What’s your role as an Instagram user?

Instagram Movement Guides.

Never heard of them? You’ve probably seen them. Instagram Movement Guides are the increasingly popular Instagram posts that portray facts in an aesthetically pleasing way. They can also be mantras or phrases, but regardless of the content they all have some connection to political activism. Most of the people making them are actual designers, sharing information that add to the visuality of protest, allyship, social justice, and many other things. Some examples you may have seen include the Instagram account @soyouwanttotalkabout, posts from @subliming.jpg, or posts from @madison.utendahl like this one.

These Movement Guides are doing a lot of things. For one, they’re making information accessible, condensed, and quick to consume. While it’s common to get lost in the Instagram scroll for hours, Instagram posts at the same time can be small snapshots that are quickly consumable. These guides portray the (subjectively) most important information about a topic chosen by the creator; the added element of “aesthetics” make these posts even more desirable. It’s not surprising that many people use these guides as a source of news instead of scrolling through paragraphs of text from The New York Times.

Another thing these Movement Guides are doing is making the line between social media and reality more thin than ever. I’ve always been a firm believer that “social media is not real life,” but honestly, I’ve been really reconsidering that. Did I watch Tracee Ellis Ross’ IGTV with Maya Harris about the Biden campaign? Did I watch Lizzo’s IGTV with Kamala Harris? Do I get a lot of my news from Instagram posts from The New York Times? Yes, yes, and yes. As much as I hate to admit it, social media is real life to a certain extent. It’s getting closer every day, and these Movement Guides are only adding to that, which maybe isn’t good or bad but just different.

Arguably the most important and revolutionary thing these Movement Guides are doing is making everyone who consumes them an editor. “Consumes them” can mean a lot of things, such as following accounts that post them, using them as a primary source for news, or reposting them on Instagram stories which is what I see people doing the most. Do you consume Instagram Movement Guides? If so, you’re now an editor. Before you share these posts to your stories for your followers to see, you have a responsibility to verify that information. And yes, I know that most Movement Guides are factually correct, and most actually include sources (which is great!), but you still have a responsibility.

I used to repost Movement Guides all the time onto my Instagram story. And I wasn’t even thinking about if the information was correct or not; it honestly felt like a trend I needed to be doing. Which is why I’ve stopped doing it, and for a while now I’ve refrained from posting anything political on my Instagram. The reason is that I honestly can’t be bothered to fact check these Movement Guides, and honestly I don’t know who would have the time for that. I’d rather read articles directly from newspapers or watch TV news, which I trust a lot more than Instagram guides.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel explain in The Elements of Journalism that “With the Internet … and with the rise of social media, in turn, individual citizens themselves — recommended and passed along content that they had no direct role in producing, and often, made no effort to verify …  The burden of verification has been passed incrementally from the news deliverer to the consumer.” This is precisely the reason why I haven’t been sharing Instagram Movement Guides or consuming them, no matter how efficient or accessible they might be. As a student journalist for The Stute, I have a responsibility to verify information for the content we produce, which of course I take very seriously and put a lot of time and effort into. But as an everyday person, I don’t want to log on to Instagram to be faced with information I don’t know is true or not.

From Kovach and Rosenstiel’s analysis, I would argue that Movement Guides have passed the burden of verification from the source to the consumer. But here’s a tip: it doesn’t have to be that way! And most of the time, it isn’t that way! News is free and out there and available for you to consume outside of social media. Obviously, everyone is free to consume what they please on social media, or repost whatever they want to, but if you consume and redistribute Instagram Movement Guides, I hope this makes your perspective on them a little more rounded.