Being a teenage girl is a process fraught with complications and insecurities. Putting it all online for the world to see? It doesn’t make things any easier.
Just ask Essena O’Neill. The eighteen-year old Instagram star amassed more than 500,000 followers on the social media platform, followers drawn to her aspirational posts about health, lifestyle, and beauty.
Now, she’s looking to give it all away. O’Neill announced last week that she was “quitting” social media, and she is now focusing her energy on revealing the ugly truth behind our favorite Instagram feeds and YouTube personalities, starting with her own story.
Much like this commercial advising us to get off of our phones, O'Neill is now working hard to debunk our worldwide obsession with social technology by pointing out that it's all essentially fiction.
The Australian deleted most of her platforms and removed roughly 2,000 images from Instagram. In their place, she has created a website called Let’s Be Game Changers, and has turned her once-perfect Instagram into a revelatory feed called “Social Media Is Not Real Life.”
Taking a revisionist approach to her old Instagram persona, O’Neill edited her Instagram captions to reveal what was really happening in each photo, from corporate sponsorship to unhealthy diet choices. Scroll through the gallery below to see what O'Neill thinks about her Instagram photos now.
Update: At this time, it appears that O'Neill has taken down her official Instagram account.
Why I think social media sucks from Essena O'Neill on Vimeo.
Here she is, modeling a white dress that shows off her slender physique. In her edited caption, she notes that she spent the whole evening trying to look "hot" for social media, but didn't enjoy herself at the formal party that she wore it to.
In one of the most notable edits, O'Neill describes the torturous process of creating the perfect bikini shot–a process that involved countless photographs and unhealthy crash dieting.
She focuses many of her edits on posts where she promoted brands in exchange for money, paying particular attention to brands that don't live up to her own high standards for ethical manufacture.
She also makes sure to call attention to the intense cycle of insecurity that she developed as a result of her Instagram addiction. She adds the caption "please like this photo," to highlight the desperation that led her to take the same picture fifty times, in the hopes of "social approval."
Watch the video below to learn more about what prompted Essena O'Neill to pull back the curtain, and change the way we view other people's "perfect lives" on social media.
If this all powerful story about the perils of fame and technology made you think, please use social media for good, and SHARE this story to spread O'Neill's game-changing message!
