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Originally Posted by QuikSand
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Huh. Interesting one. Because of my years in close proximity to some high school football programs, my social media friend universe contains maybe a couple dozen high school and college coaches. At some point, just about every one of them has posted generic advice to young athletes about how their social media feed could cost them a scholarship and/or a job offer, and sometimes they use screen shots as example. I'm guessing that I see these sorts of "PSAs" once or twice a month. As a result, I probably have a bit of an inherent "she should have known better" bias that may not be fair in all cases. That said, if the potential employer asks you to follow their IG feed, shouldn't that be a least a yellow flag that they want you to make it easy for them to check out your online presence?
FWIW, a high enough percentage of my former YL kids use "altered" versions of their names on both FB and IG that I can only assume that it's a fairly well-known best practice to do so. This is the group that was in high school or college when FB first came out, and only high school kids, college kids, and people they invited had access to it. As a result, many of their feeds from back then are rampant with pics of drinking and/or weed smoking, profane rants, etc. I'm sure that if they don't want to delete their accounts, rather than trying to scrub stuff from 2005, it's just easier to change their names so that no potential employer can see that stuff. Examples: 31-year-old with initials of "T.M." now goes by "Taylor Made" on both FB and IG. Late-20s lawyer now goes by his first and middle names, last name nowhere to be found on social media. Even a certain former UT and Tucker High tailback who infamously shunned UGA because "UT plays for National Championships and Georgia goes to the Peach Bowl"--and then proceeded to play in and *lose* two Peach Bowls at UT--now uses a fake name despite his mug being easily recognizable to any serious SEC fan.
In every single one of these cases I've seen, the person used to use their first and last name, but changed it, so it seems fairly clear that it's to avoid this sort of thing.