Social media and the authentically-curated content
At 2 p.m. on Friday, April 29, Alexander Mutammara, 23, received his daily BeReal notification. He just got home from a dentist appointment and was heating some Whole Foods pea and potato samosas. Off work, Mutammara wanted to eat a quick snack when a notification on his iPhone 10 drew his attention. He only had two minutes to share a two-photograph post, taken with the phone’s front and back camera. He quickly pointed it to the samosas resting on an oven’s baking sheet and shot. Behind the mirror screen, the camera captured a selfie of Mutammara chewing a crumbling samosa. Although posing with his mouth full of a distasteful semi-frozen snack made him feel silly, he was committed to the authenticity of the app. Four friends replied, two with inside jokes and two with smile emojis.
BeReal is the latest rising star in the crowded universe of attention-fueled social media platforms. Created in 2020 by a 25-year-old French entrepreneur fed up with the “excesses of Instagram,” the app wants to convince people that, against current digital aesthetics, unfiltered reality is worth-sharing. Every day, its users receive a two-minute notification to share a front — what you’re looking at — and back — how you look like — photograph in one combined post. The limited posting time and the changing notification alert tries to prevent them from manufacturing reality. Additionally, they are only able to see their friends’ stories after posting their own. The app’s objective is simple but, for its users, it has become an indispensable part of their social media diet.
You’re not able “to overthink and overcurate your posts like you would on other social media sites,” said Mutammara in a call. “I just snap a picture of whatever is in front of me, and hopefully it’s engaging for the people that I’m posting to.”
With a 315% growth in the last year according to Apptropia and one of the top-5 most downloaded free apps on the App Store at the end of April, BeReal is the digital place to be.
“Because the whole purpose of the app is to be really true to who you are and very candid, this is what I’m doing,” said Mutammara. “I take it pretty seriously.”
A sales reporting analyst, Mutammara first heard about BeReal in February, when a friend told him about a cool, new, promising app. Growing up with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, he thought that BeReal, based on authenticity, felt like a refreshing idea. On February 19, after going out to a bar, he shared his first post, a picture of two of his friends sitting on a couch accompanied by his late-night face.
“It’s pretty simple, but that’s the intention,” said Mutammara.
BeReal’s popularity is part of a broader trend in the pursuit of digital authenticity, the belief — or self-delusion — that social media can be an accurate reflection of our offline personas, a virtual mirror. Indeed, the history of social media can be read as an elusive quest for such genuineness.
Facemash, currently known as Facebook, started as a beauty-ranking website to assess photos of Harvard female students uploaded without their consent. Although Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, eventually closed it, he learned about the potential impact of a platform profiting from familiar faces. “Facemash showed him how much people liked looking at pictures of their friends and acquaintances,” wrote Steven Levy, Editor at Large of Wired, in “Facebook: The Inside Story.”
Facebook disrupted the social media landscape with its authenticity ethos, basing its success on real-identity profiles. “Tying your online persona to your true identity was a shift from other online services, where people went by fanciful or even gross nicknames, as if at a giant, messy costume ball where anonymity could let you misbehave without consequences,” wrote Levy.
For Kelsey Weekman, an internet culture expert, Facebook was established as a digital megaphone to share personal updates. “You would connect with people in your life, you would find people who have similar interests [and] you would be there for the big moments,” she said in a call.
Despite its real-life objective, Facebook was soon criticized by many users, who depicted it as an artificial forum to merely share an upgraded version of everyday life. “For young people, Facebook is yet another form of escapism; we can turn our lives into stage dramas and relationships into comedy routines,” wrote Alice Mathias, a Dartmouth graduate, in the New York Times in 2007.
Leslie Zukor, 37, echoes her views. She got into Facebook in 2005, soon after it was launched, and eventually stopped sharing intimate, personal posts. “At a certain point, you become image-conscious and you feel like ‘Oh my god. Do I want this person seeing this?’,” she said in a call. “You can’t be true to yourself on Facebook.”
Despite criticism, Facebook eventually became the most influential social media app, with more than 500 million monthly active users at the end of 2010, according to Business of Apps. As a country, Facebook would have surpassed the population of the United States and Indonesia, the third and fourth most populous states in 2010, combined. Out of its success, Kevin Systrom thought he could become the next Zuckerberg.
A Stanford graduate, Systrom launched Burbn, a nod to the popular southern liquor, in 2009. Along with a shared Silicon Valley mindset based on the promise of social connectivity, the squared-photo sharing app included a distinctive feature: embedded filters. Social media users already retouched their photographs using editing software such as Photoshop or PhotoScape, but Systrom was a pioneer in the development of a platform featuring the tools needed to upgrade reality. With such an aspirational aim, Instagram took over the digital world.
Filters, when “used en masse, would give Instagrammers permission to present their reality as more interesting and beautiful than it actually was,” wrote Sarah Frier in “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.” “That was exactly what would help make the product popular. Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life.” Ironically, it was a picture of the unpleasant L.A. traffic — Justin Bieber’s first post in July, 2011 — what helped Instagram to take off.
If the aughts were defined by the battle between sociability-driven amateurish posts versus social-capital, staged content, Instagram’s hegemony seemed to foretell the end of the alleged digital authenticity. In 2010, Apple launched its iPhone 4, the first that came with a front lens and an improved 5-megapixels rear camera, which permitted higher-quality photographs. Instagram benefited from such technological advancement and soon, people started documenting a sweetened version of their daily lives through their smartphones.
On Instagram “you are presenting your best moments,” said Weekman. “Instagram is your highlight reel.”
