How I Went Viral Twice:

More than half of my adolescent memories happened on social media. I don’t mean fond recollections of pop-culture relics from the Dubsmash or Vine days, but deeply personal, formative ones. My friendships and relationships were shaped and defined by our interactions online. In fact, most of my social life took place on apps like Snapchat and Instagram, rather than in real life. 

For example, when I was in year 8, I fell out with two close friends over Instagram. I had forgotten to send a happy birthday message to one and we all sent angry emoji filled messages back and forth all night. I can still recall the tingling at the base of my neck as I strained to come up with a cutting comeback. My thumbs tumbling over each other, I realised I’d never had such a heated argument with anyone. None of us spoke again afterwards, and if we passed each other in school, we’d exchange awkward glances and turn our heads away. 

…Or the time I was in year 10, when, via Snapchat, I dissected the logistics of losing my virginity with my boyfriend. I was on a family holiday at the time. Shuffling across the frosty cobbled streets of Belgium, my phone two inches from my face, premeditating exactly how the sex would unfold. I remember hardly anything from that holiday but can recall the entirety of that conversation. 

It never occurred to me at the time that the majority of my social interactions were taking place online. Apart from those major moments of drama, even the smallest, most ordinary interactions with friends unfolded virtually. When I saw my friends in class, we’d either pick up a conversation from Snapchat the night before, ask if they’d seen the meme we sent, or start filming videos and taking selfies in class. During biology experiments, my best friend Diana and I would’ve posted five snapchat videos (at minimum) with the dog filter, before we’d even cleaned up the beakers. 

Meanwhile, face-to-face socialisation slipped into my periphery. I used social media incessantly: in class, during breaktimes, at home before bed, the first thing in the morning. My sense of self seemed to circulate (almost cultishly) within these platforms, constantly being reshaped and squashed to align with current trends. One afternoon, Diana and I crawled out my bathroom window onto the flat, gravelled roof of my house. We wanted to take Instagram pictures of each other in the flattering tones of golden hour, a trend at the time. In one pic, I perched brazenly at the edge, legs swinging over the drop as she clicked her iPhone 7 camera. I remember she lost her footing at one point, and we laughed naively about it as we scrolled through the photos together. My willingness to risk both my own safety and my best friend’s, for something as arbitrary as an Instagram post, affirms how distorted my sense of meaning and importance had become. 

My sense of physical community had been slowly eroding ever since I got my first phone in Year 7– a sleek, purple blackberry that shimmered in the dark of my bedroom at night. As the years passed, I found myself searching for meaning, purpose and connection beyond both the digital and physical world. 

When I was around fifteen, a few of my friends – and my boyfriend at the time – were Muslim, and I found myself seeking warmth and belonging in the Islamic faith. I would visit mosques in my town centre, their interiors decadently adorned in spirals of gold and burgundy, soft, fur-like carpets and bookshelves lined with sacred texts. The kindness of the Imams and Ustadhas wrapped around me like fine cashmere, and I started reading more deeply about the faith.  For the first time, I was enveloped into an offline community. But, I couldn’t keep away from my phone. The pull of online affirmation was more immediate and more intoxicating. 

In late 2019, just months before Covid hit, I downloaded TikTok and quickly became obsessed with the idea of going viral. It seemed easy enough: pick a trending audio, think up a wholesome or funny video idea, angle a lamp at your face and upload. It was low effort, fun and enthralled me more than studying for my A-Level chemistry mock. I filmed and uploaded about three videos a day, every day, until eventually, it happened. 

My first viral video was meant to be a wholesome video about my recent conversion to Islam. I balanced my phone against a pile of books on my bed, wrapped an amber chiffon headscarf around my hair and filmed myself proudly reading the Qur’an. The text above my head said ‘When your mum finds you praying in your room and realises you have converted to Islam.’ The video panned to another shot of me, pretending to be my mum, peering around the door and smiling. I completed the clip with a cute, instrumental trending audio and uploaded with the caption: #viral. At the time, I was ecstatic to share my newfound faith with the world, to relish in my revelation publicly. But looking back, I realise how strange it was to reveal something so profoundly personal and vulnerable on a platform built for performance.

I posted the video before bed and woke up to an explosion of notifications. Bleary eyed, I opened TikTok and saw “99+” on the notifications tab. Every time it refreshed, it filled again, another “99+” likes, another sputtering of comments. I was elated. My heart raced with excitement as I giddily brushed my teeth before rushing to school. I was so electrified I almost told my parents, but I had to stop myself. I knew they would ask to see the video, and at the time I was hiding my conversion, despite the TikTok suggesting otherwise. I feared my choice of religion would create tension, so I kept it to myself for as long as I could. 

