Social Media Isn't a Lie

Essena O’Neill is a 19-year-old who quit Instagram several weeks ago with the bold claim “social media is a lie”. In an age increasingly characterized by the online presence of teenagers, it is surprising that a star who amassed millions of followers chose to give up her claim to fame.

After her instagram account was deactivated, she re-edited the majority of her Instagram captions to highlight the reality behind her photos. On one such image, she explained how she “took over 100 [photos] in similar poses trying to make my stomach look good…”, revealing her imperfections and destroying her “perfect image”.

Essena O’Neill argues that social media was consuming her:

“I remember I obsessively checked the like count for a full week since uploading it,”

she wrote of her first ever post, a selfie that now has close to 2,500 likes.

"Social media is not real life. I don’t want to promote greedy industries or photoshop or fake art".

So how much truth is there to her claim? Is the influence of social media purely negative? Whilst we agree that social media could have consumed her, and could very well have been a complete misrepresentation of her, it was her choice to make it so. Essena O’Neill decided to be part of social media from her own free will,. She agreed to promote certain products as a way of earning money from her own free will. She decided to be consumed by social media from her own free will.

Some may argue that the constant need to feel validated, liked, and rated makes social media a platform for people to flaunt their appearance and possessions. They might argue that there is no room for reality in an industry that is built on numbers.

Over the years, social media has added functions such as: “like” and “dislike” buttons; flags; comment sections. That is precisely what has made us hungry for society’s recognition. The ability to measure numerically a person’s popularity through likes and views has allowed our society to associate their self-value to the amount of approval they received.

“’Likes' are a low-effort way to produce a counterfeit feeling of social well-being that takes more effort to achieve in the real world,” Grenny concluded.

This is why we “like” other’s photos, and why we want those “like”s as well. It is a faster, easier way to achieve immediate happiness and fulfillment. Before, we might have striven hard to meet people who validate our personality, now one can simply create an internet persona and get fulfillment through that. After all, on a platform with millions of people, there is bound to be someone that shares your perspective and will be willing to hit the like button to validate you.

But social media was designed with good intentions, for people to communicate through long distances, to express their thoughts and opinions and share them with the world. It is us as human beings that twisted these intentions into our own desires. Sure, platforms like Facebook and Twitter make it easier through the focus on the number of retweets or shares, but it is merely a reflection of what humanity wants.

Therefore, we believe that social media does not hold full responsibility for what happened to O’Neill. She allowed herself to be pressured into conforming to the ‘perfect life’, allowed herself to be immersed into a world that she deemed ‘not real’. No one had the power to force her to hit the “post” button but herself.

When one builds an idealized version of oneself, one is forced to live up to it. Nothing makes a person more insecure than when they have no choice but to pretend to be somebody they are not. Essena glossed over her own faults to create a perfect internet persona, and in doing so tried to gloss over her real life.

The solution is quite simple, really. Instead of trying to hide behind idealized versions of yourself, embrace your flaws. Admitting failure on a website where thousands of people have access to your thoughts can sound intimidating. But maybe that is the problem - we have so many followers and friends that we cannot open ourselves up to honesty for fear of criticism. But at the end of the day, if you can’t be yourself with your ‘friends’, you can’t be yourself at all.

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