You can't deny that the advent of social media has brought about a MUCH bigger problem of people getting fired, judged, or their lives ruined by stupid mistakes, posts online of a single comment they made, etc. These things aren't _new_ occurrences. People have always made stupid remarks; people have always done stupid things. The difference now is that it's trivially easy for me to go find some idiotic thing you did as a teenage that you've outgrown, and point to it as a way to ruin your life if I want to. All it would cost me is a little money to Google or Facebook. Back in the day, an attempt to truly ruin someone's life like this would require _digging_. If the person deserves it to happen to them (which is almost never), then people will go through the effort. But for the casual assholes who think it funny to SWAT someone or to call up embarrassing photos because that person called them a bad word, this barrier to entry would prevent them from doing something about it.
I only heard about this anecdotally. Do you have any data on such a huge increase in firings etc.? That would be quite interesting.
Furthermore, context matters, but context is the first thing that gets lost online.
Something that was said or done in one context can be perfectly fine in that context while at the same time that thing can be completely unacceptable in another context.
We need not and we should not strive to keep a record of everything. It is important that we are able to forget.
The world at large is not capable of ensuring due process. Real lives of innocent people are ruined. People are driven to suicide. All because the public formed a narrative about someone based on incomplete or otherwise inaccurate information.
I wish for compassion and forgiveness.
One tweet taken out of context we’ve seen many examples of is enough to ignite an epic shitstorm. No. You’re just proposing further destruction of public discourse and civility.
If you think the real solution is to change the way the world thinks about, and judges, everyone else then you're being remarkably naive.
This isn't a response, it's an insult. Two well educated, equally experienced people can come two two seperate conclusions, without one being "naive". Try and argue always assuming that the person your taking to is equally intelligent as you.
Regardless, treating the symptom (Search engines displaying old news stories) of the problem (people judging others irrationally), without treating the problem itself will only cause equally bad, if not worse, issues to pop up elsewhere. The vast majority of times a state censors information, it ends up being harmful far past what was initially intended (the red scare/McCarthyism, DMCA, FOSTA, SOPA/PIPA, etc).
I don't agree that this will protect anyone, or that they need to be protected in the first place. This is just hiding the problem that someone would judge you for whatever the content is.
In my opinion the real solution here is to be more understanding to stupid things people have done in the past. Nobody is perfect, so why are you letting whatever that story on Google is affect your judgement of the person, assuming they learned from whatever it was.