Table of Contents
BeReal and Authentic Social Apps: What Teens Are Actually Looking For
What BeReal and 'authentic social' apps reveal about what teens want from social media — and what the research says about whether they find it.
There’s a moment many parents recognize: your teenager, who seemed perfectly happy scrolling Instagram ten minutes ago, suddenly says something like “nobody is actually like that.” They know. Teens are far more media-literate about social performance than many adults give them credit for — and the rise of BeReal, Locket, and a wave of “authenticity-first” social apps reflects a genuine hunger for something different. But what exactly are teens looking for, and are any of these platforms actually delivering it? The answer is more complicated than the marketing suggests.
Key Takeaways
- BeReal peaked at 73 million downloads globally in 2022, then experienced significant user decline — a pattern that reveals the limits of novelty-based authenticity design.
- Research consistently shows that social comparison, not platform design, drives teen anxiety on social media — meaning “authentic” apps face the same underlying dynamics as curated ones.
- Teens are sophisticated critics of social performance: they use Instagram for image, Snapchat for real friendship, and BeReal-style apps as a protest vote more than a permanent home.
- The longing for authentic connection is developmentally normal and important — parents can channel it productively.
- No app design alone solves the core problem, which is that public audiences change behavior regardless of the platform’s stated values.
What Made BeReal Different — and Why It Mattered
BeReal launched in France in 2020, created by Alexis Barreyat, a former GoPro employee. Its core mechanic was radical in concept: once per day, at a random time chosen by the app, all users received a simultaneous notification. You had two minutes to take a photo using both your front and back camera at the same time. No filters. No retakes (or rather, retakes were allowed but flagged — the app showed how many times you tried). You could only see your friends’ BeReals after you posted your own.
The design philosophy attacked the very architecture of Instagram — which incentivizes endless curation, filtered self-presentation, and follower counts — and replaced it with enforced spontaneity, reciprocity, and time pressure.
It worked, briefly, spectacularly. By mid-2022, BeReal was the most downloaded app in the United States for several consecutive weeks. TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat all launched direct clones (TikTok Now, Instagram Candid, Snapchat’s dual-camera feature).
By 2023, BeReal’s daily active user count had dropped by more than 60% from its peak, according to app analytics firm Apptopia. The company was acquired by Voodoo, a mobile gaming company, in 2024.
The Apps That Followed (and Their Approaches)
BeReal wasn’t alone. A generation of authenticity-focused apps emerged, each with a different theory of what makes social media genuine:
| App | Core Mechanic | Authenticity Claim | Status (2025) |
|---|---|---|---|
| BeReal | Random-time dual camera, 2-minute window | Enforced spontaneity | Acquired, declining |
| Locket Widget | Shared photo widgets on phone home screens | Intimate circle, ambient presence | Active, growing |
| Poparazzi | Others take your photos; you can’t photograph yourself | Remove self-promotion incentive | Declined significantly |
| Gas | Anonymous compliments only | Positive-only, low-stakes | Acquired by Discord |
| NGL | Anonymous Q&A | Honesty through anonymity | Active, controversy around bullying |
| Noplace | Text-only, no photos | Remove appearance pressure | Early growth, small |
Each of these represents a hypothesis about why social media feels fake: Is it filters? Is it self-promotion? Is it appearance pressure? Is it the public audience? Is it algorithmic amplification? Different apps attack different variables.
What Teens Are Actually Seeking
Research from multiple institutions offers a clearer picture of teen motivation than app marketing does.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey of teens ages 13–17 found:
- 54% said it would be hard to give up social media
- 38% said social media has been “mostly positive” for them
- 32% said it was “mostly negative”
- The most commonly cited positive: connecting with friends and family
Notably, “authentic content” was not the top stated desire — connection was. The distinction matters. BeReal’s insight was that curation interrupts authentic connection; its implementation bet that enforcing spontaneity would fix that. What it underestimated was that spontaneity without an existing relationship is still performance.
The Audience Problem That Never Goes Away
Dr. danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research and author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, has written extensively about what she calls “context collapse” — the problem that arises when you post to an audience of people who occupy different roles in your life. A photo that feels authentic to your three closest friends looks different when your aunt, your soccer coach, and a kid from math class all see it.
BeReal had no solution to context collapse — it had the same friend-list structure as every other app. When your “authentic” dual-camera photo is visible to 150 people you barely know, the same performance pressures apply. Research published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Marwick & Boyd, 2011) identified this problem years before BeReal existed, and it remains unsolved.
What Teens Actually Do Across Platforms (Multi-Platform Literacy)
Rather than finding one “authentic” platform, most teens maintain what researchers call “platform-specific personas”:
- Instagram (main account): Curated, performance-oriented, visible to extended social network. Posted rarely but carefully.
- Instagram (Finsta/close friends story): Unfiltered, chaotic, visible only to tight friend group. Where authenticity actually lives.
- Snapchat: Daily communication with real friends. Disappearing format reduces performance pressure.
- TikTok: Content consumption and participation in trends. Performance, but impersonal — for an unknown audience rather than known peers.
- Discord: Deep community around specific interests. Lowest performance pressure, highest honesty.
When teens tried BeReal, many already had the “authentic” space they actually wanted — it just wasn’t publicly visible. BeReal asked them to bring that energy to a place with an audience, which fundamentally changed the experience.
