Taylor West, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran, lives in Winslow.

I started using the internet when I was 11. One of the first things my parents told me was, “Remember, whatever you put online will be out there forever.” 

My friends and I made MySpace accounts and learned how to “code.” We watched videos with silly jingles like, “Cat, I’m a kitty cat, and I dance, dance, dance, and I dance, dance, dance.”

This innocence quickly devolved into sitting around a computer during sleepovers. We laughed, oblivious to danger. Inevitably we were exposed to sexual predators online. The things grown men said to my friends and I as children, online, still echo in my mind. They shaped how I view men, the internet and intimacy itself. 

Life went on. The internet became more and more accessible. When young boys with the same wisdom as us began asking for intimate photos and issued myriad other sexual requests, we would anxiously oblige. My story is not unlike that of many millennials, especially millennial women. 

As an adult, the knowledge of my online history being “there forever” has resulted in a persistent fear of those moments coming to light. This fear, this fear of shame, has even prevented me from stepping up to help my community. What disturbs me most about this is the awareness that men my age probably don’t stress about society finding out about what they sent or received as kids or young adults.

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From an early age, girls are taught to carry the burden of sexual responsibility: to protect our reputations, to anticipate consequences and to feel shame for what others ask of us. Meanwhile, boys are often excused as curious or immature. “Boys will be boys.” 

The result is a culture where young women are haunted by choices made under pressure, while young men can move on and potentially even gain social status once their indiscretions come to light. This uneven distribution of shame isn’t just unfair, it’s a form of social control that punishes girls for participating in dynamics they didn’t create. While this dynamic has been true for centuries, we should know enough from our past to know we cannot foster an environment of change while we have a generation of young Americans hiding in the shadow of shame.

In a 2024 study done by the United Nations, technology-facilitated gender-based violence was introduced as new terminology. This type of violence could take the form of cyberbullying, doxing or even “intimate image abuse.” This same study highlights that 80% of women in the public eye in Latin American and Caribbean countries restrict their online presence due to safety concerns. According to another study, 73% of female journalists have experienced online violence for sharing certain types of news.

We’re seeing this America. We currently have a president who openly called a reporter “piggy.” Not only is it reprehensible to have a commander in chief treat journalists this way publicly, we should all be ashamed that the woman the president targeted went without the slightest defense from any co-worker or peer present. This sets a standard for how we treat women across the board, not just in a professional capacity.

Even more concerning than that, analysis published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in 2021 noted that “women, particularly those in positions of leadership or activism, are subject to more online abuse than men” and that, according to a 2018 study, “female politicians and journalists in Britain and the United States are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds.”

The comments made about women in these attacks is what makes them sexist. Where men are targeted for their policies and intellect, women are targeted for their appearance. One member of the Quebec National Assembly even received threats calling her a prostitute or suggesting she should “get dressed or commit suicide.”

These numbers more than likely don’t surprise anyone. However, what’s beginning to surprise me is the fact that we are vilifying internet posts, not vilifying the individuals calling for people to kill themselves because of what they chose to wear. I don’t think I realized the magnitude of this issue until I began reading about the absurdity of journalists working to uncover old Reddit posts and comments from Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.  

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Not only does the smearing of Platner’s military service, reputation and efforts to further serve our country (and, more specifically, our state) potentially distract from an altruistic campaign. It also cannot be lost on Mainers that this criticism is coming from a generation that does not know how to properly use the internet.

What is especially rich about this generational difference is that these critics are the same individuals who refuse to legislate the internet, privatize it or do anything to protect minors online. The final nail in the coffin of hypocrisy is the tendency of opponents to air out people’s dirty laundry when they themselves never had to grow up with the internet, never contended with this online record themselves.

This is not an issue faced by the “good ol’ days” Americans crying to make America “great” again. We should not be spending our time digging up people’s history for no reason. We’re hiring politicians, not pastors.

Some may harken to how this happened with Presidents Nixon and Clinton and how the morals of our president are important. I agree with this. But the standards we hold each other to cannot be subjective.

We currently have a president who was found liable in a civil case for sexual assault, features in the Jeffrey Epstein files, openly violates the Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Convention and has violated more than his fair share of laws regarding the handling of delicate or sensitive material. Meanwhile, our state is dampening the fire ignited by Platner, a man raising money, galvanizing volunteers and promising to create the change we’ve been begging for.

Young people want to help. However, if we aren’t paid adequately for our work, are demonized for our words and have to spend more time defending our past than building on our hopes and plans for our future, our nation won’t be able to continue the great American experiment.

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Part of the issue with the Platner criticism is the lackluster follow-up from Democratic leadership. Democrats have been seen as weak for several years now, and this public retreat from a strong candidate solidifies that impression. Democrats are supposed to be the party of social change and support. The party that believes that everyone, no matter their background, can create a positive impact. The hypocrisy of us standing up for those beliefs while damning Platner is no better than the hypocrisy of the Republican Party claiming to care for families and children while refusing to pass budgets. 

If we want young people with new ideas to be in government at every level, we need to get over the fact we are going to see deleted posts we may not agree with. More importantly, we need to ensure, as a party, that when we inevitably see these tweets, our response is not knee-jerk condemnation but thought-out responses. Ultimately, if our leaders truly believe in redemption and progress, we must extend those values to our own candidates. Otherwise, we betray the very ideals we claim to uphold. 

As a nation, we are crying out for the dismantling of gerontocracy while simultaneously demonizing every younger individual who steps up to try to create change. Although I don’t excuse what Platner said on the internet, I refuse to believe that youthful mistakes should obscure a lifetime of service. If we want a future led by people unafraid to evolve, we must build a culture that forgives growth instead of condemning it.

I am hopeful that legislators will work together to create meaningful policy to protect people from the darkness that the internet can bring to our communities. We need policies that will prevent strangers from diving into our earliest activity online. Policies that will protect minors from being abused and having that abuse used against them in the future.

We need to begin demanding guardrails be put into place to protect future policymakers and community leaders from being fearful of their online past. There’s a balance we need to find between holding each other accountable for violence and hate and vilifying each other for disagreements and personal growth. Until we can find this balance, we will never be able to have “fair and clean elections” in the digital age.