It’s not a mystery that Instagram is saturated with highly edited, photoshopped and filtered photos where people present not only the “best” of themselves but sometimes altogether fictitious representations of themselves. There are people who have made careers out of their postings. The Kardashians are the best example of how lucrative perfect posting can be.(Remember the story about how Kim and Kanye spent their honeymoon editing one wedding photo)

Where Instagram is a wonderful way to share your world with others, participating in it opens you up to being judged, insulted and bashed . It is a perfect environment for the development of insecurities about your life, relationships and yes your body. When people have the capacity to present an image of their lives with all the hardship, drama, and well…reality extracted smoothed out filtered it can make you feel in adequate and less then. When you engage in it yourself you open yourself up to a level of scrutiny and judgement that can range from simply harsh, to cruel. Social media is the superhighway of cyberbullies.

Well Essena O’Neil for whom social media is her industry, has had enough and deleted her social media pages, and officially re-named her IG account “Social Media Is Not Real Life”

In this Youtube rant sh explains why she has made the shift:

then retaliated by starting a site that exposed how those perfectly lit Instagram pics are made, Let’s Be Game Changers. I think its a wonderful idea, though it takes a while to stop a train that is going 300mph every little pump of the breaks helps. I think it is a witty and intelligent way to expose that we already know but often forget to take into consideration. If something like this can remind us that those images that we are coveting have a less then authentic back story perhaps they won’t have such an effect on the way we feel about ourselves, o r at the very least we can giggle at her captions…