The Research on Social Comparison and Why Platform Design Has Limits
The mechanism most reliably linked to teen mental health harm from social media is not specific to any platform: it is social comparison. Upward social comparison — measuring yourself against peers who appear happier, more attractive, more popular — is associated with lower self-esteem, higher anxiety, and depressive symptoms across multiple meta-analyses.
A 2018 paper in Computers in Human Behavior by Vogel et al. found that exposure to social media profiles of attractive, successful peers consistently lowered self-evaluation scores in young adults — and the effect was stronger when participants were led to believe the profiles were authentic rather than staged.
This is the authenticity trap. If teens believe that what they see on BeReal is genuinely unfiltered — that their friend’s spontaneous Tuesday afternoon really does look that good — the comparison is potentially more damaging than Instagram’s obviously staged photos. At least with Instagram, there’s a shared understanding that it’s performance.
A 2021 study by Twenge et al. in JAMA Psychiatry tracking US teens from 2010–2018 found that social media use correlated with increased depression particularly in girls, but the mechanism appeared to be the social comparison and sleep disruption effects rather than any specific platform feature.
Are There Genuinely Healthier Social Experiences for Teens?
Some researchers point to design features that do seem to correlate with better outcomes:
Smaller audiences: Research consistently shows that platforms where teens communicate with smaller, more intentional audiences (Discord servers, close friends Instagram stories) show less social comparison harm than broadcast-oriented platforms.
Asynchronous communication: The urgency of live social feedback (likes accumulating in real time, viewer counts) amplifies anxiety. Apps that delay feedback or remove it entirely reduce the performance feedback loop.
Interest-based community over appearance-based identity: Platforms organized around shared activities (gaming, art, music) rather than personal attractiveness show better outcomes for teen wellbeing, according to research from the Oxford Internet Institute (Przybylski & Weinstein, 2017).
Genuine reciprocity: The BeReal insight — you can’t see others’ posts without posting yourself — has real research support. Passive consumption (lurking) without active participation is more strongly associated with negative outcomes than balanced, reciprocal use.
How to Talk to Your Teen About Authentic Social Media
The research points toward conversation, not control, as the more effective strategy for supporting teen wellbeing around social media:
- Ask which platform feels most “real” to them. The answer will tell you more about their social world than almost any monitoring tool.
- Discuss context collapse explicitly. “Who can see this?” is a question worth making habitual. Help teens understand that audience size changes what feels safe to share.
- Name the social comparison dynamic without being preachy. Asking “do you ever feel worse about yourself after scrolling?” opens a conversation rather than closing one.
- Explore their motivation for joining new platforms. Are they following friends? Curious about a feature? Feeling pressure? Understanding why illuminates more than the app itself.
- Consider the Finsta model as a family conversation topic. The fact that most teens have private, small-audience spaces suggests they’ve already found a partial solution — worth discussing rather than discovering later.
What to Watch For Over 3 Months
- App-hopping frequency: If your teen is constantly migrating to the next “authentic” platform, they may be chasing a solution to loneliness or social anxiety that no app can provide.
- Passive vs. active use: Teens who scroll without posting tend to show worse outcomes than those who post and interact. Asking “do you post or mostly just look?” is a useful diagnostic.
- Mood correlation with social media use: The research is clear that passive social media consumption correlates with worse mood. If you notice consistent mood dips after social media time, that’s worth addressing directly.
- Comparison language: Phrases like “everyone else has…” or “she always looks perfect” signal active social comparison processing. These are opportunities for conversation, not correction.
- Platform consolidation: Teens who gradually consolidate to 1–2 platforms with intentional use often show better outcomes than those maintaining 6–8 apps simultaneously.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is BeReal still a thing in 2025?
BeReal still exists after being acquired by Voodoo in 2024, but its active user base is a fraction of its 2022 peak. It remains the most recognizable example of the “authenticity-first” social app wave, but TikTok Now, Instagram Candid, and Snapchat’s dual-camera features largely absorbed its mechanics into existing platforms.
Is any social media platform actually better for teen mental health?
Research from the Oxford Internet Institute and others suggests that interest-based platforms (Discord, Reddit communities, even specific YouTube channels) with smaller audiences and reciprocal participation tend to show less harm than broadcast-oriented, appearance-focused platforms. No platform is universally “safe” — use patterns matter more than platform identity.
Why do teens keep using Instagram if they know it’s fake?
Teens use Instagram for social signaling — to be part of cultural conversations, to maintain visibility with extended peer networks, and because that’s where everyone is. They’re sophisticated enough to know the performance is artificial; they participate anyway because not participating has its own social costs. Understanding this removes some of the parental frustration around the apparent contradiction.
How do I know if my teen’s social media use is healthy?
The clearest indicators are sleep quality, in-person relationship investment, and emotional stability. If social media is displacing sleep, face-to-face time, or causing consistent mood disruption, those are more meaningful signals than screen time totals. Research by Twenge (2017) suggests that more than 3 hours per day of social media use correlates significantly with wellbeing decline in teens.
About the author
Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.
Sources
- Pew Research Center. (2022). Teens, social media and technology 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/
- boyd, d. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
- Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
- Vogel, E. A., Rose, J. P., Okdie, B. M., Eckles, K., & Franz, B. (2015). Who compares and despairs? The effect of social comparison orientation on social media use and its outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 249–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.06.026
- Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376
- Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2017). A large-scale test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 28(2), 204–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616678438
- Apptopia. (2023). BeReal usage data. https://apptopia.com
