Travel blogger fakes Disneyland holiday on Instagram to prove a point

We're getting used to outrage about Instagrammers faking their exotic travels to impress their followers or their advertising clients.

But this influencer faked some shots for a rather different reason.

Instagrammer Carolyn Stritch took 10 years off her age and Photoshopped herself into a trip to Disneyland that never happened - just to show how easy it is to fake a life on social media.

Stritch, a UK-based photographer whose dreamy, desaturated Instagram account @theslowtraveler has 192,000 followers, downloaded FaceApp, which claims to "transform your face", and used it to alter a selfie. She posted the shot with a caption saying it was her 22nd birthday (Stritch is in fact 32) and that she was taking herself on a solo trip to Disneyland, California.

She then Photoshopped herself into an image of the oddly deserted Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Together, the two fake posts attracted more than 34,000 likes.

Within a day, she had 'fessed up to the ruse on her blog, and explained exactly why she did it.

"I manipulated images, captioned them with a fictional narrative, and presented them as real-life," she wrote.

"I wanted my fictional narrative to challenge the way I portray myself online."

Although she is a fan of the social network, writing, "I believe in Instagram as a tool for good," Stritch is concerned about how it encourages self-editing - and how rarely others question that editing.

She wrote that when she changed her Facebook profile picture to the edited selfie, in which she is barely recognisable, even her mother didn't question it. 

And she says, "I don’t usually FaceApp my face or pretend I’ve been places I haven’t," but she does style and edit her images.

"Sometimes that coffee cup I’m holding is empty. I suck in my stomach. I rearrange the furniture. I photoshop out dirty marks made by bashing furniture off the walls."

The fake trip, she says, was an experiment in assessing how far she is willing to take her photo-editing while still "making work that is responsible and good" - and how far others are prepared to follow her.

It's a lesson for all of us.