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More than 80,000 posts from Russian accounts had been posted to Facebook, some boosted by advertising, stirring up controversy in the U.S. about immigration, gun control, gay rights, and race relations. Russia’s goal had been to infiltrate interest groups in the United States, and then make them angry. In the process, Stretch said, the posts had gone viral, reaching 126 million Americans.
28 minutes a day on the app.
“It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.” —ASHTON KUTCHER, ACTOR
Social media isn’t just a reflection of human nature. It’s a force that defines human nature,
Sponsorship deals or not, everyone on Instagram was selling in some way. They were selling an aspirational version of themselves, turning themselves into brands, benchmarking their metrics against those of their peers.
Influencers were thinking of Instagram not as social media, but as publishing.
You’re running a full online magazine every day by yourself and you’re the creative director, editor, writer, marketer, and putting it out there, hoping people like it, and then doing it all over again.”
The Instagram effect has made it harder to sell expensive tangible products, like cars and clothing. Nine major retailers in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and many more closed their stores. Besides the rise of Amazon, analysts cited the experiences-not-things trend for affecting retailers’ bottom lines. Photos of leisure time are the new status symbols.
As people curated their lives for their Instagram feeds, they also invested in enhancing their pictures, downloading apps like Facetune and Adobe Lightroom to adjust the whiteness of their teeth, the shape of their jaws, and the appearance of their waistlines.
“These filters and edits have become the norm, altering people’s perception of beauty worldwide.”
Instagram’s solution, for anyone who asks, is to post better content—an answer that ignores how the app’s system has been gamed.
All of this perfection and commercial work masquerading as regular content has a price: a feeling of inadequacy for users who don’t understand the mechanics behind the scenes.
In May 2017, in a widely publicized study, the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. named Instagram the number one worst app for mental health for youth, specifically because it drives people to compare themselves to one another and fosters anxiety.
He was working off data that proved that more connections rendered a network exponentially more useful. He chose to prioritize that data, as opposed to the data that showed people in larger networks share less.
In 2019, Instagram delivered about $20 billion in revenue, more than a quarter of Facebook’s overall sales.
To help a journalist is to take a leap of faith. Thank you to everybody who does.
