30 Embarrassing Social Media Fails That Ruined Careers Or Worse
There’s something comforting about knowing everyone has a social media fail hiding somewhere in their past. Just think about the things you posted before we knew what social media would become. I shiver just thinking about it. Thankfully, I only have to live with being a cringey poster, and haven’t had anything nearly as wild as what people are sharing here.
This AskReddit thread delivered some real gems, so I grabbed the wildest ones. They’re all equal parts crazy, hilarious, and painfully human.
1.
“My grandmother was sending n***s to some guy on her phone and apparently accidentally posted it on Facebook.
Everyone in our family saw the old cave and I never wanted to be more blind in my life then in that moment.”
2.
“Coworker got drunk and was posting Snap stories at the bar. Was tapping through the next morning while taking a s-t and kind of chuckling at the progression of drunkenness with each passing snap. And there it was, the nip slip. I distinctly remember audibly saying ‘Ha, nice… Oh noooo…’
It was a funny conversation on monday morning.”
3.
“I’m 67. Sitting in the hot tub naked, wearing a rain hat and drinking a beer.
My wife comes to the door and snaps a pic..she is partially blind. I didn’t have the jets on.
Within 5 minutes my 40 yr old son texts..’ hey you can see Dads junk in that picture you just posted..’ his wife had seen it lol. Facebook.”
4.
“Girl I worked with made a Facebook post about a ‘nice hot bath’ but EVERYTHING was reflected in the tap.”
5.
“A coworker of mine came to work with a neck brace. She said she wasn’t going to be able to work for a while. A few days later she posted a video of herself dancing at a party. Someone who didn’t like her told the company and she was fired.”
6.
“Maybe tamer than most on here, but I have a friend who only posts pictures of herself that are heavily photoshopped and/or have snapchat filters that make her look ‘better’. (I say ‘better’ because it clears up her skin and straightens her teeth, but it makes her look so fake she looks like she’s a CGI puppet.)
It’s so embarrassing, there’s all these photos of her family on vacation and everyone looks fine except it looks like her husband has his arm around his CGI waifu.
But every now and then, every once in a while, she accidentally uploads a genuine photo, and it’s shocking to see her *look like a real person*. These photos typically get taken down soon after and replaced with a CGI version.”
7.
“Gather ’round children and let me tell you of the horrors of early Facebook.
Back in the late 00s Facebook had a feature where you could send ‘gifts’ to people that were really just a digital picture and spam.
90% of them were so-and-so sent you a bouquet of roses and it’d be a little picture of some flowers and you could click to send another ‘gift’ to someone else.
Anyway, my dad didn’t realize that those would show to everyone on your friends list, and as he was in the process of leaving wife #2 for wife #3 I logged on one day to a wall of ‘[Dad] has sent a spanking to [wife 3]’, ‘[dad] has sent a slave bikini Leia to [wife 3]’, ‘[dad] has sent a sensual kiss to [wife 3].’
I was already mad at him over the obvious affair he had been having, so this triggered us not speaking for several years.
Mouse-Direct: OMG back when you used to see everyone’s c**p on FB. I don’t miss that. Seeing all your friends’ Dads following cam girls. Ew.”
8.
“Many years ago, a coworker of mine made a series of Livejournal posts that she thought were private, chronicling how she was cheating on her husband.”
9.
“Old friend of mine posted his girlfriend’s t*s on Facebook when trying to post a photo of his new quad. He titled it ‘like my new toy?’. 16 likes and one comment later he realized what he had done.”
10.
“Maybe not that bad, but my friend’s mom joined Facebook. She wanted to snoop on an old boyfriend of hers.
She typed his name over and over in the search box…but it wasn’t the search box. It was the status update box. We all saw his name repeated over and over on the feed.
She then made another status update that was ‘how do I delete this s-t?’.”
11.
“I sent a n**e to my friend so she could approve of it before I sent it off to a guy I liked.
Well apparently she was presenting in her college class and forgot to disconnect her phone from the projector before her whole class saw my n**e. Good times.”
12.
“I sent my b***s to my sister by mistake, followed by: does this look like a cancer growth to you ?. Trying to save face.”
13.
“My father liked the local swingers group, not realizing that activity would be seen by EVERYONE.
Cue multiple calls to me by every single mutual friend… . And he couldn’t figure out how to undo it, so we made a one time deal that I would log into his account and do it for him and not look anywhere else.
(Not that I wanted to, I’d already made that mistake when trying to locate a blank CD at our house. It was not blank…).”
14.
“I ranted about my job and my dislike of my supervisor on MySpace. I worked for a political campaign at the time.
A blogger for the opposition party found it and put it on blast. I was emptying out my desk the next morning. I deserved it and leaving that field was for the better in my personal life, but it was one of the most embarrassing and humiliating moments of my life.
The thing has spread around the office like a wildfire and seeing everyone watch me be escorted out remains burned into my brain.”
15.
“My ex thought she was posting in a private chat. She admitted to having a few affairs.
What’s really sad is all the support she got for it and, of course, everyone said it was my fault.
Pretty much the only ones who criticized her and supported me over this were her two sisters.”
16.
“A girl I knew made an instagram post on Remembrance Day (Canadian version of Memorial Day). It said something like ‘Today I want to remember my amazing Grandfather and Opa. Both of them fought bravely in WW2, even though they were on different sides’. The pictures were of her grandfathers in military dress, and the Opa was wearing a very…. distinctive uniform.
