“It makes information more accessible,” said Stephens. Meanwhile, organizations focused on fighting for climate change through direct action still see political value in their reach.Īs Sunrise Movement social media manager Sophie Guthier and Social Media Lead Nakia Stephens told me, social media infographics and slideshows are valuable tools when it comes to making time-sensitive statements or offering a starting point for continued conversations and calls to action. Social media infographics have been a notable way people have sparked curiosity around police abolition over the past year and a half. With the GOP in a full-court press to ban schools from being able to teach students about racism and basic history and literature, social media is proving an important platform for sharing otherwise unpopular or repressed information. While it's easy to overstate the plus sides of social media infographics and shareables, it’s also disingenuous to understate them. “You can only do so many posts that are like, ‘Oh, we're a big movement’ if you don't show the actions that people are actually doing out here in the streets,” said Sunrise Movement social media manager Sophie Guthier. png format, handy for sharing on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. At the height of infographic-mania last June, Chevron posted a six-slide promotion of its corporate sustainability report and the steps it is taking toward “protecting the environment.” The company’s website even has a “chart generator,” where users can generate and customize charts about the progress the company is making in “environmental performance,” among other fields. Yet its Instagram and Twitter pages are dotted with digestible shareables touting the company’s investments in clean and renewable energy, among other social cause initiatives. The energy corporation is known for being one of the largest carbon emitters of the last few decades. Take the inexplicable social media presence of Chevron as one example. However, the value of social media shareables as a democratizing force means that their visual appeal and dialed-in text can be used just as easily by denialists and corporations as they can by grassroots activists and organizations. It’s this power in part that has helped grassroots climate justice efforts like the #StopLine3 anti-pipeline protests become unignorable. Two-Spirit IndigiQueer organizers Bangishimo and Amy Smoke on the revolutionary intervention known as Land Back.Īs writer Mary Retta pointed out in an essay for her newsletter last year, informative Instagram slideshows offer users the chance to share information broadly regardless of how much access their creators had to funding, name recognition, or other factors. The outdoors brand Patagonia posted a striking photo of a snowy mountain peak overlaid with the words “Carbon neutral is not enough.” Meanwhile the Instagram page of COP26 itself features many of its own shareables, like a five-slide post answering the borderline existential question, “Why are the UN climate negotiations important?” “Anything less is not good enough,” it reads. Take this two-slide graphic, complete with bullet points about what “real action” on climate change would mean (including “rapidly cutting emissions” and “restorative climate financing”), posted by Vice President Al Gore’s organization The Climate Reality Project. In the lead up to this year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, better known as COP26, a number of climate change-focused Instagram accounts took to a now-familiar format to offer insight and catchy slogans. Read the rest of the pieces, and our ongoing climate coverage, here. is publishing a series of stories that explores how queer and trans folks are working to protect our planet through organizing, creative expression, and insurgent pedagogy. To coincide with the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, them.
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