Today, Internet users are taking advantage of the many forms of social media to create an online persona. But which profile represents their true offline identity? Each website will create a partial identity, a persona, for the user based on a subset of their characteristics. Some may see this as an advantage, others a lack of authenticity.
The most common reason to create more than one online identity is to differentiate your private and professional identity. A survey carried out by Arcas showed that 45% of recruitment staff use social media as a tool to choose their employees. Facts like this are why more and more Internet users are presenting different identities on different social media websites. For example, creating a private persona on Facebook and a professional persona on LinkedIn.
Nevertheless, there have been some measures to try and avoid this. The CIPD’s guide states that recruiters should abide by a set of principles when using social media to screen their candidates. This includes, distinguishing between a candidate’s private and professional social media profile; this may avoid users creating multiple online identities.
Moreover, there have been many arguments against having more than one online identity.
Mark Zuckerberg: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”
The problem with many users creating more than one online identity is that there are concerns with authenticity and integrity. How do you know to whom you are truly talking to online? Most of us are all very familiar with the popular TV show Catfish, which has perfectly shown a large problem with social media and the ease to which users can create any online persona they wish. This has lead to people talking to someone completely different to who they believed it to be.
This is an extreme example of a lack on integrity when creating more than one online identity, compared to creating them to keep your professional and private life separate. I for one am yet to create a LinkedIn profile but when I do, I will be more inclined to create a more professional identity compared to the one I have created on Facebook.
Does this mean I am dishonest?
Should we keep a consistent online identity across all social media profiles?
References:
Krotoski, A (2012) Online Identity: Is authenticity or anonymity more important? The Guardian.
Landau, P (2013) Job applications: social media profiles under scrutiny The Guardian.
Zimmer, M (2010) Facebook’s Zuckerberg: “Having two identities is an example of a lack of integrity”
Internet Society (2016) Online Identity Overview
Alice Brown 
I enjoyed reading your blog post, it made some good points. I was particularly interested by the quote from Mark Zuckerburg which I also found while I was doing research for my blog post.
I found it to be a very utopian view of the world whereas in reality there are numerous reasons why people may choose to hold very clearly different identities online, that, for example, may act as a way of protecting themselves.
What do you think? I don’t think it’s right for Mark to assume that holding multiple identities is an example of lack of integrity and in someways that seems like it could offend others.
LikeLike