Megan Carnegie is a journalist and editor. She has written for Courier, Time Out, Guardian Weekend, Creative Review, The Telegraph, Evening Standard, and more. Outside of work, she can be found reading, running, and killing off her houseplants.

In March 2021, the newly appointed editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, 

, was forced to reckon with her teenage self after anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she posted in 2011 resurfaced online. When staff at the magazine wrote a scathing letter condemning both her appointment and her tweets to Condé Nast management, McCammond announced that she would no longer be taking up the position. The incident will no doubt have resonated with countless other job candidates who’ve had their hopes dashed by a potential employer’s discovery of their digital past – 

 of American HR professionals surveyed in 2020 said they’d denied a job to a candidate based on their social media profiles – though perhaps not all so publicly as McCammond.

With high-profile cancellations offering a cautionary tale in atoning for the actions of one’s youth, there’s a growing awareness that your past and present social media activity is as vital as a CV in the job search. Employers are increasingly 

 saying they factor social media accounts into their hiring decisions. A 2018 study even found that employers are more likely to check a person’s 

. This level of screening – and the pressure to appear a certain way to both peers and strangers – has driven the rise of 

 and Finstas among Gen Zers and Yers as well as 

. Instagram has even begun suggesting users make one to “

When Dr. Brooke Duffy began teaching undergraduate students a decade ago, she noticed their distinct anxiety about surveillance by marketers and advertisers, instilled by what she calls “the creep” – when a brand they were searching for on Google started following them on Facebook. “Over time, I noticed that these concerns were eclipsed by a concern about surveillance by their potential future employers,” explains Dr. Duffy, who is an associate professor of communication at Cornell University. “The concerns [became] ‘what happens if a company finds my social media account and this impacts my ability to get a job?’” So what are they doing to alter their behaviours even before reaching the application stage? And how are they defining boundaries between the personal and professional in a competitive landscape? Canvas8 spoke to Dr. Duffy to understand the impact of ‘

Why is this topic important to understand?

Social media – particularly the narrative that what you post online can get you hired or fired – has profoundly impacted work and labour. I was interested in how this ideology of social media monitoring impacts young people, students in particular, and how they’re responding to these narratives of monitoring when their usage of social media spans so many different platforms. Undoubtedly, they’re growing up taking their practice seriously – of how they use social media, how they adapt to it, and their practices of resistance. Young people are finding ways to communicate with their friends in ways that aren’t necessarily how the social media companies designed them.

My generation didn’t have to reconcile with the same digital footprint culture, and we’re seeing the wider implications of this now. I feel for young people who are constantly told about the potential implications of self-surveillance because the things you do when you’re a young kid don’t necessarily reflect the person you grow into. What’s often counselled is ‘be careful what you post and don’t post anything if you don’t want that to get into the wider public’. That puts the onus and risk on individuals and, as I see it, lets companies participating in wider surveillance culture off the hook. Students tell me companies ask to see their social media profiles, which I believe is illegal. They’re pushing back against a culture where surveillance is normalised.

High-profile ‘cancellations’ may heighten anxieties around digital pasts

I wanted to understand not just how these narratives of social media monitoring impact young people, but also how they negotiate these directives that so many of us are counselled to think about, which is how to self-brand, how to be employable. My collaborator, Oliver Chan, and I were interested in combining previous surveillance culture scholarship into dialogue with what was being done to understand how young people are using and adapting to social media.

With this particular project, we sought to understand the dominant narrative – of how social media can get you fired or hired, or what we termed ‘anticipatory surveillance’ – and how this impacts how young people present themselves on different social media platforms. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, we wanted to find out how college-aged students understood this potential social surveillance across various platforms and how they challenge these norms of persistent surveillance. We also really wanted to understand what they were doing to push back against this – what they were doing to maintain some sense of control over their social media usage while simultaneously responding to the larger directive to have an employable self-brand.

Gen Zers are hyper-aware of the need to curate their online identities

We found that their activities were steered not just by surveillance but by what we call ‘imagined surveillance’. By this, I just mean that it was anticipatory. They didn’t necessarily have a particular entity in mind, but a lot of their activities were structured by what could happen if they posted something or the implications if they didn’t post something. We organised our findings into three broad themes – the first was just using privacy settings. This was an attempt to manage an audience using various Facebook features to put people in groups that would show more performative content, more idealised content – if they had photos of drinking or references to things with their friends, for example. They would deploy privacy settings to make sure family members, coaches, educators, and people they worked with were not able to see this content.

The second was just self-surveillance or ‘platform-specific self-presentations’. The people in our surveys would use Facebook to share a more public-facing image, Twitter to be a little more playful, Instagram to be a little bit more creative or aspirational. Finally, the most interesting strategy to us was the creation of secondary accounts or pseudonyms, which is, ironically, more of a testament to your ‘real self’.

