Instagram Filters Quotes

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laugher, shoes lined up together dy the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there.

The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.

The trick of the internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real... which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.

A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.

More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.

We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it’s way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.

People who don't take risks work for people who do.

More than 200 million of Instagram's users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands.

Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.

Ma’s Instagram profile is classic Ma. She heavily filters photos of meals and selfies. She’s a total abuser of hashtags. #It #Is #Really #Hard #To #Read #Entire #Captions #Like #This. She noticed when I stopped following her.

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticize romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones, and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets, and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.

Everything breaks at a billion.

leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.

Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.

To me, infrared photography is not a special effect like some Instagram filter, it's a different way of looking at photography and light and the world itself.

Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.

How many times have you stopped midsentence to ask a waiter to take a photo and then spent the next five minutes fucking with filters to post it on Instagram? It’s as if we have this strange obsession with proving to the world that we are, in fact, cool. Look, I’m totally guilty of this, and I’m not sure I ever intend to stop. It’s just the culture we live in now, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

On social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.

It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.

I have worked hard to be better. But that’s all I am: better. Not complete.

Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it.

Like any system, it can be gamed. And Instagram ended up fueling a problem not just about truth in advertising, but about truth in life.

Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn't sure if they were actually living them.

Then, on impulse, I scroll back through my previous Instagram posts, looking at the photos of London cafes, sights, drinks, and smiling faces (mostly strangers). The whole thing is like a feel-good movie, and what's wrong with that? Loads of people use colored filters or whatever on Instagram. Well, my filter is the “this is how I'd like it to be” filter. It's not that I lie. I was in those places, even if I couldn't afford a hot chocolate. It's just I don't dwell on any of the not-so-great stuff in my life, like the commute or the prices or having to keep all my stuff in a hammock. Let alone vanilla-whey-coated eggs and abnoxious lechy flatmates. And the point is, it's something to aspire to, something to hope for. One day my life will match my Instagram posts. One day.

The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve.

Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.

Facebook automatically catalogued every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people's names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a "friend coefficient". The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.

If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, it’s that we’re living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts.

And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots.

I believed that Instagram, the filtered aesthetic it popularized—Instagram face, we called it—was true. It was how people had always wanted to look, would always want to look: high cheekbones, cut jaw lines, frozen brows, fish lips and perfect symmetry. I thought that was an everlasting ideal. When after some years, it shifted—girls, women, people, going filterless, makeupless, foregoing injectables, drugs, social media

At one point in 2015, a few Instagrammers in Barnieh's crowd in Hong Kong took the game to another level: they made a habit of hanging off the side of buildings and the tops of bridges. In one shot by Lucian Yock Lam, @yock7, a man is holding another man's arm while he dangles from the side of a skyscraper at night, hovering above a busy street. The caption is a simple hashtag: #followmebro. It got 2,550 likes, a fleeting reward for putting one's life at risk.

Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app. That allowed engineers and designers to work a lot faster, because there was less arguing about why or whether they should build something. Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.

It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across the dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research,12 in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault. With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.

Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.

Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.” But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.” When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves. "Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.

Excuse me,” someone said, interrupting a lively discussion about whom they’d each buy a drink for in the cantina. The whole line looked up. There were two women standing on the sidewalk with bakery boxes. One of them cleared her throat. “We heard that people were camping out for Star Wars . . .” “That’s us!” Troy said, only slightly less enthusiastically than he’d said it yesterday. “Where’s everybody else?” she asked. “Are they around the back? Do you do this in shifts?” “It’s just us,” Elena said. “We’re the Cupcake Gals,” the other woman said. “We thought we’d bring Star Wars cupcakes? For the line?” “Great!” Troy said. The Cupcake Gals held on tight to their boxes. “It’s just . . .” the first woman said, “we were going to take a photo of the whole line, and post it on Instagram . . .” “I can help you there!” Elena said. Those cupcakes were not going to just walk away. Not on Elena’s watch. Elena took a selfie of their line, the Cupcake Gals and a theater employee all holding Star Wars cupcakes—it looked like a snapshot from a crowd— and promised to post it across all her channels. The lighting was perfect. Magic hour, no filter necessary. #CupcakeGals #TheForceACAKEns #SalaciousCrumbs The Gals were completely satisfied and left both boxes of cupcakes. “This is the first time I’ve been happy that there were only three of us,” Elena said, helping herself to a second cupcake. It was frosted to look like Chewbacca. “You saved these cupcakes,” Gabe said. “Those women were going to walk away with them.” “I know,” Elena said. “I could see it in their eyes. I would’ve stopped at nothing to change their minds.” “Thank God they were satisfied by a selfie then,” Gabe said. His cupcake looked like Darth Vader, and his tongue was black. “I’m really good at selfies,” Elena said. “Especially for someone with short arms.” “Great job,” Troy said. “You’ll make someone a great provider someday.” “That day is today,” Elena said, leaning back against the theater wall. “You’re both welcome.” “Errrggh,” Troy said, kicking his feet out. “Cupcake coma.” “How many did you eat?” Gabe asked. “Four,” Troy said. “I took down the Jedi Council. Time for a little midday siesta—the Force asleepens.

