Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Vic.
1. Selfies destroying self-esteem?
Ah, the selfie.
There are some days when you’ll be feeling better than others, and be able to snap a sassy selfie with minimal editing. But what if you’re never happy with the face you want the world to see without first adding some filters and editing? Or a lot of filters? And a lot more editing? And what if you decide that to save yourself the effort of having to mess about editing pictures, you get a doctor to permanently edit your face?
Plastic surgeons report a new phenomenon, “SnapChat Dysmorphia“, where would-be patients are increasingly bringing in highly filtered and edited selfies, asking to be made to look like the digitally enhanced version of themselves. Yikes.
2. On his @jack Jones
Infowars has been banned by a lot of major platforms this week, including YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, and Spotify. If you’re not familiar with host Alex Jones, he’s basically a very angry American conspiracy theorist, who amongst other things, claims that people are putting chemicals in the water that turns frogs gay.
According to these platforms, Infowars has been banned for violating their terms, which has included promoting hate speech. But one platform that hasn’t banned him is Twitter, and users are kinda baffled.
This week, a lot of people have been contacting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (AKA @jack) asking why they’ve been banned or suspended, while he gets away with stuff like this:
It’s even simpler than that, @jack: Alex Jones harassed grieving parents to the point where they could no longer visit their children’s graves. And you’re okay with it. Say it that way, @jack. Keep it simple! https://t.co/9sVAYsmBHr
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 8, 2018
Anyway, if you do feel the urge to find out more about Alex Jones, here are some of his ‘highlights’, made into a summer-folk song.
https://youtu.be/J2lhdZx0gJc
3. Dog gone
Pet influencers. They might have thousands, or even millions of followers, which can be a lucrative way of getting free stuff and generating revenue for their owners. But what happens when they die?
As part of its Viral Market Crash week, Mashable looked to answer what at first sounded like a super depressing question.
Turns out, many dead pets live on through social media thanks to the communities that have gotten to know them over the years. And the brilliant news is, a lot of their owners use the accounts for good long after their pets have gone, to raise awareness of things like not buying from puppy farms, or to raise money for animal shelters.
I’m not going to lie, I definitely follow dogs on Instagram that I don’t know. I will never pet them. And yet, the day that my favourite dog I’ll never meet pops his clogs, I’m probably going to be hysterical.
This is DLW and I love him more than 99% of things in the world.
4. Whining about wine
Ever gone to post a white wine emoji and not been able to find one? And then been enraged to find that it simply does not exist?
Nah, me neither. Not just because I don’t drink white wine, but because I don’t care.
But some people do, including, unsurprisingly, a winery, who have submitted a proposal for a white wine emoji to Unicode, the governing body for international coding standards. It’s currently pending review.
They’ve tied a hashtag into the campaign, #WhiteWineEmoji, if you’d like to help make this a thing.
5. Competition for best football mascot hots up
West Brom’s new mascot is a boiler. A combi boiler.
Having a difficult day? Just remember that West Brom new mascot is Boiler Man. pic.twitter.com/IuYkRYVP6Q
— JJHR (@painkillerstome) August 6, 2018
He might be good, but he’ll never beat the best ever football mascot – Partick Thistle’s Kingsley.
