is it harder to lie online than in person?
Far be it from me to blame someone for writing a breezy post or article because I’ve certainly done so myself, and actually, this blog’s most viewed post of all time is a pretty quick one. Ironically, commenters on social bookmarking sites complained about it being so breezy and yet, of the dozen or so posts detailing the actual physics of relativistic rocketry and warp drives, their fellow users elevate that one. But I digress.
The reason I mention breezy articles was because of this interesting little snippet from Discovery Tech, which took a shot at investigating whether people really lie more online by taking advantage of the pseudo-anonymity it can offer, and brings up a few often overlooked caveats to our typical ideas about lying via the net. The referenced studies are unfortunately too small and only tangentially related to the topic, but they do seem to show that we may be surprised by how little and subtle lies online can be compared to the kinds of lies we’re willing to drop when talking face to face or over the phone and that when we go from personal communication to streams of data we will serialize into files and store indefinitely on countless servers, it actually does get tougher to lie.
Over the last decade, online communication went from being thought of as the refuge of lonely dorks lacking any semblance of social skills, and obsessed with comic books and role playing games, to an extension of a social life and a convenient tool for organizing your contacts and showing off your work. Half a billion people have a Facebook account and millions rely on their LinkedIn contacts to find work. And as all of them are busy chatting with friends, posting pictures, and putting their resumes and CVs online, they create an ocean of very easily searchable, time stamped data that can be stored on a server indefinitely and retrieved with only a few simple queries.
So remember that time you called in sick to work and then posted pictures of yourself at your nearby sports bar with friends that evening or the next day? Did you suddenly get so much better that you had to run out and celebrate the recovery? Or if you got over your bug that quickly, why not go to work and do that at the end of the day? And what about the time when you said you were visiting a friend at a hospital to cover up for a night out doing something you shouldn’t have and one of your loudmouth friends left a post on your wall about how much fun you had when you did something almost illegal? Better hope it wasn’t seen by any of the few hundred people you added as “friends” or screen grabbed for a Failbook post.
You see where I’m going with this, right? Like I’ve said and keep on saying, social media gives you the ability to hang yourself on saying something before you think, and when it comes to lying, things are no different. We tend to rely on others’ ability to remember only when they think is really important when we lie, hoping that the omission or the untruth will simply slip by, the person will be placated, and forget about what we said later so we can get away with it. But with the web, even the vaguest recollection or a stray click can lead you back to a conversation you had before, exposing the lie in question. We’re just getting used to communicating in a way that can be archived for hundreds and hundreds of years, which is why many of us pay little attention to what we actually say at times.
Even a techie like me felt very uncomfortable when an ex told me that she set her IM client to archive everything and presented me with a log of a chat we had many months prior. What did I say? Did I make an idiot of myself and that moment is now preserved for posterity? Did I automatically flub a detail and she could cross-check something I said with what really happened and catch me on it? The very IM that’s supposed to hide your identity and make it so easy to get away with lying your rear end off has a feature that’ll catch your lies anytime down the road. And how easy might it be to come up with a lie detection algorithm for an IM client based on even little inconsistencies with what you’ve said before? It’s tough but not impossible.
Of course you can still lie on the web and get away with it for a while. Current technology allows the curious to check whether you are who you say you are, but it relies on humans keeping their guard up and knowing how to do some very basic lie detection of their own before they decide to hit the log and compare what you said in the past to what you’re saying now. And when you say something that people really, really want to believe, you are more than likely to get a pass. This is why you can show montage after montage of TV news pundits and politicians flip-flopping between extreme positions on issues, often contradicting themselves in stunningly or absurdly hypocritical ways, and their loyal fans will still insist that they’re not just hacks and opportunists who are simply either parroting a party line or taking an opposite stance to the other party just because the notion comes from across the political divide.
They’ve heard what they wanted to hear and that’s that. The proof that their heroes, celebrities, and idols are liars will simply be discarded and forgotten. On a more humdrum and everyday end of the spectrum, social media will let you get away with little white lies because few will bother with checking every little thing you say, but if you lie about something big, like where you work or what you do for a living, expect to be found out pretty quickly because since everybody’s somehow connected or has some online presence, the HR manager of the company where you said you were a COO can quickly chime in on a blog, Twitter, or your Facebook page that he’s never heard of you and humiliating you in public. So if you really feel the need to lie on the web, remember that just by being online, you give us the tools to fact-check you.
