Os olhos também crêem

Casual spontaneity is often as elaborately constructed as Instagram’s more polished images. Earlier this year, Leandra Medine Cohen, the founder of the lifestyle blog Man Repeller (1.9 million Instagram followers), posted “How to Take a Good Instagram Photo: A Theory,” in which she admits as much. “The paradox, of course,” she writes, “is that we know (inherently at this point) how much effort might go into a selfie, but we’re willing to accept the pretend sheen of ease.” But enjoying that pretense of apparent spontaneity doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve collectively lost all grasp of the truth. For their intended audiences, these images don’t seem like contrived attempts to pass off stylized setups as everyday life but instead imply dedication to the aesthetic, a pure commitment to trying to influence. In its way, this is as “authentic” as any document that purports to capture unvarnished reality. 

For influencers, authenticity tends to be bound up with aspiration: an image is “true” if it captures and triggers desire, even if the image is carefully and even deceptively constructed. The feeling it inspires in the midst of scrolling is what matters. They draw on the ambiguity between what is real and what is possible. And after all, what could be more inauthentic than an image from an influencer that fails at seeming influential? Being liked, capturing attention, connecting with an audience: on Instagram, these incentives are not a corruption of reality but the basis of it. So a post whose strategies for garnering attention are legible conveys something essential about the “facts” of the moment that begat it. Traits like spontaneity, vulnerability, and beauty are as “real,” by Instagram’s standards, as the attention they get in being effectively signified. Instagram teaches users to decode and navigate these sorts of “deceptions” on their own terms, which is a large part of what makes it compelling to use. 

A kind of vertigo ensues if we try to assess lifestyle-oriented images in terms of their level of truth. Instagram is consumed not as bona fide reality but a hyperreality, in which representations refer to other representations, not some supposed truth outside the app. There is no natural beauty, just “natural” beauty. No candid shots, just shots that read as “candid” by the code of conventions that effective influencers have mastered — demonstrating that mastery over the conventions is how one establishes one’s influence. There is no “reality” against which to measure the particular beauty or mood or lifestyle an image is designed to evoke except itself. Using something faked, edited, misleading, or out of context to attract attention isn’t the platform’s problem but its point. There is no “fake news” on Instagram. 

But there are fake audiences. There’s no telling how many of Instagram’s 800 million users are bots; the only estimates of the number of fake accounts (8 percent as of 2015) come from the platform itself, though independent analysts have suggested bots could make up closer to 30 percent of total accounts. While the company does shadow-ban insubordinate users and delete some bots, it has not launched a large-scale effort to purge them since the “Instagram rapture” of 2014, in which millions of bots were deleted for the sake of preserving “genuine interactions.” After the rapture, Instagram received thousands of pleas from despondent users begging to have their cherished ghosts back.

 Adrienne Matei, Seeing is Believing.