Technology is the shovel - Content is the hole

It's December 2013. Justine Sacco, a senior PR executive at IAC, is at Heathrow about to board an 11-hour flight to Cape Town. Right before she switches her phone to flight mode, she fires off one last tweet. It's meant to be a joke.

It wasn't funny...

By the time her flight landed, the internet had spent 11 hours losing its mind over it. #HasJustineLandedYet was trending worldwide. She'd already been fired. Strangers had found her flight number and were waiting for the moment she'd land and switch her phone back on.

She had no idea any of it was happening. She was in the air the whole time, completely unreachable, while her old life quietly ended without her. You can read the full story on BuzzFeed News.

That's the story I keep coming back to whenever I think about technology and the internet. Not because it's the most extreme example out there (it isn't, we'll get to a few more later), but because of the timeline. One tweet. Eleven hours. A career, gone, before she'd even landed back on solid ground.

Sacco picked up the shovel without thinking twice. And the hole was already dug before the plane touched down.

That's really what this post is about. Technology is the shovel. It's brilliant, it's powerful, and it's sat right there in your pocket, ready whenever you want to use it. Content, what we actually choose to dig with it, is the hole. And here's the bit that makes it dangerous: once you've dug it, you can't fill it back in.

The Shovel

Before we get too deep into the hole (sorry), it's worth pausing on how good the shovel actually is.

We live in a world where you can learn literally anything you want, at any time, for free. Curious how a jet engine works? There's a video for that. Want to know what's happening on the other side of the world right now, as it happens? Done. Forgotten the name of that actor from that film with the guy from the other film? Answered in about four seconds.

It's easy to take that for granted, but it's genuinely wild if you stop and think about it. I remember growing up in a world where "finding something out" meant signing up for a library card and taking a trip to the library, or just accepting you'd never know. Now it's a tab away.

And it's not just information, it's people too. I can message a friend in another country and get a reply before I've finished making a brew! Video call my family whenever I want. Keep up with people I've not seen in person for years, just by scrolling for thirty seconds. None of that was normal a generation ago.

Social media, for all the grief I'm about to give it later in this post, also does something genuinely good here. It gives everyone a platform. You don't need to work for a newspaper or own a TV network to have a voice anymore. You can just... say the thing. Share the idea. Post the discovery. Anyone can dig.

That's the shovel bit. It's not the problem. The problem is what we do with it.

Digging From an Early Age

Here's where things start to get a bit more uncomfortable.

Kids today don't just have access to the internet, they've basically grown up inside it. Not just social media either, WhatsApp, Snapchat, group chats, gaming voice chats, all of it. And in most of those spaces, they're doing exactly what the shovel was built for: sharing opinions, reacting to things, being themselves in public.

The problem is, "being yourself in public at age 12" is a very different thing to "being yourself in public at age 30." At 12, you don't really have a fixed sense of who you are yet. You're still figuring it out. That's kind of the whole point of being a young adolescent, right? 🤷‍♂️

But the internet doesn't wait for you to finish figuring it out. Whatever you post, whatever group chat message gets sent, whatever opinion gets shared in the moment, it all starts building a record. A version of you, permanently online, formed by someone who hadn't actually decided who they were yet.

And it's not just the big public stuff either. A lot of this digging happens in places that feel completely private. A WhatsApp group. A Snapchat that's supposed to disappear. A message sent to one mate, not the whole world. It feels safe because it's small. But small doesn't mean gone, it just means fewer people saw it dug in the first place.

That's the bit that worries me most, honestly. Adults at least know, on some level, that anything typed into a phone could end up somewhere it wasn't meant to. Kids are still learning that. And they're learning it in real time, with a permanent record being built the whole way through.

The hole starts getting dug way before anyone's actually old enough to understand what a hole is.

The Hole Doesn't Fill Back In

Sacco's story happened in 11 hours. These next four happened over years, sometimes over a decade, which honestly makes them scarier.

Kevin Hart was announced as host of the 2019 Oscars. Two days later, he stepped down after old tweets from 2009 to 2011 resurfaced, years after he'd posted them and long after most people had forgotten they existed.

Chrissy Teigen spent a decade building a public persona as one of Twitter's funniest, most relatable celebrities. Then old tweets from 2011 came back, and she ended up publicly apologising for messages she'd sent as a much younger, much less thoughtful version of herself.

James Gunn was fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2018, over jokes he'd posted almost a decade earlier, between 2008 and 2011. Those particular tweets weren't stumbled on by accident either, they were deliberately dug up and pushed into the spotlight by people with an axe to grind. We'll come back to that bit.

Lauren Edwards, a newly elected Labour MP, had to apologise in 2024 for tweets she'd posted in 2009, fifteen years earlier, back when she was a parliamentary researcher in her twenties, long before "future MP" was even on the radar.

Look at the gaps in those stories. Two years. A decade. Nine years. Fifteen years. That's the bit that should genuinely unsettle you. It's not that a bad post might catch up with you next week. It's that it can sit there, patiently, for over a decade, and still land with exactly the same force the day it resurfaces.

The hole doesn't care how long ago you dug it. It's still there, waiting, whether you remember digging it or not.

Someone Else Holds the Shovel Too

Remember how I said we'd come back to the James Gunn bit? Here it is.

Most of the examples so far are about content just... existing. Sitting there. Getting stumbled on, eventually, by someone scrolling back far enough. But Gunn's case is different, and it matters that it's different.

