Social Media Only Lies If You Do

If you’ve been living under a rock this a past week, you might have missed the story of Essena O’Neill, a teen who blasted social media for being fake. It went viral and no one has shut up about it for days. Very sorry, but we’re about to throw in our own two cents.

Essena was an Instagram celeb. She had built a following and a profile for herself on Instagram, racking up 574k followers, and attracting companies who paid her to post ‘candid’ photos of their products. This week, she backflipped, first changing her Instagram captions to reveal the “real stories” behind the photos and then deleting social media altogether.

This is a tough one, guys. I’m gonna admit it to you, when I first saw the headline “Aussie Instababe Calls BS On Social Media” (pedestrian.tv) I was calling major BS myself.

It’s great that Essena decided that she wasn’t happy with the image she was projecting and has done something that makes her feel better. Social media can be pretty overwhelming, and sometimes we all feel like we need to take a step back. So you do you, girl.

But pulling a stunt like this and then setting up a website dedicated to herself, with vlogs and a “support me” button? Repeatedly saying she “won the genetic lottery”? My red flags are still waving, TBH.

It’s not revolutionary to say that social media isn’t real life, but it’s also not entirely true. Social media platforms are not inherently fake and deceiving. The issue stems from how their users choose to portray themselves. Frankly, it’s a little condescending that Essena and countless news outlets that reported her story seem to think that most people can’t see that a photo on Instagram has been carefully constructed. We all do it. We KNOW.

We live in a world where social media is not about to just go away. Most of us use it, multiple platforms, every single day, and each one has their own purpose and etiquette. Facebook is for knowing you still have a sliver of a connection with people you haven’t seen for years, and for rolling your eyes when said people share dumb clickbait articles (like the ones circulating on this very topic). Tumblr is for curating an archive of your favourite things, aesthetics and fandoms. Twitter is for your every waking thought (well, for me it is anyway). Instagram is for posting pretty photos. I’m sure all of us out there have taken multiple pictures to get the perfect one before. We’ve all slapped on filters and edited the heck out of that perfect one to make it look the best we can, and we’ve all smiled on a bad day. It isn’t just an Instafame thing. Granted, it’s not our job.

It’s all about the choices we make on social media. It’s only in recent years that people have been able to capitalise on it and start earning money for their posts. We, as followers, don’t mind that a company has asked you to promote their product and then paid you for it, but you can say no. There are plenty of people out there who choose not to promote things that they don’t like or believe in.

How you use social media is up to you. You can use it to form meaningful connections. You can use it to promote social change and spread awareness of issues facing the globe today. Or you can post a nice looking picture, and that’s totally cool. It can make you happy, and it can make you sad. Social media is such a powerful tool, and it’s up to us to wrangle it as best we can.

Obviously, we select what to post on our platforms, we curate how we present ourselves. We can’t put all of ourselves into every Instagram post or Tweet. We can hold stuff back online, just like we can hold stuff back IRL. We can choose to let ourselves be defined by how many likes we get, or we can just carry on with our lives.

Essena was living a life she felt was a lie, but instead of quietly redirecting her interests, she chose to promote herself even further. She disowned all responsibility and blamed the platform she had been using. To me, it seems like she’s just switched platforms, but not before one last publicity hurrah on Instagram, where she used her established brand to broadcast her move. Despite saying she doesn’t want to be defined by numbers, she didn’t start from scratch–she used her Instagram following to boost the new site, and she’s gained even more fame from her anti-social media stance going viral on social media. I just hope she really puts it to good use now, instead of just posting TED talks and trying to convince everyone else to delete their socials as well.