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Virtual Influencers: Harmless Advertising or Dystopian Deception?

photograph of mannequin in sunglasses and wig

As social media sites become more and more ubiquitous, the influence of internet marketers and celebrities has exponentially increased. Now,  “Influencer” has evolved into a serious job title. Seventeen-year-old Charli D’Amelio, for example, started posting short, simple dance videos on TikTok in 2019 and has since accrued over 133 million followers and ended 2021 with earnings of more than $17.5 million dollars. With so much consumer attention to be won, an entire industry has spawned to support virtual influencers – brand ambassadors designed using AI and CGI technologies as a substitute for human influencers. Unlike other automated social media presences – such as “twitter bots” – virtual social media influencers have an animated, life-like appearance coupled with a robust, fabricated persona – taking brand humanization to another level.

Take Miquela (also known as Lil Miquela), who was created in 2016 by Los Angeles-based digital marketing company Brud. On her various social media platforms, Miquela claims to be a 19-year-old AI robot with a passion for social justice, fashion, music, and friendship. Currently, Miquela, who regularly features in luxury brand advertising and fashion magazines, has over 190,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and gives “live” interviews at major events like Coachella. It is estimated that in 2020, Lil Miquela (with 2.8 million followers across her social media accounts) made $8,500 per sponsored post and contributed $11.7 million to her company of origin.

The key advantages of virtual influencers like Miquela revolve around their adaptability, manipulability, economic efficiency, and persistence.

Virtual brand ambassadors are the perfect faces for advertising campaigns because their appearances and personalities can be sculpted to fit a company’s exact specifications.

Virtual influencers are also cheaper and more reliable than human labor in the long run. Non-human internet celebrities can “work” around-the-clock in multiple locations at once and cannot age or die unless instructed to by their programmers. In the case of Chinese virtual influencer Ling, her primary appeal to advertisers is her predictable and controllable nature, which provides a sense of reassurance that human brand ambassadors cannot. Human influencers have the frustrating tendency to say or do things the public finds objectionable that might tarnish the reputation of the brands to which they are linked. Just as automation in machine factory labor reduces the risk of human labor, the use of digital social media personalities mitigates the possibility of human error.

One concern, of course, is the deliberate deception at work. At the outset of her emergence onto the social media scene, Miquela’s human-ness was hotly debated in internet circles. Before her creators revealed her artificial nature to the public, many of her followers believed that she was a real, slightly over-edited teenage model.

The human-like appearance and mannerisms of Miquela and other virtual influencers offers a reason to worry about what the future of social media might look like, especially as these computer-generated accounts continue to grow in number.

It’s possible that in the future algorithms will create virtual influencers, produce social media accounts for them, and post without any human intervention. One can imagine a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque future in which it is practically impossible to distinguish between real people and replicants on the internet. Much like deepfakes, the rise of virtual influencers highlights our inability to distinguish reality from fabrications. Many warn of the serious ramifications coming if we can no longer trust any of the information we consume.

One day, the prevalence of fake, human-like social media presences may completely eradicate our sense of reality in the virtual realm. This possibility suggests that the use of virtual influencers undermines the very purpose of these social media platforms. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter were created with the intention of connecting people by facilitating the sharing of news, photos, art, memories – the human experience. Unfortunately, these platforms have been repurposed as powerful tools for advertising and monetization. Although it’s true that human brand ambassadors have contributed to the impersonal and curated aspects of social media, virtual influencers make the internet even more asocial than ever before. Instead of being sold a product or a lifestyle by another human, we are being marketed to by an artificially intelligent beings with no morals, human constraints, or ability to connect with others.

Moreover, the lifestyle that virtual influencers showcase raises additional concerns. Human social media influencers already perpetuate unrealistic notions of how we should live, work, and look. The posts of these creators are curated to convey a sense of perfection and success that appeal to the aspirations of their followers. Human influencers generally project an image of having an enviable lifestyle that’s ultimately fake. Virtual influencers are even more guilty of this given that nothing about the lives they promote is real.

