Q: Misa, why did you make an Instagram account with only 8 posts and 4 followers?
A: To see how fast people confuse silence with fraud.
Today, credibility isn’t built, it’s counted.
If you’re not performing, you’re suspicious.
So I wanted to test what happens when truth has no algorithm to protect it.
Yesterday, I received a message from a woman on Instagram.
She had received an invitation to the I DO ME project, and her response was cautious, maybe even frightened.
“It looks like a scam. The account has only 8 posts and 4 followers. There’s no reference anywhere to who you are.”
She was right, and that’s exactly why I created it.
The Experiment
I built that account deliberately empty, fragile, invisible.
Because I wanted to see what happens when a photographer’s reputation is stripped of proof.
No big following.
No blue checkmark.
No digital applause.
Just silence, and a name most people don’t yet know.
And what happened was predictable: the absence of followers became the absence of credibility.
In a world where reality is validated by numbers, the lack of them looks like danger.
We no longer trust the work, we trust the algorithm’s opinion of it.
The New Currency: Validation
A photographer with 25 years of experience, exhibitions, failures, lessons, and evolution apparently doesn’t exist unless he also exists online.
Because for many, existence now requires performance.
The tragedy is not that people doubt, doubt is healthy.
The tragedy is that they only trust what is visible, quantifiable, clickable.
If it doesn’t trend, it can’t be true.
The Real Scam
The real scam isn’t a fake profile, it’s the illusion that visibility equals value.
That the size of an audience defines the weight of your truth.
We’ve been trained to mistake popularity for legitimacy.
But followers don’t measure integrity.
And metrics don’t measure meaning.
The world is full of verified nobodies and invisible geniuses.
The Photographer’s Responsibility
I don’t blame the woman who doubted.
Her caution was honest, her fear, understandable.
But what we must question is the culture that taught her to measure trust by likes and longevity by posts.
I still believe in the slow architecture of credibility:
in years, not clicks; in presence, not promotion; in work that lives in the dark long before anyone applauds it.
That’s why I made the account small.
To remind myself, and maybe others, that silence, too, can be a form of truth.
Final Reflection
So, no, the project isn’t a scam.
The scam is a system that made you believe that only what glitters is real.
I’d rather stand behind 4 followers and 8 posts, than hide behind 40,000 and say nothing true.
MISA