A few minutes later, Jennifer Lopez - looking as if she had a permanent Instagram filter attached to her face and body - scooted in and said a soft hi to me before turning her attention to the returns.

The metaverse is far from being just VR. The metaverse, conceptually, is not Fornite, Minecraft, or The Sims. It's not an Instagram filter that turns you into a unicorn. It's not a Black Mirror episode, either. It's a new way to interact with reality(ies), being real-life, AR, VR, or MR. But, more interesting, the metaverse can (and probably will) be a fully functioning economy. How this will affect travel is still largely unknown, and even though I can foresee some of the Metaverse applications, the "hows and whys" are still nebulous.

to Netflix to Instagram—the lie that all you have to do is buy this, work out like this, wear this, style it like this, believe this, pursue this, get a career like this, find someone like this, and you, too, can find the way to a perfect life, just like this. But buy any perfectly filtered and marketing-framed illusion, and you end up painfully disillusioned. Regardless of what Instagram or all the glossy ads are shilling, your suffering isn’t some unique

You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you. It certainly sounded like Instagram was going to try to profit off the budding prominence of its photographers and artists. But Krieger and Systrom were just as shocked as the users were.

The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.

Businesses born of Instagram that have had better luck are those that leveraged the psychology of their users—the need for followers and recognition—while simultaneously creating interesting content.

But Zuckerberg’s word was final. He was working off data that proved that more connections rendered a network exponentially more useful. He chose to prioritize that data, as opposed to the data that showed people in larger networks share less.

He could choose not to be a part of it, but he couldn’t prevent it from happening. “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton underscored. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.

The worst part was that Facebook had known of the data leak for years, and hadn’t properly enforced its policies, or let users know when their information was compromised. The company had even sent threatening legal notices to the media to keep the story from coming out.

You couldn’t know what someone else saw when logged onto Facebook, what shaped their reality. Some people were selling illegal drugs; some people were getting radicalized by the Islamic State; some people were not people at all, but bots trying to manipulate public conversations. Only Facebook had the power to understand and police it all—and they weren’t. And yet, there was not much legislators could do.

He and Systrom had spoken extensively about using Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory of product development, which states that consumers “hire” a product to do a certain task, and that its builders should be thinking about that clear purpose when they build. Facebook was for text, news, and links, for example, and Instagram was for posting visual moments and following interests.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. The tasteful lighting somehow accentuated my horrific appearance: I looked like a hostage video with an Instagram filter.

In my humble, probably wrong, select-all-delete opinion, we womenfolk today are faced with a decision: Salem or Barbie. We can either rip off the internal trapdoor that your Alanis Plath of Arc has been suffocating under or cement over it and instead luxuriate in a Hello Kitty porny Instagram-filtered cell where the validation is better than heroin and the thoughts are shorter than Mickey Rooney. (HEY-YO!)

We don't choose friends or relatives in our life, we choose Instagram filters.

Even the most insane day gives way to a sunset sooner or later. The sun moves to light up another side of the planet, and the sky, as if wishing to steal the show, offers a display of amazing colours. Dark lilac blended into magenta, into pale pink and faded into light blue with a spatter of fluffy white spots. Should you post such beauty on Instagram, you'll be accused of abusing filters. But tourists, undeterred, posed on the sandy line of Barcelona's famous beach and laughed, sharing the snapshots with each other. By and large, behaving like normal people, whose life was following its predictable and straightforward course.

Teens said—and researchers appeared to accept—that certain features of Instagram could aggravate mental health issues in ways beyond its social media peers. Snapchat had a focus on silly filters and communication with friends, while TikTok was devoted to performance. Instagram, though? It revolved around bodies and lifestyle. The company disowned these findings after they were made public, calling the researchers’ apparent conclusion that Instagram could harm users with preexisting insecurities unreliable.

with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).

I casually shifted my gaze to peer at the newcomer, only to find him staring straight at me. Unapologetic. Demanding and utterly mouthwatering. He wasn’t just attractive; he was the personification of unattainable perfection. The ideal beauty standard every Instagram model promotes but has to use filters to achieve.

