Social media sees sparkle fade as Meghan Markle quits for good

Royal-to-be Meghan Markle is the latest celeb to quit social media. Should we follow suit, asks Helen O’Callaghan.

No sooner was she engaged to Prince Harry than Meghan Markle called time on her social media accounts.

Kensington Palace told BBC she’d deactivated her Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook because she hadn’t used the accounts in some time.

The royal-to-be is just one in a string of celebrities who’ve quit social media — for good or for extended periods.

Lindsey Lohan deleted all her Instagram and Twitter posts early last year — her mother reported she’d gone on a social media break. Keira Knightly deleted her Twitter account, saying she hadn’t enjoyed the site. Ed Sheeran took a break from his “phone, emails, and all social media” for over a year, while Rihanna and Justin Bieber have taken six-month breaks from Instagram.

“In a celebrity world, Meghan Markle most likely wanted to be proactive before her profile gets bigger. She’s taking herself out of the narrative,” says Alma Brosnan, social media manager at Fuzion Communications.

The celebrity world isn’t short of cautionary tales about old tweets and posts coming back to haunt, even years later. Just hours after he was appointed manager of the England women’s team last month, former Manchester United player Phil Neville deleted his Twitter account after sexist old tweets resurfaced. Late last year, YouTube star Jack Maynard left the I’m A Celebrity jungle because of an outcry about past derogatory comments made on social media. Maynard later apologised via a YouTube video, saying he’d “tweeted some bad things, some horrible things, some pretty disgusting things that I’m just ashamed of”.

Author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed Jon Ronson has travelled the world, meeting the subjects of high-profile shamings — people who maybe made a bad joke on social media and are demonised or sometimes fired from their job when their misstep is found out. For Ronson, it’s an escalating war on human flaws.

“With social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high dramas. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain… like [we’re] soldiers in a war on other people’s flaws and there [has] suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.”

In his book, Ronson asks how big a transgression really justifies someone losing their job. What about the people who become global targets for doing nothing more than making a bad joke on Twitter? Do they deserve to have their lives ruined?

It’s enough to strike fear into the heart of anyone who, in a less enlightened, less evolved younger version of themselves, posted messages that, viewed a certain way, could be a bit questionable, a bit oops. So should we start deleting our online history — or at least those aspects that might just land us in it?

Once it’s out there, it’s out there, Brosnan points out — if a message was racist or sexist 10 years ago, it’s still so today.

She recommends asking yourself: How comfortable are you with the images, comments and photos you’ve posted?

“Before this interview, I looked at my own tweets from 2008, 2009,” she says. “They were all based around TV programmes, cookery shows. None of it was anything I was uncomfortable about. I know I can stand by those posts. If you can stand by your posts and retweets, fine. If not, think about removing them.”

But are we allowed any human imperfections anymore? Does a tweet or a post ever become irrelevant? Or is the world — with social media at its centre — gone very short on understanding and compassion?

UCD lecturer, solicitor with FP Logue, and Digital Rights Ireland chair TJ McIntyre says there’s a fundamental unfairness about judging people based on snippets cherry-picked from years of social media.

“The risk is that something’s going to be used selectively. In the context of the abortion referendum, for example, you could expect people to be singled out for attack with tweets from years ago taken out of context to smear their current position.”

There’s a risk, he says, of much greater self-censorship as people shut down any potentially risky or controversial comments. “There’s a sense in which our internet history limits our freedom, by forcing us to do something with one eye to the future, as to how it might be judged by a prospective future employer or an insurance company.”

He points to the US, where candidates have been denied jobs based on searches of their internet history — using software, employers can put in a name and see ‘risk/value’ for them.

“It’s quite worrying and becoming more visible. You have situations, particularly in the US, where employers demand passwords to social media accounts so they can look through them,” says McIntyre.

While European privacy laws are stricter, he says the US situation is a “warning as to what we might see here” if we don’t maintain stricter laws.

Even if we delete elements of our online presence, there’s a good chance there’ll be a digital trace, says McIntyre. “There are some sites that maintain an archive of tweets, even deleted tweets, like Politwoops. It monitors politicians’ Twitter accounts. When it detects a politician deleting something, it saves it, so what’s just been said can be seen.”

In this sticky world of social media, it seems Jack Maynard’s advice is worth following: “Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t say to your mum.”