Conversations around Self-expression and Sincerity on Large Online Platforms

Expressing one’s identity authentically on platforms like Instagram is much easier said than done. For young people in the digital space, it has remained one of the largest platforms for communicating and sharing photos of oneself with friends and/or family. The need to share media about you and from you is important for most people, forming a sense of community as they grow up. Although Instagram allows this, it is not the only space, as communities can form and develop on dedicated, smaller, and specific platforms. The distinction between large and small-scale platforms is important to discuss because many of the issues and discussions on one can be answered and solved by the offerings of the other, but it is unrealistic in reality to expect users to switch between platforms for a variety of intricate and complex reasons, and most often, users do not. Arguably, they should not have to, if the platforms are there to serve the user rather than the other way around. 

(Fig 1) AI Disturbance Overlay, 2024

Instagram’s increasingly invasive data-collection policy, used to train its algorithms, raises ethical and moral concerns for users. Some artists in 2024 operating on Instagram have reacted (https://www.threads.com/@99kroi/post/C7qN9HwP8qE) to Meta’s policy on training artificial intelligence from user data by placing AI Disturbance overlays (Fig.1), colourful, psychedelic patterns, within all of their designs. https://thoselethalarts.tumblr.com/post/753873531955249152 The claim that “AI can’t read your image because AI counts every single pixel in your art”, although it could have been true in 2024, has most likely been surpassed by learning algorithms’ ability to adapt to such overlays. The desire to use these overlays stems from the belief that only human eyes should be able to interact with the art, as machine viewing it is seen as inauthentic. If authenticity stems from human-to-human interaction, these larger platforms exploit this expectation that someone is always watching, which is one of their key unconscious selling points: that so many people use the platform that there always will be someone to respond, and even no response is still a kind of feedback until this becomes threatened. (Dean, 2010) mentions that “social network sites let us see ourselves being seen”, which has been the unspoken appeal of these platforms. They imply innocence and sincerity in autonomous posting, specifically the conscious ignorance of being seen, of doing things, and of expressing yourself naturally. Something seen in the format of blog posts as “they seem real in part because they are only glimpses, fragments, and indications rather than fully formed and composed reflections in part because we witness them being seen by others”. So when these glimpses and fragments of the self become self-aware and defensive about their authenticity, as in the case of AI disturbance overlays, sincerity becomes conscious, active, and performed. Feeling somewhat forced or unnatural, but most importantly, identifiable. 

User authenticity, once identifiable and categorisable, poses a threat to how that content operates. (Stamm, 2022) states that the “ethos of digital capitalism, which is predicated on rational and predictable correlations between data and behaviour”, reduces self-expression into a commodity. The commodity is restrictive because it enables the authenticity of a user to be captured and used for purposes not intended: “the liquefaction of identity on platforms’ terms”. In that case, to maintain authenticity, the identity has to be constantly reinvented or obscured from inhuman systems, which, under existing social pressures, the obfuscation and resistance, become inauthentic themselves. Efforts to implement aburdism and forms of content that are visibly obscured even to the general userbase, often highly subversive art or compilations, still strive for visibility amongst what has already been absorbed by the algorithm and therefore exist as temporary, fleeting movements of protest. Moments that are quickly trendified and how (Ellul, 1962) describes “Technique, instead of provoking conflict, tends rather to absorb it, and to integrate instinctive and religious forces by giving them a place within its structure”. The platform rewards safe, predictable reproduction of the absorbed conflict and sells back identity to the user in a watered-down, inauthentic form. This back-and-forth struggle between the platform and the user has been more identifiable with artificial intelligence getting involved, but has always been an underlying aspect of self-expression online and ultimately to Foucault's arguments on a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” and that “visibility is a trap” (Foucault, 1975). In a modern context, as much as the idea of self-expression is necessary, so is the “extraction of wealth from smaller slices of everyday life” and the irresistibility involved. (Paglan, 2016)