As a result, human consumers of artificially-created social media content (especially younger audiences) are comparing themselves to completely unreal standards that no human can ever hope to achieve.

The normalization of virtual influencers only adds additional pressure to be young, beautiful, and wealthy, and may inhibit our ability to live life well.

Virtual influencer companies further blur this line between reality and fantasy by sexualizing their artificial employees. For example, Blawko (another virtual influencer created by Brud) who self-describes as a “young robot sex symbol” has garnered attention in part for its tumultuous fake relationship with another virtual influencer named Bermuda. Another unsettling example of forced sexuality occurs in a Calvin Klein ad. In the video, Lil Miquela emerges from off screen to meet human supermodel Bella Hadid, the two models kiss, and the screen goes black. Is the complete, uninhibited control over the sexual depiction of virtual influencers a power we want their creators to have? The hyper-sexualization of women in advertising is already a pervasive issue. Now, with virtual influencers, companies can compel the talent to do or say whatever they wish. Even though these influencers are not real people with real bodily autonomy, why does it feel wrong for their creators to insert them into sexual narratives for public consumption? While this practice may not entail any direct harm, in a broader societal context the commodification of virtual sexuality remains problematic.

Given the widespread use and appeal of virtual influencers, we should be more cognizant of the moral implications of this evolving technology. Virtual influencers and their developers threaten to undercut whatever value social media possesses, limit the transparency of social networking sites, cement unrealistic societal standards, and exploit digital sexuality for the sake of fame and continued economic success.

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Praise and Resentment: The Moral of ‘Bad Art Friend’

black-and-white photograph of glamorous woman looking in mirror

The story of the “Bad Art Friend” has taken social media by storm. For those who have yet to brave the nearly 10,000 word New York Times article, here is a summary of the tale: Dawn Dorland, a writer, decided to donate one of her kidneys after completing her M.F.A. She kept her social media friends abreast of her donation and surgery, and noticed (some time after the donation) that one of her friends had failed to comment on the donation. Dorland wrote to the friend (Sonya Larson, herself a writer) asking her why she hadn’t said anything about Dorland’s altruistic activities. They exchanged pleasantries, Sonya praised her for her sacrifice, and all seemed well. Several months later, however, Sonya published a short story inspired by Dorland’s kidney donation which set off a bevy of legal and relational blows involving multiple lawsuits and, potentially, ruined careers.

There are a slew of ethical issues and questions embedded in the text and subtext of this story: questions about the differences between plagiarism and inspiration, questions about appropriate boundaries in friendships and acquaintanceships, and questions about the legality and propriety of lawsuits. But a majority consensus has seemed to emerge about the protagonist of this story: almost universally, readers are not on the side of Dawn Dorland.

Elizabeth Bruenig, in an op-ed for The Atlantic, describes Dorland as the “patron-saint” of our “social-media age,” emphasizing the description is not a complement. She characterizes Dorland’s initial behavior towards Larson as follows:

“Dorland, in particular, went looking for [victimhood], soliciting Larson for a reason the latter hadn’t congratulated her for her latest good deed, suspecting—rightly—a chillier relationship than collegial email etiquette would suggest. She kept seeking little indignities to be wounded by—and she kept finding them. Her retaliations quickly outpaced Larson’s offenses, such as they were.”

Bruenig is right that Dorland considered herself to be wronged by Larson’s apparent apathy. And insofar as we find it implausible that Larson really did wrong her in this way, it is understandable why Bruenig might analyze the situation as one in which Dorland sought out a kind of victimhood status. This may explain part of why Dorland’s behavior immediately turns us off — looking for victimhood, or claiming it too quickly, seems like a kind of injustice to those who really are victims of really bad actions or circumstances. In diverting attention to extremely mild wrongs (if they were wrongs at all) done to herself, Dorland distracts people from truly awful situations that merit their consideration. Human attention is zero-sum: if I am paying attention to you, then that means I am not paying attention to something else. So, there is a consequentialist argument to be made that I should not seek out “victimhood” status and, thereby, attention, if the public’s attention would be better spent elsewhere.

