Ten years after Instagram launched, its users are drastically changing the way they utilize the social media platform to communicate with each other.
While Instagram remains a space to showcase fun photographs, videos, and visual creations, over the past few months a new trend — which seeks to inform, enlighten, and inspire — has dominated the platform: user-made Instagram guides.
Instagram launched its official Well-being Guides in May, but user-made guides started becoming more widespread back in February. As people navigate a global pandemic, protest systemic racism and widespread police brutality, and approach a crucial U.S. presidential election, they’re feeling more and more compelled to make guides about topics close to their hearts.
A number of people are using Instagram’s album feature (which allows up to 10 photos and videos in a single post) to distribute their own succinct, visually appealing, educational guides on serious, often complex topics. Though the short guides aren’t able to paint complete pictures of the issues being outlined, their extremely digestible formatting makes it easy for users to read, reflect, and share in a matter of minutes.
Because the guides are so easily shareable, they have the power to help raise awareness on pressing issues, and can also act as a starting point for anyone looking to further educate themselves. It is, however, worth noting that Instagram is owned by Facebook, and many companies are currently boycotting Facebook’s questionable rules and ethics by pulling their ads from the social network. Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have both been criticized for failure to act on posts that promote violence, hate speech, and false facts.
As the activism guide trend continues to spread, Mashable spoke with some of the writers, artists, truth-seekers, and change-makers behind some of Instagram’s most popular guides to learn what inspired them to start creating.
A helpful tool from overwhelming helplessness
Sophie Williams, a 32-year-old writer based in London, didn’t set out to become a leading voice in the anti-racist movement. But after posting a guide titled “Being an Anti-Racist Ally” to her secondary Instagram account, @officialmillennialblack, she quickly gained tens of thousands of followers along with the attention of celebrities like Justin Bieber.
Williams uses black and white text in a light-pink guide to outline the differences between being “not racist” and “anti-racist,” encourage white people to listen to and learn from people of color, and more. The guide isn’t perfect. It includes a few typos and a duplicated slide. But Williams barely had any followers when she posted, and had no idea that anyone, let alone hundreds of thousands of people, would see it.
“I created it because the day after George Floyd’s murder I just felt really helpless,” Williams explained during a phone interview. “I essentially spent most of the day crying, because I think when these things happen to a marginalized person, we sort of feel it as ourselves. We feel the fact that we’re unsafe.”
After processing her emotions, Williams wondered what she could do to make a difference. “I was like, ‘Not much, [but] I can try to make something that speaks to what people who can make a change can do,'” she said. So she posted her first guide.
Williams, who has a background in advertising and was formerly the chief operating officer of a social media agency, originally secured the @officialmillennialblack handle as a placeholder social account for her forthcoming book, Millennial Black, which publishes in April 2021.
“I created it because the day after George Floyd’s murder I just felt really helpless.”
Williams was inspired to write Millennial Black after discovering that many books about women in business and leadership roles focused on white women. She hopes it will serve as “a toolkit for Black working women,” and help non-Black and male business leaders learn what needs fixing.
Since Williams’ “Anti-Racist Ally” guide took off, she’s created additional guides on topics like keeping up anti-racist momentum after the news cycle dies down, diversifying social media feeds, and problems with a lack of workplace diversity. She plans to continue using her platform to educate others. She’s not alone in her mission.
Education through original art
While many guides solely use text to relay data and information, others incorporate original artwork to make posts more appealing and engaging. In June, Pan Cooke, a 29-year-old portrait painter from Dublin, Ireland, refocused his secondary Instagram account (@thefakepan) to illustrate stories of Black people who’ve been killed by violent acts of racism and police brutality.
Cooke created the account in February of 2019 to share general cartoons and doodles, but in 2020 it became a space to post daily lockdown comics. On June 2, aka Blackout Tuesday — a well-meaning day of action that ended up controversial as Instagram users attempted to show solidarity with Black people by posting a picture of a black square on their profiles — Cooke felt compelled to shift the account’s purpose again.
“When Blackout Tuesday happened, I posted my black tile, but afterward I felt like I needed to do more,” Cooke said over email. “I decided to use the same comic format I had used during lockdown to educate myself about realities and stories I had been passively ignorant to in the past.”
“I am not teaching people about these stories, we are learning together.”
Cooke’s first comic was about Eric Garner, who was killed in 2014 by a police officer who put him in a chokehold and ignored his repeated final pleas of “I can’t breathe.” The post received more than 43,000 likes and an huge number of shares. It subsequently inspired Cooke to highlight the horrific stories of other Black people who’ve been killed in recent years, including Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
“The reaction has been pretty staggering,” Cooke, who now has 221,000 followers, said. “I started this project as a way of educating myself, but I think a lot of other people are learning through the comics as well, which is great. That’s something I try to make clear when speaking to people, I am not teaching people about these stories, we are learning together.”
A format for all kinds of activism
Since George Floyd was killed in May a significant number of user-made guides related to the Black Lives Matter movement have circulated the platform. But the format isn’t limited to a single topic or issue.
Though the majority of Williams’ posts focus on race, she wants to use her newly established platform to be a better ally to all marginalized or unfairly treated people. That’s why she posted a guide titled, “How To Make a Complaint To Parliament,” after British member of parliament Baroness Nicholson made transphobic comments about a transgender activist and model, Munroe Bergdorf.
The format for making Parliamentary complaints is very opaque, so Williams broke it down for her followers in hopes that they would speak out against Baroness Nicholson’s behavior.