Instead, I bragged about it heavily at school and on my Snapchat story. I must have lost five Snapchat friends that day as a result of my constant uploads. “NOW IT’S AT ONE MILLION VIEWS” … “THREE MILLION” … “A FAMOUS PERSON JUST FOLLOWED ME”. I don’t blame them: not very modest. But at the time it felt like a sign from God– proof that I wasn’t alone, that I was on the thoroughfare to a higher community, praise and purpose. 

After a few days the likes began to slow, and so did my euphoria. I kept posting, trying to satiate my new audience, but my videos now only gathered a meagre twenty thousand views, and I was now receiving handfuls of hate comments. “Where’s your hijab?” … “People who think she actually reverted 🤡🤡🤡” … “You will miss real happiness and go to hell unless you turn to Jesus ✝️🙏” … “Isn’t your skin supposed to be hidden?”. I made a much requested storytime video to explain my reasons for converting to Islam. Still, the comments fixated on my clothing and lack of hijab. I grew resentful of my overbearing online audience, and soon noticed that other users online were referring to them as the “Haram Police”. 

I wanted to go back to posting whatever I wanted without being hunted down by the Haram Police. But my usual content was getting barely any traction, and they never really lost my tail. I went viral once more a few weeks later for a video that included a compilation of eerie, half-baked conspiracies I’d stitched together from Reddit. In a series of different shots in my kitchen, I posed pensively while statements like “Life is a sexually transmitted disease” and “Death is the moment you stop dying” floated across the screen. When I realised the video had hit two million views, I was relieved that people still liked me, but the rush wasn’t the same; it didn’t feel like a divine message and I didn’t brag about it to anyone. The sensation of mass online approval had lost its lustre, and became tedious. 

As I kept churning out content on the app, my frustration both at myself and the constant preaching of the anonymous users encroached into my daily life. I grew defensive with my friends and family whenever religion was even mentioned. At a group sleepover, four of us were sitting on pillows around a coffee table, playing Uno and gossiping, when the topic came up. They all agreed that believing in a higher power was totally ridiculous and immature, while I, the lone outlier, felt suddenly embarrassed and unsure of how to defend my choices.

More catalytic still, on Christmas Day one of my cousins had seen my TikTok and told my Catholic Grandmother. I sat stiffly on her cracked leather sofa, twisting the hem of my trouser leg between my fingers as she questioned me about it. She regarded me quietly as I denied being Muslim, desperate to shut down the conversation before my parents came back in. My eyes burnt and my skin turned clammy as I tried to lie convincingly. My dad walked in mid interrogation. The drive home was blisteringly silent. I remember staring out the dusty window as the dark woods rolled into the distance and, from then on, an irreparable rift seemed to open up between me and my parents. 

After graduating sixth form, my religious views became increasingly confused and ambiguous. I gave up praying, folded up my prayer mat and stuffed it at the back of my wardrobe, along with my books and Tasbih beads. I stopped going to the mosque and started calling myself an Agnostic. I stopped making TikToks altogether. The thrill had faded and, along with it, what remained of my sense of higher community and self. 

Our attachment to our online personas remind me of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The story revolves around a painted portrait of Dorian Gray, a handsome young man. After seeing the portrait, he realises that he will lose his beauty with time. So, he impulsively sells his soul, asking for the portrait to age instead of him. As Dorian plunges deeper into a life of vanity and moral decay, the portrait becomes uglier and older, visually representing his sins. Dorian’s friendships and romantic endeavours grow hollow, and he can’t stand what the portrait looks like. He attempts to destroy it, by stabbing the painting with a knife, but the act ends up killing him instead. The portrait becomes young and beautiful again, and Dorian is found dead on the floor, aged and unrecognisable.

I think that social media is like a reversed version of Dorian’s portrait. In the material world, we live in our physical bodies, but on social media exist as edited, airbrushed, cherrypicked personas built around our ideas of perfection. We swipe through filters to soften or sharpen our photos; we mould our appearance drastically on photo editing apps like Facetune, all while chasing a higher like count- a harder dopamine hit. 

Meanwhile our real social lives and offline selves wither like Dorian’s portrait in the attic. Social media profoundly alters the way we interact with those around us. It has damaged our social skills. By forcing us to constantly monitor our digital appearance, we reject vulnerability in conversations with people and fail to forge deep connections, leaving us isolated. When I started university, I expected to find an immediate community, but sometimes people seem confused, reticent if you speak to them. I struggle not to slip into the mannerisms of my online persona when meeting new people, and I suspect others do the same. Social media has become a mask for our ego, and as the distance between our true selves and that mask grows, our ability to connect deeply with others falters.

Growing up in an increasingly digital era has led to an epidemic of silent loneliness despite our hyper-connection. This broadening gap between the real and online world has catastrophic effects on not only our mental health, but also on the broader trajectory of our lives and our sense of personal purpose. It’s easy to fall into the trap of moulding your online persona to appeal to others, but in doing so, how much authentic human interaction do we lose?