Whether you’re job searching or have a pending friend request from your boss, it’s a good idea to clean up your social media profiles every once in a while. After all, even if you’re pretty militant about what gets posted publicly, things can slip through the cracks (i.e., that Throwback Thursday photo from freshman year you didn’t realize you were tagged in). But, let’s face it, you don’t always have time to comb through your profiles to find this potentially questionable content.
That’s why we were pretty stoked to find SimpleWash, a new app designed to quickly make your profiles squeaky clean. Basically, it scans all the content on your Facebook profile—including comments by other people on photos or posts—and detects key words that might be associated with things you don’t want a potential employer seeing (drugs, alcohol, profanities, and the like).
You can browse through all of the flagged content, click on anything you want to remove, and be transferred directly to the post on Facebook, where you can delete or hide it. An even more helpful feature: You can run custom searches to make sure you’ve never voiced any negative opinions about the company you’re about to interview with (i.e., “Thanks for the 6-hour delay, United. #lame”).
Not every post SimpleWash picks up will be something you want to remove (i.e., when I ran it, “crack me up” often got picked up as a potential drug reference), but it’s a good way to quickly review the messages you’re sending to the world.
Oh, but SimpleWash only detects words. So for now, you’ll still have to filter out those old college party photos on your own.
Get SimpleWash for Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter version is currently in Beta, but if you’re desperate to clean up your feed, just shoot the company a tweet.