“These problems are only going to grow more intense,” said Melissa Zukerman, a partner at Principal Communications, which has clients like Marvel Studios, Imax, Legendary Entertainment and the art film studio A24. “It’s the result of a collision of two things: a new cultural intolerance for harassment and bias; and the accessibility of everything, from a decade of Twitter posts to videos taken at high school parties to college term papers.”

Ms. Zukerman and another Principal Communications partner, Paul Pflug, pointed to the furor that broke out on Friday around Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, after the discovery of a racist photograph on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. Mr. Northam first acknowledged that he was one of the people in the image, which showed a person in blackface with another in a Ku Klux Klan robe. He later reversed himself and has refused calls for his resignation.

With Edgeworth as its partner, Foresight will have the ability to review online information in 200 languages, scour social media networks, search court records and even plumb the so-called dark web. Foresight will offer multiple services, but its core offering, Red Flag, involves exhaustively scrubbing a person’s online footprint and recommending how to remedy anything problematic — although the firm will stop short of saying whether a person should be hired at all.

Take the situation with Mr. Hart and the Oscars. Had Foresight existed, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might have contacted the firm while he was under consideration to host. Foresight’s research would have turned up his circa-2010 anti-gay comments. The firm would have flagged them for the academy and provided suggestions (should the organization still want to hire him) to address the matter: Have an apology ready, for instance, and perhaps ask Glaad, the L.G.B.T. advocacy organization, to assess whether Mr. Hart’s views had changed.

“How might something be used as a teachable moment?” Ms. Zukerman said. “If you are really going to mitigate risk, you also have to take a hard look at what reparation looks like.”