Conall Lynch
Social Media Review: Instagram
When writing this Social Media Review on Instagram, I realized that I actually have a blog post from exactly 1 year ago ABOUT INSTAGRAM. This was when I first started blogging and sucked at it. I want to share that blog after a fresh take on Facebook about a year later.
June 24, 2021
Let’s talk about Reels… or as I like to call it, Diet Tik Tok. A little less than a year ago, Instagram released their response to the Tik Tok insanity called Reels and I don’t think it’s that out of the blue to say that we hated it. We, like every new form of social media, hate things until they can make us outrageously famous for doing absolutely nothing.
Tik Tok is already dominating this field but Reels has actually gotten pretty popular over the past 6 months. The main reason being… it’sTik Tok. You can use the same video you just posted on Tik Tok and repurpose it on Reels. And the same kind of videos is what is getting traction. Girls dancing in no clothes, people showing off cleaning/cooking “hacks”, and the occasional funny video are what you are getting.
So because more people are gravitating towards Reels, the content is getting confusing. I feel like this is now a battle between Tik Tok and Reels like it is with Chrome and Windows in that you can get sent a Tik Tok by a friend and say “yea I just saw that on Reels.”
I don’t use reels, but I have had multiple friends say that to me so the change might be happening. Think about that for a moment… Facebook has Instagram (currently the best version of “Facebook” right now in terms of posting photos a feed). Instagram has stories (which I believe is taking over the “stories” since Snapchat is dead. And now Instagram has Reels (which also seem to be taking over Tik Tok as the “short funny video”). Facebook owns all of that. Mark Zuckerberg is slowly taking control over all of us.
And now a blog written exactly 1 year ago today and written on the same topic:
(also please remember this was a year ago and might not have the most current references)…
“The Racist Filters Of Instagram” (written June 24, 2020)
I’m sure we all remember the Instagram filters that would have the prompt “what Disney princess are you?”, “What mood are you in?”, or “where are you going to be in 25 years?”. Then you would hold the camera up to your face and, almost like a roulette machine, it would cycle through all the answers quickly before coming to the logical conclusion of knowing what the answer is. I am explaining how they work… because they don’t fucking work, it’s all random. It’s like we are back in middle school playing with a magic 8 ball trying to see if Sarah actually likes you, or if I will get an Xbox for Christmas. This is the social media version of that shit, but instead of doing it with one or two of your friends during recess, you can do it to 100,000 people across the world and let them all know that you suck.
First of all, I want to let anyone reading this know that… I know this is just some stupid Instagram filter that doesn’t actually mean what it’s saying, so why am I so angry about it? I don’t know maybe read this then tell me your thoughts as to why I’m so angry, but in the meantime, fuck this shit. The people who are using these filters are not kids. Because I am not friends with any kids on Instagram, so you have 20-something year olds posting what Disney princesses they look like according to an app on their stories. Now it’s one thing to do this by yourself or with your friends and be curious as to what princess Instagram thinks you look like, but to then post that video Is a whole new level of douche. What are you gaining from that other than wanting all your followers to know that an app thinks you’re as hot as a fucking drawing.
Another issue I have with these filters is that they seem racist. I will see a video of a white girl doing the Disney princess filter and get Mulan. Now obviously all this shit is random, but the girl will then zoom in on her face and make a sort of disgusted look. As if because Mulan is not her same skin color, the filter is messed up and she is mad. That’s fucked up. I will also see comments from her followers like “OMG hahaha they got it so wrong lol”. Isn’t that racist of them? Also, wouldn’t a person of darker skin color getting matched with a darker-skinned princess also be racist? Because the app has to decide what skin color the person is in order to accurately match them with the correct princess right? So who is that programmer over at Instagram that was forced to basically make a “racist skin color filter” but then was like I’ll just call it the Disney princess filter so we can make some money with racism? That’s fucked up.
The next filter that I see a lot of is the “what mood are you in” filter. This one works by holding the camera up to your face as it cycles through all the different moods that you apparently could be in until it tells you the answer. Why do you need an app for this? Can’t u just take half a second and send whatever signal it is to your brain asking “hey… we good?” I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to physically do something to check how I’m feeling. But I also don’t need a fucking app to tell me either. And you know how I mentioned previously some of these videos of people using these filters would sometimes end with them not liking the answer and zooming in on their face… because that’s comedy. Well, this filter has a much higher percentage of that because it’s no longer using the physical appearance of skin color (which it never should have been and I am 100% against it) it now is using something more personal and harder to guess… emotion. So now like 50% of these videos are just of some white girl using the filter looking all happy until the filter says she horny, so she zooms into her face making a smirk and that’s it. There are hundreds of comments below this video with just “OMG HORNY LOL” or “Wow someone needs to get laid out there lol”. Why do these people exist?
I understand that these are just stupid Instagram filters that are random and don’t matter. My argument is that these “influencers” make them seem real in order to seem relevant or, dare I say it, funny. The filters are obviously harmless, besides the one that literally guesses your skin color so it can match you with something of the same color… we have to watch out for that one.