“Members of the House Of Lords are bound by the house’s code of conduct, which specifically covers bullying and hate speech,” Williams captioned her guide, which included a screenshot of a tweet from Bergdorf. “When they fail to live up to that code of conduct, we can make complaints and ask for an investigation.”
Williams said nearly 30,000 people have accessed her simplified guide, and she hopes that it inspired them to take action.
Others, like Sophia Pesetti, are experimenting with guides on various topics, too. Pesetti, a 23-year-old based in New York City, recently founded Thoughtful, a non-profit that works to support Black-owned businesses and offer local alternatives to large corporations.
Pesetti posts about how to be a conscious consumer on the @shop.thoughtful Instagram account. Two of her most popular guides, “Why You Should Stop Using Amazon” and “How to (Mostly) Stop Using Amazon” have more than 250,000 likes combined, and Pesetti hopes they’ve inspired people to consider the impact of where they’re making their purchases.
“Purchasing is inherently political, and you can use it as a form of activism for what you believe in if you have the means to do so, ” she said.
When it comes to account variety, however, Jess, a 27-year-old freelance marketing consultant in Brooklyn, New York, is a master. Jess, who asked that her last name be excluded from this piece for privacy concerns, started the popular @soyouwanttotalkabout Instagram account at the end of February 2020 while volunteering for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for U.S. president.
“[I] felt really defeated by so many misconceptions that a lot of people around the country had about Bernie and, specifically, democratic socialism,” she said over email. “I thought it might be helpful to make a page that breaks down social and political topics for people to better understand.”
Since her first guide on Sanders, Jess has provided followers with information on everything from general pandemic-related concerns like anxiety and social distancing to political issues like climate change, cannabis legalization, and gun control. She’s gone on to create more than 150 guides, and now has 737,000 followers.
While Jess started the account to spotlight issues related to Sanders’ campaign, she made her first #BlackLivesMatter guide after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging in February. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by armed white men who stalked him in a truck not far from his home in Georgia.
In wake of George Floyd’s murder, Jess felt a responsibility to use her platform to help educate her followers on racial inequality, so she created guides that focused on white fragility, prison reform, anti-racism, the NYPD, microaggressions, and systemic racism. And as election day approaches in the U.S., Jess plans to ramp up her political coverage with guides that focus on President Donald Trump’s time in office.
Fact-checking and looking beyond pretty packaging
With a large platform comes a great responsibility to ensure that information being shared is accurate and up-to-date. Fact-checking condensed, shareable guides like these is crucial to avoiding widespread misinformation.
Several creators, like Jess and Pesetti, include their sources on the guides in the captions and, after doing ample research, the creators run posts by trusted sets of eyes before sharing. If an error does slip by, which it has for both Pesetti and Cooke, they’ll make edits, corrections, and even delete posts if necessary.
“Where I can, I try work with the family members or friends of the victims.”
Cooke also takes requests for guides, and tries to collaborate on a deeper level when researching. “Where I can, I try to work with the family members or friends of the victims,” he said. Cooke wrote his guide on DJ Henry with the help of Henry’s sister, Amber. Henry was a 20-year-old Black college student who was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2010.
In contrast with official, trusted accounts like the ACLU that post similar educational guides, many users who are creating their own are still learning. They’re not experts on every topic they post about, rather they’re trying to inform themselves and others in this small, yet impactful way.
The creators we spoke with work to verify their posts, but users should never blindly trust information they see online. It’s also important to remember that generalizations are made in these guides because 10 slides can only fit so many facts. Before sharing a guide with your followers, take the extra steps to verify that the words and visuals you’re reposting are factually correct.
A look at @soyouwanttotalkabout’s colorful guides.
Just as people felt the memes that called for the arrest of the cops who killed Breonna Taylor belittled the struggle and severity of Taylor’s death, the packaging of these guides has also been called into question. When grave topics like racism, sexism, and police brutality are presented using fun and colorful-looking fonts, backgrounds, or visuals, it’s easy to feel like they’re being made light of in some way, however, the creators we spoke with feel that the Instagram-able aesthetics only help their mission.
“I’ve had so many messages from people who are like, ‘I’ve signed my first ever petition. I’ve made my first ever donation. I’ve gone to my first ever protest,'” Williams said. “And if putting [information] into a format means people will look, and will read, and will share, then that feels valuable to me.”
Instagram guides are here to stay
Though the account owners we spoke with had no idea they’d go viral when they made their first educational guides, they’ve embraced their new platforms and want to continue helping others learn, grow, and take action. It’s hard to tell exactly how impactful these posts are, but when you log onto Instagram they’re impossible to miss.
Jess and Pesetti have received messages of thanks from followers who’ve learned from their guides, and Cooke is currently speaking with Amnesty International about drawing some educational comics.
“I think the comics are an easy-to-digest format for getting across information,” Cooke said. “With my following growing as fast as it is I feel a responsibility to use that voice to speak about important, often overlooked issues,” he said.
After Williams’ Instagram guide to allyship was so widely embraced, she decided to write a second book, Anti-Racist Ally, which further explores the topic, to be released in October. Williams also launched a web shop — 100 percent of the profits support anti-racism charities.
She hopes to keep up the momentum and use her account to encourage allyship and supporting marginalized people.
“I hope to do things with the account in the future that I can’t even imagine now,” she said. “I’m really trying to do something worthwhile.”