I agree 100% with your conclusion, but not so much that saying they were private and not active on SM was (necessarily) a lie.
If someone asked me was I active on SM I would say no, even though I've been on (and off
) this forum for years, and signed up on Twitter a few months ago. Depends on how one perceives and defines "active," perhaps especially in comparison to others.On Twitter, just for example, I see folks who seem to spend their whole day there, tweeting & retweeting & seemingly trying to rack up as many tweets & followers as possible. I'm there almost entirely to "follow" peeps and orgs of interest to me, because their collective tweets provide updates & news I might otherwise not get, and they're all in one place.
As for their joint FB account. I never saw it, so don't know how they used that account, but as others have said, for many FB is a quasi-private place for families to share family photos & news. Settings can be used to disallow access by any other peeps, right?
All that said, what I've also seen often enough are folks who are all for using SM to their own advantage, but who complain about their privacy being invaded, etc. when the peeps whose attention they sought on SM " turn against them."
(One egregious example of that I remember well involved a couple who blogged about taking their toddlers on a round the world sailing trip, and who shopped their blog to local media and to multiple online groups.
Their blog was as personal as it gets, including details about the two having sex; the mother accusing her father of sexual abuse; and the same mother saying, frequently, that she wished the kids slept more often & longer so she didn't have to deal with them, and my favorite- an entry about her cooking a special treat just for her husband, lying to her kids when they asked about it, and hiding it until the kids slept & she and her husband devoured it by themselves.
Some readers of their blog found a lot of that pretty appalling, criticism they ignored, until......(long story short) one of their kids almost died on board, and the lot of them had to be plucked out of the ocean at great expense. Then the criticism poured in, which they responded to with great indignity, saying no one had a right to question their personal decisions or to invade their privacy).
It is also plain fact that after her return at least a few people supposedly close to the Papinis went all over SM to try to shape the narrative about what had happened. But... neither KP or SP have done so themselves, speaking in their own names. Their silence for the past year, actually, is IMO, one of the strongest arguments for believing that SP was indeed victimized, whatever the circumstances & motivation may have been.
And my profile indicates NOTHING of the sort. It happens. 
