#Blessed, #Goals, #Fitspo—at one point or another, these hashtags have crept into our social media posts. They each relay the state of being “happy,” “satisfied,” or “confident,” but more often than not, instead of actually experiencing these emotions, people are creating them through false images uploaded on social media platforms. This realization hit 18-year-old Instagram star Essena O’Neill who “quit” social media to reveal the “real stories” behind her posts. The Australian teenager posted her first picture on Instagram when she was 16 and built a career through her massive following of over half a million fans on Instagram, 200,000 on YouTube and Tumblr, and 60,000 on Snapchat. Last week, she indiscreetly inactivated all her accounts, with the exception of Instagram. She addressed the reasons through a confessional video uploaded to her new online platform, called Let’s Be Game Changers, saying, “Never again will I let a number define me…for three years, I was only ever happy when my content did well, or when a brand deal was really good, or when people told me they liked me—that was my happiness.” Now, she has renamed her Instagram account to “Social Media is Not Real Life,” where she has rewritten captions on previously uploaded photos of herself in bikinis, fitness gear, and other outfits with descriptive anecdotes, pointing out how her posts were staged, paid for, and extensively edited.
While O’Neill’s social media detox is making headlines to “change the game,” she is not the first one to address the misconceptions that social media icons portray on sharing platforms. In a recent interview on Style.com/Arabia, Kuwaiti style influencer Ascia AKF weighed in on the Middle Eastern blogging community, saying, “It’s just disturbing to me—and a bit of a scary trend—that we [the blogging community] are too afraid to show our followers how we look without makeup on or are too afraid to show people that we are not always dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes.”
We’re hoping that such honest messages from social influencers will help steer the digital world—and its ardent users—towards a more genuine and conscious social media movement.
