'From a statistical point of view, he wasn't as popular with everyone out there...'
A US-based mummy blogger has come under fire on social media for revealing which of her children receives the fewest likes and least engagement in her Instagram posts, as part of a sixth birthday message to her son.
Katie Bower, a mother of five who goes by the Instagram handle @bowerpowerblog, shared a photo of her son accompanied by some birthday wishes, which then took a radical departure when Bower decided to reveal that, out of her five children, it is her six-year-old that tends to receive the least likes.
‘Guys I am gonna be perfectly honest… Instagram never liked my Munchkin and it killed me inside. His photos never got as many likes. Never got comments,’ she wrote, adding that ‘from a statistical point of view, he wasn’t as popular with everyone out there.’
She went on to explore the potential reasons for this, hypothesising that ‘maybe part of that was the pictures just never hit the algorithm right. Part may be because he was “the baby” for a very short amount of time… And people like babies.’
She continued in the post, which has since been deleted, writing: ‘I say all that because I want to believe that it wasn’t him… that it was on me. My insufficiency caused this statistical deficit because obviously my Munch should get ALL the love and squinty eyes are totally adorable.’ As a final note, she asked her followers to like and comment on the post, ‘because I truly know that my Munch deserves alllllllllll [sic] the likes… whether or not a stranger gives it to them.’
When BuzzfeedNews journalist Stephanie McNeal shared screenshots of the post on Twitter, it quickly went viral, with even Chrissy Teigen weighing in...
Bower - who also found herself at the centre of a social media storm earlier this year, when she revealed that she 'didn't actually know people were in the buildings' in a post marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks - was criticised for presenting her son as 'underperforming' in terms of Instagram likes. Though clearly not intended to be critical or negative, her post certainly (if inadvertently) manages to show a more problematic side to 'mom-fluencer' culture.
Many social media users also took issue with the postscript that Bower added, in which she claimed she spoke on the topic because 'one day [her son] will see the numbers and will have to learn that his value is not in online approval,' pointing out the potential irony in doing so while framing her children in terms of Instagram likes.
Later that day, Bower spoke to her followers directly in an Instagram story, explaining that she decided to remove the post as 'the drama was out of hand.'
'I had to learn that the likes do not reflect much to me. That I had to choose that, because I work with brands that tell you the opposite,' she reiterate the sentiment from her previous postscript and adding, 'Kids know there’s likes on photos and it’s very human nature to compare. So for me, my personal growth journey is teaching my kids it doesn’t matter.'