If I told you I wanted to post on Instagram without anyone seeing it, you might wonder if I even know what social media is for. I mean, the word “social” is literally in the name, implying that interaction from others is more or less a part of it.Â
But posting on social media doesn’t mean what it used to. Once upon a time, an Instagram post was synonymous with a square image of you and your friends posing, overlaid with the app’s built-in Valencia filter. Today, at least by most Gen Z standards, a post needs to look effortless, real, and full of personality, even if you took 500 retakes and spent an hour adjusting a table flatlay behind the scenes to get the shot.Â
Even when you spend hours picking out the right pictures and sequence for your carousel dump, you also have to figure out the right caption and song to go with them. And just when you think the work is done, you have to figure out how you’re going to engage with commenters, because each of those elements will determine how people see you.
In other words, it feels like social media isn’t about sharing your life with your loved ones as much as it is creating a persona for the world to consume.
So naturally, Gen Z has found a way to accomplish what sounds like an otherwise paradoxical feat. It’s called ghostposting, and it might just allow Gen Z to have its cake and eat it too by allowing users to participate in Instagram’s high-stakes performance environment without feeling like there’s an audience to impress — at least, not immediately.Â
What is “ghostposting?”
If you’ve ever posted something on Instagram and then using the app’s “archive” feature to immediately pull the post from your feed, only to unarchive it after a couple days (or even weeks), you’ve ghostposted.Â
This method of posting allows time for other posts to populate people’s algorithms and flood yours out, reducing the amount of people who will see it in their feeds when you bring it back online.Â
But why go through all of that work?
Sure, you could just post a picture and turn off your notifications or comments and pretend you sent your post into a void instead of the world — I’ve certainly done that before.Â
But that doesn’t fulfill what ghostposters are looking for. Pretending no one is seeing your posts in real time doesn’t do enough when the goal is to control how your story is being told in a digital environment where each post could unpredictably and drastically shape your public perception.
When you ghostpost, there are really only two groups of people who will see your post when you bring it online again. One of these groups includes people who regularly engage with your content — AKA people you’re familiar with. Because engagement is naturally lower on ghostposts, the algorithm isn’t necessarily motivated to push them beyond your closest audience.Â
The other group includes people who go out of their way to look at your profile. That might sound a bit scary or intrusive, but it’s actually another benefit of ghost posting that a lot of users seek. Many users like to curate their feed by using “filler” pictures. These are pictures that don’t usually showcase the poster; instead, it tends to show a snippet of their life or aesthetic that doesn’t really need any engagement. Oftentimes, users will even disable permissions for commenting, sharing, and viewing likes because those posts aren’t supposed to be perceived individually: They’re supposed to contribute to a user’s aesthetic as a whole.Â
Given that Gen Z and social media have more or less grown up with each other, it’s not surprising that they’ve shaped each other’s trajectory. The impact that social media platforms like Instagram have on younger users’ mental health has only recently begun to face legal scrutiny, so it seems understandable that users have found ways to make the platforms work for them as they wait for the world to catch up.