Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
These are my active social media accounts: Twitter (automated posting): https://twitter.com/DrAndrewThaler Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drandrewthaler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drandrewthaler/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drandrewthaler Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@DrAndrewThaler Project Mushroom: https://projectmushroom.social/@DrAndrewThaler
Tear gas is bad for fish. Surprising no one, if you unlawfully unload tons of tear gas into a peaceful crowd of protestors in order to create chaos as a precedent for state violence, that tear gas will eventually find its way into drains and all drains lead to the ocean. And that is bad … Read More “Tear gassing fish, new NOAA chief, and Facebook’s flop – What’s Up With the Oceans this Week?” »
August 19, 2020 Facebook is a hardware company. This week Oregonian revealed that Facebook quietly abandoned drilling equipment off of the Oregon coast. Fifty feet below the seafloor, heavy drilling equipment designed to lay fiber optic cable was damaged and abandoned by the social media company’s subsidiary. Facebook has no plans to recover the abandoned … Read More “Facebook ditches drilling gear, Mauritius copes with a crisis, and a new giant rises from the deep – What’s up with the Ocean this week?” »
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
Fog Horn (A Call to Action)
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
Southern Fried Science has at the forefront of trying to debunk fake news, such as faux documentaries about mermaids or giant sharks. In their article “Fish tales: combating fake science in the popular media” Andrew Thaler and David Shiffman asked that:
“scientists familiarize themselves with common sources of misinformation within their field, so that they can be better able to respond quickly when factually inaccurate content begins to spread”
Read More “Sifting the fact from the false in an internet full of fake ‘news’” »
It’s time for another “philosophy of activism” discussion, in which we debate a tactic that a particular group of activists is using in order to determine if the environmental movement should adopt it. This time, we turn to Facebook.
As a Facebook addict, I’ve noticed a new trend: groups that say “I bet we can find one million people who (insert your cause here)”. Examples include “I bet we can find one million people who support same sex marriage”, “I bet we can find one million people against abortion,” and “I bet we can find one million people who want Japan to stop killing whales”. There are over 1,100 such groups (though some are not political in nature, such as “I bet we can find one million people who hate the Jonas Brothers”. Let’s discuss whether or not these groups help their respective causes.
Read More “Philosophy of activism: “I bet we can find one million” facebook groups” »