Facebook Actually Doesn’t Lie… More or Less

After interviewing one person on the validity of their Facebook profile I had thought that perhaps I interviewed one of the few who are honest about themselves online. In order to test my assumption I interviewed two more people. Of course their answers were almost identical to the first subject. The conclusion that I came to is that although Facebook offers a variety of ways to display oneself, it also makes it hard to lie about who you really are. One question I asked my subjects is why they did not lie about themselves on their profile. All three subjects said that their friends would see it and question it, or write on their wall and tell them to change it.
After the interview I noticed that the worst score of all of the subjects was a four out of five. I was particularly surprised by this because the social distance theory would suggest that because Facebook can connect people all across the world; people would create impressions about themselves that may not be particularly true but because they are also connected with close friends, they are not able to do so. When comparing the amount of deception with the chart which we went over in class it would be most similar to email, where less then 10% of lies were told.
I think it would be interesting if the same study was done with a new category specifically for Facebook. My prediction would be that Facebook would have the lowest percentage of lies when compared to; face to face, telephone, instant messaging and email. I also noticed that some of my subjects had numerous parts of their profile where they had nothing written. Turns out that they all decided to leave that section of their profile blank because it is where they would have most likely twisted the truth about themselves. This was a perfect example of selective self presentation and also how one can tell the truth but yet not be completely truthful.