Identity Issues on Social Media

The issue of identity in cyber world is a complicated experience to different personalities. Social media as most cyber environment is referred to has been the most vulnerable to the challenges experienced by members of the cyber world. The concept of multiple cyber identity has become a common norm in the social media world. People in the quest to join a virtual social group or connection often manipulate their identity to appeal to the target group or personality. 

Dave Birch in his blog "Put your game face on"^[i] identified that there is a normalcy to maintain multiple cyber identities than can be explained. He pointed out that anonymity in cyber space can make people to reveal little or more about their identity. To this end a fundamental objection to letting people have multiple identities in cyber world is that it can lead to no good intentions.  Identity issues have been a problem in social media from the early years of the social cyber world. Friendster, one of the pioneers of social media with a noble idea to rate and increase individual access to the sites;  led most of her registered members to multiple identity formation online to help break the barrier to increased access on the site. 

The identity issue has led to the infamous fakester epidemic; however, it was for the advantage of gaining increased rating and access to social groups in the early days of social media. Recently events have shown that there are implications to this act irrespective of the intent of the fakester. The effect of multiple cyber identity was also highlighted in the article "multiple identities trap the unwary online". This reveals how multiple identities online could lead to a no good act such as fraudsters, perverts etc. The death of a child was traced to an individual with over 200 cyber identities and I feel this speaks volume on the disadvantage of multiple identities. "83 million facebook accounts are fake and dupes".^[ii]

Your identity is very important today more than it was considered in the early days of social media, it impacts on every aspect of you virtual and real world existence. For example, online dating is now being organised to reveal more of the party’s identity through strings of questions. The resultant effect of identity issues online to the future of friendship can be explained better from the impact thus far.

• Friendship will become very difficult to cultivate judging from various recommendations on choosing and developing friendship on social media.
• Identity issue is likely to lead more people away from the much buzz about meeting and developing friendship online back to traditional methods of relationship building.
• The challenge of fake identity online keeps changing in style and unsuspecting victims such as teens and adults too could be miss-led into dangerous friendship.
• The issue of trust in social media friendship in the future is a challenge that is currently and will continue to face friendship development online

By: Michael E.

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[i] David, B. (2010).  Put on you game face. Digital identity blog. Retrieved from http://digitaldebateblogs.typepad.com/digital_identity/2010/12/put-your-game-face-on. 

[ii] Heather, K. (2012). 83 million facebook accounts are fake and dupes. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fake-accounts/index.html