cut right to the chase, the gist of the story is that the rich politician’s tweet offended so many people because it portrayed her as being insensitive and condescending towards ordinary people.

All over the world, people lose their job, ruin their relationship with others, dent their career and lose the respect that others have for them all because of something they posted online without properly considering how this might affect them or others.

However, it’s not politicians and celebrities alone who screw things up with inappropriate posts. Ordinary people do it every day too on Facebook and Twitter, forcing their friends and followers to delete or block them. Sometimes the dislike continues permanently.

Jennifer says, “I once had this so-called activist friend on Facebook who used to totally irritate me with his insulting posts concerning the president. I warned him that if he continued I’d have to un-friend him, but he became even worse and I had to delete him. I never contact him any more. I don’t know why people have to post insults on Facebook in the name of activism. It’s senseless to me.”

“This month,” says Biodun, “one South African blogger I’m following on Twitter began to vent about the South Africans who died in a recent church building crash in Lagos. Then she said something about why South Africans would fly thousands of miles to Nigeria for help, ‘as if Nigerians are not suffering already’. It was really appalling, and I unfollowed her at once.”

Social media thrives on impulsive posting. That’s why most of the top networks urge users to “say something” or just put down “what’s on your mind”, because the more people keep talking on those networks, the more successful the networks can become. The implication for users is that often they say things without enough thought about propriety, civility and that kind of thing. They just want to get out their thoughts or put out those pictures.

“Sometimes you see people post a comment or photo online and then after thinking about it, they delete the post,” says Biodun. “It’s like wearing your socks before your shoes. But why don’t we just do the first thing first and think before posting?”

The thing is, deleting a tweet or a status doesn’t even mean it’s actually no more online. The internet has a long memory, so even when someone posts something online, then repents and deletes it, anyone can pull it out later on somewhere on the internet. This is why people are advised to consider carefully the things they say or put online, no matter how inconsequential it may seem and no matter how inconsequential they may think they themselves are.

In the first season of the American thriller House of Cards, Michael Kern has been nominated to be the United States’ next Secretary of State. But opponents soon discover that an editorial board he headed while in college wrote something objectionably critical about a key foreign nation. So they latched in on that and covertly promoted the idea that those words were in fact written by his own hands. It wasn’t true anyway, but the point is, he forfeited the nomination.

It just illustrates how something someone said can affect them badly even decades later, and the internet has even made that type of thing so easier than ever.

Jennifer says, “I’m very careful about the things I put online. Some people think they have to tweet their every thought on politics, religion or their day at the office. I feel the same urge too sometimes, and at times I regret something I posted and later delete or edit it. But if we could be a little more considerate and thoughtful about the things we share online, it could save us a lot of bad things now or later. Besides, ten years from now some of us will probably just look at the photos and comments we’re sharing presently and we’ll just laugh at how silly we were. That’s how I feel about it.”

Kolapo Olapoju