For young people, there’s been a lot of attention and moral panic since Finstas first emerged. I see Finstas and multiple accounts as a way for young people to preserve their leisure time and present their identities in ways that aren’t necessarily tethered to the employable self-brand circulating in wider public culture. Their second account, the Finsta, is a way to project a more authentic self, to showcase their mundane moments, candour, and humour with a small network of friends without concerns that this would be seen by somebody unwanted. As well as Finstas, young people said they’d have their real Instagram account that was much more curated and something they’d keep public in case an employer was searching for them and wanted to get a sense of this candidate.

Almost a third of UK Gen Zers have both public and private social media profiles

With age comes greater imagined surveillance anxiety

, COVID-19 has hit young people’s job prospects 

, and that’s before considering the extra checks and balances that hiring professionals now enact through cyber-vetting. While Finstas are one way to hide information from potential employers, some teens have been going further by using the 

 or Close Friends features on Snapchat or Instagram. And while Dr. Duffy’s research illustrated Gen Z’s protective techniques in a culture that has normalised surveillance, a study by 

 suggests that with age comes greater anxiety about digital behaviours – 31% of Gen Yers and Xers surveyed said they always consider the impact of things they post online, compared to only 19% of Zers. Additionally, acceptance of the fact that ‘nothing or almost nothing’ is private online increases with age (68% for Gen Zers, 73% for Yers, and 86% for Xers). With Whatsapp’s controversial privacy policy coming into force in spring 2021, the 

 suggests a desire for security that transcends generational boundaries.

 have both public and private social media profiles, compared to 53% who have only public and 17.5% who have just private. However, it’s worth considering not just who can view these feeds but how young people post on them. 

 began as the antithesis to Instagram posturing, and while its algorithm has resisted it becoming a popularity contest, users are transferring its characteristic irreverence to other platforms. ‘Casual posting’, for example, began on TikTok (the hashtag has 

) and emerged on Instagram in late 2020. “It is about posting whatever you want without over-filtering your content,” says 23-year-old 

, from Manchester. “Whatever you think is pretty or cool without trying to impress anyone, fit a clean, polished look, or follow a formula.” While some Gen Zers monitor their output carefully on multiple accounts, others are shattering the status quo and revealing their true selves, with evidence suggesting this fusion of realness and creativity could 

. With more people expressing themselves with freedom online, there’s an opportunity for employers to consider how seriously they take potential employees’ online personas. This might mean not judging a post someone made when they were 16 as a reflection of who they are at 25.

 feel less mentally healthy while working from home, and 

 found that 2020 was the most stressful year ever in people’s working lives. As companies take steps to transition out of lockdown – whether that’s adopting hybrid working arrangements or going fully remote – an awareness of what internet technology researcher Melissa Gregg calls ‘

’ is key. This blending of personal and professional lives has been exacerbated by remote working and heightened screen usage. In the UK, trade unions have been calling for a 

, with the majority of workers in favour of such a policy. Until this is in place, however, a collective activity to mark the boundaries of each day may be one way to separate work from home, which Microsoft facilitates through 

. “One of the takeaways for brands who are either employing now or will be employing young people is to think about how to allow them to maintain and uphold a marked distinction between their personal and professional lives,” explains Dr. Duffy.

People would prefer to be monitored by tech

It’s not just during the hiring process that people feel they’re being watched – employee surveillance tools have been massively ramped up during the remote working era, whether it’s 

 tools logging when workers are away from their screens or 

 to spot ‘infractions’. This isn’t entirely new though. A 2018 report revealed that out of 239 large corporations, over 

 were monitoring the content of employee emails and social media accounts, as well as who they met with and how they used their workspaces. What differs is employee sentiment towards increased scrutiny – 

 of UK workers subjected to monitoring software have used personal tech to evade it. For employers, they not only risk 

 but losing their workforce too – almost a quarter of UK workers would quit their job if they felt their privacy was being invaded. The 

 for many, however, would be algorithmically-enabled systems over tracking by humans. For example, 

 generates a productivity score by monitoring interactions between employees and identifying levels of collaboration.

 of American HR professionals claim that they’ve denied a job to a candidate based on their social media profiles 

 of Gen Yers and Xers say they always consider the impact of things they post online, compared to only 

 of British workers say they would quit their job if they felt their privacy was being invaded by their employer 

In a competitive job market, young people are taking their social media usage seriously, carefully picking what to post on different apps to match their desired effect

Having both private and public accounts helps young people share their ‘real self’ while maintaining an employable self-brand visible to others

Employees are feeling the strain of blurred work-life boundaries while operating from home – anxieties that are heightened by perceived surveillance

Dr. Brooke Erin Duffy is an associate professor at Cornell University in the Department of Communication and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her areas of interest include social media; gender, identity, and inequality; digital labor, cultural work amid platformization; and, promotional culture. She’s the author of ‘(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work’.

Global

Behavioural Sciences

With more of day-to-day life taking place online, the sense we’re being watched is hard to ignore. But is there a way to hide our personal personas from professional prospects? Canvas8 spoke to Dr. Brooke Duffy about how students are altering their digital presence to resist employer surveillance.

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