How Instagrammers were fooled into believing places were beautiful
Commentary: The Worldwide Fund For Nature shows how the environment is being destroyed with an ingenious Instagram campaign.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
No, the Great Barrier Reef doesn't quite look like that anymore.
The save-the-Earth thing isn't going too well.
We seem better at talking about it than doing anything about it.
Instead, we seem to be too busy marveling at all the beautiful places in the world that we see on Instagram.
This is fed by a bevy of travel bloggers who post gorgeous pictures and garner vast numbers of followers.
Which seems to have inspired the World Wide Fund for Nature in France to make people wonder about their sense of wonder.
The conservation group created a campaign with the portentous and witty title "TooLatergram."
It "sent" well-known travel bloggers to nine places around the world and got them to post attractive images as if they were at those places.
Naturally, their followers dutifully posted comments about how wonderful, amazing and wow these beautiful places were.
The twist was that these were retouched images. All these places are actually in various states of decay thanks to environmental neglect.
If you scrolled past the beautiful images, a new image appeared that showed the current truth.
The WWF didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but you'd imagine the campaign would make people think.
Action, though, may be harder -- especially in the US. As the president withdraws the country from the Paris Climate Agreement and some members of the government appear to think that climate change is a bit of a hoax, you wonder what the effects might be in years to come.
Stephen Hawking, for one, feared the worst. He worried that Donald Trump's climate policies could turn our planet into Venus.
That would make for interesting before-and-after Instagram pictures.