The Internet Never Forgets

TechEyeSpy Newsletter 14th September 2025

The Internet Never Forgets your sins

The internet never forgets. That’s the lesson being learned the hard way this week as waves of progressive commentators, academics, and junior professionals are being pushed out of their roles over flippant comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. Many thought they were making harmless “hot takes” in the fog of breaking news. Days later, those comments have resurfaced in screenshots, archives, and AI-fed search logs not just from this week but from years of digital history.

Freedom of speech has always carried consequence, but never before has consequence been so automated. A remark that once might have disappeared into the ether is now searchable, sharable, and permanent. Employers scan Twitter threads. AI monitoring tools trawl Discord chats. A friend’s screenshot becomes the evidence in a HR tribunal. The result is mass dismissals, a new kind of digital reckoning that reveals the paradox of online speech: we are freer to speak than ever, yet never more accountable.

It raises a deeper question: what does freedom of speech mean in an era when every word is preserved in silicon, replayed without context, and punished without appeal? And what role do the tech companies play in building and profiting from this permanent memory?

This week’s paid dispatch tackles that head-on. We’ll examine how digital permanence is reshaping both personal freedoms and corporate risk, before diving into this week’s Tech Nectar our sharp digest of market-moving tech news and closing with a feature on the education sector, as September classrooms open to a wave of new AI-powered learning tools.