Social media creating false personas in an effort to be accepted

Posted October 2020

By Narden Ishak

Staff Reporter

People on social media act, or fake being nice, to feel loved and accepted by an audience online.

I definitely think it's really easy to pretend to be someone you are not online. For example, Instagram influencer / YouTuber Natalia Taylor shared luxurious Bali vacation pictures on her Instagram. She later revealed on her YouTube channel those pictures were taken at her local Ikea as an experiment to see if she could trick her followers and prove that not everything on Instagram is real.

"Life on the Internet isn't always what it seems; especially in this day and age where it's so easy to pretend to be anyone you want to be," she explains in her YouTube video. "So many influencers have actually been caught in the act pretending to be at a destination when they really weren't; it is just either photoshop or it's not even them."

Social media is an excellent way to get to know your favorite celebrities. We can hear, engage, and see their selfies directly from them, or at least we hope to.

“Of course, there are celebrities out there who hire ghostwriters, and it isn’t actually them, and you don’t know—they try to pass it off,” stated Scott Kleinberg, former social media editor at the Chicago Tribune, to Vanity Fair in a 2016 interview. “It’s not necessarily as authentic an experience as you think, although some fans don’t know the difference, [and] some fans don’t care.”

Sometimes posts and the media come back to haunt celebrities when they are caught lying. In January of 2019, in a celebrity scandal that captured attention online and across the media, actor Jussie Smollett was accused of staging a racist, anti-gay attack on himself in Chicago, causing him to face a felony charge for allegedly filing a false police report.

Even when Instagram and other social media apps were not popular there were still scandals. In 1998, president Bill Clinton declared that he, ”did not have sexual relations with that woman.¨ When confronted with allegations of engaging in an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the White House that was “not appropriate.”

Catfishing is another example of faking online to feel loved, accepted, and experience what it would be like to be more attractive, be the opposite gender, or to escape insecurities. I don't think catfishing helps insecurity. When reality hits, it will just make it worse. There's a reality MTV show called Catfish that has been airing since 2012, which follows the journey of couples who have formed an online relationship, but have never met in person, then what happens when they meet in real life for the first time. The show feels scripted due to the reactions of the people meeting their partners. Sometimes they're a little too overactive, and other times they are a little too calm. Even celebrities can get catfished. American actor Thomas Gibson was catfished for two years. Australian rapper Iggy Azalea revealed on Catfish that she was catfished by her own mother posing as a super fan, and NFL star Manti Te'o was duped, just like the media, by the widely reported death of his girlfriend from leukemia.

Phys.Org began a psychological research to investigate what kind of person becomes a catfish. They recruited 27 people from around the world who self-identified as catfish for online interviews that were mainly focused on their motivations and feelings about their catfishing behavior. They found that loneliness was mentioned by 41% of the respondents as the reason for their catfishing. Some claimed that a lonely childhood and ongoing struggles with social connection were contributing factors. That makes me think that these people might have suffered from Reactive Attachment Disorder, or RAD, which is a condition in which an infant or young child does not form a secure, healthy emotional bond with their primary caretakers (parental figures), which might cause the child trouble managing their emotions or cause a struggle to form meaningful connections with other people.

Insecurity about physical appearance was also common.

"If I try to send my real, unedited pictures to anyone that seems nice, they stop responding to me,¨ one respondent said.

That's kind of similar to an experience I had. I was looking into how to start a small business, an etsy shop to be specific, and I found a lot of tiktokers and youtubers who were making helpful content, but they weren't saying everything. I had a lot of questions about certain details and since all these people seemed nice and encouraged their fans to message them with questions, I did. I messaged several people and even though they were popular, they still didn't have a lot of followers, so I expected they would reply to me. Literally two out of nine got back to me. I am quite sure they didn't have a ton of messages and mine was lost in the masses. I felt very disappointed that these people didn't actually respond to my messages like they claimed they would.

¨Some people are real. Some people are good. Some people are fake and some people are real good at being fake.¨ -Anonymous