Advice for Child About Online Content?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>My child used to be very opinionated and outspoken. Luckily, though, his/her ideas are much more nuanced and balanced nowadays.</p>

<p>However, as a teenager, he/she made several posts (without my prior knowledge or approval) to the Internet–articles, book reviews, comments, etc. To me, many of the posts seem dogmatic and even inflammatory; my son/daughter now realizes this. There were about a dozen of them.</p>

<p>My kid is now a young adult who will soon finish his/her post-secondary education and look for work. He/she worries that the Internet postings could affect his/her employment prospects. </p>

<p>We were able to call some of the webmasters and get roughly 20% of the content removed. The remaining sites have no phone numbers (and sometimes no email) listed. </p>

<p>For the ones with emails, how would you phrase the email message to the webmasters. Since the ball is in the webmaster’s court, I advised my son/daughter to be polite, state that it was a youthful indiscretion, kindly request a removal, and thank the webmaster for the consideration. Is there anything else that you would advise my kid to say?</p>

<p>For the ones without emails or any other contact information, how should we proceed?</p>

<p>Also, what if the webmaster(s) either don’t respond or outright refuses? What can we do then?</p>

<p>Should we offer to purchase the content? Should we persist? My child’s best friend jokingly suggested hacking into the site, but I oppose that.</p>

<p>There is positive content (scholarships, volunteer projects, achievements, etc) about my son/daughter on the Web. I just worry what impact everything else would have on his/her future.</p>

2

<p>Do these postings have your S/D’s name and or address attached to them? Do they come up in a Google search of the name? Is the name so rare that they could clearly not belong to anyone else? How long ago were they made?</p>

3

<p>Yes, it does come up during a Google search. And it is an uncommon name.</p>

<p>D/S has now learned his/her lesson, but still hopes to do what s/he can to salvage online reputation. </p>

<p>Doesn’t want people to make judgments or have preconceived notions. D/S is a cheerier and calmer person today and hopes to stay that way.</p>

4

<p>Change his name?</p>

5

<p>You could contact one of those companies that scrubs people’s Internet footprints.</p>