The #nofilter Self: The Contest for Authenticity among Social Networking Sites, 2002–2016

Abstract

This study traces appeals to authenticity, over time, in the promotional material of leading social-networking sites (SNSs). Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the public-facing websites of major SNS platforms-beginning with Friendster in 2002-were sampled at six-month intervals, with promotional language and visuals examined for authenticity claims. The authors tracked these appeals, with attention to changes in promotional copy, through to July 2016, among the most popular social media services (as determined by English-language web presence and active monthly user figures or, when unavailable, reported network size). The study found that nearly all SNSs invoked authenticity-directly or through language like "real life" and "genuine"-in their promotional materials. What stood out was the profoundly reactive nature of these claims, with new services often defining themselves, openly or implicitly, against legacy services' inauthenticity. A recurring marketing strategy, in other words, has been to call out competitors' phoniness by substituting (and touting) some other, differently grounded mode of authenticity. Since the affordances of social sites, even those touting evanescence or anonymity, make them vulnerable to similar charges, the cycle gets replayed with numbing regularity.

Political Authenticity: Conceptualization of a Popular Term

“…Communicator research on political authenticity interprets the concept as a self-presentation by politicians. From this point of view, authenticity is a social performance in which politicians seek to construct an authentic self in the public sphere (Coleman and Firmstone 2017;Enli and Rosenberg 2018;Gaden and Dumitrica 2015;Iversen 2018;Liebes 2001;Liu et al 2015;Salisbury and Pooley 2017;Shane 2018). Studies on performed political authenticity assume that politicians try to appear to others as consistent with their true selves (Enli 2015;Fordahl 2018).…”

“…The immediacy dimension refers to the construction of authenticity as a direct translation of the inner self to others (Enli 2015;Fordahl 2018;Salisbury and Pooley 2017). In a temporal sense, immediacy in political communication is associated with realtime communication reflecting spontaneous thoughts from a politician's mind without revision or reflection (Gershon and Smith 2020;Shane 2018;Valverde 2018).…”

Facebook futures: Mark Zuckerberg’s discursive construction of a better world

“…Established in 2013 (Zimmer, 2013), the archive includes a variety of documents of different types, such as media interviews and editorials, social media posts, letters to investors and earnings calls, as well as transcripts of product presentations, conference talks, and public speeches. Previous research has used the archive to scrutinize Zuckerberg’s language regarding different subjects (Haimson and Hoffmann, 2016; Hoffmann et al, 2018; Salisbury and Pooley, 2017). For my analysis, all 265 documents available in the archive at the beginning of the study in November 2017 were imported into the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA.…”

“…Iversen (2017) particularly explored Zuckerberg’s personal storytelling, describing his Facebook posts as “peculiar amalgamations of the personal, the strategic, and the moral,” conveying an underlying idea of what it means to share private matters on Facebook (p. 374). Other researchers examined Facebook’s corporate communications with reference to specific aspects, such as user identity (Haimson and Hoffmann, 2016), authenticity (Salisbury and Pooley, 2017), or privacy (Raynes-Goldie, 2012), illustrating how central concepts of digital culture are discursively framed by one of its most influential actors.…”

Phone Eats First: An Investigation of Femininity Represented in Instagram Posts of Food

“…The ideal feminine figure should be able to balance home and work life, but also should be upfront about her struggles in maintaining this balance? People on social media often have a preoccupation with exposing the inauthentic (Salisbury & Pooley, 2017). However on a site that involves self-presentation creating an identity, the "authentic" will always be somewhat constructed.…”