CELEBRITIES have long trotted out that old hypocritical line about an “intrusive” media while at the same time shamelessly using the media to promote themselves.

Hopefully, their shallow demands for a right to privacy while hogging the headlines to shout about their latest film/music/products has been spotted and understood by a discerning public.

Whatever the general perception of this skewed set of values, it’s interesting to see that it still continues. And that it has now been applied to social media by pop singer Katy Perry.

In an interview with an American entertainment website, she has told fans that she is a “victim” of social media, adding, interestingly, that it is causing the “decline of civilisation”.

As the 33-year-old American is the most followed person on Twitter with 176 million followers and regularly plugs everything there from her albums to her make-up, surely this is the height of hypocrisy?

She also has 68.4 million followers on Instagram and sends out several messages a day but says that she feels pressured to share so much of her life online. In a flash of honesty, she says it’s because it helps her career but still believes she is “as much a victim as everybody else” because of it.

She criticised the Instagram culture of young people posting photos of themselves in order to gain “likes”. She said: “It’s hard because I’d rather not care about that and just live my life. We buy clothing and products or pose a certain way or go to an event to get a picture – it’s not good for us as a society.”

Those sentiments would certainly all be worth considering – and even Ms Perry saying them doesn’t completely detract from their merits – if it were not for the fact that she is earning millions of dollars from social media coverage.

Celebrities today are more influential than probably at any time previously because they are more readily available to us, thanks to social media and the technology explosion of the last decade.

There is no doubt that the emphasis on taking selfies and publishing them online to gain superficial approval is not a completely healthy one. The over-emphasis on how we look is promoting false values, especially in young people with little experience of life.

But, it is still up to today’s celebrities to exhibit an important trait: honesty. Without that, little they say is valuable.