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Image: Getty Images / Tina Tiller
Image: Getty Images / Tina Tiller

MediaAugust 4, 2022

Your Facebook feed is filled with pointless garbage now, but look on the bright side

Image: Getty Images / Tina Tiller
Image: Getty Images / Tina Tiller

At least it crowds out the conspiracy theories, MLMs and anti-vax nonsense from people you actually know, says Emily Writes.

This story was first published on the author’s newsletter, Emily Writes Weekly.

Everywhere I look people are fretting over changes to the way Facebook and Instagram work (or maybe that’s don’t work?).

As somebody who has been repeatedly and relentlessly Zucked over many times in my career, I suppose I should be joining the chorus. Just yesterday, Zuckerberg and his army of incels deigned to send my book launch post out to just six people. The day before, Facebook had rammed ads on either side of my post about child sleep which reached 27,000 organically.

Still, I find myself largely unbothered by new changes to the platforms I love to hate. Of course, I feel for the small businesses who are once again having to navigate a platform that will likely change again in a month. Of course, I feel for the activists who now have to figure out how to beat a system that they abhor. And I always feel for the artists, the creators, the change-makers.

But I find myself thinking – surely, surely this is the death knell?

I loathe Facebook. And I’m on it every day. I hate Instagram slightly less and find I can enjoy it more when I’m in my stories and DMs with a locked profile. I’m also on that platform every day.

Do either of these platforms make my life better? Absolutely not.

I am terrified (possibly more than I’m terrified of climate change) that these apps will irreparably harm my children as tweens and teenagers. Not an empty fear given by its very design Instagram profits from, and encourages, social conformity and needing to “fit in” and Facebook is slowly poisoning us against each other with misinformation.

Zuck and Facebook’s execs know this: “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board (from the Wall Street Journal).

Instagram is literally causing our kids to harm themselves and each other. In its own research it found 13% of British users who had suicidal thoughts (and 6% of American users with the same feelings) traced the desire to end their lives to Instagram.

So I find myself in a conundrum: will I lose money and potentially my career if Instagram and Facebook die? Possibly. Big possibility actually.

Would it be worth my career ending if we didn’t have these platforms any more? Yes. Probably. Big probably actually.

Both Instagram and Facebook have announced changes that suggest they view the threat of TikTok as existential (Photos of Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Getty Images, additional design: Tina Tiller)

In theory, ethically, we should be celebrating the end of Facebook, even if that would be a financial disaster for us. Even if it takes away our ability to discover our cousin is an anti-vaxxer who thinks Jacinda Ardern is a communist who hates truck drivers.

The deaths of these platforms might also push toxic influencer culture into the metaphorical wood-chipper too. A move that I would celebrate with every fibre of my being.

Dozens of times this week I’ve seen influencers share a post that says, “I just want to see my friends online”. They’ve encouraged their followers to share the same post and even write to Instagram to save their beloved platform. A platform that has banned black content creators for having black bodies and censored POC creators. A platform that has harmed sex workers by using sex trafficking legislation as a weapon. A platform that has basically aided and abetted the harassment of trans and nonbinary people, then removed their content or used the alogorithm to censor them.

But aside from that, this message from influencers is disingenuous. The inference is clear: “I’m your friend, you want to see me.”

But influencers and businesses and companies are not in it to make friends with their clients and customers. It’s like your workplace saying you’re one big family – which is only true in that your family and your workplace is dysfunctional. It’s all marketing. Chat to me, engage in my ads, and we might be friends!

This push to view followers as friends by influencers is part of the parasocial relationships they cultivate then complain about for content.

When influencers rally against changes to Instagram, it’s because those changes hit their pocket – it’s not because those changes mean you won’t see your third cousin’s engagement announcement. A minor distinction, but one I think is worth pointing out anyway.

We lost the Facebook and Instagram that was about following friends a long time ago. These days people with 100+ family and friends following them view themselves as micro-influencers. Everything is an ad.

Most of my friends do not and have not posted anything but memes on Instagram for a long time.

It took me ages to find anything in my feed from my friends, and most of it was “I have Covid” or “I’m in Fiji” which is jarring enough that I could have done without it.

Facebook has been garbage for us for ages is what I’m saying.

Instagram has been feeding me the most illogical garbage known to man for months and months now. And I eat it up like the slack-jawed burnt-out neurodivergent millennial that I am.

