The following is excerpted from an online article posted by USA Today
Some young people are intentionally uploading photos to Instagram, immediately archiving them and resharing them days later. The post still shows up on their profile, but those posts don’t necessarily appear on their followers’ feeds. It’s called “ghost posting.”
Instagram first added the archive feature in 2017, intended as a way for users to remove photos without needing to permanently delete them. But the feature has taken on a new prominence as young people look to regulate and take more control over their relationship with social media and how their content appears online.
In the same vein as Finstas (fake, secondary or private Instagram accounts) and Stories only shared with close friends, young people are pushing back on solely using social media as a place to see and be seen. With the ghost post, there’s no engagement, and that’s the point.
As the first generation to grow up entirely online, Gen Z came of age “comparing and despairing,” Don Grant, a media psychologist and National Advisor of Healthy Device Management for Newport Healthcare, previously told USA TODAY.
“We learn about ourselves and where we stand in the world only from the reactions and responses we get from others,” explained Grant. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that public sphere is online. “They grew up with everything online becoming their social currency and the litmus of who they are.”
Ghost posting offers them some agency as well as a small way to interrupt that feedback loop without doing away with social media altogether.