Yet, Bruenig’s analysis does not consider the fact that our mild disgust at Dorland begins even before she voices her complaints to Larson. They begin even before she speaks to Larson at all. They begin where Dorland seeks out praise and attention for her (admittedly very brave) act of donating her kidney. But did Dorland actually do anything wrong in seeking out praise for her praise-worthy act? Does our disgust stem from genuine moral assessment, or a deeper kind of resentment of people who act more selflessly than we do?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant theorized that it was morally impermissible to treat others as a mere means to our own ends — we must always consider them to be intrinsically valuable creatures themselves, and our actions must reflect this. We may, therefore, think that Dorland’s seeking of praise for her donation indicates that she was using the kidney recipient as a mere means to gaining praise, popularity, or notoriety.

Still, it is not clear that Kant’s concepts would apply in this case. Dorland’s donation of her kidney indicates that, while she may have used the opportunity as a means to other social ends, she was not using the recipient merely as a means — in saving his life, she acted toward him in acknowledgement of his value as a person. There is nothing in Kant’s moral philosophy which prohibits us from using people to attain our ends, so long as we respect them as persons while doing so.

From a utilitarian perspective, seeking praise for your good works may even maximize happiness, meaning that it would be the morally correct thing to do. For example, by seeking praise for your honorable deeds, you may draw attention to what you did, encouraging others to display the same amount of selflessness and charity. Additionally, you yourself would derive happiness from the praise, and it doesn’t seem that anybody would lose happiness by praising you. Therefore, it seems that seeking such accolades may benefit everyone and harm no one.

A virtue ethical approach to the issue may seem to yield different results. After all, surely there is something unvirtuous about someone who seeks out praise for supposedly altruistic actions? Many consider humility to be a virtue, and Dorland’s constant social media updates and attention-seeking behavior seem to indicate a lack of humility in her character. Perhaps we are turned off by the desire for praise because it indicates a character vice: pompousness, perhaps, or neediness.

And yet, historically virtue ethicists have praised the (appropriate) seeking of praise. In his Nicomachean Ethics, book four, Aristotle calls it the virtue of “small honors,” which we might more simply understand as the virtue of seeking to do, and be rewarded for, honorable things. Of course, Aristotle still holds that I should not seek praise for things that are not praiseworthy, nor should I act in praiseworthy ways purely for the praise. Still, seeking honor (and the praise that arguably ought to go with it) in moderate amounts is a virtue. At least for Aristotle.

There is a case to be made that our distaste for those who seek praise has a distinctly Christian origin. In Christian scriptures — specifically, the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6 — Jesus preaches against seeking recognition for acts of charity:

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

In the Christian tradition, the idea is that those who seek recognition from others in the here and now eliminate their opportunity to build character and, perhaps, gain other spiritual rewards. One may have earthly, social rewards, or longer-lasting spiritual rewards, but one may not have both.

Yes, I suspect there are many who would not claim Christianity who nevertheless are repelled by the idea of someone asking for praise for donating a kidney. Those familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings will recall his extensive critique of Christian moral thought which, he wrote, “has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; placed all the basic instincts of his type under ban” (The Anti-Christ, p. 5). Nietzsche argued that traditional Christian morality — which he referred to as “slave morality” — served only to make humans weak, powerless, and full of resentment at those who were powerful and flourishing. One can imagine a Nietzschean critique of our distaste for those announcing their good deeds in the public square: perhaps, rather than a kind of virtuous disgust, what we are truly experiencing is resentment toward someone acting with more courage than we have.

