Why I’ve Been Unfollowing Some of My Favourite Influencers

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.

We love them, we hate them and we love to hate them – never have we debated whether influencers are still culturally relevant as often as we have during the pandemic. Back in early 2020, when this nightmare was just beginning, some speculated that the influencer bubble was about to burst, as aspirational content became increasingly unbearable to the humble masses. 

According to the 2021 Global Digital Report, more and more people are using social media today – about 4.2 billion, which is equivalent to a 13 percent increase on last year. The report also determined that social media use had “accelerated significantly” since the outbreak of COVID-19. Another 2021 survey conducted in Italy by the market research firm Ipsos found that 70 percent of participants said they liked influencers just as much as before the pandemic, while 18 percent said they liked them even more.

As a product of my generation, I too spend way too much time on social media. But lately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content, especially on Instagram, where influencers are rewarded for posting prolifically and consistently. Whenever I opened the app it felt like zapping through TV channels, just looking for something that would make me feel good. All the while, I’d feel guilty about all the time I’d wasted.

At first, I started hiding some of the content posted by my favourite influencers. Then I stopped following more and more of them. It’s been a slow process, and it’s still ongoing. But that doesn’t mean it is not important. I talked about it with Marilena Iasevoli, a Rome-based psychologist who studies our relationship with social networks. She said we often tend to underestimate and downplay the importance of our online experiences, when in fact they’ve become an integral part of our daily life.

"Just as in real life, it’s important to surround ourselves with people who make us feel good, who we feel an exchange of energy with,” Iasevoli said. “We need to follow people who don’t drain us.” That is much more complicated on social media, because we don’t know who the people behind the screen really are and what their life is actually like. “Some studies have shown that following people you don’t know on Instagram can cause or exacerbate negative feelings,” Iasevoli said. “That’s especially true if the life they portray to us on a daily basis seems much better than ours.”

Although more and more influencers have come out to expose their editing tricks and real-life imperfections, I still can’t shake off feelings of inferiority. “Instagram is designed for constant social comparison,” Iasevoli said. “If you see an influencer at an exclusive opening, you’ll think they’re going to better spots than you even though they might not be having fun.” Although I can rationalise how hard and time consuming having a spotless Instagram feed is, that gut feeling of missing out on life is still there.

I asked my group of friends if they’d ever unfollowed an influencer they really liked before. Most of those who said yes explained that it was because the influencer had somehow changed. Maybe they’d started collaborating with other influencers too much, or posting sponsored content too often. Maybe they held an opinion my friends disagreed with, which only became evident after some time. It all seemed to speak to a sort of unspoken agreement between the influencer and their followers, that the latter will continue to support a specific persona as long as it doesn’t change too much. But of course, that is not realistic – everyone changes in life, even influencers.

Besides, striking a balance between entertaining a large audience while supporting yourself financially isn’t easy. Working for brands too much might make people dislike you, but likeability is an influencer’s main source of revenue. That’s why the industry is famous for leading many creators to burnout. “Social media is like a stage,” Iasevoli said. “If you show an idealised version of yourself to a big audience, it will tire you out in the long run. It will create an inner discrepancy – are you the actor or the person behind the role? Or maybe you are just an intersection of the two you no longer recognise?”

If you’re starting to get a bad vibe from someone you follow on social media, Iasevoli thinks you should treat that relationship similarly to how you might treat any other bad relationship with someone you actually know. You might feel guilty or even sad about not supporting them anymore, especially if you’ve followed them for years and really liked them at some point, but you shouldn’t fight those feelings. “Over the course of our lives, how and with whom we spend our time can change,” Iasevoli said. “We just don't apply that mindset to our online life yet.”

For my part, my relationship with Instagram has improved since I stopped following some of my favourite influencers. My feed used to be oversaturated with opinions and advice from strangers – I thought that would enrich me as a person, but in the long run, it left me with a feeling of unsolicited inner chaos.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from this, it’s that behind any profile there is always a person you know very little about. And if what little you see no longer serves you, you can just let it go.