It is easy for the leader of a business to take a quick look at Kumasi, and at the thousands of up-and-coming cities in the developing world, and conclude that his or her company is not missing out on all that much by not being there today. But at a time of rapid, surprising change, snapshots that capture a moment in economic time can be deeply misleading. In this age of Instagram, we must apply new filters to the mental and financial pictures we take. Our intuition—the nerve center that turns images into narratives—has to reset so that it processes the incoming data intelligently. The portraits we take of cities must capture the dynamism underneath the surface and highlight the brightness of opportunities, while toning down the alarming flares of risk. Most of all, they must be able to project forward motion.

Days gilded with golden sunshine and Instagram filters. A Facebook mashup of images that showed the pearls but not the oyster shells. That

Every time the woman turned her head, it was like she was posing for a picture with an Instagram setting that filtered out humility.

Snapchat has a lot less social pressure attached to it compared to every other popular social media network out there. This is what makes it so addicting and liberating. If I don’t get any likes on my Instagram photo or Facebook post within 15 minutes you can sure bet I'll delete it. Snapchat isn't like that at all and really focuses on creating the Story of a day in your life, not some filtered/altered/handpicked highlight. It’s the real you.

The first few days felt quite surreal for gone was that filtered world of perfect angles made up of peoples’ best moments and selves. Gone was the wormhole that one jumped into at the sign of any awkward silence or pause in conversation.

Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.” Those artists, designers, and photographers were turning into evangelists for the product, and Instagram needed to keep them as excited as possible for as long as possible.

Today, Facebook is still the most dominant social network in the world, with more than 2.8 billion users across several social and messaging apps, and the primary driver of its revenue growth is Instagram. Analysts would later say that approving the acquisition was the greatest regulatory failure of the decade.10 Even Chris Hughes, one of the cofounders of Facebook, would in 2019 call for the deal to be undone. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,”11 he wrote in the New York Times.

But as Facebook became a destination for political conversations, the human curation in “Trending Topics” wasn’t the actual problem. It was how human nature was manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm, and how Facebook looked away, that got the company in trouble.

Obama knew from U.S. intelligence, but didn’t say to Zuckerberg at the time, that some of the incendiary news wasn’t coming from shady media entrepreneurs. One of the country’s biggest adversaries was running a pro-Trump Facebook campaign too.

Twitter was based on live events and virality, so they wanted stars to use the site to do things that would start conversations and lead to a lot of retweets. Nowhere was that more obvious than at the March 2014 Oscars. Twitter’s television partnerships group had spent months with host Ellen DeGeneres’s team,15 tossing back and forth ideas about how she could create a tweetable moment from the star-studded awards event. DeGeneres liked the idea of taking a selfie.

By this point, around 2017, the public started to understand that the social media properties they loved weren’t just built for them, but were being used to manipulate their behavior too. Spurred by public and media outcry, all of these products faced reckonings for what they’d wrought on society. Except Instagram, which largely evaded criticism. Instagram was the newest, founded four to six years later than the others, so users were still catching up to such effects, which weren’t as immediately offensive and visible during the user experience on Instagram as on the other sites.

McFarland understood the power of influencer marketing, paying Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single Instagram post to drive ticket sales. He preyed directly on the lifestyle Instagram influencers valued.

The Instagram effect has made it harder to sell expensive tangible products, like cars and clothing. Nine major retailers in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and many more closed their stores.

Photos of leisure time are the new status symbols. People line up for hours to buy giant rainbow cotton candy at the Totti Candy Factory in Tokyo, or go to Purl bar in London for a cocktail served with a helium balloon or billowing honey fog, or pursue vacations in more picturesque settings like Iceland and Bali.

In May 2017, in a widely publicized study,22 the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. named Instagram the number one worst app for mental health for youth, specifically because it drives people to compare themselves to one another and fosters anxiety.

These feelings can promote a ‘compare and despair’ attitude in young people. Individuals may view heavily photo-shopped, edited or staged photographs and videos and compare them to their seemingly mundane lives.

On Instagram, anyone could become famous among strangers. And so the Kremlin’s IRA did too. Nearly half of their accounts achieved more than 10,000 followers, and 12 of them had over 100,000. They used the accounts to sell things. One sold the idea that Hillary Clinton was a bad feminist. Another, @blackstagram_, with 303,663 followers before Facebook took it down in the Russian account purge, touted products from what it said were black-owned businesses, while telling black Americans not to waste their time voting.

It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.

In order to achieve these goals, he thought, Instagram needed most of the press about Instagram to be about its best users, not about the company itself.

Facebook was indeed biased, not against conservatives, but in favor of showing people whatever would encourage them to spend more time on the social network

News organizations had been designing more clickable headlines ever since the social network became key to their distribution. But those news organizations were getting beaten by these new players, who had come up with an easier, more lucrative way to go viral—by making up stories that played on Americans’ hopes and fears, and therefore winning via the Facebook algorithm.

