Next year’s Oscars could be selfie-less if campaigners have their way (Picture: @TheEllenShow/Twitter)

You don’t know Louie ‘Bull’ Geary. You won’t find him on Facebook. You can’t follow him on Twitter. But he’s out there. And he’s watching you.

When Geary turned 21 at the beginning of January, he made a promise to himself. A promise that would take him from a small town in Florida right to the door of Number 10, Downing Street. All without leaving the laptop in his bedroom. Geary is on the internet, he just doesn’t want anyone to know it.

‘Like all my friends, I spend a lot of time online,’ he told Metro from his home in Mini-Glades, about 100 miles west of Miami. ‘But unlike them, I’m not a complete idiot when it comes to how I look to the rest of the world.’



Geary doesn’t hold back when attacking his pals about their online habits – they’re used to it, he says. But they also use his one slip-up so far to goad him: he got the nickname ‘Bull’ after he posed for a selfie in front of the famous Charging Bull bronze sculpture near Wall Street during a college trip to New York last year. Now he wears the nickname like a badge of dishonour.


Geary is the poster boy for a growing anti-selfie movement in the US, but he is a poster boy without a face, preferring a multitude of online aliases instead of his real name and image.

For him, selfies are eating away at the very fabric of society, shaping us into snap-happy morons who can only communicate by standing in front of a mirror with a smartphone.

‘They’re like a disease,’ said Geary, who has amassed a database of millions of selfies in the past three months from websites such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as evidence. ‘I look at my friends’ profiles and I think, “You should be doing something better with your life”. There is more to life than covering the internet with pictures of yourself.’

Geary, a psychology student, is frank about his own selfie aberration in New York, when he got carried away and clicked because a girl in his class was also taking one on her phone. He later deleted the image from his device – it didn’t make it online.

‘It was a dumb move,’ he said. ‘A rookie move. I was doing what everyone who takes a selfie does – I was showing off. Did it make the girl like me any more than she did before? No. Did it make me look like a jerk? Yes. But what it also did was make me more determined to lead the fight against selfies.’

Geary is taking that fight to the doors of the most powerful people in the world. He has handed over his database of selfie crimes to governments in the US and Britain. He said Washington is still going through his data, while he claims to have received ‘very encouraging initial feedback’ from officials in Whitehall.

The government is concerned that selfies are a corrupting influence over young people (Picture: Kim Kardashian/Instagram)

There could be further encouragement in the days and weeks to come, for Metro has learned that a new branch of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport has drafted proposals for a ban on selfies, which could come into force as early as the end of next year.



In their current format, the plans are controversial. Under the proposals, web users would only be allowed to upload ten selfies a month to sites such as Facebook and Instagram. An 11th selfie in that time would lead to an automatic £25 fine. Further infringements could lead to restrictions on social media usage.

The government is confident Facebook and Twitter will be open to the idea as they continue to make their services more about news aggregation than photos of young people in various stages of undress. Coalition MPs will be encouraged to speak out about the plans in the coming weeks to test the water ahead of next year’s general election.

‘There is a feeling that this new breed of self-portraits is harming Britain at all levels of society,’ said a source at the Department for Arts, Photography, Reflection, Images and Light, which has set out the plans.

‘These so-called selfies are having an impact on youngsters in our schools, right through to our own politicians in parliament, so it is our responsibility to have a contingency plan in place if they are deemed worthy of restriction,’ added the source.

An outright ban has not been ruled out, but the government faces serious questions over enforcement, even if users are granted a selfie quota.

‘It would be impossible to monitor individual users online and their selfie habits,’ said US technology writer Ted Rick, bestselling author of The Ishhota Axis.

‘And anyway, how can you tell someone not to post another picture of themselves on Twitter or Facebook? It’s unworkable. You are swimming into very dark, uncharted waters when you start making demands of how people behave socially online. It sounds like the law-makers in Britain want to cash in an apparent selfie backlash that may not really exist. Perhaps there is little educational benefit in posting a picture of you starting at your butt in a bedroom mirror, but that doesn’t mean millions of people shouldn’t be allowed to do it.’


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The government will also face opposition from the telecoms industry. Pictures of people in their pants are big business when you’re trying to sell smartphones with the latest camera technology.

The new HTC One M8, launched last week, even has a selfie mode to make it easier for users to capture themselves looking their best.

‘Consumers no longer see their phone as just a phone,’ said Edwin Hodok, chief executive of Swedish smartphone start-up Go-TACH. ‘They take more selfies than they make calls. The camera is king.’

While there have been moves recently to clamp down on the phenomenon – runners in the Hong Kong marathon this year were encouraged to refrain from taking selfies and a ban was put in place at a sorority at the University of Alabama – the government’s move to regulate it could be ill-judged.

While selfies were once the preserve of Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, everyone from the Pope to David Cameron has now had a go, while a selfie taken of acting stars at the Oscars last month became the most shared message in Twitter’s history.

Crucially, selfies are also saving lives. The recent no make-up campaign – in which women posted images of themselves without their foundation, eyeliner, lipstick et al – raised £8m for Cancer Research UK in just six days.

However, plastic surgeons in the US and in Britain said last month that selfie-obsession is leading to a rise in young people asking for cosmetic procedures. There are also concerns that we are raising a generation of narcissists – a generation of tech-savvy narcissists – but narcissists, nonetheless.


MORE: Selfie obsession fuels rise in young people seeking cosmetic surgery, experts fear

Geary believes we are creating a digital future in which image is everything and any kind of intelligent discourse is dispensed with as quickly as a deleted red-eye shot on Instagram. Even if the government proposals do become a reality, he won’t be giving up the fight.

‘This is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘As long as there are people who think the world wants to see what they look like in a bikini in a badly lit bathroom, I will have a job to do.’