Scrubber does an ok job, but you are better off policing your own content.
Scrubber.social is a social media service that goes through your Facebook, Twitter, or even Tumblr, and flags anything that might be considered inappropriate or controversial. Anyone looking for a job or just looking to clean up their internet presence might find this tool useful.
Unfortunately, you have to pay for it. I say unfortunately not because I don’t think this service is worth the money but because I like free things. There is a free trial of sorts, but it only tells you the first few things that show up on the report before demanding you upgrade to look further than yesterday’s salty posts (if you’re me) about kooky Christmas sweaters. So know that if you plan on checking out Scrubber, you’ll probably be disappointed with the free trial if you’re trying to clean up posts from that embarrassing new-to-social-media-so-posting-everything phase you went through years ago. I only tested the free trial, but it does give you a look at what Scrubber does (and then tempt you to upgrade so you can see your full report later on).
To start, you go to Scrubber’s website and start the free trial. You give it your email so it can send you a report card after its finished browsing your accounts, and you link it to the social media platforms you wish to tidy up. The options are Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Reddit. It then takes a bit for Scrubber to go through and flag any posts ever with potentially dangerous keywords related to profanity, politics, drugs or alcohol, strip clubs, or Las Vegas (just in case). The results can be hit or miss. In my case, for the 10 results I could see with the free trial, one was flagged because a company in the post had the word “tipsy” in its name (a post about a sweater I want that has Santa riding a unicorn) and four were tweets that mentioned America (flagged for politics). One was a retweet about the DAPL protests that was flagged as alcohol related but not for politics because of the use of the word “poison.” There were also a few posts that flagged certain words that were not flagged when used in other posts, so I’m not entirely sure how Scrubber catches and flags things.
Depending on how deplorable your past internet behavior was and how often you post, it might be worth the money to clean up your social media profiles. If you’re not sure, you can run the free trial to see if the number of flagged items is worth your attention (mine is 216 of 4,967 posts, and I got a D). Just based on this trial, I wouldn’t buy it. I definitely like the idea of cleaning up my internet presence, but the few results I viewed didn’t give me enough confidence in this specific tool to go past the free trial step. So for now, I’ll just keep on keeping on with my apparently bad internet behavior and try to cut back on the cursing and tweets about America.
For more information, visit scrubber.social.
Find Scrubber on Facebook and Twitter.
