The Identification Trap: How Social Media is Killing Individual Identity

By Lina Lataoui

What kind of person are you? Scroll long enough, and you’ll find your answer. Online, every interest, mood, or aesthetic has a ready-made label alongside its own corner of the internet. But social media has transformed these identities into less about authenticity and more about self-packaging. Every hobby, outfit, or passing impulse must come with an algorithm-friendly tag and curated aesthetic which leaves little room for the contradictions and messiness of reality.

Creators understand the rules: the algorithm rewards recognisability. The faster a piece of content can be slotted into a category, the further it travels – and ambiguity doesn’t trend. In this system, authenticity withers; even ‘personal’ content, like morning routines or bedroom tours, rarely feels like a genuine glimpse into someone’s life. Instead, it doubles as proof that they’ve mastered an aesthetic. Identity becomes a performance in which the label comes first and authenticity comes second, because visibility is survival.

Source: Pinterest

Audiences, in turn, internalise this logic – the more we consume media full of neatly labelled identities, the more we absorb the belief that identity must be singular, consistent, and easily readable. Social media doesn’t just mirror culture; it sets the terms of what is desirable and acceptable. Even private choices – the music we listen to, the books we read – start to feel like signals that must align with a polished persona. And no matter how carefully we curate, there’s always the nagging sense that we’re falling short of the flawless models we see online.

The danger here is not just that we perform for likes or views, but that the performance begins to override how we understand ourselves. Individuality becomes a curated illusion, a patchwork of trends designed for consumption rather than lived experience. What once felt like curiosity or genuine preference now passes through a filter of what is coherent, digestible, and algorithmically recognisable. Social media then doesn’t simply reflect identity – it manufactures it, turning us into products shaped by trends, comparison, and the ever-present gaze of our peers.

The irony is biting: the very communities that once promised freedom and connection end up enforcing sameness and rigidity. In the search for belonging, we trade authenticity for palatability and risk losing not just individuality but the ability to experience identity as something fluid, contradictory, and alive.

Communities built on shared passion soon feel narrow, more about fitting templates than true exploration. We start measuring ourselves against these scripts, internalising the idea that personality must fit neatly into a box, but the real self rarely aligns with such categorisation. When it fails to conform, doubt creeps in – our interests feel unoriginal, yet simultaneously we never fully belong in the groups built around them. The parts of us that once felt spontaneous or distinctive now seem incompatible with belonging. We end up in limbo: neither unique, nor fully aligned, always falling short of the ideal.

Source: Pinterest

What passes for individuality online is often little more than the repackaging of self-expression as self-advertisement. But the fact that this feels hollow is itself revealing. It points to a hunger for something real, detached from commodification. If algorithms flatten us into monotony, then the act of embracing contradiction, mess, and inconsistency becomes a quiet rebellion. True individuality thrives in friction – in the gaps between categories, in the messy overlap of tastes and impulses that can’t be neatly explained. By embracing those contradictions, we reclaim identity as something lived rather than branded. Communities, too, can be reimagined not as rigid templates but as open-ended spaces where exploration is valued over digestibility. By resisting the pressure to be coherent, we rediscover the fluid, shifting self that social media works so hard to iron out.

So, what kind of person are you? The kind that can’t be so easily defined.