On social media, people often value authenticity and realness, yet the ways in which platforms promote authenticity may conflict with people’s goals to present an idealized self. Launched in 2020, the social media app BeReal encourages authenticity by prompting users to post unfiltered front and back camera photos at a particular time, thereby limiting control over their online self-presentation. We interviewed 25 BeReal users, exploring how they understand, perform, and evaluate authenticity given these unique constraints. Our findings reveal that participants resist BeReal’s prompts and encouragements, employing strategies to regain control over their self-presentation. Yet participants simultaneously ascribe to BeReal’s notion of realness, believing posts should appear effortless, branding themselves and others as fake when they ignore BeReal’s prompts. Ultimately, we discuss authenticity as sociotechnical and reflect on the ways in which people’s values around authenticity shift over time.

中文翻译：

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“我是时候变得真实了吗？”：在 BeReal 上理解、执行和评估真实性


在社交媒体上，人们通常重视真实性和真实性，但平台促进真实性的方式可能与人们呈现理想化自我的目标相冲突。社交媒体应用 BeReal 于 2020 年推出，通过提示用户在特定时间发布未经过滤的前置和后置摄像头照片来鼓励真实性，从而限制对其在线自我展示的控制。我们采访了 25 位 BeReal 用户，探讨他们在这些独特的限制条件下如何理解、执行和评估真实性。我们的研究结果表明，参与者抵制 BeReal 的提示和鼓励，采用策略来重新控制自己的自我表现。然而，参与者同时认同 BeReal 的真实性概念，认为帖子应该显得毫不费力，当他们忽视 BeReal 的提示时，他们就会给自己和他人贴上虚假的标签。最终，我们将真实性作为社会技术进行讨论，并反思人们围绕真实性的价值观随着时间的推移而变化的方式。