The mistake of understanding people (only) through their public personas

How did we get here?

Once upon a time, there was an era on the internet where we followed our friends and acquaintances and posted little snippets of our daily lives, sometimes with cute filters for flair.

Since then, things have changed a lot. The introduction of concepts like followers (replacing contacts or friends, hinting at hierarchy) and likes (quantifying external validation) made some people realize how much they loved these little numbers and that they’d be willing to invest significant amounts of time, money, and eventually, do horrible things to increase them. Platforms then decided to show more of these people and organizations to everyone, making them increasingly visible and well-known, with several consequences that brought us to where we are today.

When we started calling "social networks" "social media" back in the 2010s, we were visionaries. "Networks" were about community, exchange, interconnected individuals, and communication from everyone to everyone—more "peer-to-peer" connections. This still exists but is no longer the dominant dynamic. "Media" suggests a context where few produce and many consume (more "point-to-multipoint", in telecom jargon), and lately, that’s what’s happening—especially considering that the consumption model increasingly leans, on virtually all platforms, toward what is recommended by algorithms rather than being based on who you actually follow. According to a study conducted over 10 years, 85% of YouTube views go to just 3% of channels. A widening gap separates creators from consumers.

Adam, will you please tell folks where is the content from friends and people they follow?

Do you see why Instagram started showing sharing numbers on posts recently?

Public personas are no one's true self; we are all our own infomercial hosts

As this shift from the "network" phase to the "media" phase was gradual, many people haven’t realized it yet. There are many explanations for this emptying of the digital public space, already discussed in previous editions, but in short: for many people, platforms are increasingly like a huge designated smokers area where many of us, though intoxicated, cannot afford to leave because we need to socialize, be seen, and do business.

It’s safe to assume that most public, non-restricted (to followers) and permanent (not disappearing after a while like Stories) content today is directly or indirectly commercial—it either sells something or seeks to build an audience to eventually sell something. As a result, it’s inherently performative and focused on simulating closeness or spontaneity, much like parasocial interactions from much older channels. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The real issue is believing that analyzing public data from platforms can deliver spectacular insights like the "pulse of culture" (as if culture didn’t exist outside the platforms!) or a "deep understanding of human beings" (as if our existence were reduced to our public online presence!). Using such analyses as a primary (or worse, the only) decision-making information on customers, with a shrinking (as platforms prevent scraping and fewer people post publicly), dirty (bots, fakes, and AI-produced content), and increasingly performative (driven by commercial interests and parasocial relationship creation) data pool is the digital equivalent of reading tea leaves. There’s no magical AI that will make the raw data overcome inherent limitations. Does this happen because the large numbers of posts, likes, and mentions create an illusion of representativity and relevance? Or because it's easier to measure than things that are actually more important?

Our most authentic selves are in private messages, incognito tabs, and personal conversations—not in our feeds.

After countless public statements, including from Brazilian CEOs, rightly condemning yet another provocation from a corporate “agent of chaos” in recent weeks, some reflections remain:

• How much approval and back-patting did this person receive from like-minded individuals in private channels and behind closed doors?

• How many of those who publicly condemned the behavior (signaling virtue and/or self-promoting) don’t actually think the same or exhibit identical behaviors in their private lives?

• When will we collectively understand that, especially on digital platforms, the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference? What makes this kind of revolting strategy work is that a large number of people react as predictably as lab rats being shocked, allowing outrage to be used as a weapon and a growth lever.

The tension between our public and private selves has also moved into the digital space to some extent. And, as it has always been, it’s in the private world where we show who we truly are and feel freer from the judgment of others or what is considered socially acceptable.

Pedro de Santi, an incredible psychology professor that taught during my undergraduate years, used Dangerous Liaisons to explain our public and private selves—I never forgot the richness of this analogy, and I’ll appropriate it here. If public posts are like the opera for the European aristocrats of old, as shown in the film—a place to display social standing, virtue, and power, highly edited versions of ourselves—closed channels are our alcoves, the most intimate room in the house, where life is much more real and uncensored.

Dark Social and Anonymous Public Communities: Digital Alcoves?

