Governments, there’s nothing IRL on social media

Both proposals have unsurprisingly sparked outrage and anger. Beatriz Lopez, executive director of the pro-immigration group Catalyze/Citizens, issued a statement calling it “undemocratic surveillance" and accusing the Trump administration of “turning online spaces into surveillance traps." She warned, “Today it’s immigrants, tomorrow it’s US citizens who dissent with Trump and his administration." She might have a point. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the state department demanded visa applicants disclose five years worth of social media history, a requirement that has since been challenged in court as violating the First Amendment. But that was about foreign nationals seeking an American visa from outside the country. This new requirement targets people who are already in the US and want to change their status.

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In India, the income-tax proposal put both the Congress party and former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai on the same page. The Congress put out a social media post saying, “Warning: Your privacy is under attack", while Pai called it an “assault on our rights!"

The pushback comes along predictable lines—privacy, freedom of speech, the right to dissent, nosy Big Brother government. Many people have shared the writer James Baldwin’s famous quote, a line that now sounds almost fanciful now—“I love America more than any country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually."

But there is more irony at play here. The government wants to look at our social media because they think the truth lies out there. Yet these days Facebook is really Fakebook, where most of us are just putting on a public performance not of the lives we actually lead, but the lives we want others to think we lead. I returned from a vacation in Turkey in 10 days but my Instagram was still holidaying there after two weeks. I wasn’t trying to dupe anyone. It was just more Insta-worthy than my humdrum life in Kolkata.

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A site like Facebook was once all about sharing. Its original mission statement read, “To give the people power to share and make the world more open and connected." I might be connected to more people than I ever was. But I am not more open. I cannot gripe about an annoying party I went to because the host is probably on my friends list. Or their best friend is. So I bite my tongue.

On the other hand, another friend discovered the highlight feature where she can make every Facebook post of hers announce itself to all her followers and friends. When friends gently suggested she skip highlighting each post, she took great umbrage and declared she would not be silenced.

But I can’t really blame her. For me too, social media, irrespective of the platform, has just become a megaphone, a marketing tool. I rarely use it to communicate my feelings. Instead I just share the latest article I’ve written and move on. I am performing as “writer" there. But I don’t talk about writer’s block or writerly insecurities and anxieties. All of that is part of a writer’s life but carefully excised from my social media persona. On the other hand, there are writers who revel in playing the tormented angst-ridden writer on social media. Or the lit-fest hopping literary jet-setter.

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All social media is a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. A writer friend posts not just reviews of their books but random reader comments from bookseller websites as if sharing excerpts from a New York Times review. Some use social media as a way to turn their offspring into savants. Every day comes with a new pithy bon mot from the wunderkind. Some of the wordplay sounds suspiciously sophisticated for a seven-year-old, but we all play along, liking the posts, posting smiling faces in the comments. No one wants to annoy someone with thousands of followers. Some want to be more woke than thou, others only want to review every trip to the Amex Gold Card hospitality lounge at the airport. Business-class selfies are mandatory. The most annoying might be the love bunnies, the ones who document their love affairs in nauseating detail. One friend would routinely copy-paste from previous posts about previous loves. He had deleted them at the end of each affair but we, the haters, remembered their “look-at-me" smugness.

Social media has spawned the anti-fan as well, the hate follower. All of us follow people who annoy us just so we can be triggered and share screenshots with our friends. It’s a twisted kind of therapy. In fact our true social media selves are not displayed on our walls. They are in the screen captures we secretly forward our friends. That’s where our true feelings, bile unchecked, are in full bloom. Screen capture is probably the greatest social media invention known to humans though sometimes in our nasty haste, we mistakenly forward the screen capture to the very person we are dissing.

Our social media personas are increasingly at odds with our real-life personalities. A firebrand X agent provocateur turned out to be meek and mild in real life. The X exhibitionist was painfully shy in person. So many people’s feeds are just focused on going viral. They dress outrageously, do attention-grabbing stunts, gush over every momo outlet as a “hidden gem". None of it is real. Everything is a social media construct aiming for clicks.

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The truth is social media cannot ever reveal our true selves because we are really creatures of many parts. The Facebooks of the world struggle to grasp that. After all it was created by and for university students where everyone was swimming in the same hormonally heated pools obsessing about sex, grades, parties and jobs. The real world gets a lot more complicated.

In the real world we can be Momma’s boy and Employee of the Month and Whisky Drinker and SngleManLking4NSAFun and MurderMysteryFan. There is no utopia where all those identities can be flaunted with equal ease.

In some ways we cannot fault the governments for wanting to poke around our social media worlds. They say you know the truth by ferreting through someone’s garbage. They are merely “catching up to modernity", Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst and attorney at the think tank Migration Policy Institute, told the news portal The Verge. Now that we have fed the apps all our data, they can construct a profile for us. Until now that profile might have been used to sell us shoes and sauces. Now it can be used to deny us things as well, like a visa, or trigger an audit. It would be naive to not expect governments to want to use that power.

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Already there have been so many reports about job offers being rescinded because a prospective employer stumbled on to too many drunken party pictures on someone’s website. Old tweets have come to haunt everyone from Oscar-nominated actors to Trump administration hires. Perhaps that’s why so many of us now bare more in ephemeral stories on Instagram and vanishing messages on WhatsApp than in anything that can be preserved forever in digital amber.

But one thing is clear. Social media was meant to bear witness to our daily lives. Now it might well become a witness for the prosecution.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.

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