Abstract
I didn’t keep a teenage diary. Something held me back – probably a feeling deep down that my adolescent thoughts were at best dull and at worst plain stupid.
Is it fair to put a person’s entire social and personal life under scrutiny?
I was also conscious that my 30-something self would probably cringe at the mere thought of the existence of tortured writings from half-a-lifetime ago, never mind actually reading them.
I’m not sure teenagers today have that option. In fact, not only are they expected to keep a record of the minutiae of their lives, they are expected to do so in public – on Facebook and elsewhere.
You can say ‘no one has to be on Facebook or Twitter’, but I’m not sure that’s true. As New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny has pointed out, conformity has an enormous pull. This is particularly true for teens, who even in rebellion often feel a desperate need to be in with the in crowd. I would go further and say, for many people, the concept of ‘the web’, as opposed to the real world, is increasingly redundant. People do not think: ‘I am putting this piece of information on a publishing platform.’ They think: ‘I am saying this.’
Which brings me to the case of Paris Brown.
Seventeen-year-old Paris was part of a UK scheme to get young people to engage positively with their local police forces. Ann Barnes, police commissioner for Kent county, appointed Brown as the UK’s first youth police and crime commissioner, complete with a £15,000 (US$23,338) salary.
Almost before anyone had time to tweet their congratulations, Brown’s social media profiles were trawled by the popular press.
And there reporters found a tale of woe. To the Mail on Sunday’s horror, Brown had used rude language on Twitter, some say even racist. She had also made reference to drugs and alcohol.
Commissioner Barnes was initially sympathetic. She wrote on her blog: ‘I absolutely do not condone the content and language of Paris’s tweets. I suspect that many young people go through a phase during which they make silly, often offensive comments and show off on Facebook and Twitter. I think that if everyone’s future was determined by what they wrote on social networking sites between the ages of 14 and 16 we’d live in a very odd world.’
But the story wouldn’t go away. The police even got involved, investigating the tweets before announcing:
We have spoken to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] about our findings, and given them our view that this case does not pass the evidential threshold for prosecution; we will make no recommendations to them for charges and will take no further police action having discharged our duty to investigate. Whilst some of the language used is offensive, particularly the comments which derogatorily refer to particular social groups, we do not believe that in the context they are grossly offensive on a reasonable objective assessment considering intent.
Lucky Paris.
Of course, her position became untenable, and poor young Paris resigned. Kent police’s experiment in reaching out to young people was undermined by the fatal flaw that they had reached out to a fairly normal young person, who smoked and drank when she shouldn’t and said stupid things on the web.
After this debacle, many asked why, seemingly, no one at the police commissioner’s office had thought to check Ms Brown’s various social media pages for dodginess before offering her the job.
Obvious question, and normally, yes, one would have a look at what a Google search revealed about a job applicant, whether as a formality or out of curiosity.
But is this the right thing to do? Is it fair to put what, increasingly, is a person’s entire social and personal life under scrutiny in this way? Particularly young people?
When we reach a certain age, we can laugh off youthful indiscretions, even to the point where the past two presidents of the United States have been able to admit to alcohol and drug abuse in their youth. But what if, from high school onwards, people had been able to examine what teen stoner Barack Obama got up to in his spare time? Would his career trajectory have been quite so impressive? Or would he have been stymied at every turn because tagged photos of him and his Choom Gang buddies turned up in searches?
Some suggest children should be taught what kind of thing they should and shouldn’t say on the web. This has its merits, but is also a little sad in its suggestion that we teach people to be more guarded, and more secretive, and to restrict their use of what remains a miraculous communication tool.
Perhaps, then, some kind of statute of limitation? Maybe nothing anyone says on the web before the age of, say, 21, should be allowed to be used against them? This was suggested by Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, which, in guidelines issued in December 2012, recommended that ‘the age and maturity of suspects should be given significant weight, particularly if they are under the age of 18,’ in investigations into social media ‘crimes’. This did not stop the police questioning Paris Brown, by the way.
There is the other extreme option put forward by Google’s Eric Schmidt, who in 2010 told the Wall Street Journal that young people should be entitled to change their names on reaching adulthood in order to write off their online past.
Or perhaps we could all be a little less judgmental about youth in the first place. Nah, won’t happen.