You know the famous sarcastic quip "If it's on the Internet, it must be true"? It applies pretty well in this context as well, don't you think? Since its inception, the Internet has been a breeding ground for deception, fake identities, and imaginary friends. Alright, that last one might just be me projecting, but I was hurt that my real best friend didn't want to be friends anymore, okay?
We tend to lie online less in spaces where the people we know might hold us accountable. On sites like Facebook, Twitter (X), or Instagram, where our followers are mostly our friends. Social media platforms for professionals like LinkedIn are actually better in that regard than, say, paper resumes.
Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication and the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, says that we lead a kind of double life online. He calls it our "inside world" and our "outside world" respectively. Our "inside world" is the immediate circle that we communicate with online: family, friends, colleagues – the people we know.
Our "outside world" is all the accounts and people that we see but don't know personally. That includes posts from strangers, news articles, and comments on any social media platform. Anonymous or not, we're not familiar with these people on a personal level, so they are, essentially, outside our "bubble."
Hancock says that we tend to communicate more honestly with the people in our "inside world." "Those messages are recorded and come from people that we will have future interactions with," he says. "We don't want a reputation as a liar, and it's easier in some ways to get caught in a lie online." He also says that this is one of people's greatest fears – being perceived as a liar.
There's a lot more leeway when communicating with the "outside world." Whether we're anonymous or not, we're much less likely to engage in an online conversation with these people again. Take the comments section, for example: even if you're commenting with your name and picture, what is the likelihood that you'll ever see the person you've just responded to somewhere else again?
Hancock notes that this logic doesn’t only apply to personal communications. "These lies include sock puppets [false identities], follower factories, purchased likes, propaganda bots, and fake news," he explains. "So, the degree to which we can trust messages online is really the degree to which you know the source."
Most people would probably say that people tend to lie most on their dating profiles. In 2017, Kaspersky Lab and B2B International researched the behaviors of people in the online dating scene. 57% admitted to lying about their names, marital status, appearance, or location. In his research, Hancock also found that people tend to lie when they wish to appear more attractive to the other person and when making up excuses as to why they don't want to meet.