In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences. Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests. Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy.5 Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.

How much should technology companies work against human nature? When their users chose to read hyper-partisan news, chose to share conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism, chose to share racist tirades or the manifestos of mass shooters, what was the company’s responsibility, if any, to curtail them?

The DJ congratulated them on the acquisition and lamented that he didn’t have the username he wanted. Jessica Zollman set him up with @Deadmau5 right there at the table.

Making money, in Zuckerberg’s opinion, is something to try only once a network is strong enough, so valuable to its users that advertisements or other efforts aren’t going to turn them off.

Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.

For Facebook, the acquisition was crucial. While people were escaping the watchful eye of their governments, they were unwittingly giving Facebook competitive intelligence. Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it. They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did.

With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.

Systrom and Krieger, on the other hand, were awarded life-changing sums. Krieger solidly owned 10 percent and Systrom 40 percent, and so netted an estimated $100 million and $400 million, respectively, per the original deal price.

Facebook automatically cataloged every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people’s names they searched and did not befriend.

This Journey Is Only 1% Finished,” the posters around campus declared. “The Riskiest Thing Is to Take No Risks.” “Done Is Better than Perfect.” “Move Fast and Break Things.

The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it's a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you're supposed to be.

Pretty pictures were just tools on Instagram in the pursuit of being understood and validated by the rest of society, through likes, comments, and even money, giving users a small slice of power over their destiny.

When I got back to my room, the people upstairs were having sex again. Rhythmic thumping against the wall. I hated it, but then I felt bad, because maybe it was two people in love. In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was in falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Eyes across a dance floor. I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found that nothing was there. A mirage.

I snap a picture of him with his back turned to me and post it to my Instagram with a rosy filter. I caption it with three hearts and Game night with my love! No better way to cap off an awesome day, and there’s no one else I’d rather spend it with. xoxo. #LivinTheLife #MarryingMyBestFriend #TrueLovesKissFromARose

To Instagram, then; she needed visual candy: oh look, a new post from Rachel, a car-fie, a caption about the golden hour, a Louis Vuitton duffel in the background. God, she was so self-obsessed; had she aged even a day since they’d graduated? Had she done something to her lips, or was it just a filter? Anjali scrolled back through Rachel’s older posts, even though she had seen and summarily judged them all before, shifting in her seat, attempting to ignore the sensation in her bladder. Oh no—had she accidentally liked one? She tapped again. The heart disappeared, then reappeared. Had she tapped twice? Thrice? Was the Wi-Fi even working? Had she ever responded to that text from Rachel? She had to have, right? The things you did, the places your mind went, when you needed to pee. She swore her brain

As Brian came around, it didn’t surprise him to see where he was or how he was bound. The oddest part of this situation was that Spencer’s family didn’t pay Brian much attention. Each ankle, each wrist, his waist and his chest were all tied to a retro wooden crossback dining chair, yet despite the presence of their captee, the guy’s pre-pubescent daughter was more interested in her iPad, and his wife was more interested in finding the right filter for her selfie on Instagram.

In the end, that was the problem with romance. It was so easy to romanticize romance because it was everywhere. It was in music and on TV and in filtered Instagram photos. It was in the air, crisp and alive with fresh possibility. It was falling leaves, crumbling wooden doorways, scuffed cobblestones, and fields of dandelions. It was in the touch of hands, scrawled letters, crumpled sheets, and the golden hour. A soft yawn, early morning laughter, shoes lined up together by the door. Across every dance floor. I could see it, all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there. A mirage.

I imagined an Instagram filter of Cartagena, a 140-character version, a status update, a quip, a bite, a piece, all of which I would learn were too small to capture the reality I was about to encounter.

فیسبوک همیشه شبیه تجدید دیدار دانش‌آموزان بود و همه آشنایان‌شان را در جزیان اتفاقات بزرگ زندگی که از زمان آخرین گفت‌وگویشان رخ داده بود، می‌گذاشتند. اما اینستاگرام همیشه شبیه قرار اول بود و همه بهترین نسخه‌ی زندگی‌شان را به نمایش می‌گذاشتند.

فیسبوک همیشه شبیه تجدید دیدار دانش‌آموزان بود و همه آشنایان‌شان را در جریان اتفاقات بزرگ زندگی که از زمان آخرین گفت‌وگویشان رخ داده بود، می‌گذاشتند. اما اینستاگرام همیشه شبیه قرار اول بود و همه بهترین نسخه‌ی زندگی‌شان را به نمایش می‌گذاشتند

That was exactly what would help make the product popular. Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.