It's time to BeReal

“Mom, wanna be on my BeReal?” my 16-year-old daughter asked me one day. “Um, sure,” I replied sheepishly, because frankly I didn’t even know what she was talking about.

She told me to look at her camera phone, and she quickly snapped a photo of us.

I didn’t really give it much more thought at the time. Since then, my husband and I have made guest appearances in both our daughters’ BeReal feeds several times.

What is BeReal, you ask? Well, it’s just another social media app that all the kids are using.

Launched in 2020 by French app designers Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, BeReal is a photo sharing platform without all the frills and filters.

Users get one notification at a random time each day, and they get 2 minutes to capture and share a “BeReal” photo for the day. All users in the same geographic area receive the notification at the same time.

I call it “slice of life” social media. I’m intrigued, as it appears to require little planning. Just take a quick snapshot of your real life in one moment and share it.

I like it for its simplicity. Some people post multiple times a day on Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms. Brands, “influencers” and small business owners like me spend time planning what they’re going to say, take even more time to get the perfect image with the best filter and then wait for a response. They have to then scroll through endless ads and other randomness to find their friends’ photos and posts.

With BeReal, I don’t have to think about it. And everyone else’s photos are just as mundane as mine.

As Kathryn Hopkins wrote for Yahoo! News in 2022 as downloads of the app exploded outside its native France, this is exactly what the designers had in mind.

“After being tired and annoyed with all the bulls–t on social media, I decided to launch my own,” Barreyat wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time of BeReal’s official launch, explaining his reasons for creating the app. “No like, no followers, no ads, no filters, just what my friends are doing, in the most authentic way possible.”

It’s the equivalent of asking “whatcha doing right now?” to your entire friends’ list and getting them all to reply back immediately. Except you don’t get to decide when to ask, the app does that, and your scrolling is limited to the number of friends you have.

Right now I have a handful of friends, and two of them are my daughters. Apparently not many people in my phone’s contact list have it yet.

In a statement to CNN, BeReal’s creators noted, “BeReal won’t make you famous; if you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”

Writer Sarah Cottrell broke down the features and safety of the platform for “Parents” magazine last December. She said she “loves the concept” of BeReal, particularly its pursuit of authenticity. It is rated “T” for teen.“From a mental health perspective, the BeReal app may be a healthier choice as it does not allow users to incentivize popularity through likes, shares, and comments,” she wrote. “There are no number counts or ways to objectively compare one account to another. You can comment and react to your friends’ posts, but only if you post your own photo.”

It sounds like a great choice for a teenager’s first social media experience.

I asked my daughters last night, “Why did you join BeReal?” Both of them have nearly a dozen other social media apps already.

One said her college friends encouraged her to download the app so they could react to her daily photos. They would snap photos in class, and even their professors appeared in their feeds.

The other, the one whose feed I was originally featured on, said all her friends were talking about it at school.

“So basically, you caved to peer pressure,” I teased.

They both informed me that they downloaded it because they wanted to, not because they were influenced.

After that, they helped me take a photo of myself for each “emoji” reaction I can make to my friends’ photos. I can also take a “live reaction” photo to post on a friend’s feed, they informed me. Let me tell you, my reactions are epic!

Another thing I like: If you go to someone’s BeReal profile, you can’t see how many total friends they have.

You can see who reacted to a friend’s latest BeReal, however, which I was informed by my daughters, would be a way for their friends to see that I had joined the app.

“Oh boy,” I thought. My list of “people you may know” populated by the app was already filled with young people.

Right now, it’s just one more square icon on my iPhone. Who knows how much I’ll actually engage with it.

That said, I have two ground rules I expect my kids to follow with any social media platform.

First, always be kind. Even in an app founded on authenticity, there are certainly opportunities to post negativity and inappropriate content.

And second, as I tell my kids all the time, “If you don’t know the person, don’t add them on a social media platform.” Don’t accept requests from people you’ve never met.

As I was writing this morning, I saw a BeReal notification pop up. “I’m not even dressed,” I thought.

Thank goodness, it was someone else posting yesterday’s BeReal 11 hours late, not my one chance to take a photo that day. I guess it would have been authentic, because let’s “BeReal” – pretty much any photo of me taken at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday morning will show me writing in bed. It’s press day, and I have a column to write!