Felix Petty, deputy editor at i-D, writes in an article about how Sousa, who can be found on Instagram under the name lilmiquela, is a computer-generated digital avatar placed in real life situations.
Created by Brud in 2016, Petty says Miquela’s two-year lifespan on Instagram 'had been uneventful until she got into an online beef with a fellow CGI influencer called Bermuda, who hacked Miquela’s Instagram, deleted everything and forced Miquela to reveal she wasn’t human'.
"Since then, she’s been going through whatever passes for an existential crisis when you’re a digital avatar," Petty adds.
In the article, Petty asks whether Sousa is a performance art piece, satire, a PR stunt, a desperate play for attention, a money-making scheme or a 'harbinger of doom'.
"There’s no simple answer, but she obviously is bits of all of these," he says.
What Petty does find interesting about the popularity of Sousa, who amassed over 1.1 million followers by the end of April, is that she 'questions all our assumptions about what we perceive to be real'.
"If Miquela is fictional, if we question her reality, should we start examining the truths all those other influencers are living? Miquela is a performance of reality framed within the unreality of the Internet," adds Petty.
"All influencers are performers, trapped within the flatness of our online fashion world. Miquela highlights the 'fakeness' of the performance of fashion by pretending to be 'real'," he says.
Petty’s article is also a reminder of the Instagram life of then 25-year-old Parisian Louise Delage who, after joining Instagram on Monday, 1 August 2016, had amassed 65 000 followers in little over a month.
However, on Thursday, 22 September that same year, Delage made her final post to Instagram, revealing that she was not, in fact, a real person, but a creation of advertising agency BETC.
Delage was part of the 'Like my addiction' campaign, with the client being Addict Aide, an organisation that aims to raise awareness of alcoholism among young people.
In each of Delage’s 150 posts, the person posing as her had a drink in her hand or alcohol featured in the picture.
While the campaign was a success from a metrics point of view, Stéphane Xiberras, creative director and president of BETC Paris, told AdFreak that it was disappointing that many of Delage’s followers had not recognised that she had an alcohol problem.
Characters like Miquela Sousa, and other phenomena like her, is something to keep your eye on, especially the questions their existence raise around real-life influencers and how they portray themselves on social media.
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