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Colleges Looking at Social Media: Protecting Your Online Identity

You might have seen your upperclassmen friends all change their Facebook display names to be more incognito when they applied to college. Some colleges do look students up online in case they’ve got a history of malicious behavior nobody knows about. The recent Harvard admissions rescission case should definitely be a wake up call. So while it’s rare that your online profiles will play an active role in your admissions process, this verification isn’t out of the question, and happens more frequently with each passing year. So what should you do? While you could try to erase your entire existence from the internet, there will always be some digital footprint left out there. But it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick review and make sure there’s nothing too incriminating for colleges looking at social media to find.

With newfound freedom in the form of a powerful keyboard or cell phone, many people, especially teenagers, don’t consider the consequences of their actions online. But when you have colleges looking at social media finding posts without any context, interpretation can get messy. If you’ve got something you want to delete, do it before you send in your application. It will take a good deal of time, a fair amount of creativity, and a lot of frustration, but it can be accomplished to some degree. Go through the following platforms and ensure your online presence is as clean as a whistle:

Google Your Name 

If you have a common name, try adding additional terms such as the name of your high school, significant academic or extracurricular achievements, or important activities that you’ve participated in. For example, you might search for “John Smith Choate,” or “Jane Doe Soccer.” Running a Google search is probably where colleges looking at social media will also start, so it’ll give you a good idea of what’s out there that you need to remove.

Research Yourself 

Once you’ve located yourself, dig a bit deeper. Click on all of the links from the first two or three Google pages (you’re probably safe beyond that because admissions officers’ time is far too valuable to spend searching for your high crimes and misdemeanors), and see what is said about you, by you, or in relation to you. Generate a list of everything you might need to remove.

Stay Cautious on All Social Media Platforms

You should change your profile picture on all your accounts. No matter what/who the picture is of, it shouldn’t be identifiable as you. If someone finds one of your Facebook or Twitter posts, you want to create the possibility that this is just another “John Smith.” If you don’t want to make it anonymous, make sure your profile picture is professional. You should also make sure to change or remove any personally identifying information about yourself in the “About” section of your pages. 

Next, set your privacy and security settings to the highest possible setting. You don’t want anyone outside of your friends to be able to find you on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram at all. Not even your name. Become a ghost to anyone you are not friends with, including friends of friends – especially friends of friends.

Edit Facebook

If you have a picture on Facebook of you heavily partying, or status updates bragging about fighting with your friends, delete them. If someone else has posted unsavory pictures, make sure you untag yourself. Another thing to consider is changing your name on Facebook. This retroactively changes the name attached to any disparaging comments you’ve made under your real name. For example, if your name is “John Davidson,” and you change your FB name to “Jon Davis,” it separates your account from a search of your proper name. 

It’s important that the name you choose be somewhat similar to your actual name. Because Google doesn’t immediately update it’s search results after a change has been made, once someone clicks into the Google link, your name will be changed on the actual Facebook page – i.e., the post will appear as being written by Jon Davis, even though Google said it was written by John Davidson. Thus, colleges looking at social media might reasonably believe that the search engine has simply made a mistake. In the admissions game, plausible deniability is your ally.

If you are a member of any questionable Facebook groups, delete every comment you’ve made on that group’s page, and then leave the group. “Unlike” pages which might be controversial if you’ve liked them in the first place.

Look through YouTube

We’ve all made embarrassing videos with our friends when we were younger. Now, if you were among those who vlogged about every moment of your life and put it up on the internet, there might be some things in there you don’t want colleges looking at social media to see. Or if you’re a singer applying for a music program, and you’ve got some unflattering fun karaoke night videos in there, now is the time to remove them from the world wide web. Go through your old videos online and with as many clicks as it takes, get rid of the ones which are too wild for admissions officers to see. 

Revisit Old Tweets

Twitter is a social media platform where it’s very easy to get carried away. With the character limit enforced, you might have tweeted on one issue multiple times. When it comes to cleansing your feed for colleges looking at social media, you might have triple the number of tweets to delete in comparison to your other posts. One easy thing you can do is make your Twitter account private, and protect your tweets. But if you love the attention in the form of retweets and want to keep your account public, it’s time to clean up your act. Better safe than sorry.

If you’re the type to mention your least favorite celebrity and tell them how much you hated their last song or movie with very colorful condemnation, now is the time to delete all those tweets. Similarly, if you got into an argument with someone online and were very expressive with the curse words, that’s definitely not something you want colleges to see. 

Make Sure It’s All Clean On Instagram

If you can’t make your account private for some reason, then at least ensure that there are no pictures on your account that would be an immediate red flag for colleges looking at social media. Go through the captions as well to see that they’re PG and don’t reflect badly on you. 

 A unique feature on Instagram is that direct messages can be deleted. Make sure there’s nothing incriminating in your inbox that someone can screenshot and forward to admissions offices. But if you really have to go this far to clear your record, maybe you should take a step back and think about how you’re using social media in the first place!

Remove Yourself From Attack Forums

These can be a little trickier. If what you need removed are comments you made yourself, then you can simply access your account and erase them. This will probably require re-locating or guessing at your old username/password.

If what you need removed is a comment made by another person but linked to you, then you have two options: First, you can contact the culprit and ask that they remove the comment themselves – obviously unlikely given that they were the ones writing disparaging comments about you, or second, you can contact the website administrator and request that they remove the content. If you choose this second option, consider using words like “harassing,” “slander,” or “defamation” when describing the offending comment. Simply saying that you don’t like what was expressed will rarely be enough. If the website allows you to report these comments, you should do that. 

Cringy Old Blogs

If you’re a blogger on a website such as WordPress or Tumblr, make sure your blog doesn’t have any information that colleges looking at social media might disapprove of. Admissions officers appreciate when students develop blogs to write op-ed style articles and think pieces, but if your blog is dedicated towards planning a coup at your school, or spreading hate against something you dislike, all blog posts should immediately be deleted.

Initiate Google Re-crawl

As mentioned previously, Google does not update its search results instantly. Thus, even once I had destroyed an infamous Facebook group, a Google search of my full name continued to display the group’s name, and a description below it which included my full name. While clicking on the link brought you to an error page, this result was nonetheless troubling.

If this happens to you, you must pay homage to the Google-gods. You need to submit the URL of the offending webpage to Google for re-crawling. Basically, Google uses software known as “spiders,” to “crawl” the web and find content to add to its index. Re-crawling basically refreshes Google’s index for the selected URL. Google says that re-crawling will usually happen “within a day,” although it can sometimes take a little longer. Go to Google’s webmaster tools, and select “Submit URL.” Paste the page’s URL, click “ok,” and hope that Google gets to it sooner rather than later. You can read more by searching “Google re-crawl” on Google – I know, even more ironic.

Imagine if your application is nearly perfect and admissions officers are very happy with the idea of accepting you - until they see a series of tweets which leave a sour taste in their mouths. Colleges looking at social media want to ensure they’re not accepting students with criminal records or a history of antisocial, undesirable behavior for their communities. So, if you have any pictures or posts that might cause colleges to think twice, delete them before your inbox fills up with rejection letters. After all, nothing quite tarnishes a promising career like personal commentary about your unsavory indiscretions in Vegas. Of course there’s nothing wrong with having fun - you’re only human and probably don’t have bad intentions. Just make sure the evidence isn’t plastered all over the internet right around when your dream school decides to do a little Google search.