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Essena O’Neill, Instagram Star, Recaptions Her Life

With over 800,000 followers, Essena O’Neill is an Instagram star. But Ms. O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian, recently surprised her fans by abruptly speaking out against social media.

Changing her Instagram name to “Social Media Is Not Real Life,” Ms. O’Neill has denounced the artificiality of social media, recaptioning many of her old pictures on the site to reveal the painstaking work that went into creating what seemed to be spontaneous moments. It was akin to Beyoncé admitting that she did not, in fact, wake up like this.

In one of the pictures, showing Ms. O’Neill in a bikini, the caption has been rewritten to explain that the photo was taken and retaken over a hundred times. In a smiling selfie, the new caption ends with a disclaimer all in upper case: “There is nothing real about this.”

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An image from Essena O’Neill's Instagram account.

Ms. O’Neill later removed her Instagram and YouTube accounts from the Internet entirely.

Her awakening to the posturing she says is inherent to social media was accompanied on her page by images and drawings that promote a philosophy opposed to self-promotion.

She was particularly frank about her attempts to change the way her body looked, describing herself in one old picture as “a 15 year old girl that calorie restricts and excessively exercises.”

The most recently posted image was a resharing of a popular Tumblr meme, a cartoon of a person with a television for a head, its screen reading, “We are a brainwashed generation.”

In a YouTube video published on Nov. 2, Ms. O’Neill elaborated on what she says is her departure from social media in a nearly 18-minute video that she says will be her “last-ever post on YouTube.”

A day later, the video had been watched over a million times.

Ms. O’Neill was able to parlay her social celebrity into modeling work. In the video, she said that she had “no idea how I’m going to make money.” But some Facebook users, skeptical of Ms. O’Neill’s declarations, view her turn against Instagram as just another means of self-promotion.

One Facebook user, commenting on the story on ABC Australia, wrote that “this is simply smart marketing. She’s reversing her conventional image and in the process, gaining even more media exposure. She’s clever — this will only improve her career in a shift towards ‘body positive’ advocacy.”

It is not particularly unusual for celebrities at various levels of fame to announce their exit from social media platforms, only to return to them shortly thereafter.

Were Ms. O’Neill to decide to give social media another chance, she would return to an audience that has swelled with tens of thousands of new followers on Instagram alone. Indeed, in one rewritten caption, she was already promoting a new website.

Nathan Jurgenson, a researcher at Snapchat who has studied social media and Internet culture, says that intentional construction of our identities is not an activity unique to the online world.

“Identity performativity isn’t new, but how we do it is new,” he said, bringing up the sociologist Erving Goffman and his 1959 book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”

Mr. Jurgenson added: “All of identity theory is about talking about how we perform, so it’s a little bit strange when people who have studied that literature hear people go ‘oh everyone’s performing now,’ and it’s like, no, that’s all the self has ever been.”

“It’s kind of a feel-good narrative to say that on the Internet everyone is just posing,” he continued. “We really like that narrative because that means that everything that isn’t online gets to be real.”

Ms. O’Neill embraced the distinction Mr. Jurgenson referred to in her most recent video, encouraging her followers to “go outside, go to a park, go to a beach, go somewhere there are people around you.”

“What I’m doing here is a statement that real life isn’t through screens,” she said.

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