No matter your opinion on Bad Art Friend and all the drama that story contains, it is worth reflecting on how we respond when someone announces their good deeds to the public. Why do we prefer discretion? What is wrong with desiring praise and honor? These questions may be worth investigating deeper, lest we act in ordinary human resentment rather than careful moral consideration.

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American Social Media Support of the Hong Kong Protests

photograph of protest in NYC with many participants streaming on iphones

Since March of this year, there have been protests in Hong Kong which have gained mainstream media attention and regular coverage since they began. The protests began over a bill proposed by the Hong Kong government that would have allowed for the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China if China’s government found them guilty of some crime.

Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997, has a long history of more liberal and democratic governance than the mainland. When returned to China by the British in 1997, Hong Kongers were promised a policy of “two systems, one country.” However, many believed that this law would erode the independence of the Hong Kong government and the freedoms of its citizens. Mainland China is known for not being friendly to antagonistic voices, jailing those who dissent and censoring speech generally. While free speech is technically guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution, people can be arrested for endangering vaguely defined “state secrets” which allows for mass censorship. If a Hong Konger, used to the free speech protections afforded to a citizen of Hong Kong, dissented against the mainland government to such an extent that the Chinese government wished to arrest him for endangering state secrets, this proposed bill would allow him to be extradited to China. Essentially, the free speech of Hong Kong would become the “free speech” of China.

As these protests and confrontations between protestors and police grow more violent, Hong Kong is getting more attention from Western media and from Western social media. Many people on social media are calling for boycotts of the NBA and of Blizzard, a video game production company, for bowing to China in silencing employees supporting the Hong Kong protests. Far more are simply expressing support for the Hong Kong protests, a fact being taken advantage of by Hong Kong protestors. During the protestors’ occupation of the Hong Kong airport in August, signs like this one saying “Sorry for the inconvenience. We are fighting for the future of our home” made the rounds on social media. Importantly, the message on the sign was written in English, as are many of the signs used in the protests. While English was the official language until the 1970s, far more people know the local dialect of Chinese, Cantonese, than know English.

Clearly, the purpose of these signs being written on in English is for people to take photos of them and to spread them around on English-speaking social media rather than for other Hong Kongers or even mainland Chinese to read them. English-speaking nations and their people are typically very supportive of the sorts of liberal democratic values for which Hong Kongers are fighting. However, one has to wonder to what extent English-speakers, particularly Americans, should be spreading these Hong Kongers’ messages around.

The United States has a long history of intervention in the affairs of foreign nations. Some people believe that this period of intervention should end, that Americans and the American government should focus on domestic affairs instead of sticking their noses into the affairs of others. People point to the chaos in the Middle East, or the historic meddling of the US in Latin America to demonstrate the common proverb that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

As China would have people see it, the Hong Kong protests are an internal affair (for discussion see Tucker Sechrest’s “The Hong Kong Protests and International Obligation”). Rather than fighting for freedom, mainland Chinese people and a portion of Hong Kongers see protestors as damaging social stability. Indeed, in response to the Houston Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of the protests, the Chinese consulate in Houston said that “anybody with conscience would support the efforts made by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to safeguard Hong Kong’s social stability.” If Americans have anything to say about the protests, China says, it should be in support of normal governmental processes working to resolve the conflict and maintain stability. Supporting the protestors, no matter one’s personal beliefs on the issue, clearly is disrupting the social order. Roads are sparse and hotel rooms are cheap as tourists decline to visit. Fights between protestors and police are regular. Typically, when the US destabilizes another country’s governmental authority, collapse and chaos follow.

At the same time, while there are clear examples of US intervention going wrong, especially when it is militaristic and government-backed, it is not clear that a bunch of Americans tweeting in support of the protests will cause the same damage. For a long time, people’s social media posts in support of this or that social issue, especially with regards to protests, were labeled examples of “slacktivism” and “virtue-signalling.” The idea is that the posts people make on social media do not foment any real social change but are selfish attempts for people to make themselves look like good people. In essence, some claim that people posting about the protests do not care enough to actually support the protestors, but are simply “making it about themselves.”

