Instagram’s latest terror for teens
Keep your head up in class, or your bad posture might end up online.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
Maybe we should have stuck to Zoom class. —Kate
A lot has been written about teenagers and Instagram—how it affects their self-esteem, their body image, and more. Much of this is blamed on Instagram’s algorithm rewarding toxic habits and presenting users with potentially triggering images. But there’s also a near-certainty that the insecurities and judgment and identity crises that go hand in hand with adolescence would present no matter what platform that generation was using, just as they did on Tumblr and MySpace before. I say all this because as much as there are things about Instagram I believe contribute to worsened mental health, a recent TikTok I stumbled upon was a reminder that even if we fixed all that, teens would still be using the platform to terrorize themselves.
“Me in school rn because of all the insta pages,” the caption of the TikTok, which shows the creator repeatedly trying to straighten his postures, reads. This didn’t immediately make sense to me, but the video has over two million likes, with people in the comments writing things like “I THOUGHT IT WAS ONLY MINE.”
It only took a few more context clues to piece this whole thing together: in this DeuxMoi world, Instagram users are creating high school-specific accounts for everything from bad posture to poor parking jobs, filled with photos seemingly taken by students and submitted anonymously for the dedicated accounts to post. (Shoutout to the Sherwood High School and Webster Groves High School newspapers, that had the first coverage I could find of this phenomenon this past month!)
“Mine has a sleeps, bathroom feet, eating at lunch, bad parking, outfits, haircuts, etc,” one person wrote in the comments.
For fun, I tried searching my own high school, and found that the exact same thing was happening there. Here’s its account dedicated to students sleeping. There were a few other ones, including ones dedicated to gossip and “shipping” students together, which I closed out of immediately because it’s probably illegal for me to be there.
I don’t think it’s worth wasting any energy condemning this, or writing some larger screed on What This Means For Teens Today, because as much as this tactic is new and scary, it is just a manifestation of the exact same casual cruelty and public humiliation that’s happened in the halls of high schools for decades. In what way is a high school gossip account posting a rumor about a student any different than 15 years ago, when someone wrote “Lucy gives blowjobs” on a million tiny pieces of paper and threw them around my school’s atrium? Or a few years later, when “confessions” pages were all the rage on Facebook, and someone at my college posted a thinly-veiled message calling me a “c*nt”? (In their defense, I was probably being a c*nt.)
The one difference, really, is that these accounts were extremely easy for me to find and write about. While I’m sure many are private, just as many are easily accessible by typing the name of a high school into Instagram’s search and seeing what suggestions come up. “Lucy gives blowjobs” is known only to the people who happened to be in the right place at the right (wrong?) time, but your bad, 16-year-old parking job could be on the internet forever.