The Josh Hader of NFL writers

That's what always stuns me about these instances. Eight years, presumably thousands of tweets in between, and probably not a current pattern of similar tweets, so how and why do people unearth these things?
Why would anyone even be looking for them? Do the posts pop up in your timeline as a reminder of something you did on that date, like Facebook occasionally does?
If someone was mad at them and wanted to drop the hammer, have they been sitting on these things for a decade? And if so, why now instead of at any point along the way?
Is there an army of folks whose job it is to comb Twitter for potentially offensive tweets from every semi-public person?
It boggles the mind.

 

Maybe when she commented on the standing ovation for Hader somebody said, "oh, let's see what you were saying as a teenager."

 

Have you seen what posts people inventory, then retrieve, on this site?

 

Yeah, I guess there's always that person who says something that sticks in your brain for whatever reason. Still weird to get motivated to randomly dredge it up years later, though. Even if, as Jake_Taylor suggested, there was a reason in this case there are dozens of others where these things resurface out of nowhere that make you go, "WTF!?"

 

At my former stop, there was a college that went through a similar storm, when some elected student government leaders had some pretty awful things in their social media past. A reporter there - acting on a tip - wrote about it, as did the student newspaper. Then friends of the ousted student government leaders started digging into the Twitter history for these student journalists, and of course they had some awful things in their past, so the reporter wrote about that, too. Bad situation all around, with job suspensions and resignations.

Flash-forward a couple of months, and the reporter - openly and proudly gay - celebrated Pride Week by liking some posts (from his account that ID'd him with his employer and title) that showed a video of a young man wearing a T-shirt that said, "COCKSUCKER" and enthusiastically mimicking his blow job technique.

I know it was just a "like" but it seemed pretty hypocritical to me.

 

Twitter has a search function that does it too. You can search one account for tweets with “any of these words”

 

Find someone you want to discredit. Use the search function mentioned above.

The giveaway is usually the offending words. The more esoteric, the harder someone had to look.

 

I'm pretty dumb on Twitter, but search results suggest not ruin-my-life dumb. Hurrah.

That statement is not intended as a challenge, by the way.

 

If you’re thinking about Twitter slurs enough to criticize someone else, you’d think it would pop into your mind to scrub your own account

 

Another way to approach it is to just not be an asshole, and you won't have that problem.

If you can't handle that, then that really is who you are.