Over the past couple of years, I’ve become an Instagram lurker: a figure whose shadowy presence is reduced to a blink on the “who has viewed your story” list.
Posting on Instagram started to make me nervous at some point after 2020, when the things you said or didn’t say on social media began to carry the weight of things said and unsaid in real life.
Suddenly if you neglected to post a black square during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, for instance, you were “part of the problem”; silence was violence, and silence now included the absence of posting. Your political beliefs really only mattered where everyone could see them.
So despite having never considered myself the proselytising sort, I tried to play my part in this brave new world of obligatory social media activism for fear I might otherwise be perceived as a servant of the violently silent faction. BLM? Look, here’s the receipt from my donation to the ACLU! Roe v. Wade overturned? Here’s an infographic about the harm this will cause American women in the red states! And it was easy when I had all the “right” beliefs to share with my morally righteous followers – we were all repeating the same uncontroversial opinions to one another, each of us trying hard not to be “part of the problem”.
I started to feel a secondhand embarrassment for people who kept leaping on liberal bandwagons every month or two
But then October 7 happened, and when I visited Instagram expecting to see my own sorrow for the Jewish lives lost that day mirrored in my virtuous echo chamber, I found none.
The more recent atrocities committed against Jews at Heaton Park and Bondi Beach confirmed the same: “silence is violence” only applies to certain causes, and the real-world danger of antisemitism is not among them.
While October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas in Gaza seemed for some of my peers to be an opportunity to express their “anti-colonial” values on Instagram, my feet struggled to find moralistic ground. I didn’t speak out because suddenly my beliefs didn’t feel so anodyne.
The urge to post something was still there, but mostly because I felt so helpless in the face of the whole tragedy that posting seemed like the closest thing to action. I still see what’s happening, I still care, posting seemed to say.
But instead, I went dark on Instagram. Instead of sharing my opinions online, I grappled with them in private. Instead of reposting the Gaza infographics my friends did, I looked up their sources and went down Wikipedia rabbit holes. And like Homer Simpson in that meme where he disappears into a hedge of bushes, I retreated into a rarefied space of online political invisibility.
To be sure, this was largely motivated by fear of being judged by the censorious “liberal” crowd of which I had long considered myself a part. I knew that posting in support of the Israeli hostages, for instance, didn’t mean I didn’t care about the deaths of Palestinians, but my followers on Instagram didn’t know this.
Posting about one and not the other was in itself a statement, and I felt stifled by the prospect of having to clarify to these faceless followers the precise nuance of my outlook on the situation.
But that was the thing. I also discovered I had a lot more room to learn new things and change my mind when I wasn’t bound by the static, one-size-fits-all routine of reflexively sharing my beliefs about every issue du jour on Instagram as if I’d become an expert overnight.
I stopped treating social media as a place to share political views even about uncontroversial things; to do so began to strike me as sort of crass, like stripping naked in front of strangers. I started to feel a secondhand embarrassment for people who kept leaping on liberal bandwagons every month or two, posting their recycled political opinions about this or that remote cause for seemingly no reason other than to remind everyone that they were a good Samaritan. That they were not “part of the problem”.
For a long time, this was me; I was terrified that if I didn’t add to whatever rallying cry I would be seen as some kind of narrow-minded pariah among my progressive cohort.
And look, I’m sure we can all do better to rail against the manifold injustices of the world, myself certainly included, but at a certain point I realised how stupid it was to measure my contribution to society’s inequities by how often I posted about them on Instagram to my sub-1,000 followers.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.