With the advent of Twitter and Instagram, I’ll admit that Facebook and I have grown apart, but I’m not ready to let go of it completely. I have too many fond memories of how exciting it was to join Facebook my junior year of high school after Myspace had fallen from grace. Facebook was the first social media site where I stalked the popular kids and their boozy red cup pictures with captions that claimed they were drinking apple juice. In college, clicking through everyone’s dedicated Macbook webcam photo album spared me from many a boring lecture.
Now that I’m older and wiser, I’ve started noticing that most of my Facebook friends are full of shit.
I think we’ve all come to expect a certain level of dishonesty on social media. After all, we want to convince everyone (and ourselves) that we’re living our ~best life~, and how better to do that than to slap a filter on it or embellish some of the details? There are some Facebookers, however, who I would like to formally accuse of straight up lying in 90% of the personal anecdotes they post. I suspect you have a few of these of your own in your friends lists.
As a result of these Facebook fictions, I’ve started regarding my newsfeed like a social media version of that old show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. If you’re not familiar, Beyond Belief shows you a few stories about uncanny, often supernatural events that may or may not have actually happened in real life. After each vignette, the host comes on and waxes philosophical and invites you decide whether the story was fact or fiction. By the end of the show, you get to find out which events actually happened and which did not.
As I present the following stereotypical Facebook posts to you, I invite you to enter a world of attention-seeking and “feeling accomplished :D,” where everything is not what it seems. Are these posts fact? Or are they just Facebook fiction?
The Encourageable Emerging Adulthood Hot Mess
The Guy Who’s Trying to Convince Everyone He’s Getting Laid
The Overzealous Animal Lover
The Joint Facebook Account Parents Who Are Trying Too Hard
The Simpatico Guy Who’s Struggling In So Many Ways
The Passionate Political Activist Who May Have Exaggerated
…They’re all fiction.
Edit: This is a small sampling of offenders, and I know there are some pretty glaring omissions. If there are Facebook liars you’d like to see added to this list, leave them in a comment.
