The firing of director James Gunn this past summer points out a unique capability of social media. In July, the director, who was slated to direct Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3, was removed from the project after some objectionable tweets came to light. The tweets, which were posted nearly ten years ago, contained inappropriate jokes about rape and pedophilia. Social media played a decidedly large role in this incident, highlighting a new usage of such platforms.
Although James Gunn’s tweets were inexcusably vulgar, a controversy was formed on the fact that it took place so long ago. After being let go, Gunn promptly responded with an apology, where he articulated that he was not the same person as when he posted the tweets. It’s impossible to definitively gauge Gunn’s level of sincerity, and perhaps that’s why social media’s ability to dig up the past is so troubling. Because Gunn’s words were the source of the problem, the credibility of his subsequent comments was damaged.
It wasn’t long before conspiracy theorist, Mark Cernovich, claimed responsibility for being behind the Gunn incident. Supposedly, these types of social media attacks on right-leaning public figures led him to employ the same strategy against politically left celebrities. Cernovich was quoted saying:
“I enjoy just the raw human visceral reaction of jumping into the arena and just swinging the hammer and seeing what is left over afterwards. Twitter is just modern-day gladiatorial combat.”
As he suggests, social media has introduced a new type of warfare. Social media creates a timeline of a person’s life on a scale that never existed before. Even the most careful record-keeping cannot rival the level of permanence of social media. Comments posted online are public and have a wide audience—unlike most personal records—so there is a higher number of witnesses, increasing the likelihood of those words being remembered and sometimes saved.
Additionally, no other documentation captures the minutia of day-to-day life. People tend to use social media in a way that reflects the now: how they’re feeling, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking about in the present. As a result, when used impulsively, social media can be a record of a person’s worst moments and, as Cernovich demonstrated, even when the comments are deleted they can be recovered. This ability to reveal the past can be beneficial, such as when it’s used to bring a criminal to justice, or it can be used for personal gain, like in James Gunn’s situation. Regardless of how we interpret these events, at very least we should be compelled to reflect on our own use of social media and the impact it has on others.