We have seen cases of people across the social media landscape who post updates which are later uncovered to be jacked from someone else or to be completely false. This is due to the “rewards” social media sites have like “likes” “retweets” “hearts” and “favourites that triggers the brain to release dopamine, the feeling good hormone. This has effects in that people nowadays will do anything to post pictures that will draw interest for the engagement even if it is all a lie.
HTC UK did a survey about this issue of people faking it on social media and found out that:
- 6% of people had borrowed items to include in the images in order to pass them off as their own and make others jealous
- Two thirds post images to their own profiles to make their lives seem more exciting.
- 76% of people asked said that they judged their peers based on what they saw on their Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook profiles
- More than half said that they posted images of items and places purely to cause jealousy among friends and family.
Although this research was done in Britain, it paints a picture of what social media is actually being used for with minimal variances between countries. However in some social media sites like Twitter, you will see cases of people posting photos that were downloaded off the internet being called out for their actions. It seems like in order to curb this cases,
- Social networks should come up with a way to uniquely tag each photo that is uploaded so that when someone else uses it, the person’s followers would know it is not owned by the said person.
- People should call out those people who pass images that they don’t own as theirs so as to minimize this cases. Social media sites have “report as spam” or “flag” buttons, which are used in this case.