His old tweets weren't found by accident. They were deliberately dug up by Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator who went looking specifically because Gunn had criticised people he liked. The tweets weren't the point. They were the ammunition. Someone else picked up Gunn's old shovel, on Gunn's behalf, and used it to dig a hole for him.

That's a genuinely different kind of danger to the one we've talked about so far. It's not "I said something dumb once and it eventually came back to bite me." It's "someone went looking for a reason to hurt me, and my old posts gave them exactly what they needed."

And this is where it gets uncomfortable for the "young people online" thread of this post. Because kids and teenagers aren't just at risk of their own old opinions catching up with them one day. They're growing up in a world where other people, classmates, exes, strangers with an agenda, can go digging through years of their posts, screenshots, and group chats, looking for something to use against them. Right now. Not in a decade.

Adults have at least had years to build up a filter. A sense of what's fine to say out loud, what's fine to type, and what should probably just stay as a thought in your head. That filter gets built slowly, usually the hard way, through actually living in the world and occasionally embarrassing yourself in front of people who'll forget about it by next week.

Young people are building that same filter in public, permanently, often in short bursts, on platforms designed to reward the loudest reaction rather than the most considered one. And they're doing it in a world where anyone, a bully, a future employer, a stranger with a grudge, might be the one holding the shovel next.

That's not really their opinions being unfair or dishonest necessarily. It's that the opinions were formed by someone who hadn't finished forming yet, and the internet doesn't come with an asterisk for that.

Australia's Answer

While all this has been playing out, Australia's had a genuinely interesting response: just don't let under-16s dig at all.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill passed with bipartisan support in late 2024, and came into effect on 10 December 2025. Platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, X, Reddit and a few others now have to take "reasonable steps" to stop under-16s from holding an account at all, whether that's a brand new signup or one they already had.

The BBC covered it well when the ban first landed: platforms use things like facial estimation via selfies, ID uploads, or just inferring your age from your online behaviour, to figure out who's underage and lock them out. There's no exemption for parental consent either. If you're under 16, you're out, whether your mum and dad are fine with it or not.

The logic tracks with everything we've talked about so far. If a huge chunk of the "hole digging" is happening before people are old enough to understand what a hole even is, then the simplest fix is to hand over the shovel a bit later.

And credit where it's due, it's not a token gesture either. Platforms face fines of up to A$50 million for systemic failures to comply, which is enough money to make even the biggest tech companies actually pay attention.

It's not perfect. Kids have already found workarounds, from VPNs to just fudging a face scan. But as a first move, delaying the age at which kids start building a permanent public record of themselves? That's a genuinely sensible one.

The UK's Version, and Why a Ban Isn't a Silver Bullet

Britain's watching Australia closely, and it looks like we're about to follow.

In June 2026, Keir Starmer announced that the UK will ban under-16s from platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are expected to be left out of it, which is worth remembering given everything we said earlier about "private" messages not staying private. The legislation is expected to go before Parliament before Christmas, with the ban itself coming into force sometime in early 2027.

It follows the same public consultation route as most UK policy these days: 116,000 responses from parents, teens, and the tech industry, with over 90% of respondents backing an under-16 ban. That's not a marginal call, that's a pretty overwhelming "please do something" from the people who actually deal with this daily.

So credit where it's due, this is a real, meaningful step. But I don't think it's the fix a lot of people are hoping it is, for a few reasons.

First, it delays the age you're handed the shovel. It doesn't change what happens once you've got it. Turn 16, get an account, and you're right back in the same hole-digging position as everyone else, just a couple of years later than you would've been.

Second, and this is the bit that matters most for this post, grown adults dig holes too. Plenty of them. The Kevin Hart, Chrissy Teigen, James Gunn and Lauren Edwards stories weren't teenagers making mistakes, they were adults, some of them well into their 30s and 40s, who still said things they'd later regret, often once they'd found a group of like-minded people cheering them on. An age limit doesn't touch that at all.

So this is a sensible first step. It's just not a silver bullet. It changes when people start digging. It doesn't change the fact that the hole never fills back in.

So, Blessing or Curse?

Right, time to actually answer the question the whole post has been circling.

Technology, the shovel itself, is genuinely brilliant. I meant that earlier and I still mean it now. The ability to learn anything, reach anyone, and share your voice with the whole world is one of the best things humans have ever built. I'm not about to pretend otherwise.

But content is the hole. And the hole is where all the damage actually happens.

Justine Sacco dug hers in the time it takes to type one bad joke, and it swallowed her career before she'd even landed. Kevin Hart, Chrissy Teigen, James Gunn, and Lauren Edwards dug theirs years, sometimes over a decade, before it caught up with them. Kids today are digging theirs earlier than any of us did, often in spaces that feel private but really aren't, building a permanent record before they've even worked out who they want to be.

And once it's dug, that's it. No filling it back in. No growing out of it quietly the way people used to. The internet doesn't do quiet, and it doesn't forget.

That's why, if you're asking me to actually pick a side rather than sit on the fence, I think the balance tips more towards curse than blessing. Not because the good stuff isn't real, it clearly is, but because the bad stuff is permanent and the good stuff usually isn't. A brilliant Google search doesn't compound over ten years. A bad tweet can.

Australia's ban and the UK's upcoming one are steps in the right direction. They just don't fix the actual problem, they only delay when people first pick up the shovel. The shovel was never really the issue anyway. It's what we do with it, and how long the internet decides to remember, that decides whether technology ends up being a blessing or a curse for any one of us.

We built the tool. We're still working out how to be careful with it.