Know that social media is loaded with sins of omission, exaggeration, and outright lies. Do not base your expectations of others on it. –

Being hyper positive on social media is an issue worth pondering. One positive Facebook post on your feed will elicit someone else to have two more positive posts on theirs.

This creates a competition where everyone wants to present their best selves all the time.

Highlighting the best moments of your life can create the illusion that you are not supposed to talk about the negative aspects of life or the moments where you are emotionally down.

It can also lead one to be anxious about not being able to keep up with other people’s achievements.

Data from Google searches reveal some humbling facts about who we really are. These searches are our technological ID (our instinctual desires, embarrassing questions, darker curiosities).

Here we are our most uncurated selves, this is our digital truth. Data collected from social media reveals ‘Digital Truth’ (searches, views, clicks, swipes) and ‘Digital Lies’ (social media posts, likes, dating profiles).

These are unpleasant things to face. that the U.S. is not as over its racial divides as the narrative during Obama’s two terms would imply.

That we still subconsciously value attractiveness in our daughters more than intelligence.

And that despite hopeful stats from Children’s Services it appears more children were in fact being abused during the recession.

It is all very interesting, and very depressing. We lie on social media to hide our ugly side, and our ugly side is really ugly.

What are the benefits of this interesting but depressing data? From a marketing perspective, companies have learned we lie online not just to others, but to ourselves, and these companies adjusted accordingly.

We lie to ourselves based on social standards.

We tell ourselves we want to watch content that challenges us and makes us think on Netflix, but for the most part we want distraction.