Neera Tanden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene couldn’t be more different politically. But they share one common trait — they’ve recently been frantically deleting old social media posts in efforts to salvage their political careers.
Tanden, President Biden’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, deleted over 1,000 tweets from her Twitter account starting shortly after Election Day. Tanden was known for tweets critical not just of Republicans, but also Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whom her old boss, Hillary Clinton, beat out for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
Greene, meanwhile, has dominated headlines this week, with House Democrats threatening to take the unprecedented step of removing the Georgia Republican from her committee assignments based on social media posts from before her time in Congress. Greene has recently deleted a series of Facebook posts and tweets, including some referencing QAnon, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and a “Clinton kill list.”
And Rep. Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas, quickly removed a tweet touting a “great meeting” with people who attended the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6, which ended in a mob storming the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. A day after the incident, Sessions changed his tune, condemning the riot in a subsequent tweet.
But such efforts to scrub the past are largely futile, say public affairs experts. Removing past posts that are embarrassing only amplifies the content. Anyway, there’s little chance of it ever going away.
“Screenshots are forever. It doesn’t matter if you delete it. It just looks worse, and at that point, you just have to come out with a statement and explain maybe why you have changed your opinion on that, or what the context was,” said Rebecca Howell, former senior director at GOP opposition research firm America Rising. “If it’s out there even a little bit, you just have to let it be.”
Howell, who recently founded 36th Street Strategies, also told the Washington Examiner that Greene’s past online activity may be particularly harmful because it’s not only things she’s posted directly that are in question. Greene also actively liked and reacted to other posts expressing controversial views.
The internet is forever
With sites such as PolitWoops, which tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including both candidates and those in office, it’s hard to hide slip-ups if you’re in a position of power.
Though Twitter has tried to remove the site in the past, citing a policy violation of preserving tweets, the tracker is now back up and running, like others that aim to hold officials to account. And evolving technology has made it nearly impossible to remove online content fully.
“I’ve found stuff that’s 15-20 years old that still exists somewhere on the internet,” Rob Eberhardt, a partner at the Democratic opposition research firm, Stanford Campaigns, told the Washington Examiner.
Eberhardt, who’s been working in opposition research since the early 2000s, said he makes sure to screenshot everything he finds and has gone so far as to find old blog sites that once belonged to candidates.
He said the best thing a potential political candidate can do is self-audit their social media and keep it as private as possible.
And there’s an increasing market for unflattering information about candidates’ pasts. Polarization has made it common for people to look past the negatives behind the candidate or party they support.
“A story from the New York Times or MSNBC on a Republican candidate is going to have very little impact on Republicans in part because they’ll never see the story,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant at the Virginia-based North Star Opinion Research. “The same goes for a Fox News attack on a Democratic candidate. It might hurt that Democratic candidate among some independents who watch Fox News, but it’s certainly not going to have an effect on Democratic voters.”
Survival of the fittest
Some public figures can withstand revelations about their social media pasts, while others melt.
“Who survives and who doesn’t?” said Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo. “What are the characteristics of a politician who’s able to acknowledge or even deny those kinds of things and move on and still have a successful political career versus which are the ones where it’s effectively a career-ender?”
The most prominent social media provocateur is former President Donald Trump. Until Trump’s Twitter account was taken down by the company on Jan. 8, eight days before he left office, over statements surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, Trump fully stood by his past tweets. Even if dealing with uncomfortable topics such as the Access Hollywood tape, private phone calls that led to his first impeachment, and a New York Times report that alleged the billionaire only paid $750 in taxes in 2017.
Trump rarely apologized, aside from the Access Hollywood tape, and was normally quick to dismiss charges against him as “fake news” or part of a scheme led by establishment politicians to take him down.
But not everybody can be like Trump.
Tanden is likely to be confirmed to lead the OMB, even if her confirmation hearings involve some embarrassing questions about past social media posts.
As for Greene, who some House Democrats want expelled and who has been called a “cancer” for the GOP by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is set to lose her committee assignments in the House.
However, she’ll hold on to her House seat and could win reelection in 2022.
Still, her branding may have long-lasting consequences on her party beyond what’s just coming out now, said Ayres, the Republican pollster.
“They’re potentially devastating if they come to define the Republican Party of 2021 and 2022,” Ayres said. “Republicans really suffered in a lot of well-educated suburban districts this year, and having a Marjorie Taylor Greene become the face of the party or apparently indicative of the kind of message that’s tolerated in the party just hurts even more in those areas where the party is already struggling.”