Ultimately, however, this analysis falls apart when social networks are analyzed. Research out of NYU and University of Pennsylvania shows that “occasional contributors,” that is, people who are not political activists, posting about this sort of thing constantly, are vital for information about the protests to spread. Importantly, this pattern, dependent on occasional contributors, was not found in other large scale social media discussions, such as about the Oscars or the minimum wage. Hong Kong protestors recognize this fact as, again, demonstrated by their use of English in their protests. To get real change, even a ton of protestors on a small island off the coast of China cannot act alone. Rather, Hong Kong protestors, if they want their government to be pressured need to get the attention of the powerful English-speaking nations of the world. Social media posts bubble upward with even world leaders eventually taking heed of them. Donald Trump has even suggested talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a result of this social media attention, he himself tweeting about it.

Whether the United States, its government or its people, should be commenting on or intervening in the domestic affairs of other nations is an open question. However, it is undeniable that the Hong Kong protestors, if they are to maintain their liberal democratic society, need the support of other nations. And, that support is greatly influenced, in nations with free speech, by the most common avenue of political speech today, social media. As is often said “the revolution will not be televised,” but, as we see today, it might be tweeted.

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Deceptive Vulnerability: Caroline Calloway and the “Unlikeable Woman”

photograph of framed polaroid of Caroline Calloway

In early September of 2019, an online magazine called The Cut published an essay by Natalie Beach that instantly went viral, spawning a plethora of opinion pieces and Twitter threads commenting on Beach’s story. In the essay, Beach explains that for years she has been ghostwriting and editing Instagram posts for her former best friend, controversial “influencer” Caroline Calloway.

Calloway, a 27-year Cambridge graduate with a degree in art history, rose to popularity on Instagram in 2013, eventually amassing over 800,000 followers. She doesn’t peddle dietary supplements or offer makeup tips; the only content she produces are the captions on her photos. Beneath each image of fireworks over the Cambridge skyline or her arm-in-arm with a boyfriend, she describes her personal life with the introspective and inviting language of a young adult novel.

This approach to social media, coupled with her brutal honesty about troubled relationships and drug addiction, might even have revolutionized Instagram. In an article on Calloway for Vox, Constance Grady notes that in 2013, “the idea of writing a blog post in an Instagram caption was new and fresh. It made her appear almost uniquely vulnerable: She was just a girl, she seemed to be telling her followers, trying to make it through her life in the beautiful, dangerous world.”

However, the illusion of down-to-earth relatability couldn’t last forever. Her Instagram posts eventually caught the eye of Flatiron, a major publishing house, which offered her a book deal for roughly half a million dollars. The deal fell through under mysterious circumstances, but it seems Calloway backed out of her contract without writing anything after spending the exorbitant advance from the publishers. She was heaped with even more criticism for her disastrous series of “creativity workshops.” The workshops would ostensibly teach attendees, who paid $165 each to participate, the ins and outs of brand-building and the artistic process. Many sessions were cancelled without refunds for ticket-buyers. Those who were able to attend claimed it was a glorified meet-and-greet at best, and a scam at worst, with one journalist dubbing it a one-woman Fyre festival.

While Calloway received negative attention from the media for these incidents, Beach’s essay has transformed her into a viral sensation. The article catalogues nearly a decade of hurt and deception, from Calloway’s struggle with addiction to Beach’s silent role in Calloway’s rise to fame. Now the media focus is on their fractured friendship, which in Beach’s essay reads like an Elena Ferrante novel transplanted from mid-20th century Naples to the virtual landscape of Instagram. But most remarkable about the story is Calloway’s continued commitment to telling all. Her Instagram feed is littered with screenshots of articles condemning her, with captions like “I cannot believe this is my life right now. I feel like I’m about to wake up at any moment.” She consistently emphasizes the unreality of the situation, her shock and hurt at how events have unfolded, and part of what keeps drawing people to her page is her willingness to comment on the drama rather than hide or stop posting.

