• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 19, 2016

As most people now realize, the main purpose of social media is to make other people jealous with your vacation photos, which show that you went somewhere foreign and sunny and are therefore better and happier than them. In fact, the pressure to make other people feel miserable about their dreary, deskbound existences is so great that many of us have taken to faking images of our allegedly fabulous holidays, according to a new survey of 2,103 British social media users commissioned by Oasis Drinks.

Indeed 23% of Brits admit to posting fake holiday-related content on social media, the Oasis survey found. Furthermore 10% of Brits said they posted content from someone else pretending that it was their own, and 10% confessed to Photoshopping their vacation photos before posting them to social media. Somewhat maliciously, 14% of Brits said they chose certain times to post holiday-related content to social media specifically to make other people envious.

As so often with social media, certain kinds of holiday-related content have been posted so often they are now clichéd, not to mention widely detested. Asked which holiday photo themes bug them the most on social media, 45% of respondents said they are annoyed by happy couples engaged in PDA on the beach, while 36% said they hate the “hotdog leg” shots – you know the ones, showing the idyllic setting just beyond two well-tanned knees – and a quarter said they dislike poolside shots. Finally 23% took issue with sunset silhouettes and 20% were bothered by beach panoramas.

The objects of all this pristine puffery – call them the jealousees? – are fighting back: in fact, over a quarter of Brits (26%) said they have blocked or unfollowed someone on social media in order to stop the deluge of holiday bragging, with the average respondent dropping two connections between June and August for this offense.

Earlier this year a survey of 2,000 Brits conducted by Custard, a UK-based digital marketing services firm, found that 57% of respondents said they don’t consider their profile page a fully accurate reflection of themselves. Men were somewhat more likely to lie about their lives online, with 30.9% of men admitting to large numbers of fabrications, compared to 21.5% of women.

Asked how they distort their social media presence, 31% of Brits said they edited out all the boring details to make their life seem more exciting, and 14% said they specifically craft their profile page to make it seem like their social life is much more active than it actually is.