How Brands Vet A Creator's Old Posts
A creator's old posts are a public record kept by someone who did not know they were keeping one. Brands now screen that record before signing, and the practice has arrived faster than any agreement about how it should work.
The trigger was predictable. A handful of campaigns unravelled not because of the work but because of something the creator had posted years earlier, and procurement responded the way procurement does.
What screening old posts actually looks for
Three tiers, in practice. Legal exposure, which is narrow and uncontroversial. Category conflict, meaning a creator who mocked the product type or endorsed a competitor. And reputational risk, which is where it becomes subjective and where most of the arguments happen.
The first two are legitimate diligence. The third is a brand deciding what opinions it will tolerate in a person it is paying for two posts.
There is a difference between checking whether someone is safe to work with and auditing their past for opinions.
What creators should expect
That it is happening, usually by a tool rather than a person, and usually without being told. A reasonable ask is simple transparency: tell the creator screening took place and what period it covered.
The part brands get wrong
Treating an old post as a current position. People change, and a scan that surfaces something from eight years ago with no sense of context produces a lot of false positives and a strong incentive for creators to delete their own history.
What good practice looks like
A defined lookback period, a human reviewing anything flagged, category conflict treated separately from opinion, and a right of reply. None of that is expensive, and all of it is rarer than it should be. ASCI's codes govern what a post may claim, not what a person said in 2018, and the two should stay separate.
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