About this app

The #10YearChallenge gained widespread traction on social media this month. It calls for posting two photos of yourself side by side — one from today and one from a decade ago — to show how you’ve changed. People are participating mostly on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
“Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram,” she wrote in a tweet last week. “Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition.”

Her words hit a nerve.

People responded with concerns about whether they were helping the tech giant get better at identifying people. Ms. O’Neill’s post got more than 10,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes. She expanded on her thoughts in a widely shared article in Wired.

If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year.

One of the first profile pictures I ever posted featured me, front and center, with a Yoda backpack hanging from my shoulders, a Freddy Krueger-inspired sweater, a pair of baggy blue jeans, and a look on my face that said “undateable.”

It’s adorable, and I only came across it, buried deep in my Facebook gallery, thanks to a movement that caught on over the weekend. The “glow-up challenge,” as many have dubbed it, asks people to post one of their earliest Facebook profile pictures alongside their current one. It’s a cute, though slightly narcissistic challenge, especially for those between the ages of 24 and 29. Teenage awkwardness is adorable and a near-universal experience. In our 20s, most of us are much more composed than we were while going through puberty.

“This challenge has shown me that I simply have an old man’s face,” wrote Kevin Hart, adding the hashtags #FML and #iHateThisChallenge. “I’m going to go sit my old face *ss down somewhere.”

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