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| Bad tweets even from years ago can be damaging to you if you're in the public eye like Dillinger Photo Credit: WWE.com |
"I am embarrassed by the jokes I liked years ago."
"Those tweets were in-jokes with a friend; I didn't think they'd offend anyone."
In the age of Twitter, where your takes are embedded in bandwidth for as long as the servers stay intact, it's easier to find out who in the past has had problematic takes to put it lightly. Something you said to a friend in a car ride can be obscured forever, but once you @ that person on Twitter with a similar joke, someone can term search using your handle. The Twitter search squad has dripped egg on a few baseball players, and hell, those who acted in bad faith from the right got James Gunn fired from Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. Of course, not all of those Twitter mobs act in bad faith. For example, Sean Newcomb and Josh Hader had racist, homophobic, and otherwise bigoted tweets resurface from the near past, and well, they're still where they are. Baseball is slow to punish people on social issues though. Domestic violence is treated as a joke compared to the violation of taking performance enhancing drugs, but baseball's shitty priorities aren't the point.
Of course, the phenomenon isn't new in wrestling. Jessicka Havok, for example, had tweets where she used, to put it lightly, colorful language surface during her WWE tryout. While it's unclear whether those tweets cost her a job with the company, the fact that they came out at the time of her tryout couldn't have helped matters. Will similar repercussions happen to Cedric Alexander and Tye Dillinger though? Yesterday, people retweeted brusque tweets about, ahem, consent from 2011 and 2012, which were far more grotesque than anything Havok posted and was rightfully lambasted for. They both issues apologies today, which is a small step towards reconciliation.
It's easy to say that people should always be expected to be decent, which in a perfect world is a reasonable take. The world is far from perfect. Impressionable children grow up in environments where racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic language is considered okay, and it's hard to break them of it. Something is to be said about people who grew up with pre-woke periods and then learned and grew and showed they deserved forgiveness. It's not to say that people who post rape jokes or go hard-r on the N-word who make non-apologies or barely apologize should be given second chances with the same ease that Oprah Winfrey gives her audience new cars. But I mean, everyone has a pre-woke period unless they were raised by the shining paragons of leftist thought in an ivory tower divorced from anything that might have colored their prejudice. As far as I know, that person doesn't exist.
That being said, if you want people to believe you're not that kind of person nowadays, aside from making a real and heartfelt apology that addresses the people you may be hurting and acknowledging that you may not deserve forgiveness right away if at all, the first thing you want to do is start deleting tweets. If the n-word or gay jokes or really gruesome claims like "it's not rape if she's asleep!" aren't what you stand for, the best thing to do is make sure no one can associate those things with you. Would deleting those tweets be considered hiding a problem though? One could make that argument, but it feels like the kind of argument you'd make if you weren't the kind of person who was into accord or reconciliation and instead got off on seeing people squirm. That kind of attitude isn't conducive to anything, and if you delete those tweets before anyone sees them, which I have to stress should come with NEVER MAKING THOSE KINDS OF JOKES AGAIN, then you can at least show that even if you did make them, you don't want them to be seen by anyone. Therefore, those words can't trigger someone or make them feel uncomfortable in the first place, and thus things are better.
Deleting tweets is easy. Even if you don't want to do it manually because it might take too long, hell, you can use a program like Tweet Delete. Would you lose some great tweets? Well, if you're a wrestler, I'm guessing most of your tweets are Bible verses, selfies, ads for tummy tea, or some kind of bullshit motivational shit about grinding or hustle or whatever. If you do have a tweet you think is of value, you could always save it. But is that one tweet worth people seeing a tweet you made in jest that's actually really hurtful to a large group of people? The answer is no.
Of course, you don't have to be a wrestler to do this. Everyone who thinks they're trying to do good, which I hope is the entire audience inclusive of TWB, should probably give their accounts a scrub. Again, even the best Twitter accounts probably have thousands of tweets of banter or extremely normie content that wouldn't be worth keeping around if they thought they used a slur or whatever several years ago. Few people run accounts like @dril who are event tweeters. Save your best content, delete the rest if you think you may have been guilty of this kind of thing in the past.
The best way to show that you're not the kind of person who makes terrible jokes that hurt people is to make sure you don't make those kinds of jokes. If that means deleting visible instances of when you did make those jokes on a public platform, well, get to scrubbing. The image you project now includes everything that is attached to you that leaves an imprint. If you delete those tweets before they get a light shined upon them, you're not hiding a sordid past. As long as it comes with a true change in heart, it's making sure no one gets hurt by your past. That's admirable, and it means a lot more than some bullshit platitude that people spew when they get caught with these kinds of tweets still laying around.
