By starting with the posts, comments and tags that you know might get you in trouble, you’re probably getting most of the ones that others know about too. Photo of you naked, strapped to a pole with a bullseye drawn on your arse with lipstick? Delete. Tweet about how many dingers you shelved at Splendour that year? Delete. Thought that going to muck-up day dressed as a Klansma… you get my drift.

This one might be the most overlooked, as the fact that a tweet doesn’t necessarily age well isn’t always your fault. What if you tweeted, back in 2015, how much you loved Harvey Weinstein? Or Bill Cosby? Or how Roseanne is long overdue for a comeback? All innocuous tweets in their own right, but over time might prove to be a little bit … well … shit.

This is by the far the most tedious and boring part of hoping the internet forgets your previous bullshit, but if you’re a real shit-stirrer, a necessary one. Scrolling through each post, one at a time, used to be the only way to guarantee a new life as the social media nice guy, but thanks to Scrubber, a web-based service that allows you to filter through past posts (including comments made by your dickhead friends) for nudity, profanity, mentions of drugs or alcohol, and religious / political views (just in case).

This may seem like the most obvious, but it’s perilously easy to assume that there’s no actual dirt floating around the rest of the web, that isn’t necessarily on your social pages. See, there’s this website called “Google” (pretty sure they just made that up) that basically aggregates every single thing that’s ever happened into literally millions of pages of search results. You can check it out at google.com.

Seriously, this is the easiest way to hide yourself online from people who aren’t approved to see your profiles on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, and not a bad idea in the current era. What started as a way to connect with friends has also become a way of wearing a little too much on your sleeve, and given the ability to pull up dirt on just about anybody is easily demonstrable, updating your security settings is certainly a better idea than dropping the N-word in a comment, even if you were just referencing the lyrics to Chamillionaire’s breakthrough hit Ridin’ Dirty, which, was, like, totally not even a thing back then. Everybody did it. Right. Right?