"The Twitter Me Is Not The Real Me"

There is a interesting article at LA Times "The Twitter Me Is Not The Real Me"


I strongly agree with that article.
The only way you could have any type of accurate personality analysis is using a normative personality test, like the 16PF5.



Some fresh papers:
For Social Networking sites:
- "Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles"
".... Here we examine impressions based on 133 Facebook profiles, comparing them with how the targets see themselves and are seen by close acquaintances.
...... Extraversion was the only Big Five trait that showed evidence for meta-accuracy ....."



For Online Dating sites [only the ones offering speeddating proposals, Powerful Searching Engines or Matching based on Self-Reported Data – Bidirectional Recommendation Engines NOT for Online Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Algorithms]:
- "What lies beneath: The linguistic traces of deception in online dating profiles."
" An emerging body of research .... has shown that liars often use words differently than truth-tellers. ...judges' perceptions of the daters' trustworthiness were not accurate. The accuracy rate for the judges in categorizing daters into high versus low trustworthiness was 48.7%, not different from chance, suggesting that the judges were unable to classify daters on trustworthiness from their textual self-descriptions. Consistent with previous research on deception detection, an important reason for the low detection rates was the operation of the truth bias. ...judges made trustworthiness decisions largely based on HOW the targets talked, rather than on WHAT they said. "

- "Perceptions of trustworthiness online: the role of visual and textual information"
".. the accuracy of trustworthiness impressions is low regardless of the type of information available, because of a truth bias. "

- "Reading between the lines: linguistic cues to deception in online dating profiles"
"theoretical implications regarding the impact of media affordances (i.e., asynchronicity and editability) on the occurrence of linguistic cues to deception."

- "Making Sense of Strangers' Expertise from Signals in Digital Artifacts"
"...recent research also shows that there is deception involved in online profiles, raising issues of the credibility of information found online."

- "The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles"
".. The study examined four popular online dating sites in the United States: Match/MSN, Yahoo Personals, American Singles and Webdate. We focused on traditional sites, where individuals create profiles and initiate contact with others, as opposed to sites that pair users based on survey responses (e.g., eHarmony).


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In other words, browsing profiles at social networking sites or online dating sites, any person will assess quite well the level of Extraversion of the other persons and not well the other personality traits.