Louis Wise on the rise of 'finsta'

Louis Wise takes respite in the ridiculous world of the Fake Instagram
Mobile phones have been banned from Samuel Smith pubs in the UK
Shutterstock / AlessandroBiascioli
Louis Wise4 April 2019

They first started appearing in my ‘suggested for you’ tab on Instagram, strange accounts I couldn’t for the life of me work out.

Who was ‘Unreal Housewife’, and why would I want to follow her? Who is ‘Cyst With A Twist’? And who, or rather what, is ‘Smoked Trout Pout’? What are these slightly disturbing pages that are invariably private, with some Kardashian or cartoon as their profile pic and a stream of memes that are very, very rude? Finally I sussed that these were all my friends using pseudonyms, and that I was being sucked into the world of the Finsta.

A Finsta — or fake Instagram account — is nothing new. Teenagers have had them for years. While you have a public account that’s all smiles and success and face filters, you have a private one that is videos of you lying on the sofa making cat noises, or joking about being a fat old heifer. In other words, having fun. I suppose it’s logical that kids would have one; it’s the kind of thing kids have time to do. But when the married and mortgaged over-30s start getting them just so they can post videos of, say, a giraffe blissfully fellating a lamppost, it’s surely time to take stock.

“Instagram seems to have two main modes: either sell yourself, or be sold to”

Louis Wise

God bless Instagram, but it’s exhausting. It seems to have two main modes, which are either sell yourself, or be sold to. Once it felt like wandering into a bijou little market; now it’s like traipsing through a huge shopping mall, with people spraying scent at you every five seconds and Swedish House Mafia blaring out of the sound system. What’s more, its ads are rather cruel. All it pushes my way, for instance, is a pile of inane influencers and models. ‘WHY are they suggesting these people to me?’ I tut, conveniently blocking out the 30 minutes I’d spent that morning on some Croatian thirst-trap’s page. Instagram knows my algorithm, and sadly it’s ‘basic + beach’.

With all this in mind, a Finsta seems a welcome respite. It’s not that it’s any more or less ‘real’ — a lot of our official accounts are surely just as much the real us, needy and samey and banal, and that’s something we need to make peace with. In fact, we should probably have five or six accounts, to reflect all our different personalities and moods, what Gwyneth Paltrow might call ‘the collage of you’. But just the one Finsta is a start. Besides, don’t we all need a space to be happy and absurd and carefree? A space to be that giraffe?

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