When I scroll through my Instagram feed, it looks very different than when I scroll through my friend’s little sister’s feed. Her name is Lina, she is 13 years old and thus really grew up with Instagram. I got my first Instagram account when I was around 16 years old. I have a very different relationship with social media than a young teenager has today. We go onto social media for similar reasons, but see different pictures.
When I scroll through my feed, most of the pictures I see are pictures from my friends. I follow several YouTubers and Influencers and also pages for food inspiration. Lina also follows her friends, Influencers, YouTubers and food-related pages. She also follows pages that only post about horses, which is something where we differ.
Of course, the pictures by Influencers we see are very similar – we even follow the same ones in several cases. Our feeds differ when it comes to what our friends are posting. The pictures my friends post are mostly pictures from parties or vacation. Often, they are similar to what influencers are posting. The pictures Lina’s friends are posting stand out because there is something on them that I never see on pictures of my friends. The images are covered in dog- and golden flowers-filters and faces are either hidden behind scribbles or a hand.
There is barely one single picture where we can just see the girls’ faces. That is a phenomenon I had never seen on my own Instagram feed and must be specific to the generation that is currently in their early teens. It startled me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. A lot of these girls grew up idolizing YouTubers and Instagrammers that have seemingly perfect lives and post flawless images. At the age of 13, you are still very much in a phase where you are getting accustomed to your body and it is not easy loving yourself. They see all these other girls on Instagram and do not think that they can live up to these standards. That realization made me extremely sad and I thought about it more and more. I have a YouTube channel and I went on to make a video to talk about these new understandings.
The feedback I got for the video was amazing. One girl, a young teenager, posted a selfie of herself on her Instagram account with the following caption [This caption was originally in German and this is my own translation]: “!!!Please read!!! I used to put filter over filter over filter. I did not feel comfortable without a Snapchat filter. At one point, I asked myself what I was trying to achieve and what I got out of that. A good comparison for me: Am I going through life with a filter? Am I hiding behind makeup each day? I am not trying to say that that is bad, but I am saying it is not good if you do not feel comfortable without makeup anymore. Other people can spontaneously take pictures or take videos… Not me. Why? In my eyes, I did not look good in that moment. There was always an excuse. So you could conclude that I never looked good. I am tired of putting filter over filter. If you do not think I am ‘pretty’, I do not care. I am staying myself, I want to be myself, without having to hide myself. I was thinking about deleting all the pictures with snapchat filters on my Instagram page, but then I did not because I want to show that I was no different. I almost want to say it is an addition to hide behind Snapchat filters.”
I thought this Instagram caption was very powerful of a young girl to write. I got more and more messages similar to these. People were thanking me for talking about this topic – especially young girls. It just saddens me that all these beautiful people think they are not pretty enough to post their own faces on social media. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing bad about posting a selfie of yourself with a Snapchat filter but you do not need to hide behind it or feel like you are not pretty without one!