The perfect online persona is beginning to look suspicious.

For years, polish was treated as proof of credibility online. Clean visuals, rehearsed captions, controlled tone, and careful self-presentation became the grammar of digital seriousness. Now those same signals are increasingly being read as evidence of distance, calculation, or something withheld.

A new global survey from MyIQ suggests that audiences are growing more receptive to unfiltered authenticity: content that feels reactive, self-aware, imperfect and emotionally legible. Across responses from 12,400 adults in the US, UK, Europe, and Latin America, users repeatedly described heavily managed online personas as tiring, predictable, and harder to trust.

According to MyIQ, 68% of respondents said they trust creators more when content feels spontaneous rather than heavily produced, while 61% said they are increasingly suspicious of accounts that appear “too perfect” online. Another 57% said they now prefer low-production videos, casual posts, voice notes, or reactive commentary over highly edited formats.

The shift is not simply a rejection of beauty, professionalism, or production value. It reflects a change in how people interpret the surface of the internet. Highly polished content once signalled care and effort. Increasingly, it can also signal management. The more seamless a post appears, the more some users seem to wonder what has been removed from it.

That suspicion has sharpened in a culture crowded with brand scripts, influencer partnerships, templated advice, AI-assisted captions and self-optimised personal brands. In that environment, imperfection has become a kind of social proof. A rough edit, a pause, a contradiction, a screen-recorded thought, a casual voice note or a blunt comment-section reply can make content feel less like a performance designed for conversion and more like a person briefly breaking through the format.

MyIQ’s findings suggest that audiences are not asking for the end of performance online. They are becoming more sophisticated at detecting which performances feel emotionally plausible. Nearly half of respondents said they can immediately tell when a creator or brand is trying to appear relatable in a calculated way, while 52% said scripted internet personalities now feel more emotionally distant than openly chaotic or inconsistent ones.

Sarah Meyer, Managing Director at MyIQ, said the findings point to a more complicated phase of digital self-presentation. “The internet has not become more authentic in any simple sense,” Meyer said. “It has become more alert to the signs of management. People are no longer just judging what someone says online; they are judging how much of the person seems to have survived the editing process. The new trust signal is not messiness itself. It is the sense that a human being has not been completely flattened into a strategy.”

That distinction matters for brands as much as for creators. Informal comment sections, reactive posts, low-fi videos, and self-aware humour are increasingly replacing heavily scripted campaigns on platforms where users expect immediacy rather than presentation. But the same audience that rewards looseness can also punish imitation. Forced casualness may now read as even more artificial than traditional corporate polish.

MyIQ found that 63% of respondents believe internet culture currently rewards people who appear self-aware, chaotic or emotionally transparent, while 58% said overly curated content now feels “dated” rather than aspirational.

What emerges is not a cleaner or more honest internet, but a new visual and emotional code. The old ideal was control: the perfect image, the coherent persona, the edited life. The emerging ideal is presence: the sense that someone is reacting in real time, with enough friction and inconsistency to feel recognisable.

That makes the current moment more unstable than a simple authenticity trend. If polish once helped people and brands appear trustworthy, excessive polish can now create the opposite effect. It can make the person behind the post feel absent. The most effective online identities are not necessarily the least edited, but the ones that leave visible evidence of thought, mood, and human interruption.

The curated internet has not disappeared. It still shapes commerce, celebrity, and personal branding. But its cultural authority is weaker than it once was. Increasingly, the people holding attention online are not those who look untouched by the mess of being human, but those who know how to let some of that mess remain visible.

About MyIQ:
MyIQ was launched in 2024 and is used by over a million individuals worldwide. It is a digital self-knowledge platform that offers more than an IQ score, with over 9 million completed tests across the various test categories: cognitive, personality, and relationships, all with personalised, actionable insights. The platform offers over 25 brain games, more than 150 intelligence puzzles, over 20 hours of expert video content, and 300+ available lessons on emotional intelligence, problem-solving, innovation, confidence-building, and decision-making. Through its IQ test, full-spectrum personality assessment, and relationship insight quiz, MyIQ delivers structured, personalized feedback that helps individuals better understand their inner world and behaviour.

Media Contact:
MyIQ
pr@myiq.com
Sophie de Villiers
PR Manager