Eventually, the Instagram aesthetic, a millennial-pink global trend filled with succulent plants and avocado toasts, achieved global prominence, from Berlin to Manhattan. Instagrammable cafés and restaurants started to pop up in trendy urban neighborhoods like Malasaña, in Madrid, and Canal Saint-Martin, in Paris, non-places defined as AirSpace by tech culture writer Kyle Chayka.
Despite its aesthetic content, Eleonora Francica, 25, found Instagram welcoming at first. After signing up in 2012, she thought that the intimate, artsy content reminded her of Tumblr, a social media platform based on visual posts and anonymous communities. Filters helped her improve the light and color of her photos, but she still felt her content was authentic.
“When I first joined Instagram, it was a really nice platform,” said Francica in a call.
The introduction of Stories in 2016 changed that. After acquiring Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, Zuckerberg tried to convince Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO and another Stanford graduate, to sell him his company, an offer he refused. As a result, Facebook’s founder introduced the option to upload 24-hour-lasting pictures, Snapchat’s distinguishing feature.
The wide range of filters available on Snapchat allowed users to enhance their reality but, as Weekman argues, the app still intended to foster intimate, friendly connections. Instagram’s copycat, however, compelled people to document their veiled reality for a larger public, pressuring them to curate their content.
On Instagram “you could have a wider audience looking at your stories,” said Weekman. “You wanted them to be good because a lot of people are going to see them.”
“When Instagram started to do Stories, it was fun at first,” said Francica. “But then, I saw people went crazy about it, and filters made it worse.”
With Stories, filters evolved from merely altering colors to transforming facial features — fuller lips and higher eyebrows. The era of the Instagram Face, as cultural critic Jia Tolentino coined it, was born. This perfectionist-driven obsession negatively impacted youth mental health. According to a 2021 investigation by The Wall Street Journal: “Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram.”
For Paula Yanes-Lukin, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University who specializes in anxiety and mood disorders, one of the reasons is the app’s own nature.
“Instagram is less about relationship forming, connecting with other people, and more about looking at other people’s images and your images that you’re presenting,” said Yanes-Lukin in a call.
An aspirational visual mirage may heighten mental health issues in some people. “The larger the discrepancy between that idealized self and the real self, the more dissatisfied they’re going to be with themselves, feeling they’re not doing enough, worthless and hopeless,” said Yanes-Lukin.
Pierce Firebaugh, a 25-year-old film graduate, grew tired of the social pressure to post content for the sake of his peers’ approval. He got Instagram after graduating from high school and, after a few years, he knew it was time to move on. “I just realized that every time I was posting something, there was so much of a focus on what other people would think of it,” he said in a call. In 2021, he finally closed his account. “As long as I have this there, I’m going to be worrying about what other people are thinking,” he said.
Despite his escape, Firebaugh still thinks about the way he would perform online and the reputation he would earn if he was still in the app. “It’s like sometimes I think about an outfit that I’m going to wear based on how it might be perceived in a social media context,” he said. “How cool would it be to post that so everyone could see.”
Many Instagram users have revolted against the imposition of a curated narrative. Celebrities like Bella Hadid or Selena Gomez have recognized the negative impact social media has had on their mental health.
“Social media is not real. For anyone struggling, please remember that,” wrote Hadid last November on an Instagram caption.
Ordinary users have also reacted. Finsta — fake Instagram accounts — and casual Instagram popularized among younger users who, along with the Close Friends option, wanted to curate a more unfiltered digital persona. Despite the eased pressure, for some users it still meant a continuous performance to uphold a social self-standard.
“The same thing started happening with finsta, I was so worried about what other people were thinking,” said Firebaugh. He finally deleted his alternative account at the end of last year.
Kelsey Weekman also believes that, despite the apparent casualness of finsta and Close Friends, people are still trapped within Instagram’s corseted environment. “Now we have photo dumps and blurry photos, but that’s an aesthetic trend more than anything,” she said. A quick scroll of the 1.7 million #photodump content proves her point, with a majority of the “Top” posts showing a flow of young, normative-looking women casually posing to the camera lens.
“You can’t be fully authentic online,” added Weekman.
For her, authenticity is more of a tech-company buzzword than a social media user obsession and, although BeReal has become the refuge for people fed up with the artificial and overly saturated reality induced by Instagram, it risks becoming another attention-driven app without a refreshing allure.
“Unless they add more features, I think people will probably start getting bored of it,” Weekman said.
Despite BeReal’s unfiltered promise, there’s nothing casual about the digital sphere, and the pursuit of an authentic social media identity may be a quixotic effort, an oxymoron. As Jia Tolentino wrote in her book “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,” everybody performs online.
“People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason,” wrote Tolentino. “On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.”
Natalia Poblete, 23, agrees. She got BeReal last March 25, after Miranda, her roommate, told her about a new social media platform people from their high school were using. She posted a picture of her foot poking at Miranda and thought that BeReal would be a silly, fleeting app. However, she wanted to check her friends’ content, so curiosity prevailed.
“Once I got in, I wanted to be able to see other people’s [stories] that I just added as friends, so I posted one,” she said in a call.
Despite its popularity, she believes that the app’s fixation with everyday life will end up becoming boring. “I wish that people would wait to post until they were in a more interesting place, because I’m tired of seeing everybody sitting at their desk,” she said.
For her, social media is intrinsically tied to an aspirational self, and she disregards content depicted as an authentic version of somebody’s offline persona. “The accounts that I really like on Instagram, or people that I think are good at posting and that I would like to post more like them, are not necessarily authentic accounts,” she said. “I’m actually not sure that I am interested in authenticity.”