This morning I watched someone press the stomach of a stingray and I watched baby stingrays shoot out of the stingray like it was a ravioli maker.

I looked at the comments and somebody said, “I thought they laid eggs” and then someone else said, “don’t stingrays need water?” and then someone else responded to that person and said, “you leftards don’t know shit about fish let’s go Brandon”.

So, I went to Facebook.

Here’s what Facebook delivered to me this morning:

Never in my life have I shown even a passing interest in birds.

But this is a nice bird.

Would I choose being shown this nice bird over my friend’s dad sharing a post saying children these days are far too coddled? Yes. I would pick this bird.

Next up was this, complete with illogical “my heart is melting. <3” commentary.

This dog is clearly, clearly saying that he was once proud and mighty, and he does not deserve to be in a tie and faux shirt and waistcoat combo. This dog is saying “look, I care about you Greg, but this is a step too far. I’m pleased you and Stephanie have found each other, but I’m a dog. I want to lick my balls and chew on pig ears. That’s it.”

Would I choose this dog over my aunt sending me a post that says a new study has found cucumber could treat type one diabetes? But the study only had two people in it and found cucumbers did nothing and it was actually about type two diabetes? Yes, I would choose the sad dog who doesn’t want to wear human clothes.

Thank you @ Inspirational Quotes 720. That is indeed inspirational.

I will never give up on my dream for my job to be “Muscle Inspector” on the set of all Marvel and Alexander Skarsgard films. It is something I really want after all.

Do I want this quote served to me over an announcement from a friend from high school that she’s selling essential oils and everyone should go organic even though I distinctly remember doing drugs with her in high school those drugs were not organic? Hmmm maybe. Undecided.

And then finally. More farken birds.

Splendid Fairywrens (Malurus splendens) males in Australia by Mark Eatwell.

Are they not splendid? They are very splendid. Is Splendid Fairywren not the best name you could call these beautiful birds?

Do I like birds now?

They are beautiful birds.

Splendid birds.

Who am I to disagree with the mighty algorithm?

At least these posts don’t make me want to set myself on fire.

And if they put us one step closer to burying Facebook and Instagram on the second and third hole of Donald Trump’s golf course then quite frankly:

*Does the Lizzo TikTok dance*

It’s about damn time!

This story was first published on the author’s newsletter, Emily Writes Weekly.

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Rodney & Otamatea Times, August 1912
Rodney & Otamatea Times, August 1912

ScienceAugust 4, 2022

The New Zealand news nugget circling the globe 110 years after publication

Rodney & Otamatea Times, August 1912
Rodney & Otamatea Times, August 1912

A 1912 report in the Rodney & Otamatea Times is being shared everywhere. Is it real, where did it come from, and why is it proving so popular?

On Wednesday August 14, in the winter of 1912, a reader of the Warkworth-based Rodney & Otamatea Times (incorporating the Waitematā & Kaipara Gazette) who had shelled out the thruppence for the newspaper and made it as far as the seventh of its eight pages, might have scanned their eye across to the third column and arrived at “Science Notes and News”, a collection of short items from around the world. Beneath snippets on a very deep hole in Germany, on nickel kitchen utensils, and on a new “machine for skipping” that not only “turns the rope but records the number of skips”, came a paragraph-long report that more than a century later has achieved a status the very description of which would have baffled its reader and writer alike. It has gone viral.

“COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE,” was the headline. “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” it began. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

And that was it. Science Notes and News proceeded without pause to other matters of the day, such as a new tunnel in Russia and the qualities of asparagus in light of the “awful odor which the use of this article of food causes in one of the bodily excretions”.

But it was the succinct, matter-of-fact 1912 nugget on carbon and climate that survived, or was reborn, in the leadup to its 110th birthday, shared by tens of thousands and viewed by millions on social media in response to this:

British Conservative MP Chris Skidmore, who recently opposed a plan to open a new coal mine in Cumbria, joined the party.

They were not the first, however, to disinter the August 14, 1912 edition of the Rodney & Otamatea Times (incorporating the Waitematā & Kaipara Gazette). The same 67-word report circled the digital world in 2016, in 2018 and again in 2021.

The report is authentic, certainly, and has passed every fact-check examiner it has faced. You can read it yourself on New Zealand’s best website, Papers Past. But, sadly, it was not the work of an industrious Warkworth journalist. It had earlier appeared in both British and Australian titles. The entire page, in fact, was published four weeks earlier by the Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal in New South Wales: holes, tunnels, skipping machine, coal consumption, everything. Even the layout and typography is identical, suggesting the plate may have been shipped over the Tasman after they were done with it. 

