A New Social Media

Do you also have the feeling that social media has just become way too fake? The people that I know in real life seem to be completely different people on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok profiles. I’m sure they don’t exercise that much and, clearly, they don’t have avocado toast for breakfast on a daily basis. Our App of the Week is here to change that since it’s designed for everyone to be much more honest than we are used to in the old-school social platforms. Ready to BeReal?

The first step to be real on social media is not editing the pictures you publish. In BeReal you cannot use pictures of your gallery so the one you are going to publish must be posted directly after taking it; without using any filter. Yes, it sounds weird, especially after all the craze about filters we’ve experienced in the past years led by Snapchat, Instagram and, a bit later, TikTok. Although good lighting and the perfect pose can have amazing effects in distorting reality, it’s true that in BeReal we’ve found much fewer of these fake posts.

In addition, BeReal allows you to post only one picture per day and to do so, the app will send you a notification at a random moment. Once you tap on it, you’ll have two minutes to take your picture (with both front and back cameras) and publish it. And this really has an impact on the content you’ll find in BeReal. You’ll see your friends actually watch TV, drive to places and have normal dinners. In order to incentivize users to publish content, BeReal only allows you to see your friends' posts if you actually posted your daily picture. If you don’t publish, you don’t get to see anything!