Kelly Stone
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Social media has many advantages, like helping you stay in touch with family or letting you know which of your former high school crushes believe the Earth is shaped like a pancake. Unfortunately, it can also turn otherwise nice people into obnoxious, destructive jerks in the blink of an eye. Here are a few more instances of idiocy fueled by social media.
It's no secret that most of what you see on Instagram has about as much basis on reality as the latest MCU movie. An influencer's too-good-to-be-true home might be a designed-for-Instagram hourly rental, and that gorgeous turquoise water might be ... toxic? Outside the Siberian city of Novosibirsk is a gorgeous "lake," known to locals as the Siberian Maldives. It's beautiful, it's picturesque, and it will kill you quickly. This hasn't stopped people from swarming its shores in hopes of taking the perfect selfie.
Despite the YouTuber's claim that the staff "were cool with it," this incident led the restaurant chain to ban photography and video recording in all of its locations, and the company plans to pursue "severe legal action" against future GoPro shenanigans. Which is a real tragedy, because what's the point of eating out if you can't take a photo and force all your friends to scroll past it?
How would you feel if people from all over the world started paying crazy attention to, say, your next-door neighbor's fence? You've never given that fence a second thought, but people with cameras show up in droves to take photos with it. They park on your lawn, make tons of noise, and when they're done with the fence, they demand to use your bathroom. Substitute "fence" with "shed" and that's more or less the surreal situation happening in Perth.
JarrahTree/Wikimedia CommonsThis is the only building in Australia with 0% snakes.
Somewhere on the Swan River is a small wooden boathouse someone named, very optimistically, the Crawley Edge Boatshed. It's been there since the 1930s, and it's the kind of place that sort of blends into the background, like a bird fountain or homeless people. Or at least, that's how it was, until Instagrammers discovered the place and launched it to overnight stardom. Suddenly the lowly boat shed became the most visited spot in Perth, with tour buses unapologetically shuttling masses of daytrippers to the site so they can snap the perfect pic with it.
Photos of the poppies spread through social media like wildfire (sorry), and before long, the beautiful hills of poppies were crawling with people desperate to snap a selfie among the flowers. Predictably, the place got trampled, and soon the poppy fields were pockmarked with the imprints of a thousand butts.
Before long, the poppy-palooza turned into a poppy-apocalypse, and steps had to be taken. People stopped all along major highways and caused such significant traffic problems that residents of the nearby town were unable to leave. Plus, so many poppies got smushed that officials closed the canyon so the flowers could recover. Or ... they tried to.
We've already delivered the depressing news that officials had to ask people to stop playing Pokemon Go at Auschwitz. Is it even possible for humanity to sink lower than that? It is our sad duty to inform you that yes, it totally can. In March 2019, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum was forced to speak up once again, issuing a Twitter plea for visitors to stop taking "balance beam" selfies on the freaking railroad tracks.
At least those misguided Pokemon Goers were following the noble ideal of trying to be the very best, like no one ever was.
Sadly, the same sort of boneheaded behavior occurs with increasing frequency at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. But unlike the Auschwitz staff, who make fervent appeals to people's better natures, the Berlin memorial found a different sort of champion. An Israeli-German writer named Shahak Shapira was so appalled by people posing ridiculously and disrespectfully on the memorial that he started a website called "Yolocaust." Clearly speaking the language of the Instagram-addicted, he took their photos and replaced the backgrounds with black and white images of the Holocaust -- corpses, emaciated victims, mass graves. Disturbing content below, if you hadn't guessed.
But if you visit the Yolocaust website now, all you'll see is a letter from Shapira saying that almost all of the users featured in the photos "understood the message," apologized, and deleted the offending pictures. Could it be that social-media-inspired stupidity is actually curable? Don't do that, Shahak. Don't give us hope.
For more, check out Why Parents Who Over Share On Social Media Ruin Their Kids:
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