Women more deceitful on social media reveals fifth round of The Works’ Datafication study
Women have been found to be more deceitful on social media compared to men according to the latest social media study conducted by Sydney-based creative agency The Works and UTS University.
The Deceit Algorithm, truth, lies and brand trust in social media research found 64 per cent of women compared to 36 per cent of men were found to have made “embellished or deceitful statements” when posting on Twitter and Instagram.
However, while women overall were found to lie more often, on Instagram Adelaide men were found to be the biggest liars, followed by Sydney men. Adelaide women came in third place on the photo-and video sharing platform while Melbourne women were the least deceptive.
The research is the fifth round of the Datafication project, which last year revealed Australian brands are “laggards” when it comes to utilising social video apps such as Vine and Snapchat.
i don’t really understand how they came to this conclusion – can an algorithm really tell if one is being truthful?
“women lie to make others feel good, men lie to make themselves look good” sounds bogus to me – i mean, it might be true, but how do you measure that?
according to the works’ website: The deceit algorithm takes 4553 such indicators [i take this to mean, words that are commonly used deceitfully] (including for the first time emoticons) and classifies them into categories and allows a score to be appended to any social media post. This score is indicative of the presence of deceit and by aggregating these scores we are able to look at facts, trends and comparisons across different social platforms
i would need a lot more information about the algorithm itself and how it is constructed, as well as some concrete examples of ie a deceitful tweet, to give this research a pass
still, it did manage to cop a mention in most of the trade press and daily newspapers which was probably the most important point of the research anyway.