Most friends post Facebook pictures to make you Jealous

IANS . London |
 
Most friends post Facebook pictures to make you jealous. Photo: AFPIf you believe in that stunning picture of your friend on Facebook showing an amazing scenery or attending a luxurious party, take another look. Chances are that he or she may just be trying to make you jealous of their “good life”.

According to a new British survey done by smartphone maker HTC, almost everybody lies on their Facebook and Instagram profiles to look good.

“Over two thirds of us post images to our profiles to make it look like we’re more adventurous than we are,” the findings revealed.

Nearly 75 percents of people admitted that they judge their friends based on what they see on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, Mirror.co.uk reported.

The survey asked questions to 4,004 people between ages 16 and 54 across Britain, Spain, France and Italy.

Of 1,000 Britons who were surveyed, 52 percent said they posted pictures “purely to make their friends and families jealous”.

“From snaps of people’s homes to perfectly laid out outfit shots, every images counts and smartphone photography has never been more important,” Peter Frolund, HTC general manager (UK & Ireland), was quoted as saying.

“When it comes to why we feel a desire to share our public displays of possessions, it’s all about impression management,” behavioural psychology Jo Hemmings was quoted as saying in the report.

A recent study involving 400 men and women published in the journal Social Networking found that the more people changed their profile picture, the more likely they were to report narcissistic traits.

The study also looked at the time they spent on Facebook and the words they used to rate their profile pictures.

Social Media do not Reveal true Human behaviour

 
As researchers are mining Facebook and Twitter data to learn about online and offline human behaviour, a new study warns them to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets.
Such erroneous results can have huge implications as thousands of research papers each year are now based on data gleaned from social media.
"Publicly available data feeds used in social media research do not always provide an accurate representation of the platform's overall data - and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams," explained Derek Ruths, assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
"A large number of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behaviour," Ruths said.
The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured.
"For instance, on Facebook the absence of a "dislike" button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive "likes," added study co-author Jurgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Software Research.
Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics and events - making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are.
For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65 percent accuracy for typical users - even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90% accuracy, the authors contended.
"The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they are actually analysing when working with social media data," Ruths concluded.
The article appeared in the journal Science.