How to ruin your reputation with a single YouTube video

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it,” said businessman Warren Buffett. American senior executive Adam Mark Smith recently shrank that window from five minutes to about two minutes, the length of the viral video he posted on YouTube. This chief financial officer lost a job that paid $200,000 a year and a million dollars in stock options. The cause: a video protesting the homophobic remarks made by the boss of the fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A.

In the age of social media, a video or any other piece of content that goes viral can become a serious problem. Be careful about what you post, because the internet rarely forgets.

Adam Mark Smith, a resident of Arizona, learned this the hard way. This chief financial officer worked for a medical device manufacturer and lost a handsomely rewarded job. The reason? In the summer of 2012, he filmed himself berating an employee of Chick-Fil-A over the homophobic remarks of its boss, Dan Cathy. Those remarks sparked heated controversy in the United States between supporters and opponents of gay marriage.

In the video, Adam Mark Smith goes up to the counter to get a free cup of water. “I don’t want to give my money to this hateful company,” he rails at the receptionist, who tries to keep her composure. “I don’t know how you can work for this company,” he adds before leaving.

Posting the video on YouTube and its virality would have disastrous consequences. Adam Smith was fired from his job some time later, after his voicemail overflowed with threats. Even once it was taken down, the video was reposted by others. Aggressive and parody content multiplied across the web.

Two months later, Adam Mark Smith found a new job. But he was let go a few weeks after that, once his employers discovered the video and reproached him for not mentioning it during the hiring interview.

The apology he made to the Chick-Fil-A employee who had been targeted changed nothing. Neither did the public forgiveness of the Chick-Fil-A employee, who was shocked to have been filmed at her expense. Adam Mark Smith is unemployed, and he and his family are now forced to live on food stamps.

To share his experience, Adam Mark Smith released a book, “Million Dollar Cup of Water”. He said he had sold only 17 digital copies on Amazon, while at the same time receiving the lowest possible rating for his book 23 times!

Screenshot of the ratings for Adam Smith’s book on Amazon (source: amazon.com)

How to avoid ruining your reputation online: be careful about the opinions you share on the web

This story, worthy of Hollywood, raises the question of the traces we leave on the internet. They can have devastating effects on private and professional life. Especially if they are picked up and made to go viral.

How can you avoid ruining your reputation online?

The first piece of advice is to be careful about the opinions you share on the web. The line between private and public life has become increasingly blurred with social networks and blogs. Certain personal statements or opinions posted online can have disastrous consequences.

Remember the tweet from Justine Sacco, head of public relations for the American media group IAC, before she left for South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

The consequences: a tweet that went viral at breakneck speed, furious reactions and, despite Justine Sacco’s letter of apology to her employer, a dismissal. Since then, unlike Adam Mark Smith, Justine Sacco has found work again, a humanitarian job with an NGO in Africa working to reduce maternal mortality.

How to avoid ruining your reputation online: prevention is better than cure, so moderate

This control over your digital footprint is especially important when it comes to job hunting. According to a 2014 study by the Jobvite platform on recruitment methods, 55% of recruiters are influenced by social networks. Candidates must therefore be more vigilant than ever about their online reputation.

All the more so because recruiters frequently google candidates. In Adam Mark Smith’s case, the results on Google’s first page are highly damaging.

Results for the query “Adam Mark Smith” on Google

To avoid regretting the publication of certain content, you can, for example, remove the tag from a post, photo or video so that you don’t appear in it. This action does not, however, mean the post has been deleted. On Facebook, you can go to the moderation options by clicking the padlock at the top right of your account.

Privacy settings on Facebook

How to avoid ruining your reputation online: use sites that help erase your traces on social networks

Once the damage is done, there are sites to help you erase your traces. Alongside Account Killer for English speakers, Just Delete Me sorts more than 250 sites by how difficult it is to delete an account. Even so, your content can be picked up and quickly become impossible to control.

YouTube, Wikipedia, Pinterest and Blogger make up the internet blacklist, because it is nearly impossible to make these accounts disappear entirely. Personal data is, after all, a real goldmine for the designers of these websites. For example, you cannot delete your YouTube account without deleting your Google account. But you can delete your channel. Twitter, on the other hand, is easy to delete by going into its options.

screenshot of the Delete Me site

How to avoid ruining your reputation online: exercise your right to be forgotten

Another solution, one that Adam Mark Smith, as an American citizen, is not entitled to: since 13 May 2014, a resident of the European Union, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Iceland or Norway has the right to exercise their right to be forgotten under certain conditions.

The figures for right-to-be-forgotten requests mostly concern social networks and blogs. This is largely explained by poorly configured privacy settings.

According to statistics gathered by Forget.me and Semji after one year of exercising the right to be forgotten, 1 in 5 requests concern social networks and community platforms. But be careful: while the number of requests is high, so is the failure rate. According to that same source, only 7% of the URLs deindexed by Google come from social networks, and being the author of the content is the second most common reason for refusal. Through its Google My Business service, Semji makes it possible to manage and remove reviews on your Google My Business page.

Faced with the scale of Google’s refusals across the various types of requests (70%), Bertrand Girin, president of Semji, is calling for easier appeals for people turned down by search engines. “This seems like a worthwhile subject for lawmakers to work on, as part of the draft European regulation on the protection of personal data.”