Trust Me, I’m A Lying Social Media Performer

The early 2010’s internet used to be so simple. 

Facebook was used for connecting with friends. Instagram for sharing our pictures. Twitter for our thoughts. And LinkedIn to network. Everything was shown in chronological order. 

Fast forward to today, and the internet has become one Great Online Game. Every tweet is supposedly a free lottery ticket. Every TikTok video is a bingo card to overnight fame. And we’re promised endless asymmetrical opportunities so long as we put ourselves out there. But here’s the thing: with great opportunities comes great deceit. We’re now living in the Golden Age of Lying.

Facebook and Twitter have become a cesspool of rage bait. Instagram — the art gallery hosting the exhibition: #livinmybestlife. And LinkedIn — where gurus write broetry on How To Make $10,000/month in 5 Simple Steps.

Morgan Housel @morganhousel

.@jasonzweigwsj's three ways to get paid to write: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

Of course, people have lied in the past and will continue to lie in the future. But today, algorithms incentivise us to exaggerate and extrapolate certain truths. It rewards us for telling social media performance lies. To stretch the truth. To bend it. And to make us seem better than we are. 

All of this is causing me to become cynical. I no longer know Who, What, Where, When and Why to believe on the internet. I know a few people who base their persona on posting motivational quotes on Instagram and Twitter. They engage in what my friend Trung calls motivational signalling – A conspicuous attempt to display on social media that they’re always positive, driven, and motivated. Yet, I know that in real life, these people are just ungrateful, miserable bastards. 

Of course, presenting ourselves in a favourable light is nothing new. We’ve been flexing our talents since the dawn of time for sex.  But what feels different in this modern era is the pervasiveness of performative self-promotion.

We “soft-launch” our new boyfriend campaign. Art-direct our romantic dinner at Nobu. And spend hours crafting captions like advertising copy for our photos.

The social media era has conditioned everything we do in real life through the lens of “how will this look like on social media?” This includes me. I had to take a step away from Twitter because I found myself thinking in tweets — how can I turn my thoughts into catchy, pithy sentiments?

We all know everything on social media is superficial. But that doesn’t stop us from engaging in superficial behaviour.

I’ve certainly done it. There have been many attempts at turning myself into a personal brand. I, too, wanted to follow in the footsteps of the A.I. guy, the marketing girl, or the insert-some-niche guru.

I know it’s good for my online writing career, but at the same time, the thought of it plagues me. Because every time I play the personal brand game, it drives a split between who I am and how I want to be seen.

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Not In The Mood For Love

It’s not just social media that’s a culprit here.

In 2021, data was released on how couples meet. And for the first time in history, most couples now meet online (which is still growing rapidly). 

Yet, as a recovering dating app-oholic, I noticed I previously optimised online dating to resemble something closer to a cold lead generation funnel:

1. Create awareness and send a tailor-made message

2. Provide value and make them smile

3. Get their number

4. Evaluate what they have to offer

5. Ask for a date

Rinse and repeat. It’s become so performative that it has stripped people of their dimensionality.

The act of giving someone a chance and slowly getting to know them disappeared. Why bother when someone better could be waiting after the next swipe? It was either fuck yes or no.

It has changed the nature of our expectations. Whenever we see something, meet someone, date someone or work somewhere, there’s always a bit of a letdown – they weren’t who they said they were. Everything now looks better in the black mirror. 

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The Psychology of Social Media

We make an average of 35,000 decisions every day. Most are made using the rules of the subconscious brain known as heuristics – mental shortcuts to make quicker decisions. These shortcuts privilege certain types of information, which can give rise to many of our biases. Algorithms work by exploiting our heuristics.

For instance:

We make decisions based on how they make us feel over whether they’re the logical and rational choice – emotion bias.

We remember the first and the last thing on a list – the serial position effect.

We choose things based on how quickly we can remember or whether they’re immediately available – availability bias.

We often pick the default option – default bias.

We value things that are scarce – scarcity.

We are biased toward people who are popular, beautiful or similar to us – the halo effect.

So how does the algorithm exploit our heuristics?

Well, let’s say you’re deciding to follow someone on Twitter—how would you decide?

You would probably check their profile to learn more about them. The first thing you’d look at is their number of followers. This has a significant impact on your decision. Your brain’s internal dialogue will either say, “Only 50 followers?... I don’t think so.” Or “Wow! 500,000 followers! I better follow!”

Yet, what if that second account has 499,999 bots and the person’s mom? Your brain doesn’t know that when it makes quick decisions. It just has an immediate instinct that this person is more valuable and worth following than someone with fewer followers.

Social media doesn’t care how good you actually are. It only cares about how well you can play the algorithm game. So if you want to stand out and capture attention, you have to exaggerate yourself. Be vaguely controversial. Push the limits of what you say and split your personality into multitudes – or you will fall into the pits of social media obscurity. 

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Martin Luther King hoped that one day we’d be judged by the “content of our character.” But it seems like we skipped that entirely and are now judged by the character of our content. 

We’ve fallen for vanity metrics because, well, they’re easy for our heuristics to measure and base our judgement on. They give the appearance that we’re important, but often they mean nothing. Having 1 million followers doesn’t mean you’re a good person. Just ask Sam Bankman Fried.

Sure, the internet has created new opportunities — and I’ve certainly benefited from it. But it’s exhausting. Being human is hard enough. But now we’ve got to spend half our time passively advertising our intrinsic worth to make money, find love, get ahead or even just exist.

I’m starting to think relying upon so much technology in order to survive has eroded much of our humanity.

Because of this, I’ve been trying to take parts of my life offline. As I alluded to earlier, I’m trying to let my dating life happen organically. But my career obviously depends on playing the Great Online Game. So what am I going to do to use this in a healthy way?

Well, the only way I know how:

To keep being honest about my intentions.

To be more vulnerable.

To be more honest.

To not pull my words.

To bear my soul to the world and say…

… this is me.

P.S. Sorry, this was a late one today.