Social media is one of the most dominating forces in the world today. Never before has news and messages get communicated from person to person so easily. Celebrities and companies finally have an easy way to talk to fans and customers, and people can get their news straight from their phone rather than on TV or in the newspaper. It’s amazing how far we have gone from the last decade. But social media also has a lot of downfalls that come along with it. The hacking of personal information and the issue of cyberbullying are serious concerns introduced with the rise of social media. But another unforeseen issue is people (usually immature teenagers) posting dumb tweets and posts about themselves or someone else online that ruins their image. I’m sure all teenagers are well aware that they can harm themselves if they post dumb things online by now. They are many examples of this before.

I remember an employee getting fired because she tweeted that she won’t get AIDS travelling to Africa because she’s white. Or that one student who lost her chance to go to her dream college because she posted herself doing dumb things at a party according to an article titled “They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets” by Natasha Singer from the New York Times. It’s so prevalent that educational institutions are advocating to hide these harmful posts. Sometimes, these warnings are easily ignored.

Teenagers wants attention, and these are the years where they are the most free (without any responsibilities of an adult or the careful attention from their parents) to do almost anything they want. As they develop the maturity from child to adult, they are prone to selfishness and peer pressure to post dumb things online.

I really do think that students and employees should be punished if they are caught, but I believed that they should be told so if they do. They expect any job/college rejection or layoff to be because they are inadequate or from better competition, NOT because something of what they post online. It’s kind of unfair to them to be rejected if they are more talented or more experienced.

There was recently news of an Apple engineer getting fired because he let his teenage daughter posted a video about the iPhone X on YouTube before release date. The daughter took down the video and later posted a video to inform the audience that her father was fired, but she inferred that she was not to blame since he taken full responsibility. Her attitude infuriated me because she disregarded rules and was such a privileged teenager. Things like this show that people who do dumb things like this should be punished and taken into account any job or college application.

It’s NOT an invasion of privacy for colleges to nose around because anything you post could potentially be online forever. I never post anything about me online because I was the shy type, so I never had any problems. But I do think that while colleges aren’t supposed to be nosing through students’ personal social medias, they can do so because we need professionals to be mature in the workplace. Students can’t thrive without growing up first and be respectful to themselves and the people around them.