BeReal: The attention war on social media

During a vocational training class one morning, the teacher was discussing the possible solutions to a problem with her students when a notification signal suddenly rang out from a mobile phone. A student took his device out of his backpack, and asked for a break in the class for a few moments so that he could take a photo and post it. This is a real example of how BeReal, the French social media application that was created in 2020, has crossed the virtual threshold to the real world, effectively capturing its users' attention, and affecting events.

A study carried out by researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), published as open access in Emotion, Space and Society, examined users' relationship with this social network, compared it with other social media such as TikTok and Instagram, and looked at the strategies it uses to successfully capture users' attention and channel their behaviour.

According to Ana Gálvez, co-author of the study, researcher and member of the UOC's Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, BeReal is "an example of the successful use of psychopower" – a concept that covers how social media exert control over our attention and desires.

"In the context of social media, [psychopower] is used to manipulate users' behaviour and exploit their cognitive and emotional processes almost automatically, without allowing for any critical reflection," added Francisco Tirado, associate professor of the Department of Social Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and co-author of the study.

Nudges

BeReal sends a daily notification to the user, who has two minutes to take photos using the device's two cameras – front and back – to show what they're doing and how they feel at that moment. The platform aims to encourage users to share their real circumstances in a shift away from the overly prepared and posed images on Instagram or TikTok.

Unlike these other platforms, BeReal is not designed for users to spend a lot of time consuming content or scrolling. Instead, they can only connect to it and see what other users are doing after posting the images they're prompted for.

"This approach, as well as the ability to obtain immediate social reactions through RealMojis [emoticons made using real photographs of the user] creates a cycle of social rewards that hooks users without requiring them to invest too much of their time," said Gálvez.

The fact that interaction with the app is limited to just a few minutes a day creates a sense of urgency and exclusiveness, which is crucial in capturing users' attention, according to the authors of the study.

The app uses 'nudges' to channel its users' behaviour, including a daily notification that invites them to share an authentic moment from their day, and visual elements that encourage them to interact with the platform.

"Over time, these constant nudges are what end up making interaction with the platform a habit: the user ends up interacting with it, in terms of either using it or thinking about it, almost unconsciously," said Joan Rovira, professor of the Department of Social Psychology at the UAB, a course instructor in Organizational Psychology at the UOC, and the lead author of the study. After this habit has been formed, interaction takes place almost automatically when the user receives the nudge.

The app's ultimate goal, according to Rovira, is to capture users' data in order to sell it for commercial and advertising purposes. "On different days and times and in different situations, thanks to geolocation and the application of AI algorithms, the app retrieves data on what you're doing when you feel a specific emotion, how you react to other people's posts, and where you are at each time during the day, which is valuable information that can be used to send targeted advertising to people."

An autoethnographic experiment

The authors used an autoethnographic methodology to carry out this study. Rovira created a profile on BeReal, and interacted with it between January and July 2023. During the day, he made notes in a notebook about all his experiences with the app. This field notebook was the basis for examining how it is designed and operates. In the future, the authors plan to continue the experiment with a cohort of volunteers of both sexes and different ages "to see the differences between generations".

This project contributes to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3, Good Health and Well-being.