The pressure among Instagram’s regular users to present idealised images of themselves has only increased as celebrities have inundated the platform with their own envy-evoking posts.
But life isn’t all rooftop parties and 45-degree-angle selfies. Some young adults, weary of trying to live up to their annoyingly perfect online avatars, have created “finstagrams,” or fake Instagram accounts, that present truer versions of themselves than their main profiles. These locked, pseudonymous accounts capture something rarely seen by people who follow these same users on their main accounts: reality.
Created mainly by teenagers and 20-somethings, finstagrams are intimate online spaces intended for an audience of friends, with the number of followers purposely kept in the low double digits.
“Finstas are private accounts that you only let your closest friends follow,” said Amy Wesson, 18, a student at Trinity College who has more than 2,700 Instagram followers and about 50 finstagram followers. “You post things you wouldn’t want people other than your friends to see, like unattractive pictures, random stories about your day and drunk pictures from parties.”
Some people use their fake accounts to stay connected with friends and family. Ixchel López, 18, a student at Wellesley College who has more than 570 followers on her main account, shares a charmingly absurd account with her younger sister that is devoted to photos of lizards.
Principles that guide Instagram are cheerfully ignored on fake accounts: If posting more than once a day to a main account is considered something of a faux pas, it’s perfectly acceptable, on a finstagram account, to unleash a stream of mundane images, screen shots of text conversations and ugly selfies.
Seems Ridiculous?
While young people of every generation have struggled with how to project their identities onto the greater world, teenagers of 2015 arguably have it worse. Given the pervasiveness of social media, the feedback mechanism never shuts down.
For many young people, social media has become a burden, a part of life that must be managed. Consider the story of Essena O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian who, with more than 800,000 followers, was considered an Instagram star before she deleted her account. Recently, O’Neill started the website Let’s Be Game Changers to campaign against the pressure to perform that seems integral to the social media experience.
“I made myself into a machine that gave others what they wanted from me, never knowing or valuing my true self,” O’Neill wrote on her website. “I was lost to expectations, pressures and a fearful desire to be accepted.”
While O’Neill’s case is extreme, many teenagers similarly think that their main Instagram accounts do not present fully authentic versions of themselves.
“Everything that goes on my regular Instagram is a picture of me and other people, and everybody looks good, and it feels important,” said Rebecca Cibbarelli, 18, a student at Franklin & Marshall College with more than 420 followers on her real Instagram and 30 on her fake one. “On finstagram, you post whatever you want because you don’t care.”
The Friend-and-Family Zone
Because they are locked, finstagram accounts allow you to screen your followers; no one can follow you without your permission.
“You follow them first — that’s how you alert people that it’s there,” said Dominique Escandon, 18, a student at Carnegie Mellon University who has more than 370 followers on her main account and 33 on her pseudonymous one. “You tend to follow your best friends.”
Keeping the numbers low encourages conversation and ensures that a post meant in jest won’t serve as fodder for trolls. For a time, Escandon took on an alter ego on her fake account, filling it with images and captions meant to portray her as a right-wing “trophy wife.”
“I identify very much as a feminist, and I created this character,” she said. “I knew the group who followed me would understand that’s not who I really was, and they would understand that it was all a joke.”
Deciding who makes the cut isn’t always obvious. “Someone I recently met tried to follow my second account,” said López, the Wellesley College student. “I haven’t declined or accepted. It made me really think about the kind of stuff I post there.”
Backstabbers aren’t unheard-of. Called “finsta snitches,” these people take screen shots of revealing posts and use them for leverage. López described a situation in her high school in which several students posted compromising photos on their fake accounts that eventually reached the inboxes of authority figures.
“It comes down to trust,” said Toni Dawkins, who dealt with the question of fake Instagrams on her podcast “Tuesdays With Toni.” “If you’re going to post embarrassing things, you have to trust that group of people to not share it out.”