Vetting Writers

Something I've been seeing a lot of lately in the feminist/activist blogosphere: dredging up a blogger's past (or past work) as proof of said blogger's bigotry.  Feministe and xojane have both apologized after publishing some controversial posts, and in the case of the xojane blogger, it was her Twitter feed that was cited (though the post itself was reeking of privilege and excuses).

Without going into too much detail, as I'm only a semi-regular at Feministe, and a mere luker at xojane (which to its credit, is not a feminist blog, but a lot of self-identified feminists are part of their community), both things were bad, like, real bad. But if you pride yourself on being at least somewhat socially aware, shouldn't you be doing a better job at vetting your bloggers? And what does it say about the rest of us who are plodding along, trying to unpack our own privileges while leaving a record of things we've written we aren't so proud of?

I've been online is some capacity for a long time. I've written under my own name and for a big mainstream blog. Not everything I've written was ideologically perfect. I may have re-tweeted something I thought was funny, but in fact was just in really poor taste. There were words I didn't know were offensive until I started participating in the SJ and feminist blogosphere. I'm not making excuses for things  I've written in the past, and I'm truly sorry, but I can't help getting a little nervous when I see things from a writer's past being brought up as evidence of their current indiscretions.

Of course, this is only possible because of the internet's capacity for archiving everything. I'm not sure what my stance is on this, or whether there is a correct one or not. I think a lot could be spared by vetting the bloggers in advance rather than have this stuff come up in the comments. But where does it end? Fish through every tweet or every status update?