Personal Traits According to Certain Social Media Platform

Using social media updates to detect the dark personality sides apart from the Big Five, the dark triad model to assess personalities similar to using the Hogan Development survey. This model found that people who use more swear words are highly probable to having psychopathic tendencies and Machiavellianism tendencies. It also states that individuals who used words such as ‘I, me or mine’ more than others may be narcissistic. The limitation that is present in this situation is that e.g.

Twitter is a micro-blogging website/ application, therefore on this platform one will tend to talk about their life and how they feel etc. If the results are taken from data that was obtained from Twitter, would that data be reliable in predicting narcissism as that person was merely carrying a way of speaking that is meant for the platform? This may be an inaccurate way of predicting certain personalities traits if we do not keep in mind the purpose of the social media platform. The bigger question here may be that, does use of social media itself signify a certain personal trait?Different platforms have different purposes. Facebook is seen as more of a personal journal, Twitter is a micro-blogging site and Instagram is somewhat of a photo album collection.

One limitation of this model may be the fact that people behave slightly differently on each social platform. Therefore, different dimensions may be over or under-represented in certain platforms. If the data was taken from the social platform that under-represents a certain trait such as agreeableness, then the individual will be scoring lower on agreeableness as opposed to how they would score in a real-life questionnaire.

Lastly, another implication I would like to discuss is that a person ‘hypothetical self-scale’. I am referring to the fact that one would know how they behave throughout the day, perhaps only that person would know the truth of the extent of each trait they have of the Big Five. For example, how conscientious they are or how open they are.Therefore, if a person states in the social media about a specific incident that highlights their conscientiousness level, e.g. Exceptional performance at their workplace.

Humans only tend to share good information about themselves or rather information that shows themselves in a good light. There may have been other instances that the same person may have done things that go against being a conscientious person such as bailing on an assignment or not giving quality work. There is a high chance that the individual may not report this instance on their social media platforms, therefore this comprises the results concluded for this person as the information taken from their social platform is not a complete and detailed report of their conscientious or non-conscientious behavior. The scale of their own behavior may not be transparent to the researcher that is using social media to draw conclusions on the individual`s behavior or personalities, with incomplete information accurate results cannot be attained.