A social media star best known for her half-a-million-strong Instagram following has made big headlines with a deeply honest admission. Essena O’Neill, an 18-year-old Australian who also created videos on her YouTube channel, tearfully announced her decision to step away from a social media presence she finds suffocating. In the process, she is raising big questions about nature of our digital interactions with the content creators we admire.
The heart of O’Neill’s social presence was her Instagram page, where she posted a lot of photos of herself in all orders of attractive poses. Her popularity led her to a modeling career with an Australian agency. In a video on her YouTube channel, however, she reveals all the apparent brilliance of her Instagram posts to be fool’s gold. “Everything I was doing was edited and contrived,” she says, “everything I did was for views, likes, and followers.”
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While she appeared to live a perfect life filled with glamorous white dresses and idyllic beachside picnics, O’Neill harbored feelings of depression and sadness related to a life she found to be empty. She has retroactively edited her Instagram captions to reflect how she actually felt on the days her photos were taken. “The only thing that made me feel good that day was this photo,” she said of a particular picture. “How deeply depressing. Having a toned body is not all we as human beings are capable of.”
How can we, as social media content creators and members of the media, properly respond to O’Neill? She’s not the first person to shine light on the damage caused by social media and the inherent distance it creates between creators and consumers, but her case is particularly hard to ignore. It’s a cry for us to consider the lives behind the cameras, even as we glorify the ones in front of them. What O’Neill has said feels very real, and there are undoubtedly many other content creators who share her feelings, but are not courageous enough to express themselves as she has.
One thing we can do is mark O’Neill as a brave, thoughtful person whose voice deserves to be heard. Luckily, she has given us an avenue to do just that–she has launched a blog called Let’s Be Game Changers, where she hopes to, in her own words, “do something, anything, something radical, something a little different. I want to use my imagination, my individual mind, my unique take on this world. I want to research more into stuff that truly matters. Read more, listen more, ask more.”
