BeReal and the Fantasy of an Authentic Online Life

The earliest media coverage of Instagram tended to emphasize the platform’s technical attributes—its ease of use, its many filters, the pleasantness of its neat grid layout—as much as the social aspects. By the time that Facebook acquired the app, in April of 2012, however, it had developed a distinct culture, one firmly rooted in the aspirational. Instagram, as a New Yorker contributor remarked the day after the acquisition, “makes everything in our lives, including and especially ourselves, look better.” With assistance from the app’s glossy filters, even the most mundane of still-lifes—a poppy-seed bagel on a desk, a curtained window, a traffic cone lying on its side in the road—could be imbued with an indelible hipness. Ten years later, Instagram is a veritable dinosaur, culturally ubiquitous but quietly flailing as its appeal among teen-agers shrivels. Meanwhile, the current fixation among young people is a platform marked as the “anti-Instagram.”

This is BeReal, a social-media app founded in 2020 by the French entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau. In the past few months, the platform has seen a surge in users, accompanied (or perhaps catalyzed) by a rash of glowing media coverage, including in the Wall Street Journal, Teen Vogue, and Business Insider. To summarize the BeReal user experience: once a day, at a random time, the app sends a push notification to its users, granting them two minutes to snap a two-way photo using their phones’ front- and rear-facing cameras. Only after posting the daily photo can users see what their friends have posted; photos taken after the two-minute window are marked as late, and metadata reveal how many times a photo has been retaken before the final image is posted—an element supposedly designed for the sake of transparency, but which reads more like a badge of shame. There are no filters and no videos, just a stream of candid-seeming photo diptychs, all of which disappear once the next alert is sent. The strict limitations and sense of urgency inherent to BeReal’s design, the app’s team and fans argue, serve its goal of cultivating “authenticity,” a word that can be found in virtually every article written about the app. On the marketing front, the company doesn’t shy away from throwing a gauntlet at the feet of the platforms against whose image BeReal was made. “BeReal won’t make you famous,” the App Store description states. If you want to become an influencer, it continues, “you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”

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