Instagram Against Ranchers? #Disappointed
Today I discovered something slightly saddening, and as Gen Z as this sounds, my sadness stems from social media. Here’s the ridiculous yet frustrating story…
My vegan and anti-ag Facebook groups were pretty bland this past week: a handful of people mad about a BLM wild horse gather, a few teary-eyed dog pound photos shared, and (as always) an abundance of users pointing the climate crisis finger at farmers and ranchers. I suspect I’ll get my fill of animal activists turn climate activists posting about the hurricane here within the next week, so I decided to turn to Instagram.
Instagram is a social media platform where users can share photos and videos, I’ve referenced it a lot in my previous columns. Like other forms of social media, Instagram is a way for users to connect all around the globe.
Back to the story: so I’m sitting in my office chair, scouring Instagram for a column worthy post to rip apart and found the same problem as I had with Facebook — it was the same old same old.
I decided to then look for something positive to post about. I follow a handful of agvocates on Instagram but wanted to see what someone outside of my agvocate bubble was saying and quickly searched for #animalagriculture (a hashtag, symbolized as #, is placed in the caption of posts to sort of categorize the posts topics or themes).
I try to look at the positives of Instagram and think that this is a great thing because I can see what other agriculturists are doing overseas, however, #animalagriculture didn’t show any of that.
#Animalagriculture showed hundreds, if not thousands, of the “top posts” using that hashtag from the past seven days — notice I put quotation marks around “top posts,” remember that I did that. These posts included videos of vegan activists putting down animal ag, blaming us for global warming, shaming ranchers and farmers, calling everyday meat consumers murderers, the list goes on and on.
I was taken aback; shocked; annoyed; and frankly a little upset with myself and fellow agvocates on the platform.
I understood why my posts weren’t showing up as “top posts” as they didn’t have near the likes some of the bigger agvocates out there get, nor the tens of thousands of followers they have either. Immediately, snap judgement got the best of me. Why were other agvocates, who had this massive platform, showing up under this hashtag? Had they stopped fighting for the agricultural industry? Did I miss something in the few hours my phone died on Sunday?
I searched some big names to do some investigating and they WERE posting about ag, just like they always had.
I scratched my head, compared posts from those sharing the truth about animal ag to those spreading misinformation. The agvocates got just as many if not more likes on their posts, yet they weren’t showing up. So when someone who doesn’t know much about animal ag goes to search #animalagriculture on Instagram, they are met with a mountain of anti-ag propaganda.
Do you see why I’m upset yet?
We are trying, y’all. Thousands of us agvocates are actively posting on social media every day and doing what we can to promote agriculture, but it seems the system is rigged…Instagram has failed us.
I guess I’ll keep using social media to promote animal ag the best I can — when it works it’s super effective. But even platform that’s supposed to give every creator a fighting chance isn’t doing so, and I’m disappointed.
Instagram: do better, and don’t censor one side of the story.
