The Year of the Deleted Posts

Candidates keep being haunted by their own pasts on social media.

Graham Platner’s Reddit posts. Abdul El-Sayed’s tweets. David Crowley’s burner account.

After many years of warnings, this is the election cycle where politicians’ social media archives have finally been turned inside-out. Several high-profile races have been jolted in recent months by the discovery of old (often deleted) social media posts by candidates.

Many of the finds have had a certain ideological flavor: progressive Democrats who posted things in the Peak Woke era of 2019-2020 that are no longer quite as fashionable. See Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted X posts calling for defunding the police. Or: New York House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier (“In New York they don’t say ‘I love you,’ they say ‘NYPD suck my dick’ and I think that’s beautiful”), Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (“radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country”), and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong (“Cancel Thanksgiving”).

Other candidates plagued by their social media histories have been caught doing what everyone else does on social media: spouting off. The most notable example has been Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate, who was dinged for his thousands of deleted Reddit posts, opining on everything from foreign wars to porta-potties. Late last month, CNN reported that Troy Jackson — who took Platner’s place as the Senate Democratic candidate in Maine — used an anonymous alias to blow off steam about Republicans in the Bangor Daily News comments section while working with them in the state legislature.

Then, a few days later, NBC News reported that Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — who is running against Hong for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nod — had used his personal email address in his 20s to register an account with the name “Dirt McGirk” and handle @No_pork_plz.

Many of the posts on the account were racially and sexually charged. One said: “#confession I’ve never boink a white woman!! Is that bad???” Another: “That’s just NASTY!!! I wouldn’t f– her with YOUR d–!!!!” #slapyourself” Crowley’s campaign said the account, which was active from 2010 to 2014, was shared with 10-12 other people, and that Crowley himself did not author any of the controversial posts.

Notably, in their unguarded and (they thought) fleeting missives, many of the posters-turned-candidates were found to have shared disparaging things about key constituencies they were now courting. On Reddit, Platner called rural Americans (aka 62% of Maine) “racist” and “stupid.” On Twitter, Utah state Sen. Nate Blouin, who was running for a House seat earlier this year (but was defeated in the Democratic primary), was found to have described the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (aka 61% of Utah) as “a bunch of bigoted assholes.”

Mallory McMorrow, who was running against El-Sayed for the Michigan Senate Democratic nomination (but has since dropped out), deleted X posts in which she complained about the politics of her adopted home state and even pined to leave. “There are days like these that make me miss California even more,” she wrote in one post. “Pushing for [a] future where we don’t own cars… Cars are dead,” she wrote in another, years before running for office in a state defined by its auto industry.

This is not the first election cycle where old social media posts have come back to haunt political candidates: Marjorie Taylor Greene had to answer for hours of old Facebook videos when she was first running for the House in 2020; Mark Robinson’s 2024 campaign for the North Carolina governorship never quite recovered from the revelation that he referred to himself as a “black NAZI” in comments on a pornography website’s message board. (Yes, that was a real sentence.)

But several opposition researchers I spoke to agreed that this cycle stood out for the sheer quantity of candidates being dogged by their social media pasts. “I think we are reaching kind of the peak of this,” said Tyson Brody, who has worked as a “ragpicker” (his words) for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, among others.

Brody, one of the top Democratic opposition researchers, noted that there is a bit of what he calls an “echo effect” going on here. “Whenever there’s a big oppo story on someone, it just makes people want to do the same thing on other people,” he said. In this case, Platner’s trove of Reddit posts meant that every opposition researcher in America started looking through the social media archives of other candidates. Brody likened it to when Trump allies accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of committing mortgage fraud, and then suddenly trying to find the same dirt on all his other enemies, from Sen. Adam Schiff to Fed governor Lisa Cook.

There’s also the age factor, of course. X (formerly Twitter) is now 20 years old. Reddit is 21. Facebook is 22. If you were, say, in your 20s or 30s in the early days of the technology, you’re now the perfect age to be running for Senate or for governor. In addition, this cycle has also seen a wave of less traditional candidates — Platner included — who might have been less likely to have had perfectly manicured pasts on social media.

At the same time, Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic opposition research super PAC American Bridge, told me that combing through social media archives has become harder as more platforms have made it difficult to access old posts in one fell swoop. Opposition research is “much more manual and boring” nowadays, Dennis said. “There are tools that allow you to sort of pull down tweets and read them programmatically. Nothing like we used to have.”

