Back in 2005 a man named Jawed Karim uploaded the first ever video to a brand new platform called YouTube. It was an 18-second clip of Karim in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego zoo, and if there’s one thing you’re bound to notice about the birth of the world’s biggest video-sharing site, it’s that ‘Me at the zoo’ is extremely boring (the quality is bad and his chat meandering at best). Fast forward 17 years and were Karim touring the zoo today it’d be a whole different story: a full production crew with one cameraman per elephant, a mood board for the petting zoo, a dedicated Photoshop budget for the capybaras, and a long list of #afflinks for the gift shop. Truly, we are not in Kansas any more.

This is not to say that only YouTube has changed from its heady candid days of yore. Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok (despite its infancy – it’s only been available worldwide since 2018) seem to have grown into places where real-life content takes uncharacteristically large amounts of work, from idea generation all the way through to professional-level editing and marketing. What used to be about getting an insight into people’s lives has become a look at the life they want you to see. In short, reality now demands stage direction. So imagine the horror of Zuckerberg et al when an app named BeReal began taking off in early 2022 designed around the very thing that traditional social media cannot seem to keep hold of: genuine, ugly, unpolished realness.

The French app launched by former Go-Pro employee Alexis Barreyat along with co-founder Kévin Perreau, first hit app stores in December 2019, but it only really began to make its way into the mainstream this summer. The premise is simple: at a random time every day users are served with a notification telling them it’s “Time to BeReal”. At that point you have two minutes to take a photo (using both the front and back camera) of whatever you’re doing in that moment and share it with your friends. There are a few crucial aspects designed to make the app the ultimate self-proclaimed “anti-Instagram”. Firstly, you can only post one picture a day, and if you don’t like what you’ve posted you only get the chance to delete it once. You can’t see others’ posts until you’ve shared your own – eliminating the urge to doomscroll – and there are no follower counts, blue ticks, ads or brand accounts. So far, so real.