I still wish I had screenshotted it, but it was gone when I returned.”
17.
“I had a friend that is a digital illustrator, she takes custom orders.
She logged into the wrong insta and cross-posted some very detailed and quite frankly, very well done dirty furry videos to her fb wall. I sent her a message within 2 minutes of her posting.
But that’s how i found out dirty furry “videos” is expensive and you never know who does what to pay the bills.”
18.
“About 7-8 years ago a married (to a woman) guy in Scotland tried to post a pic of his grandson on Facebook and accidentally uploaded two photos of himself topless with some guy’s **** in his mouth.
He couldn’t work out how to delete it for ages and ended up claiming it was a ‘face swap’. I always wondered if he got away with it or not.”
19.
“I thought instagram was just a way to add cool filters to stuff so I used it to make an artsy d**k-pic I sent to my then GF.
Account got suspended about 30 seconds later and I realized what happened. Thankfully I didn’t have any followers on there at the time, but that was embarrassing to say the least.”
20.
“My bio parents, who haven’t been together since before my birth, openly sexting on each other’s Facebook walls.”
21.
“On FB I belong to a close knit group of women I’ve known for 20 years…we have a private group. In a drunken rage at about midnight, I went to the group and posted a very long, detailed, post about how I was tired of my husband never wanting to have s*x and it had been YEARS and I was over it and over his drama and I’m sorry that his junk didn’t work and I mean just LAID IT OUT THERE. It was not kind but I was hurting and had been drinking and needed to vent but because of the hour I didn’t have anyone to call and these women knew of the issues to a lesser extent.
About 3 minutes after I posted a dear friend of mine, a few hours earlier in her evening due to time zones messaged and said, ‘Not sure if you intended that post to be public…but it is.’ I took it down immediately and thanked her and she played therapist for awhile because clearly I needed it.
But for about 5 minutes intimate details of my non-s*x life and my husband’s ED were out there for the world to see…or at least all of our friends and family. As far as I know no one saw it because no one ever brought it up…or if they did they were kind enough to spare me embarrassment of it. I’m sure no one mentioned it to him because he’d have, rightfully, lost his s**t.
He’s an ex now and I’ve also quit drinking. Neither directly related to this incident though he is an ex due, in part, to the s*x situation.”
22.
“My cousin who was in his 50’s posted naked pics of his gf on facebook dressed as an elf holding presents and candy canes.”
23.
“Someone posted something about loving JFK and I went posted what I thought was a nice normal gif of JFK, not knowing that it was a gif of the zapruder film when he gets shot in the head but over and over again at a seizure inducing speed.”
24.
“Not a post, a comment. Our former classmate’s baby was stillborn. She posted her trauma and another person we went to school commented ‘Congratulations! How is the baby doing now?’
I messaged that person and told them, hey you misread that. Would you want to edit your comment? She replied she was a social media expert and knows what she’s doing. Comment remained.
Lady posts a tribute every year, with the photo, and yes, that horrible comment reappears.”
25.
“A girl I went to school with posted a picture on Facebook of her new tattoo, ‘Belive’. It was up for about 15 minutes before someone posted about the spelling and she deleted it. How she or the ‘artist’ didn’t notice is beyond me.
Amesb34r: Spelling is hard for some people but if it’s something that you can’t delete and write again, like a tattoo for instance, I think I’d triple check that.
ShiraCheshire: I’ve done some pixel art involving letters before. When you’re hyper focused on the tiny details of each letter, it’s easy to lose track of the word and miss/substitute letters. Which is why you need to do something to mark the letter positions and orders before starting.
It’s not a big deal when you’re a teenager on deviantart posting Pokemon pixel art that accidentally says ‘Champon’ instead of ‘Champion’, but it is a very big deal when you’re a tattoo artist.”
26.
“Some of the worst things I’ve seen were not mistakes. Just people sharing waaay too much information with the world about their family and relationships and it’s so embarrassing.
whatsername25: Tell me about it. A woman I know posted a long spiel on Facebook about how her husband cheated on her with her brother’s girlfriend. They’re still together and she’s since deleted the post but everyone knows…”
27.
“My buddy asked my Facebook and other websites kept posting p-n ads, we had to tell him his ads are based off his viewing history.”
28.
“My little brother’s friend posted an album of his 1 year old on Facebook. Middle of the album was a D-pic with his face.”
29.
“Not sure if it technically counts as ‘social media’ but we got a new spindle sander at work (carpentry shop) last year. If you don’t know what that is, picture a dowel about an inch around and 6 inches tall with sandpaper around it rotating very quickly while also moving up and down.
I took a video of it running with the caption ‘best seat in the house!’ and sent it to what I thought was a WhatsApp group chat with my friends. Shortly after posting I realized it was, in fact, the group chat with the board members of my region’s chapter of an international college honors society.
I have never been so thankful that WhatsApp gives you the ability to delete a message. I still don’t know to this day if anyone saw it.
gaijin5: That ‘DELETE FOR EVERYONE’ panic lol. Not knowing who has seen it. Yeah been there.”
30.
“My Twitter and Facebook both got hacked a few years ago. I didn’t own a smartphone at the time, just a regular dumb phone. I was about 4 hours from home and started getting text messages from people all over the place asking me why the f-k I was posting p-n all of a sudden.
Ended up having to call a trusted friend, give him my email password and ask him to please take care of it. Fun day.”