That version of the story has had its viral moments, too, albeit not on the scale of the Rodney & Otamatea Times. A 2016 Facebook post on the Dispatch and Journal report by the Braidwood Museum “reached over 180,000 people”, according to the Braidwood Times (the Dispatch folded in 1958). “The most common comment has been ‘Wow’,” a Braidwood Historical Society committee member told the paper.

Whether Braidwood, Rodney or wherever, the words of the item have since been traced by science writer Alex Kasprak back to Popular Mechanics magazine, then published out of Chicago, and its March 1912 edition, where they can be found in the caption to an image illustrating an article on the “Remarkable weather of 1911”. 

Even by the remarkable-weather year of 1911, the central tenets of the climate science that endures today had been around for some while. In 1824, French mathematician Joseph Fourier crunched numbers that suggested our planet, given its distance from the sun, should be cooler, and posited the existence of a blanket-like layer in the atmosphere. In 1856, the American scientist Eunice Foote published a paper that identified the predominant ingredient of that heat-absorbent blanket: carbon dioxide. 

Given all that, why did the Rodney & Otamatea Times clipping catch the social media tide? It has the advantage of concision and clarity, sheeting crisply home just how long our species has known about global heating – since long before the denialism and inaction became a talking point – in keeping with the observation by Benjamin Franklin on the failures to address the dangers of lead despite six decades of evidence: “You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist, before it is generally received and practised on.” As for the Rodney masthead, the fact it emanates from a country largely isolated at the bottom of the world just emphasises that. And even when it’s not wholly true, the idea of New Zealand as a progressive pioneer prevails.

More prosaically, it may just be a matter of right time, right place – and it seems it was a New Zealand group, the Sustainable Business Network, that first shared the report on social media, in 2016. “Whether something goes viral on social media typically depends on factors like timing, novelty, irreverence or use of humour, the ease to share, public understanding of the message, etcetera,” said Alex Beattie, a specialist in media and climate change based at the Centre for Science in Society, Victoria University of Wellington. “But there’s no exact science or proven formula.” 

‘If you look through news archives and scientific journals there are many of these warnings dating back to the 1800s,” said Rebecca Priestley, a historian of climate change and associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington. 

She joins the dots between one example from the Christchurch Press in 1957, headlined  “Threat From Melting Of Polar Ice Caps”, and this week’s policy announcements in New Zealand. The Press report “warns of global warming leading to sea level rise”, said Priestley, “but it’s only now, in 2022 – when we can see and measure the effects of sea level rise, and make projections about what the next few decades will bring – that we’re really starting to take sea level rise seriously and start planning for it with measures outlined in the just published National Adaptation Plan.”

Priestley continued: “When we see old news reports like this, it’s important that we don’t just beat ourselves up for not responding to climate change sooner. These early warnings and hypotheses led to decades of scientific research that has provided us with evidence of why and how and how fast our global climate is changing. And that evidence is now clear. The first IPCC report was published in 1990, and the evidence for climate change has been getting stronger with every report.” 

The latest report, in April this year, came with a press release that read, “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now. We can halve emissions by 2030,” noted Priestley. “But those of us encouraging change, and trying to enact change, are really aware that there are businesses, governments and individuals with such vested interests in the status quo that they are working against action on climate change.

Priestley, whose PhD is in the history of science, admitted to finding old news reports on climate change fascinating, but urged us to face the right way. “The only thing we can change is the future. The climate is changing, the oceans are warming, the ice sheets are melting, but what happens next is not inevitable, it’s up to us, collectively,” she said. “We need to do everything we can to meet our Paris Agreement targets, because two degrees warming is not as bad as 3 degrees warming, and three degrees warming is not as bad as four degrees warming. And so on. As the Extinction Rebellion call says, ‘the science is clear, our future is not’.”

As for the Rodney & Otamatea Times (incorporating the Waitematā & Kaipara Gazette), it was bought up by Fairfax in 2005 and today continues, as the abbreviated Rodney Times, published weekly on a Thursday. It noted its own moment in the social media spotlight back in 2016, remarking, half a tongue in cheek: “The Rodney Times has always provided insightful content to readers. In fact, we even predicted climate change more than 100 years ago!”

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