The following was posted to Facebook and Instagram this week:
Six months ago I made a choice to stop proactively using Meta as a social media platform for The Turtle’s Back, for reasons outlined in my blog. I don’t regret the decision at all—in fact, I’d recommend it—and time away from the noise, negativity and nonsense of Facebook has been cathartic.
Having had time to reflect and observe as more of a bystander, though, it’s become clear to me that there is a lot of curiosity and confusion out there about Maine turtles. I can help with that…but not by adding brief comments on posts I happen to see or be tagged in, where they are lost in the scattershot, crowd-sourced mass of opinions. Not only is that a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, it’s also not an effective way to answer questions and address misinformation. That requires content generation. Turtles are just too complicated for sound bites.
Unfortunately, sound bites are the cornerstone of social media; to combat the incomplete facts they generate, one must ironically fully engage with social media. As a nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of our native turtles, public education is my north star. Successfully sharing useful, accurate information in the service of helping people in my state help their local turtles is ultimately more important to me than my judgment of the tools available to do so. And, for better or for worse, Facebook and Instagram are still the most widely used communication tools here.
There are also stories and images worth sharing along the way—I’ve missed that! So, after giving it a lot of thought, I’ve decided to begin actively using my FB and IG pages again. My opinion of Meta has not changed, but the potential benefit to turtles of having better informed citizens far outweighs the cost of one user supporting a fraught platform. I’ll be cross-posting on Substack and, of course, my blog.
So…it seems appropriate to begin by announcing the arrival of our first 2025 hatchlings, Eastern painted turtles hatched this week from eggs harvested from mothers who were injured while crossing roads on their journeys to their nesting spots. These little miracles will spend the week here, absorbing their yolk sacks, then be released back to the wetlands their mothers came from. It’s reclamation week for us all.
