[hutzlibu]

Your last sentence was funny, but I disagree with:

"We need to find a balance of forgetting things online"

I rather think we need to find a balance of dealing with each other's misstakes and abandon Facebooks etc. styled and polished world of perfectness.

We are not perfect. We made misstakes. Lot's of them.

But in most cases that's OK, if we learned from it.

[RubenSandwich]

I think it actually has to be erased, otherwise, some future employer, acquaintance etc, might judge you for something you've moved on from. People do learn and move on from their mistakes, but not when they are continually berated for them because that causes them to be self-defensive and it's my experience that as soon as the defenses go up the ability for self-reflection is lost.

What I mean by balance is that political scandals should definitely not be forgotten, but thoughtless things written by a minor should. I just don't know where the line should be and personally, I think it varies widely by the circumstances.

There is a movement across the globe currently to try to make the internet forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten.

[hutzlibu]

I know there is this movement.

But I believe in truth. And despise hypocrisy ...

But I believe hypocrisy is a follow up, when you set the standard, that there might be no dark past.

So the person from human HR interviewing you than, can look down at you, because your incident made it into local news - but he got lucky and his incident gots forgotten and ereased. And he believes now in his righteous act, even though he did the same things (drugs, racism, whatever).

I rather believe there should be a right to move one. Yeah you did those things, but you learned from it. (or still stand by them) This I would like much more, than pretending everything is and was shiny, which it often was not. But you can't really solve the problems if you can't even talk about them.