"I can't tell you how free I feel without social media. It had suffocated me," says Essena O'Neill.
Business Insider
Famous teenage Instagrammer Essena O'Neill has decided to rebel against social media.
The Instagram star - who will turn 19 this week - created the website Let's Be Game Changers to explain her decision and to shed light on the fantasy world of social media.
"And yes, I quit all of social media. With 570,00+ followers on Instagram, 250,000+ subscribes on YouTube, 250,000+ on tumblr and 60,000+ average views on snapchat. Tumblr and Snapchat gone forever. My instagram left to expose the harsh and often humorous reality behind the #goals #instafamous culture and YouTube for purely vegan education. Deleting all those apps from my phone was one of the most empowering and freeing thing I have ever done," she explains on her website.
She criticizes the brands who paid for her to model, saying "we are a generation told to consume and consume, with no thought of where it all comes from and where it all goes"
She still has photos on her Instagram page, but according to The Sunshine Coast Daily, the Australian social media star has been deleting her photos over the past week. She has edited the captions of her remaining photo and debunked the myth that many of her photos were "real" - many, in fact, were paid for by various companies.
In fact, her Instagram bio proudly boasts her new credo - "social media is not real life."
She's also spreading her thoughts on social media with videos on her website.
Her first video on the website was called "Why I Think Social Media Sucks."
Underneath the video, she explains her feelings towards social media.
"I can't tell you how free I feel without social media. Never again will I let a number define me. IT SUFFOCATED ME. Not because I had 500,000 followers, I felt the same as a young girl, I would just spend hours looking at everyone else's perfect lives and I strived to make mine look just as good... Guess I succeeded. It's totally stupid. Everyone's doing it. And I know you didn't come into this world just wanting to fit in and get by. You are reading this now because you are a game changer, you might not know your power yet, I am just finding mine, but man... when you do... far out you'll go crazy. It'll be brilliant. You'll be brilliant," she writes, challenging her followers to go one week without social media.
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