Your audience doesn’t mind if you’re fake
About a month ago a motorcycle-loving Japanese woman with 27.8k followers on Twitter revealed that he was actually a 50-year old Japanese man who had been using a photo app to make his face look like a young woman.
According to the BBC, the man did this because, “No one will read what a normal middle-aged man, taking care of his motorcycle and taking pictures outside, posts on his account.” By editing his pictures to look like a young, attractive woman, he was far more popular on Twitter. “I get as many as 1,000 likes now, though it was usually below 10 before,” Soya continued in his segment on the TV program Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi (Sitting Up Late From Monday).
But even after being unmasked when eagle-eyed fans spotted an unedited reflection in a selfie, Soya is still editing his photos. And people are still talking to his alter ego as though she’s real.
If an influencer is fake, can she still have real fans?
Soya isn’t the first to successfully pose as a young, attractive woman for internet fame. He’s not even the first to create a persona who is still popular despite her fakeness. Miquela is the “fictional character” featured on the @lilmiquela on Instagram. The account posts CGI pictures that belong in the uncanny valley, unabashedly CGI, but she is still popular. Miquela frequently does brand sponsorships and has over three million followers on Instagram, despite being imaginary.
In an age where it’s possible to be anyone online, and authenticity isn’t valued as much as the image of authenticity, your social media persona doesn’t have to be real to be popular.
Why are young women more popular online?
According to Statistica, 84% of influencers earning money on Instagram are female, despite only being 51% of the population on Instagram. It’s also worth noting that of the handful of CGI influencers, the most popular are created to present as young, attractive women, like Miquela (3 million Instagram followers), Shudu (215.5k Instagram followers), Bermuda (291k Instagram followers), and Imma (330k Instagram followers). And I couldn’t help but notice that Soya did not create text posts of his younger, female incarnation with motorcycles: he created images.
There’s a reason most successful Instagram influencers are female: they dominate the arena of monetizing their looks.
“Perhaps, women are more prone to take advantage of the visual aspect of the social media platform or are more used to be evaluated based on their looks, which is a sad fact,” writes Ana Bredava in Search Engine Journal on the subject of female influencers on Instagram.
Part of the allure in Soya’s case was that men are expected to be interested in motorcycles. Young, attractive women are not. Like the scene in Transformers 2 when the camera slowly pans over Megan Fox’s extremely attractive self as she works on a motorcycle, Soya’s implication is clear: “I’m a hot woman, and amazingly, I like boyish things.”
In my younger days of trying to be a Cool Girl, I found that I got a lot more male attention when I guzzled beer, pretended to like soccer, and feigned an interest in video games. I can only assume Soya experienced the same to be true for his Twitter account.
The robot invasion has begun, but (where) will it end?
These CGI influencers and Soya’s creation are separated by one crucial distinction. One was created by a specialist team in AI and robotics. The other was created by a random guy using a free app, FaceApp, to edit his own pictures.
It will only become easier to create convincing human facsimiles. In the words of Frank Mulhern, a Northwestern University professor of integrated marketing communications, CGI influencers will probably be “indistinguishable from real people” as technology improves. The article for which he was interviewed was written in October of 2019, and as I look at Soya’s pictures not two years later, I find myself skeptical that I could have told the difference myself between a real pic and her edited ones.
Where’s the line between cosmetic surgery, FaceTuning, and Deep Fakes?
When I first beheld Soya’s image or Imma’s Instagram pics, I had about the same reaction as when I see a picture of Kylie Jenner: unbelievably attractive, with an emphasis on unbelievable.
Here’s the issue with all these images we consume online. To one degree or another, they’re all fake. Yes, incredibly attractive people exist in real life, but social media has done things to help bend our relationship with the reality that most people aren’t.
It’s made it not just possible but actually lucrative to edit yourself either in the flesh, with fillers or plastic surgery, or just in the image with an app like FaceTune. This incentivizes celebrities like the Jenners, individuals like Soya, and companies like that behind Imma to create these fake narratives of hot women.
Imma doesn’t exist. She was created by a team to be an influencer. Soya doesn’t exist. She was edited into existence by a guy who likes motorcycles and wanted to become Twitter-famous. And Kylie Jenner also doesn’t, really. At least not the image she presents us, her adoring public, with.
She’s so wealthy she can afford any facial treatments. She has a personal stylist and makeup artist to make sure she looks impeccable in all her images posted online. She has fillers to augment her natural good looks. And on top of all that, she also edits her pictures to raise them to another level of attractiveness. None of that is real or attainable, despite the products she markets to us with her face and body.
Is Soya any different from Kylie Jenner? His aims are the same — to become famous by being pretty. His methods are remarkably similar. And both individuals accomplished what they set out to do.
How this his artifice any different from the highlight reel of another of the famed Kardashian-Jenner, Khloe Kardashian, who only earlier this month took legal action to remove an unflattering picture of her? After all, that is altering reality, too.
The relationship between the role influencers play in society, the ease of modifying images online, and the commodification of female attractiveness is a tangled one. Soya’s experience proves what the 3.3 million followers behind Miquela already knew to be true: consumers don’t care if what they see is real or not, and apparently it still influences them.
What is the role of real influencers, when anyone can create and post a beautiful persona online? And if it becomes impossible to distinguish between reality and digital falsehood, will authenticity actually come back into fashion? If Instagram or Twitter ban fakes, where do they draw the line?
Instagram and Twitter were already promoting nebulous images of beauty and attractiveness in the pursuit of engagement and revenue. Whether you’re selling Calvin Klein, as Miquela has done, or selling an image of yourself as a young, pretty woman who loves motorcycles, as Soya achieved, it’s uncanny to see how possible it is to create a convincing dupe.
For me, the most worrying thing of all is how little people seem to care whether what they consume is reality or not.
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May 08, 2021 at 02:40AM
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You Don’t Need to Be Real to Be Popular - OneZero - OneZero
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