Some US students say hiring managers and college admissions officers are holding their social media content around subjects like mental health against them
Tatum Hunter / Washington Post : Tweets: @marshacollier , @kari_paul , @mattnavarra , @washingtonpost , @taylorlorenz , and @tatum_hunter_ Tweets: Marsha Collier / @marshacollier : TikTok loves true confessions. Colleges, not so much. 👉 GenZ grew up online. 👉 Their ‘digital footprints’ may haunt them. #socialmedia https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Kari Paul / @kari_paul : not to be a luddite but it does seem concerning that the most popular platform for young people algorithmically encourages oversharing and trauma dumping with no safeguards in place for what that means in the future https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : U.S. college admissions officers continue to look at TikTok profiles and other ‘digital footprints’ The no. of college admissions officers who visited applicants' social profiles in 2022: 1 in 4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @washingtonpost : Generation Z grew up online. Their “digital footprints” on apps such as TikTok may haunt them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : This story reminds me of a piece I wrote about teenagers paying services to wipe their full online footprints before applying to college https://mashable.com/... https://twitter.com/... Tatum Hunter / @tatum_hunter_ : NEW: While corporate social media campaigns “raised awareness” around subjects like mental health and body positivity, young people shared their experiences in droves. Now, some colleges and jobs are holding it against them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop the Washington Post opened years earlier: reporting in [[a:946833|2019 showed ~44 US universities working with outside firms to data-mine and rank prospective students, including their web activity]], and schools like Syracuse U. were already tracking students' phones for attendance, raising desensitization concerns about constant surveillance. What has changed now is direction — students are discovering that content they post voluntarily, not just data collected passively, is being read back at them.
The specific subject matter is the twist. As [[a:836197|the companion report notes, colleges are weighing posts about mental health and body positivity]] during admissions, and the same dynamic reportedly applies to hiring managers. That collides with what MIT Technology Review flagged back in late 2019 — that obsessive online documentation makes it hard for young people to shed past identities.
First-order effects
- Applicants who posted openly about mental health now face concrete penalties from two gatekeepers — admissions officers and hiring managers — turning disclosure into a selection risk.
- Generation Z users must actively manage or delete content they created under platforms that rewarded confessional posting.
Second-order effects
- Platforms like TikTok are caught in the squeeze: as Kari Paul's commentary notes, the most popular youth platform algorithmically encourages oversharing, while its institutional audience treats that oversharing as disqualifying — pushing users toward anonymity or platform exit.
- The screening market around admissions and recruiting grows more valuable, since schools already demonstrated willingness to buy outside data-mining services rather than build surveillance in-house.
Third-order effects
- If voluntary posts join harvested data as admission inputs, the effective norm becomes lifetime performative identity management — the endpoint of the trajectory MIT Technology Review described, where no past self can be outgrown.
- Institutions that normalize reading applicants' mental-health content may eventually face regulatory scrutiny over screening practices, though whether US regulators act on admissions data use remains genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Gatekeeping institutions are shifting from harvesting applicant data passively to judging what young people voluntarily publish, completing the conversion of Gen Z's digital footprint into a permanent evaluation record.