But there are a few tricks of the trade. Oftentimes, people will use the same username across multiple social media accounts — for Mark Robinson, it was “minisoldr”; for Platner, it was “P-hustle” — which means if an oppo researcher can find one account, they might stumble on a goldmine. “A lot of the real effort is finding out what username somebody is associated with, which can be a real jackpot,” Dennis said. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, whose KFILE team has unearthed many of the most damaging social media stories this cycle, has said that he found both the Platner and El-Sayed posts in this fashion.

Joe Rodota, who was one of the first political consultants to specialize in opposition research as a Republican operative in the 1980s (and now writes a Substack on the topic), told me that artificial intelligence has also changed the field. This sort of oppo research requires taking a large corpus of text and picking through it to find interesting themes or examples, the exact sort of thing AI is great at. “This is the first cycle” where AI tools have been adopted widely for opposition research, Rodota said, perhaps contributing to the explosion of stories about old social media posts.

While these scandals have ripped through the headlines all year, there is less consensus on how many races they have actually changed. McMorrow’s old posts appear to have contributed to her losing momentum in her Senate primary, though there were other factors (including her lack of a clear ideological lane) that also played a role. It can hardly be said that Platner’s Reddit posts are what sunk his campaign, though they did contain a sign of what was to come: months before he was credibly accused of sexual assault, we already knew that he had repeatedly downplayed sexual assault in Reddit comments.

Several of the candidates have tried to turn the posts into an advantage, with varying success. “I’m a very real person, warts and all,” Platner said about his Reddit history. “These are normal tweets by a normal person,” McMorrow’s comms director told CNN.

There is also a live question among operatives about whether candidates are best served by deleting the posts; some sources I spoke to said having “deleted” in a headline can make even mundane missives seem more suspicious. Perhaps it’s better just to lay it all out there, knowing there are tools that exist to find things either way. (“No, I think you should delete them,” Dennis responded. “I think you should delete the posts. That is my advice to all candidates.” Especially as platforms start making it harder to access old posts, you never know what might just never be found.)

While this certainly won’t be the last cycle to feature old social media posts, I do wonder how long the trend will last. Many of the aforementioned posts are from a certain time and place: a period in the 2010s when people would create accounts called “Dirt McGirk” with their friends, or dispense every stray thought on Reddit or Twitter, littered with hashtags.

In some ways, those days are over. Studies show that Gen Z social media users are much more private with their social media presences, less liable to overshare than the age cohort slightly older. Indeed, many of these candidates caught up in these scandals this year are from the same generation: McMorrow is 39, Crowley is 40, Platner is 41. All grew up on an internet that was much more casual, and their posts are, frankly, very Millennial. As social media becomes more polished, and not as much a place for random thoughts, it’s possible that (somewhat cutting against expectations) fewer young candidates will reckon with these scandals over time.

As an example, Brody noted 42-year-old JD Vance’s personal website (jdhamel1.blogspot.com) that resurfaced when he was running for vice president in 2024. “No one does a Blogspot anymore,” Brody said. “The idea that you would literally have this kind of personal diary online is horrifying to a lot of younger people, who are more cognizant of finding a job and stuff like that.”

“We are cresting a high point,” he added, “but Millennials are going to be running for a while. There’s still going to be this 15-to-20-year period haunting a lot of people.”

And there will always be ways for people to express thoughts that come back to bite them — just as they always have been. In his 1884 presidential campaign, James Blaine was haunted by a series of letters that were leaked to the press and appeared to link him to allegations of bribery. In 1934, when the author Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California, the Los Angeles Times (which was openly working to defeat him) placed a box on its front page every day, “Sinclair on ____,” which would contain an out-of-context quote from one of his novels saying something inflammatory, not unlike the ads that now broadcast old social media posts from Platner or Talarico.

Even if Gen Z candidates-to-be stop posting so openly on social media, many still vent their innermost thoughts in forums they think are more private.

“If you want to talk about things that are in their golden age right now, it’s the group chat,” Dennis said. “You’ve seen this time and time again across the right wing. As people have become more afraid of posting things on the open internet, things have moved to Discords, they’ve moved to group chats. They’ve moved to these smaller walled gardens that seem really safe, until the Achilles heel that we’ve seen: somebody inside the group chat leaks on you, and then you were just acting as if this is a safe space, and it is not.”

No matter the platforms people gravitate to, for opposition researchers, “Business is always booming,” Brody said. “People are always interested in this stuff.”