‘I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?’

If I don’t, I’m doing something wrong.

PS: parents and teachers — if you’ve been telling your kids, “Hey, tsk, posting naked pix of yourselves will cost you a job one day,” you’re wrong.

As I’ve been saying for years.

Because if everybody is doing it, it can’t possibly matter. (At least if you’re gay — see below.)

And everybody’s doing it:

We ran background checks on six Gizmodo employees, including our editor in chief Joe Brown, and all but one came back clean. When it doesn’t find anything incriminating on a potential employee, it simply issues a notice that the employees passed (see below) and doesn’t generate a file.

And then there’s me. I flunked hard. (…)

Basically, I may never work again. (…)

Every image of me that might be able to identify my ethnicity is blacked out, even my hands. On my homepage, a line that reads “I drink too much beer” has been obscured because it’s ultimately irrelevant. Screw you, boss man. I love my beer. (Joe: please do not fire me.) (…)

But what’s sexually explicit in one place, like where I grew up in Alabama, may not be in another, like where I live now in San Francisco. None of my Folsom Street Fair photos turned up in the report. Nor did any of the Bay to Breakers cock shots that I’ve published on both my blog and in my Flickr stream.