An enormous number of movements that seem to have suddenly grown large started in closed or anonymous channels—from anti-vaccination movements to red pills. A particular characteristic of these mediums is that groupthink gains an impressive force, for better or for worse, because of their ability to gather people who already think alike, intensifying confirmation bias and tribalism (something worth keeping in mind if you have or are thinking of creating a longterm community of consumers/users for your brand).

WhatsApp groups have become so influential as a form of private dissemination that the platform was forced to restrict both the maximum number of participants and the sharing limits, playing a critical role in key moments of Brazil's recent history. Email, a channel that numerous gurus have tried to declare dead over the past two decades, is perhaps in its best phase with the growing popularity of newsletters. In anonymous spaces, the influence of chans in meme production and political discourse is notorious, and subreddits like r/WallStreetBets have already sparked significant movements.

In a context where many people hesitate to post publicly due to fear of judgment from others, and where the fear of cancelation shapes much of public opinion, it's reasonable to expect an even greater migration to these channels.

This is why, more than ever, in a context of false consensuses, collective illusions, and with more and more people reevaluating their relationship with or even abandoning social media, and with a rapidly advancing agenda of restricting or banning its use by children and teenagers, we must go beyond the surface level and low hanging fruits.

Much of what’s relevant to brands already happens far from the surface. If you really want to know how people think and act, you need methods that allow you to peek into the facets of private life, contrast discourse with behavior, understand tacit rituals and rules, symbolic value, and a lot of other fundamental things that don’t appear on your dashboard and can’t always be measured. And even in this highly digital era we live in, some big brands have understood this movement and made it to HBR.

Bonus: Anatomy of a made up trend

The next time you stumble upon a grand “discovery” about the human species where the best evidence is viral posts, activate your critical thinking.

“Tradwives” have been mentioned in the press and on social media as “a wave” of wives defending traditional gender roles, which for them means returning to the 1950s in the Anglo-Saxon world. The truth is, they are literally a handful of “practitioners” of this lifestyle in the US and the UK, including Ballerina Farm (who comes from a Mormon family and therefore didn’t “invent” this lifestyle), Alena Kate Pettitt, and Estee Williams. The three, in their time, enjoyed both temporary fame from press coverage and relentless online criticism that makes all digital metrics skyrocket—just like the case of the “agent of chaos” mentioned earlier in this text.

There are multiple layers of perverse incentives amplifying the reach of these factoids. The creators use the predictable identification on one side and outrage on the other as a form of self-promotion (whether intentionally or not, we can discuss!). Not coincidentally, Ballerina Farm sells products from her farm, and Alena sells etiquette books and courses. Estee Williams seems content with the visibility—for now! If there’s commercial interest involved, it’s safe to assume it’s performative. The media, as always, gives them a platform thinking mostly about views and clicks, not so much about veracity or relevance, publishing articles talking about “movements” with a sample size of 1, using hashtags as evidence.

The real novelty here is that some “insights” providers are calling tradwives a “trend” (out of ignorance or to boost engagement? You decide). It starts with a complete lack of cultural context: being a “tradwife” is still the norm, not the exception, in many places and communities worldwide, particularly in religious ones, even in the West—in some cases by choice, but not in others. No one bothered to check YouTube or TikTok, where much of the highly viewed content consists of criticisms made by Western women, who also benefit directly from the outrage-driven engagement, inflating the numbers on this topic. The comments on the most-watched videos are mostly from people who also think it’s insane or outrageous, so in the end, what generated views, likes, comments, and so on, outside of the creators’ content themselves, were people criticizing, not people wanting to be part of this, which could suggest a trend. Nothing suggests, either among followers of the three or in critics' comments, that anyone was persuaded to adopt this lifestyle because of what they saw!

“But Rodrigo, they have a lot of followers and engagement; it’s impossible they don’t influence anyone!” Sure, Dr. Pimple Popper has over 8 million followers just on YouTube, and yet, no one’s saying popping pimples is a trend.

Marketers and insights teams may not have time for fact-checking, but they can always choose better sources and providers.