Perils of problematic posts

Express Tribune

15-02-2025

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:
When it comes to social media zapping away celebrities, 2025 has proved to be quite an exciting year. Just this week, we have had rapper Kanye West – admittedly not known for his shy and retiring ways – going off on a hate-filled misogynistic, Nazi-laden X-posting rampage. Unsurprisingly, West – or Ye, as he wants to be called now – found himself having to post a goodbye message to his followers (although in a burst of good manners, he remembered to thank X owner Elon Musk for allowing himself to express himself so openly in the first place.)
Musk told his followers that they would not be seeing West's account anymore, but three days after his rant, Ye's account is up and running again, albeit with a cautionary warning advising readers that the account posts "potentially sensitive content".
Ye's X days may not be as numbered as he had hinted just three days prior, but the businesses associated with him are taking no chances. Reading the room, Ye's talent agency, 33&West, announced this week they'd be severing ties with the musician, and Shopify, which hosted his Yeezy webstore, shut the site down for violating its terms of service.
Propping up this mouthy hip-hop star as a haunting example, it is time to remind ourselves that should we, like him, feel the urge to indulge in an unhinged vitriolic posting session, we should approach it with the clinical diligence of a neonatal surgeon, as opposed to the hot-headed fury of a sleep-deprived toddler. In other words: think very, very carefully before you go down the dark path of posting, unless you want to tango with that most detestable thing of all: consequences.
Naturally, the ease of typing and hitting send means this sobering lesson is one we forget at our peril, but fear not. As long as there are celebrities with access to a keyboard, there will always be someone willing to prove to us that the social media posts we thought were lost to the mists of time are unfortunately like cockroaches partying through a nuclear holocaust: they can survive anything.
The Gascón debacle
Ye may hog the limelight when it comes to stirring up a hornet's nest with interestingly worded posts, but he most certainly is not the only celebrity tempting fate via social media. Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofia Gascón, dethroned darling of film award-givers, exists to teach us that potent five-year-old historical tweets can resurrect themselves from their digital graveyard and swoop down to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
To get us all up to speed, a Variety report baring Gascón's Twitter (as it was then called) escapades shows us that in November 2020, the actor used the social media platform to unburden her thoughts regarding Muslims in particular and diversity in general. Here is one agitated musing the Spanish trans actor shared with her followers:
"I'm sorry, is it just my impression or is there [sic] more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we'll have to teach Arabic."
Please do not assume that it is just Muslims Gascón is (was?) pained by, because the following year, she also felt compelled to offer her uncomplimentary observations about the overall diversity on show during the Academy Awards ceremony from 2021.
"More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn't know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M," Gascón wrote. "Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala."
Gascón may have sighed with relief getting all these troubling thoughts off her chest back in 2021, but sadly for her Oscar 2025 dreams, those tweets could not have resurfaced at a worse time. Once a shoe-in for a best actress academy award for a few glorious weeks, Gascón's social media musings have triggered a swan dive from grace, with her career having effectively been flattened by a bus. The Guardian tells us that Netflix has already removed her from campaigning materials for Emilia Pérez – in which she has a lead role. It is not yet clear whether or not Gascón will turn up for the Oscars in March, but we do know that her presence will no longer be required during Sunday's BAFTAs, and nor did she attend Spain's prestigious Goya awards, the country's equivalent of the Oscars. Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard has told Deadline he is no longer in contact with her. In simple terms, Gascón is being treated with the abundance of caution usually reserved for bat-originated coronaviruses.
Consequences are real
Is it fair to persecute someone for years-old online ramblings? Literature lessons at school have taught us all that the pen is mightier than the sword – but as the fallout from Gascón's tweeting habits has shown, compared to a pen, a keyboard is more akin to a hydrogen bomb than a sword in the consequences spectrum. Today, young school children are taught basic cyber security during IT lessons where they are repeatedly reminded of the dangers of posting online. Gascón may not have posted her thoughts with the fervour brandished by Ye, but the damage to her reputation has already been engraved.
Because it would not do to stay silent, Gascón has gone on record to apologise for her tweets. She has also deleted them and, according to CNN, insisted they were "pulled out of context", although quite what that context was is not something she made clear. However, no amount of apologising and deleting is going to stuff that Pandora's box shut again. It is like fighting a house fire with a squirt gun.
What has all this social media nastiness taught us? Perhaps this analogy will help. Picture a pillowcase stuffed with tiny Styrofoam balls. Now imagine that this pillowcase is in a car travelling along a bumpy road with potholes the size of moon craters. Before you can blink, every last one of those beastly little balls will catapult out of your pillowcase and colonise crevices you did not even know existed in your car. You will think a vacuum cleaner will get them all, but you will be wrong. From now until the end of time, there will be at least one little Styrofoam ball stuffed in a cup holder or a seatbelt pouch, repelling vacuum cleaners and evading capture. Your social media posts are those Styrofoam balls. Somehow, somewhere, whatever you do, they will live forever. Proceed with caution.