U.S. catfishing prevention on social media 2022

According to a January 2022 survey, 60 percent of adults in the United States said that they strongly supported giving social media users a safety guard for their profile pictures to prevent catfishing on social media. Overall, 56 percent of respondents thought that banning fake accounts would help to prevent catfishing and 53 percent stated that there should be laws against impersonation on social media. Furthermore, four percent of those asked said they strongly opposed requiring identity verification to create a social media profile.

Measures which adults in the United States support to prevent catfishing on social media as of January 2022

Characteristic	Strongly support	Somewhat support	Don't know/No opinion	Somewhat oppose	Strongly oppose
Giving users a safety guard for profile pictures	60%	24%	10%	3%	3%
Banning fake accounts	56%	23%	12%	5%	4%
Laws against impersonation on social media	53%	25%	13%	5%	4%
Requiring identity verification to create a profile	52%	28%	10%	6%	4%
Blocking users from screenshotting another profile picture	50%	22%	15%	8%	5%
Creating a reverse image search to identify duplicates	46%	27%	17%	5%	4%

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Release date

January 2022

More information

Region

United States

Survey time period

January 14 to 15, 2022

Number of respondents

2,211 respondents

Age group

18 years and older

Method of interview

Online survey

Supplementary notes

Original question: "Do you support or oppose each of the following measures to prevent catfishing on social media platforms?"
The source defines catfishing as a situation "where users are tricked by fake accounts into online relationships and sometimes scammed out of money".
Figures may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

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