Recently, there was a prominent film director fired from directing an episode in a very entertaining and profitable movie franchise. His firing was for tweets he made that were in very bad taste. And bad doesn’t begin to cover it, they were about topics that were universally despicable. What made this interesting was not that someone was fired for their recorded words, but rather their words from 10 years ago.

I don’t want to focus on this particular case, because we don’t know all of the details, and we probably never will. The question I want to ask is: depending on your age, right now, do you want your words from 10 or more years ago held against you by your employer? by the community? Everyone reading this blog (or sitting next to a person reading this blog), has done something that they would not want everyone they know as an adult, to see. I know I have. In high school I used words that would have gotten my mouth washed out with oh so many bars of soap if my parents had heard them. I was a typical stupid kid who didn’t know better but mimicked what were supposed to be the cool kids. A true friend of mine asked me “Why do you talk like that?” It hit me kind of hard, and since then my use of coarse language generally is limited to a car accident or two. (The overall process was not easy process… I replaced bad words with Bob for a very long time).

Of course, luckily for people my age, we didn’t transmit our transgressions electronically. If you called someone a bad name, it hurt, it may have gotten you punched in the mouth, but we usually moved on quickly because there wasn’t this record hanging out there staring at us. We grew callous to the name calling and often forged friendships with these same people. Many forgave these transgressions, and often changed our ways because we learned about how we affected others, and how they affected us. Not always, of course, because some people are just jerks.

Yet, what if there was a record uncovered of every time I hurled a certain word at someone back in high school? Would this be the end of my days in the SQL Community? What if high school had been just 10 years ago? Or 2 years ago?

In the SQL Community, there have been quite a few people who have been ostracized over things they have done. The PASS Summit doesn’t have an Anti-Harassment policy only because it was in vogue. There are documented cases, and there are stories that worked their way around about certain people. Is there a path for these folks to ever return in complete full graces of the community?

All of this is just data. I fear the day when someone with a grudge starts digging around in the history of social media to find the transgressions of the SQL Community to try to destroy someone, or perhaps even everyone. Will we be able to forgive things said back before they joined the community? What if it was strong hateful or disgusting things that people have said just to be funny? Or a just being a jerk? Or due to some strongly held conviction?

It feels like only a matter of time that it happens somewhere because all social media history is what brings our community together… data.