The Search for the Realest Person on Earth Starts with ... Social Media?

Social media today is often the home of negative emotions and addictive outrage. It's no wonder many surveys are showing a mass exodus with shrinking usage on the top platforms alongside observations that "social media is falling apart."

One platform trying to shift this perception is BeReal, a popular app that sends users prompts once a day to share an image within two minutes of what they are doing at that moment. The urgency discourages staging photos or trying for perfection and instead rewards people for being real (which explains the name). Taking their efforts one step further, now BeReal has launched a campaign to search for the "Realest Person On Earth."

If you can put aside the irony of a platform promoting being real and authentic turning authenticity into a competition, the fact that there are tools that encourage more authentic sharing is a good thing. Their challenge, and ours, will be to resist falling into the same feedback loop of approval seeking and insecurity that made so much of social media toxic in the first place.