An authentic social-media experience is an oxymoron, but that hasn’t stopped BeReal, the hot new social-media platform, from making honest and unfiltered photo sharing its mission.
The app works like this: each day at a random time, you receive a push notification (one that looks a lot like an Amber Alert) letting you know it’s time for you to “BeReal.” You then have exactly two anxiety-filled minutes to upload a photo of yourself and whatever it is you’re doing in that moment.
The post includes views from both your phone’s front and back cameras to expose you at all angles. Unlike Instagram, which suggests that everyone is on a European vacation eating baguettes and stepping out of the Mediterranean, BeReal mostly comprises photos of your friends sitting on their couches. Even the friends in Europe are forced to reveal shots of themselves sweating in a country that doesn’t believe in A.C.
This mundanity is what people seem to like most about BeReal, which is also what makes it so disturbing—that we’ve gotten to a place where we need to feel better by literally being reminded that it’s normal for us and our friends to be on couches.
As someone who feels bad about themselves for spending what feels like their entire life decaying on a couch, I, of course, had to download it immediately.
We’ve gotten to a place where we need to feel better by literally being reminded that it’s normal for us and our friends to be on couches.
The layout is deliberately simple, designed to prevent the app from becoming a time suck. There are no ads, likes, or followers. If there’s an algorithm at play, you don’t notice it. It really is just meant for your closest friends.
“It’s fun to see what your best friends are up to at that moment,” a 22-year-old tells me. I guess she doesn’t know that you can figure out what your best friends are up to from the 20 apps you already have on your phone and a little bit of deductive reasoning.
Still, having your feed only include people you’re comfortable with is definitely what makes the app enjoyable. The second someone slightly outside of your circle—or your crush, or someone who is pretty—adds you, it has the potential to make you feel just as bad and self-conscious as any other app.
BeReal, which was founded in France in 2020 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat, has grown at a staggering rate, pretty blatantly marketing itself as the anti-Instagram. The strategy has worked incredibly well for them, and it’s currently estimated to have had more than 20 million installs with anywhere between three and six million active users, mainly across Europe and the U.S. Earlier this year, it received $30 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, and as of May 2022 it was said to be valued at $600 million.
Instagram has never been one to share the spotlight, which is how it has ended up as an amalgamation of all the other social-media apps that users actually prefer. They copied Stories to compete with Snapchat and created Reels to compete with TikTok. How will Instagram steal from an app whose entire appeal is that it’s anti-Instagram, in order to keep people on Instagram? By rolling out Dual, of course—a new feature that takes photos that use both the front and back camera simultaneously.
Regardless of BeReal’s intentions (its slogan is “Your friends for real”), people will inevitably end up exploiting its “realness.” For some, BeReal’s two-minute window will set off a frenzy of fakeness where they try to cobble together the fakest real moment they can achieve. This is something bound to occur more and more as celebrities flock to the app to demonstrate their relatability and lack of Photoshop. I imagine their assistants and hair-and-makeup teams scrambling to set up the perfect shot to prove once and for all that they are only enhanced by plastic surgery, and plastic surgery alone!
If you end up missing the notification that the two minutes have begun, because you happened to not be staring at your phone for one second, or you were unable to drop everything in order to take a photo of yourself, you can take a photo later. A photo taken at any other time will say “Late” above it, but that doesn’t seem to be enough of a threat to deter anyone from doing it. Probably because it just implies you were being more “real” than everyone else, like, not-on-your-phone-level real.
Similar to Instagram stories, BeReal photos disappear after 24 hours, which makes it very hard to create a brand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t save and use your best BeReal photos for self-promotion on other apps.
We’ve gotten to the point where we recognize “casual posting” to be as calculated as anything else on Instagram, and BeReals have unsurprisingly become the coolest addition to people’s monthly photo dump. If a BeReal happens to be anything but casual, get ready to go viral. The double-view camera truly makes for the kind of selfie that inspires you to accidentally fall off a cliff and die for.
“It’s fun to see what your best friends are up to at that moment,” a 22-year-old tells me. I guess she doesn’t know that you can figure out what your best friends are up to from the 20 apps you already have on your phone and a little bit of deductive reasoning.
To post an Instagram Story you usually need to think of some kind of rationale as to why you would invade people’s eyes with this image. BeReal requires zero justification. You are being summoned. It is forced upon you, in a 1984-but-fun kind of way. If you imagine a world where the government legally ordered this app to combat social comparison, it’s easy to measure if it’s actually good for us. BeReal has built-in mandates that supposedly free us from the oppression of social media, but mandates are inherently oppressive.
Despite BeReal’s big-dictator energy, I have to admit I do enjoy it. The self-effacing posts on my feed are a safe space for the time being, probably because the app addresses problems (filtering, faking, altering) that the people who use it didn’t have to begin with.
All the while the bigger issue of social media is ignored. It isn’t simply that we’re not showing our real lives; it’s that we feel pressure to show our lives at all. To live authentically means to live without the fear of being watched and without the desire to exhibit yourself for the judgment of others. Going on our phones more in order to show each other that we are capable of being real on our phones is twisted. You can’t destroy the illness social media has created with more social media.
Cazzie David is a Columnist for AIR MAIL and the author of No One Asked for This, a collection of essays about social media and millennials