We’re all guilty of oversharing on social media. Whether this is a thing of the past or you’re still struggling with it, oversharing has implications that go deeper than the surface. While you might think it’s annoying to others, depending on what you share online, you could be putting yourself in danger. Let’s look at several things you might be doing on social media that indicate you’re guilty of sharing too much online.
1. You include your location.
People like to include their location on an Instagram post if they’re at a restaurant or a bar they love and want their followers to know about it. While sharing your location on social media is understandable if you want to give good recommendations, you want to be careful. If you share your location every time you upload a post—when you went to the grocery store, your dentist’s office, or even your therapist, then you’re oversharing.
2. You share your address.
One significant and potentially dangerous sign that you’re sharing too much of yourself on social media is if you’re sharing your address. You might love where you live and want to share it with your followers, so you upload a video of your street, which inadvertently shows your house’s street number. Or, you’re unboxing something that came in the mail for your followers, and you upload a video with the courier sticker showing your address. This type of oversharing risks extremely personal information falling into the wrong hands.
3. You share all of your emotions.
How often do you vent about how you’re feeling on social media? Once or twice a week? Every day? If you love to share every emotion with your followers, no matter how big or small, then you might be guilty of oversharing. You can’t seem to help it—every time you feel sad or happy, you just pick up your phone and post about it. You love seeing all the comments and feeling like you’re not alone in what you’re going through.
4. You post photos of minors.
You may work at a school or with children in some capacity, and you love to post about your work on social media. While there’s nothing wrong with talking about what you do for a living online, it’s essential to keep in mind that posting images of minors without their permission can be a problem. Perhaps the parents of the minors don’t want their children’s images online and wouldn’t agree to this if they knew.
5. You share intimate photos of yourself.
These days, there are many avenues to make money online, and one of these avenues is through apps like OnlyFans. While only the top 1% of creators make a decent living from this type of work, it hasn’t stopped hundreds of thousands of people trying. If you’re guilty of oversharing, there’s a good chance you’re not afraid to upload intimate images of yourself to social media—whether you’re asking people to pay for them or not.
6. You have numerous social media apps.
How many social media apps do you have on your phone right now? Three? Four? Five? When you edit a video or take a photo of what you’re doing, whether eating out at your favorite restaurant or going to the gym, you upload it to Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and sometimes Reddit, obsessing over people’s responses in the comments.
7. You get validation from your comments.
You might be guilty of sharing too much of yourself on social media if you put too much worth into the comments people leave on your content. You don’t put the effort into catching up with a friend for coffee or calling up your sibling to have a heart-to-heart when you’re feeling down. Instead, you turn to the comments, hoping that the dopamine from a stranger is enough to validate you.
8. You have a simple password.
If you share too much about yourself on social media, you probably use the same password across the board to allow easy access. You want to be able to upload to all your social accounts as quickly as possible, and you know you’re not going to remember 10 different passwords. The problem with this is that you’re at risk of being hacked and having your identity stolen.
9. You don’t check your pics before you post them.
If you love sharing everything about your life online, then you most likely don’t check your pictures too hard before you upload them. You don’t make sure you’ve blurred sensitive information, like license plates, personal documents, or home addresses on packages. You simply upload your content and hope for the best.
10. You message strangers.
If you are seasoned in sharing too much online, then you’re probably also seasoned in talking to complete strangers online. There’s a difference between having lots of people try to connect with you in your DMs and responding to each and every one. You regularly interact with people who message you and even reach out to strangers yourself. While there’s nothing wrong with meeting someone online, verifying someone’s true identity is nearly impossible and you have to be careful.
11. You share family secrets.
Every family has its secrets, and most families prefer to keep them this way. Perhaps you know that your brother is cheating on his girlfriend, and instead of talking to him about it, you choose to share this with your followers because you know that you’ll get a lot of interaction on your profile as a result.
12. You share information about your job.
Sometimes, a job relates directly to social media, and it makes sense to talk about it and share details with your followers. However, if you work somewhere that doesn’t have anything to do with social media, you might be guilty of oversharing if you’ve shared too much about your place of work. Perhaps you’ve shared where your job is located, and you’ve even shared legally confidential documents.
13. You don’t remember important events.
You’re so obsessed with sharing your life online that everything becomes an important event, from what you bought at the grocery store this morning to what’s in your bag. Your Instagram feed is so full of mundane images about your everyday life that you can’t even remember the important dates, like your parent’s 30th wedding anniversary, or reminisce on past events, like your brother’s wedding last month. You’ve replaced quality moments with quantity.
14. You share other people’s information.
What you might inadvertently end up doing if you’re sharing too much online is sharing other people’s information. Say, for example, you’re sharing a conversation that you had with your best friend. Because you’re sharing screenshots, you end up sharing their phone number on your profile. Or, you might be going on a road trip with your friends, and you share the location of your destination and the license plate number of the car you’re all driving in.
15. You post too many pictures of yourself.
A classic move of someone who overshares online is someone who posts too many pics of themselves. While you might like keeping your followers updated weekly, even daily, posting multiple images of yourself throughout the day can be classified as oversharing. Perhaps you post a pic of yourself waking up, eating breakfast, going for a run, running errands, taking a nap, and having dinner right up until you sleep again at the end of the day.
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