My Lies — and Yours — On Social Media

Just Because it is Real Doesn’t Make it True

It would probably be difficult to find anyone who does not have at least a cursory understanding of the idea of fake news. There are people who have confessed to creating fake news to make money. These people are deliberately lying for personal gain. This story is not about that.

This is about a different kind of fake news — news that isn’t news at all. They are just posts. All posts are less than the truth.

It is interesting to consider what people decide to post on social media. There is as much to be said by what people post as what they don’t. The difficulty is that most of us follow people that we do not regularly talk to in real life or know deeply. This means we often don’t know what they are leaving out.

Erika Sauter, one of my favorite Medium.com authors, recently published a story loosely interpreted to be about the subconscious lies we tell on social media. It’s a beautiful piece about the extremely different ways two women going through cancer treatments chose to share their lives on Facebook. This is a perfect illustration of my point — one person was very public about her situation and the other kept it private. In neither case were their posts on Facebook reflective of what either woman was going through internally. The pictures and events posted were accurate, but edited, cropped and filtered so they reflected “truth,” but not TRUTH.

A number of studies have linked feeling depressed with spending time on social media because people feel bad when comparing themselves with others (USA Today article, Guilford Press abstract). An interesting twist, that really makes no difference to the studies, is that people are comparing themselves with an illusion. One person’s life may seem dull or tragic compared to what their friends have chosen to post, but that person never gets to see what that person did not post. The comparisons are as unrealistic- and unfair — as those of a real human being versus a magazine model’s photo. We never see the odd angles, uncomfortable poses, unflattering shots and hours of photo editing that happens behind the scenes.

As a fun exercise, I have shared some photos below that I posted on social media, and then included information about what was happening just before or after each.

1. Posted: Happy kids on the way home after a day at a local “family fun” park. Not posted: Kids fighting, melt-downs over what rides to go on, how miserably hot we all were.
2. Posted: A beautiful day on the beach in Atlantic City — 3000 miles from home. Not posted: I was still recovering from a surgery that had me out of commission for about 8 weeks. The day before this, my wife sent me to bed in the early afternoon and told me I had to rest until the next day because I was so pale and wiped out.
3. Posted: Gorgeous sunset from our front porch. Not posted: The cat vomit I had just cleaned up from the inside (carpeted!) stairs and the mosquito bites that were driving me crazy.

1. Posted: My daughter proudly watching the fire she had just built by herself. Not posted: Scenes from her and her brother loudly arguing, calling each other stupid, and me threatening to take them home if they kept causing a scene.
2. Posted: A proud moment of me with my son after he got off the ropes course at Great Wolf Lodge. Not posted: How terrified he was before going up because he is afraid of heights.
3. Posted: Blue tongues after eating blue candy that was in the tube. Not posted: I had spent most of this 2-day trip to Great Wolf Lodge in bed with a horrible headache and a fever.

1. Posted: A beautiful fountain scene in front of The National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. Not posted: Just the day before we were freezing as we walked around D.C. due to some unseasonably cold weather that we were not prepared for.
2. Posted: This was one of many fantastic wedding photos that a friend took and posted for us during our wedding. Not posted: Our wedding was a wonderful, but bittersweet event. It was the last family gathering that my dying mother attended. She died just after Thanksgiving the next month.
3. Posted: Glimpses of our romantic Italian dinner at a restaurant in Victoria, B.C. Not posted: The next day my wife took a very bad fall down cement steps that could have killed her. She is still having pain 3 months later.

The last photo is the one I often post when I want to share a picture of me and my dog. The others are among about fifteen I took just to get the one decent one.

I don’t mean to imply that I, you, or your friends, are deliberately lying through social media posts. No one wants to see pictures of cat vomit and children screaming at each other. Thank goodness for people who don’t overshare! Sharing fun, silly, and proud moments are far more entertaining for family and friends, and more pleasant to relive as they are posted than the often messy realities of everyday life. I am suggesting we remember that everything we see and read is just one part of a complex life that someone has chosen to share. As you scan through posts, whether awe-inspiring or depressing, take a moment to wonder what is not being shared. Even better — pick up a phone and ask.