Her response to this situation is exemplified by a trademark artsy-photo-with-lengthy-caption post about her relationship with Natalie. In the photo, Calloway stands before a large nude sculpture of a woman without arms. Like the statue, she has stripped herself bare before the court of public opinion, made herself vulnerable to fans and detractors alike.

This front of honesty, however, is more strategic than genuine. She hasn’t stopped creating an online persona, she’s just creating a different one. As Washington Post editorialist Molly Roberts astutely points out, “Calloway is still selling us something. She built her brand from the start, at least in part, by pointing out the deceptiveness of brand-building, blending Instagram’s typical aspirational posts with just enough vulnerability to make her look, well, genuine.” Vulnerability is the main weapon in Calloway’s arsenal, though she’s shifted from being vulnerable about boyfriends and addiction to being vulnerable about the scandal with Beach. She posts extensively about their friendship, pulling the curtain back on old stories, or as Roberts puts it, making herself look even more genuine by “contrasting [her new story] with the unreality she was selling everyone before.”

With her rough edges and insistence on openness, Calloway almost seems to have stepped out of the growing mass of Millennial literature about “unlikeable women,” which is perhaps why the media is so perversely attracted to Calloway’s story. In her essay “The Making of a Millenial Woman,” Rebecca Liu explores the moral implications of our obsessive interest with this kind of character. The classic example of this narrative follows “an archetypical Young Millennial Woman – pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive. Often described as ‘relatable,’ she is, in actuality, not.” Rather, she is “more beautiful, more intelligent, and more infuriatingly precocious than we are in real life. But her charm lies in how she is still self-hating enough to be attainable: she’s an aspirational identifier.” Liu’s emphasis on “aspirational” is especially relevant to influencer culture, which relies on our dissatisfaction with ourselves and aspirations for “self-improvement” to reel us in.

Calloway’s employed vulnerability bears a particular resemblance to one of the unlikeable millenial women Liu touches on in her essay, the unnamed protagonist of the hit show Fleabag. The format of the show seems designed for an easy comparison to social media; the main character, played by the show’s creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is constantly addressing the audience with shocking honesty about everything from her sex life to her relationship with her family. It’s part of what makes the show funny, but her honesty functions on another level. By the end of the first series, we learn that Fleabag doesn’t tell us nearly as much as we think. In an interview with Paste Magazine, Waller-Bridge describes how her character is “using a certain type of honesty as a weapon of distraction. She talk very openly and honestly about sex so you feel like she’s being open with you when, actually, she’s completely hiding by doing that.”

This is exactly the approach taken by Calloway, using a “certain type of honesty” to create the illusion of genuineness. One might say that Calloway, unlike unlikeable women in fiction, is receiving condemnation for her actions rather than praise. However, our obsessive interest with her story, illustrated by a new Buzzfeed quiz titled “Are You a Caroline Calloway or a Natalie Beach?” smacks more of celebrity worship, of celebrating messiness and drama, than anything else. Our response to her is a kind of celebration, and as Liu points out,

“For every celebration of a rich white woman as carelessly destructive with her life as her privileged male counterparts, we should ask what it is that gives her the ability to be so brazen, and who is sidelined as collateral. Neurosis, often framed as a sign of powerlessness, can also be a sign of the opposite. To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power. But who gets to be an individual to the Western public? Who gets to be complex?”

“To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power” — this is exactly what Calloway’s Instagram posts ask us to do. Even when she is apologetic, even when she purports to be at her weakest, she holds power over her audience in a way that profits her in the end.

