An 18-year-old Australian Instagram model by the name of Essena O’Neill recently edited her social media posts to show the negative effects of social media modeling and discourage others to follow the same path she did. Essena’s Instagram account had almost 580,000 followers, her youtube account had 260,000 subscribers and she had another 60,000 users on Snapchat. However, after realizing how unsatisfied she was on these social media platforms she deleted over 2,000 photos and went inactive on Youtube and Snapchat. The photos that she didn’t delete were re-captioned to show the circumstances in which they were taken.
Essena’s new website, Let’s Be Game Changers, has more content about her terrible experience with social media modeling. The following is an extract from Essena’s website: “There is nothing cool about spending all your time taking edited pictures of yourself to prove to the world ‘you are enough’. Don’t let numbers define you. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not enough without excessive makeup, latest trends, 100+ likes on a photo, ‘a bikini body’, thigh gap, long blonde hair. I was born into the flesh I have, there is nothing inspirational about that. I am just so grateful to think of how many young men and women might see this movement and stop limiting themselves to artificial ideas of happiness online.” There are many other posts and videos that go into detail about the reasons she quit and the whole process of modeling on social media.
Essena’s revolt against social media modeling was unexpected and brought a lot of attention to the topic. What do you think about her social media blow up? Are you in favor of her new views against social media? There are links below, if you want to learn more about the topic and Essena’s new webiste.
-http://www.letsbegamechangers.com/
-https://instagram.com/essenaoneill/
– Levine, E., (2015) ‘Former Instagram Model Edits Her Posts To Reveal Truth Behind The Photos’ Elitedaily, viewed online 2 November 2015 at <http://elitedaily.com/social-news/former-model-reveals-truth-fake-instagram/1268924/>