Inside Martha Stewart’s ‘Finsta’ of 1.9 Million Followers

This is an illusion, obviously: Martha Stewart, doyenne of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, knows more about the internet than almost anybody. She knows, for example, that tossing off blurry, typo-ridden missives about the minutiae of her country-mogul life (and thirst traps) is exactly what the people want. The immediate intimacy of off-brand imperfection is the whole joke—she’s an 82-year-old domestic goddess with a finsta! Hahahaha.

It is a stark contrast to the @MarthaStewart brand account, which is shiny, consistently well lit, and warmly detached. “For a meatless main that is worthy of your next vegetarian night, try this Mexican-inspired tofu-tomatillo stew,” it offers. It proposes “7 Ways to Make Your Laundry Smell Fresh.” If @MarthaStewart precisely lives up to Stewartian expectations—buttoned-up perfection—@MarthaStewart48 does both more and less. It is Martha at the pinnacle of Martha-ness, apparently dispatched directly from her mind, wholly unmediated. The posts are disarmingly blunt, wickedly unsentimental, weirdly moving, bizarrely punctuated. (“Carlos figured out a great way to wash the chow chows! using the very spacious @scenicroadmfg wheel barrow from our stable he filled it with warm water. , soaped the dogs and rinsed them well using the stable wash stall where we wash the horses and donkeys. no mess in the basement, no locating a sink large enough for the big boy!! now we just need a drain with a secure stopper in the wheel barrow. hint hint????”)

The general consensus about @MarthaStewart48 is that it is mesmerizing because it is “authentic,” meaning, as Quartz explained, in 2018, that “she posts what she wants, regardless of its marketability,” thus granting us access to what Guest of a Guest insists is her “truly unscripted, indifferent, magical life.” This is all the more delicious because it is, in theory, unexpected: Martha, the brand, is perfect and rehearsed—even her supposedly unlikely friendship with the rapper Snoop Dogg has been exhaustively mined for corporate content, in the form of Martha & Snoop’s Potlock Dinner Party on VH1 and numerous ads—but Martha, the personal Instagram account, is off-handed and occasionally unhinged. This, the account promises, is the real Martha, who is leading what Quartz proclaimed is “a life we can relate to.”