Wannabe lawyers, beware your social media history
A University of Bedfordshire law graduate working for former human rights lawyer Sadiq Khan has been suspended over a series of offensive social media posts made back in 2012.
Shueb Salar — who is a parliamentary aid to London mayoral candidate Khan — sent a number of offensive tweets from his personal Twitter account.
According to Salar’s LinkedIn (screenshot below), that has since been deleted, he obtained a “second class” LLB from the University of Bedfordshire, graduating in 2014. During the second year of his course, Salar spent six months at Middlesex-based immigration specialist Malik Law Chambers Solicitors, as a “legal intern”.
In one tweet — that was sent during his time on the LLB — Salar tells his 200 plus followers:
Currently hating on all you faggots who have finished uni.
In another, more extreme tweet, Salar says:
Had the funniest tube journey ever! Some rowdy chavs were cussing these 2 gay guys for kissing LOL maybe they deserved it.
The messages were tweeted almost two years before Salar began working for Khan’s Westminster office.
The suspension highlights how your social media past can still have a profound impact on your prospects, years down the line.
With many top City firms acknowledging that checking a candidate’s Facebook or Twitter is now an integral part of today’s recruitment process, aspiring lawyers beware. Despite law firms unlikely to delve back as far as 2012, a drunk Facebook rant or ill advised tweet could be the difference between securing a training contract and being left out in the cold.
The way we conduct ourselves on social media has become such an issue, websites have been created especially to deal with the subject.
Tweetdelete.net allows users to delete social media posts automatically after a prescribed period of time, or alternatively, permanently get rid of up to 3,200 tweets in one go, in order to avoid embarrassment.
A spokesman for Khan told the Mail Online:
Clearly these are serious issues. Shueb Salar has been suspended from Sadiq Khan’s parliamentary office pending an investigation
Salar has since deleted his Twitter account.