Before I even start on my fun little rant, I would like to point out that I am a total Grandma. I am not one who posts much on social media, but if I do, its usually an attempt to make a terrible joke, a picture of something I baked, or a picture of my friends and me. Occasionally, I’ll brag about my pets if I get really crazy, but I guess what I am really trying to say is that I don’t have a reason to have a finsta. Everything I think about posting online is something that I would feel comfortable sharing with all of my 500 some followers.

That being said, I have nothing against those who have decided to make Instagram accounts just for an audience of close friends to post rantings, musings, and whatever else they feel. If that is the best outlet to share your humor with your friends, go for it. I am not going to stop you. Posting a rant on a closed off social-media account can be some great mental-therapy, and is a far healthier solution than other methods.

However, I still don’t think these accounts are always the safest things. You may have your settings all on private and everything, but what if a friend betrays you? What if one of your so-called “besties” decides to screenshot and share something on there that you didn’t want the whole world to know?

Say you decided to trash-talk someone to get all your feelings out, trusting that your followers will sympathize and laugh along with you. What if one of them shares it with someone else? That, my friend, is how a lot of drama can get started. I say the similar things about people who use finstas to post about all of the drinking and such that they do.

Things like that aren’t exactly hidden and can come back to bite you in the butt.

What I guess I am confused about is that if all of these people who you let follow your account are your close friends, want can’t you start a group chat with them and share all of these things? Why does it have to be published on a social media account? Why Instagram out of all platforms?

I guess I have this perspective on finstas because misreads of things I have said to friends online and what they subsequently posted to Facebook about it without my knowledge caused a lot of harm to my mental-state way back in middle school. Long story short, something I said to a person over e-mail ( because that was the cool-kids communication way back in 2009) got misinterpreted into something really bad, so said person decided to say some mean things about me on a private, but still very public Facebook post.

This caused so much drama that I would never want someone to have to go through ever.

This isn’t so much of a problem with people my age, as we all have supposedly matured. However, I have seen children as young as nine have a finsta account, and what good could come out of this? What do they have to hide? This is a breeding ground for too much drama for young people to handle.

I guess that all I have left to say is that my golden social media rule is that I don’t post things that I wouldn’t want my grandma to see, ever - finsta or not. That, my friends, is why I abstain from the finsta trend.