What’s a coarse comment among friends?
A big deal if they’re Facebook friends, as Lee Landor learned the hard way yesterday.
Landor, a press secretary for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, resigned after wading into the debate over racial profiling in the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., calling the professor a “racist” and President Barack Obama “O-dumb-a” on the social networking Web site.
“People think they’re posting in a nonhostile environment, but they’re broadcasting their inner-most thoughts to the whole world,” said Lance Hoffman, a professor of computer science at George Washington University.
“They don’t realize stuff is archived all the time,” he said. “There’s a snapshot taken periodically on the Internet, and all these things are maintained. What if you’ve done something in a prior life that you wouldn’t want an employer to see?”
That stops many from getting hired, said executive recruiter Mitch Feldman.
“It’s a growing trend,” he said.
