I have commented before about how some people make a living by being social media personalities and ‘influencers’, whom people contribute money to in return for them live streaming about themselves and/or companies paying them to push their products on their followers.

Now comes a weird story of a Chinese woman who used a filter to make herself look younger but a glitch in the filter resulted in her real face being revealed as a middle-aged woman and now she has lost a lot of followers.

There are so many lessons that can be drawn from this one single story, and one that is being debated is about the unrealistic standards of beauty that people seek to attain in order to attract a following, and the lengths that they must go to maintain that following, since China has strict controls on what people can do on the internet.

China has more than 425 million live-streamers and the use of face filters is something that is common across the myriad of social platforms.
…

[M]any live-streamers simply sing karaoke in their bedrooms, or eat snacks for hours on end.

And the highly lucrative industry is saturated by young female users, who will go to extreme lengths to stand out.

425 million livestreamers? How on Earth can one stand out in such a crowd simply by singing karaoke or eating snacks? There is a market for this?

It is now official. The world has passed me by.