Instagram is a major vector of mental illness for young people – who, mentally ill, look to coaches and influencers for magical solutions to their emotional problems.
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Whether in the U.S. or in China, Big Techs are mingled with government. In this regard, the main difference between the U.S. and China is that in the U.S. we cannot know who commands whom (the companies or the government), while in China we know very well that the state commands the companies. The U.S. is a strange country where a man like Rockefeller can buy all the oil wells he wants and then go on to sponsor the governemnt’s intelligence. This lack of state limits on the power of private money is understood as freedom by this exotic country, as well as by followers of Americanism. The opposite of this is understood as dictatorship, and dictators are as evil as Hitler.
Mark Zuckerberg was deeply involved with the Democrats’ Deep State and, with Trump’s election, has adopted a Musk style. Gone are the days when monopolies like Standard Oil were divided: Facebook, Inc., a company created by Zuckerberg, bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. In 2021, Facebook, Inc. underwent a rebranding and is called Meta Platforms. It owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others.
If Facebook was, in the mid-2010s, the social network of demonstrations and color revolutions, Instagram, after being bought by Zuckerberg, changed a lot to become a huge classified ad, where influencers knock on users’ doors selling goods.
The history of Instagram
Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched in October 2010, available only for iPhones. The app grew very quickly, as its launch coincided with the launch of an iPhone with a superior camera. At that time, the main social media plataform in the U.S. was Facebook, owned by Zuckerberg. He bought Instagram when it was less than two years old in April 2012 for one billion dollars. Only after Zuckerberg’s purchase did Instagram become available for Android, the main mobile operating system owned by Google.
Before Zuckerberg’s purchase, Instagram was a completely different social network. You can click here and see for yourself: it had no videos or stories, much less influencers. From what I remember at the time, Instagram was something that hipsters had to post photos of cats, books, coffee, Frida Kahlo portraits, etc., in order to appear intelligent or sensitive. The difference was the aspect of old photos, conveyed both by the square format and the filters. Instagram’s premise was to be a photo social media platform for iPhone users. So, if today Instagram is used even by poor old ladies and small city halls in Brazil, it is because Zuckerberg changed the platform a lot. One of the changes was to set up a marketing department and sell ads.
Marketing à la Obama
In 1999, entrepreneur and advertiser Seth Godin published Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Clients. Underneath his name were the credentials of “Vice-President, Direct Marketing, Yahoo!”
The title is self-explanatory, and the book was intended to be a solution for the obsolescence of traditional marketing. People were unable to pay attention to TV ads, magazine inserts, billboards, and posters even on urinals. As a result, companies were wasting money on ineffective marketing and needed a new solution. Godin calls this interruption marketing (because it interrupts the potential customer, who has learned to ignore it) and proposes the creation of permission marketing, which relies on the consumer’s permission for the salesperson to show them the products. By becoming your friend, the seller would be able to get you to pay attention to their ads. To do this, it would be necessary to create “permission structures”.
This term gained sudden notoriety in politics because Obama used it. And Obama used it because his strategist, David Axelrod, became an expert in electing black politicians using this marketing strategy applied to politics.
For Seth Godin, the “friend” should not only consent to the advertisement, but even eagerly await it, since he likes the seller and trusts him. Furthermore, Godin believes that today’s consumer already has his favorite brands and doesn’t care about quality, so what matters most is finding a niche market through digital means rather than going on TV to launch a new product for someone who won’t listen and, even if they do, already has their favorite brand. Another point is that merchandise has already evolved as much as it could, and no one will be able to create a T-shirt with a totally innovative technology that makes the consumer switch brands.
Godin didn’t just parachute into Yahoo. He owned a pioneering digital marketing company (Yoyodyne) and sold it to Yahoo, where he then went on to work for the large company. Given this, we understand that the Instagram influencer character was created more than ten years before the invention of Instagram itself.
A reflection of stagnation?
If political marketing in the Obama era reflected the end of political proposals and the investment in the idea of looking cool, is it true that Instagram marketing reflects an economic crisis in the U.S.? After all, the assumption is that there is no innovation and that quality does not matter.
Instagram can be described as a large platform for pyramid schemes and scams. It is there that coaches, who do not sell anything relevant to the country’s growth, proliferate. It is there that the food supplement industry flourishes, promising every miracle (and taking advantage of legal loopholes to make such promises without the risk of being sued). There, influencers show wonderful lives and give their followers the impression that there is something wrong with them, or that by buying the right product they will be able to have the beauty and love that the influencers appear to have. It is no wonder that Instagram is a major vector of mental illness for young people – who, mentally ill, look to coaches and influencers for magical solutions to their emotional problems.
I do not know if deindustrialization has generated dependence on this type of predatory market, or if this type of predatory market engenders deindustrialization, since one thing reinforces the other. But what is certain is that, if the U.S. values this platform so much, its economy does not have a bright future, since it is a bet on an unproductive economy that harms consumers themselves.
