Perhaps one of the most disingenuous things we say to ourselves is that our social media posts do not reflect our true personality. In people’s bios, you see “I’m here for fun, my tweets are not me”, and it sounds really cool. After all, aren’t we all meant to simply have fun on IG or TikTok and keep it moving? Or enjoy a debate with a random stranger and move on?
What makes the things we say and how we say them a big deal? However, arguments have shown that our social media presence can present an accurate depiction of who we are in real life, even if we do not want it to be so. Dr Margeret Hall and Dr Simon Caton once tried to find out how much of people’s personalities can be revealed through their social media presence.
“We were looking for the ‘Big 5’: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We found that we could predict where a person fell on the scale for each trait with a high level of accuracy. Posts about TV programmes were particularly revealing.” After studying about 500 people on Facebook, they concluded that someone, perhaps a potential employer, can possibly observe your personality through your social media pages.
Perhaps it would be rash to swiftly form an opinion on who a person is through their social media posts. One could agree that social media is not real life, and we sometimes decide how we want people to perceive us. People can create fake personalities for themselves online to appease other people.
Others may use social media to satisfy their alter egos or embody a part of themselves they wish they could be in the real world – like an introvert being quite extroverted online. Or a shy person