Advice for Child About Removal of Online Content?

Career Opportunities & Internships
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<p>My child used to be very opinionated and outspoken. Luckily, though, S/D's 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>S/D 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 S/D on the Web. I just worry what impact everything else would have on his/her future.</p>

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<p>If they are small articles, book reviews, etc. that were written years ago (and likely the writing style will reflect that it was written by a teenager), I wouldn’t even worry about it. Some recruiters and/or hiring managers might look up LinkedIn accounts, possibly (though rarely) Facebook or a quick Google search, but there is a good chance they won’t do any of the above. (And if they use Google/Bing/whatever, they’re looking for negatives such as arrests, negative community news articles about the person - not personal reviews or articles unless relevant to the position). **If your child wrote articles about a field they are now pursuing employment in, that might draw attention and I would pursue removing those at the very least.</p>

<p>I personally don’t do web searches for applicants (I am an HR manager), and no one I’ve spoken with in the field pries that deep either. No one will go through every link that has your child’s name attached to it with a fine toothed comb. If they have the time to do that, then your child is either applying to a highly sensitive position with extensive testing and background checks, or the manager has poor judgement and too much time on his/her hands and thus probably isn’t representing a flourishing company.</p>