How to Deal With Posting Something You Regret

It’s not as simple as just hitting delete

Photo: laflor/Getty Images

The smart-ass tweet. The intemperate blog post. The video rant. The indiscreet selfie. If you’ve been online for more than five minutes, then the odds are good that at some point, you’ve posted something you now regret.

But now, of course, that regrettable post is part of your permanent digital footprint, and undoing the damage isn’t as simple as just hitting delete.

So how do you apologize, or otherwise clean up your own mess?

Wait, do you really need to apologize?

Just because some people are angry at you online doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes online outrage is simply a reflection of digital mob mentality: The people you’ve angered are people who hated you already, even if they didn’t know they hated you. When the feminist writer Anita Sarkeesian produced a series of videos critiquing misogyny in video games, she became the target of the vicious, violent backlash that ultimately became known as Gamergate. But that reaction merely underlined the validity of Sarkeesian’s critique.

But sometimes, people’s anger really is a result of insensitivity on your part. One recent example: The TV star Gina Rodriguez’s…