When Fake is Real: Young People Rebel Against Instagram, Via Instagram

...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...

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.

...tools. Life becomes a never-ending junior varsity “Vanity Fair” shoot, and the pressure among Instagram’s regular users to present idealized 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...

Given the pervasiveness of social media, the feedback
mechanism never shuts down.

“Snapchat is more ephemeral,”
said Mr. Cohensedgh, the Columbia College student. “You don’t have to think
about it afterward.

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.

...all captured in perfect light and enhanced with various editing tools. Life becomes a never-ending junior varsity “Vanity Fair” shoot, and the pressure among Instagram’s regular users to present idealized 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,...

“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.”

Because of this, finstagram, which is made for an audience of people who
are tuned into the user’s point of view, has become, paradoxically, the “real”
Instagram.
“These platforms aren’t going anywhere, and we won’t get anywhere by
trying to fight them or say they are bad,” said Dr. Trub, the clinical
psychologist. “We need to be aware of how they’re operating for us and to
build more agency around how we interact with them.

And Ms. Escandon, whose fake Instagram account was satirical, said:
“You can be more explicitly funny in places where you’re allowed to have more
text.”