Part of the problem is the impetus to appear “relatable” (just messy enough to be interesting while still remaining palatable) online. Liu critiques this idea when she says that “Relatability as a critical tool leads only to dead ends, endlessly wielding a ‘we’ without asking who ‘we’ really are, or why ‘we’ are drawn to some stories more than others.” She asks, “What does it tell us that ‘we’ are meant to be drawn to women who live in elite social worlds, whose lifestyles many cannot afford, and whose rebellions against the world are always a little doomed and not that unconventional, even if we’re meant to think otherwise?”

Real personal growth cannot be achieved without vulnerability, but when influencers like Calloway substitute relatability with vulnerability, we end up consuming the same tired narratives without questioning who gets our attention and why.

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Should Instagram Remove Its Like System?

photograph of cappuccino with heart made with foam

We live in an era where we are at the mercy of the internet. Social media gives users the power to share their life with the world. And in exchange for sharing their life, users are rewarded with likes. The act of liking something on social media, double tapping a photo or thumbs-upping a status, is a way for users to connect and interact with one another. When someone’s content is liked, it gives them digital agency. Multiple likes, those that allow users to go viral, indicate both digital agency and status. But what about the users who don’t get that many likes? In the social media realm, does their lack of likes devalue the life that they share online? Instagram is addressing this dilemma by considering removing likes from posts and videos. The photo sharing app ran a test in Canada last week and could consider making the change for the entire app. Should Instagram go forward with removing the like system…or leave things as they were?

They say that something shouldn’t be fixed if its not broken. And technically, nothing is wrong with the Instagram app itself. People connect on the app by sharing photos and their lives. They possess the freedom of expressing themselves.  People can travel the world just by logging in to the app. The issue that is being addressed is the digital currency that has been imbued in the like system and its effects on Instagram users. Instagram has been associated with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and bullying. Why is this? Perhaps it’s because what some people post–be it social media celebrities, other famous people, or even those in someone’s friend group. Users might feel low self-esteem when their friends post their new car that they got for college graduation or record every moment of that international spring break trip. Users who don’t have that new car or can’t go on the trip might feel inferior and feel FOMO (the fear of missing out), especially if their own posts are getting only 10 to 20 likes. But this idea could be the whole reason to why Instagram is considering removing the likes system. Some users seem to be treating Instagram like a competition–seeing who has the most likes; who has more social status. Treating Instagram in such a manner takes away from its core mission–to connect and to allow people to express themselves freely and creatively. If so many people are focused on likes and you remove all of that, all should be right with the world…right?

Removing the liking system from Instagram would affect users in others ways in addition to addressing issues of self-esteem and anxiety. Influencer marketing has had a big impact on Instagram. By 2020, it is on pace to become an $8 billion dollar industry. Per Lexie Carbon, a staff writer for Later.com, Instagram is the best performing platform for influencer partnerships with brands, for there is an average 3.21% engagement rate compared to the 1.5% engagement rate on other social media platforms. In addition, entire businesses are created on Instagram–clothing brands, photography companies, etc. For some influencers and companies on Instagram, the likes–the digital currency–translate into actual money. The success of brands is often based on likes because how many people engage with a brand indicates its status and therefore, it’s quality and success. If there is no liking system, how can brands and companies communicate to potential clients that they can do something for them that their competition cannot? Some people have based their entire paycheck and livelihood in Instagram. Without a like system, how would they make a living?

At the same time, removing a liking system might give an opportunity for smaller brands and smaller influencers to gain more exposure after being overshadowed by the pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. The same applies for users who feel depression because of other posts on Instagram. A non-liking system could give their page more exposure. But the users could also unfollow the pages that make them feel low self-esteem and the liking system could stay in place. So, should Instagram incorporate a system without likes? The pros and cons seem to meet at a stalemate. But the thing about the internet is that it’s always changing the status quo. There are constant updates and improvements. Bug fixes and concept changes. Instagram could test a system without likes and see the responses from users. If positive, the app could keep it and if not, they could change it. Either way, it’s an opportunity to alter how people interact, and at its core, that’s what social media is about.