Social media star Essena O’Neill deletes Instagram account

Teenager, who quit platform after revealing how much she was being paid to promote products, has started her own website

Essena O’Neill has launched her own site to promote ‘veganism, plant-based nutrition, environmental awareness, social issues, gender equality, [and] controversial art’.

A teenager who dramatically altered her popular Instagram profile to reveal how she was paid for seemingly perfect images has deleted her account, encouraging followers to visit and donate to her new website instead.

Essena O’Neill, 18, who had 612,000 followers, had rewritten the captions on many of the images, explaining she was being paid to promote clothes and drinks, and had taken some of the selfies more than 100 times to get the right stomach-sucked-in shot. O’Neill said the pictures “served no real purpose other than self-promotion”.

The Australian teen has started her own site, letsbegamechangers.com, to promote “veganism, plant-based nutrition, environmental awareness, social issues, gender equality, [and] controversial art”.

It features a button that users can press to donate to O’Neill’s new venture. In one tearful video posted on the site, the teenager admitted she had been struggling to make ends meet.

“I can’t afford rent right now,” she said. “It’s like I’m just embarrassed to admit that I need help ... if you like my videos or like any of my posts or you like this website, if this is of value to you, then yeah, please support me because I can’t afford my own real life.”

She also appealed for “professional help and expertise” to help her maintain her website.

The media storm created by O’Neill’s rejection of social media appears to have paid off in promotional reach, with more than 6,000 people signing up to the forum.


Essena O'Neill quits Instagram claiming social media 'is not real life'.
Despite deleting her Instagram account, O’Neill appears to be developing a section of the site called: behind the image, which will have a similar purpose to the re-captioning of her photos on the social network. One picture of her aged 15 has a caption more than 2,800 words long describing the lengths her sister had gone to in order to take the photograph.

“This photo would have taken at least 30 minutes of shooting to find the right white background, to check my posing, to yell some more at my sister for not ‘doing it how I wanted’. The whole process of photo-taking back then was for one purpose: to get likes,” she wrote.

In the caption she explained her decision to quit social media for good, as well as spending the last fortnight wearing no makeup. “And then just like that I decided I don’t need social media at all,” she wrote. “So I quit everything … I can’t tell you how free I feel. Never again will I let a number define me.

“Everyone’s doing it. We just keep putting up staged photos in desperate hopes others will approve. I have a lot to learn … but I am enough. I am already everything I want to be … it lives inside of me. Not on a screen.”

On Tuesday night, two of O’Neill’s fellow Instagram celebrities, twins Nina and Randa Nelson, expressed scepticism about the motivation behind her decision to leave social media, in a video which called her change of heart a publicity stunt.

In a forum post on her site, O’Neill said she would not engage with the accusations. “I had a great time with them [the Nelson twins] but I was also extremely lost in the ‘celebrity construct’,” she wrote. “I wish they would have come to me personally, not share intimate details of my life. But this is my exact point about social media. People say gossip and rumours to avoid the real problems.”

Bron: http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...nt-social-media
(The Guardian)
Datum: 4-11-2015

Samenvatting: Essena O'Neill, een populaire persoonlijkheid op Instagram, heeft onthuld dat de foto's en activiteiten op haar profiel haar echte leven niet weerspiegeld. Voor het maken van de natuurlijk lijkende foto's werd ze uitbetaald door grote firma's die voor elke foto een ware fotoshoot organiseerden om Essena er zo goed mogelijk te laten uitzien. Nu heeft ze besloten om het masker te laten vallen en de wereld te laten zien wat er daadwerkelijk achter de schermen gebeurt.

Eigen mening: Deze actie is bewonderenswaardig omdat ze veel status op het internet heeft (612.000 volgers op Instagram) en toch besloten heeft om te vertellen hoe het nu echt zit. Door haar online profielen te verwijderen verliest ze haar job en een groot deel van haar inkomsten. Veel mensen doen zich anders voor op het internet, ook al krijgen ze niet allemaal dezelfde financiële steun van firma's en hebben ze niet zoveel fans als Essena. Ik hoop - en zij ook - dat deze gebeurtenis een bewustzijn opwekt bij internetgebruikers dat een perfect leven zoals het hare niet bestaat en dat hoe iemand zich op het internet gedraagt hierdoor niet per se de realiteit is.