(The Map Room’s Mastodon account is on both lists. If you’re looking for an instance to join, mapstodon.space is aimed at map and geospatial professionals and enthusiasts.)

Previously: The Map Room on Mastodon; Mastodon for Mappers; A Mastodon Update.

It’s like the #30daymapchallenge in November, in which mapmakers are challenged to make a map a day on a given daily theme, only the reverse: the MapFailbruaryChallenge is about making a bad map on a given daily theme. “The idea is to create the worst map possible.” Bad maps happen; will a deliberately bad map be better or worse? Either way, it’s probably worth stocking up on popcorn for when maps with the #mapfailbruarychallenge hashtag start showing up on our timelines.

(Failbruary. Fai-EL-bru-AIR-y. Say that ten times. And resign yourselves to the fact that Reddit is probably going to kick everyone’s ass on this.)

Update, 19 Jan: There’s an official website now.

Previously: Mastodon for Mappers; The Map Room on Mastodon.

It doesn’t matter that much which instance you sign up at (you can connect to any other Mastodon account on any other instance, unless your instance blocks that other instance, which happens when, for example, an instance is full of racist trolls), but instances have local feeds, which is nice when your instance is full of people who share your interests. I’ve already found several familiar faces and/or institutions at mapstodon.space.

I have no plans to shut down any of The Map Room’s other social media presences (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter)—not at this time, anyway. And you can always subscribe via RSS or email—no intermediating platform required.

Also in Bloomberg, Mark Gurman discusses Apple’s plans to expand its advertising business, which apparently includes adding ads to Apple Maps.

Apple’s cycling maps now include Hawaii, and its detailed 3D cities now include Atlanta, Miami and Seattle. They’re also testing their upgraded maps in Israel, Palestine and Saudi Arabia.

Google Maps updates outlined in a blog post last month include cycling route information, location sharing, and photorealistic aerial views of major landmarks.

Instagram announced a searchable map feature last month, expanding its map feature beyond geolocating posts. This, after a Google VP noted that young users are using apps and TikTok for discovery purposes rather than Google’s Search or Maps. You wouldn’t think that Instagram and TikTok qualify as map apps, but the street finds its uses.

Take the serious situation with Australia’s bushfires at the moment. Social media is jammed with maps showing practically the whole damn continent on fire, or superimposed on another continent to let people there know just how big Australia is (and also on fire). It’s a profoundly serious situation, and as NASA’s Joshua Stevens points out, it’s possible to present an accurate map that shows its seriousness without resorting to hyperbole.

The trouble is, social media thrives on hyperbole, because it thrives on “engagement”—which means outrage and anger and, as Joshua Emmons notes, as we get inured to a certain level of outrage, even more outrage is needed just to get noticed.

Which brings me to this thing, which is showing up all over the social web:

This is not a satellite image. It’s a visualization by Anthony Hearsey that shows the areas in Australia affected by bushfires from 5 Dec 2019 to 5 Jan 2020. It superimposes FIRMS data on an exaggerated relief 3D model of Australia. It’s also cumulative: it includes fires that have been put out. Because of that, the image looks far worse than an actual satellite image would. (A satellite image would also have a lot more smoke.)

But it hasn’t stopped people from sharing this image as though it were a real satellite image. It’s been attributed as an photo taken from the International Space Station more than once. The problem is such that it’s been flagged by Facebook’s factchecking system and has gotten written up at Snopes, the debunking website.

It’s all the more problematic since the visualization itself has a serious issue: Nick Evershed points out that it’s based on a very low-resolution FIRMS grid that makes the area affected by bushfires much, much larger than it actually is.

here's a gif showing the massive discrepancy in hotspot area you get using the gridded data pic.twitter.com/vzve4RqAQQ

— Nick Evershed (@NickEvershed) January 6, 2020

To be fair to Hearsay and his image, lots of maps and data visualizations have their issues. Only because it went so, so viral do its issues become critical. The problem is largely one of misattribution—the image being presented as something it isn’t (i.e., a satellite image)—and of map literacy: a general audience isn’t capable of assessing how the data is being presented. It’s being presented to that audience as the literal truth, and since we’re trained to expect our maps never to lie, we swallow it whole.

The Australian bushfires are a serious problem. How much worse do our maps need to make them look—how much do they have to torque the situation—just to get our attention?

I’m not sure I’m going to like the answer to that.

Update, 9 Jan: BBC News takes up the story.

Update, 10 Jan: ABC News (Australia) coverage. See also The Conversation: 6 things to ask yourself before you share a bushfire map on social media.

Previously: Studying How and Why Maps Go Viral; Bad Internet Maps: ‘A Social Media Plague’.

Previously: When Maps Lie; How to Circulate a Fake Election Map; What If Only … Voted?; Bad Internet Maps: ‘A Social Media Plague’.

Business Insider’s widely mocked, since-deleted-from-Twitter, but very very viral map of the most popular fast food restaurants by state is the launching-off point for The Ringer’s Claire McNear, who rants about the maps clogging the Internet that are stupid, uninformed, wrong and exist only to generate clicks. Among other things, she writes:

The map is bad, is my point, and obviously bad, and I sincerely wish that we didn’t have to talk about it. But we do. Because maps like this one aren’t merely birdbrained schlock: They are a social media plague, a scourge that can reduce just about any social network to gibbering in-fights in the space of a few virally shared minutes. We’re all susceptible; we’re all defenseless. A dumb internet map with incendiary falsehoods is coming for all of us, and there is just about nothing we can do to stop it.

The formula goes something like this: Map plus declaration of definitive statewide preference equals profit. Profit here means eyeballs or clicks or reshares or, most likely, some combination of all three, especially the last one, because it turns out that there are few sentiments more appealing than Oy, check out the terrible things the cretins in [Bad State] get up to.

Consider some other recent viral highlights. “This Map Shows What People Hate the Most in Each State” (using data from a brand-new dating app that no one outside a handful of stunt pieces seems to have used, and which was obviously trying to drum up interest). There are maps showing states’ Favorite Holiday Movies and Favorite Reality TV Show and Favorite Romantic Comedy (using an arbitrarily arrived at combination of AMC user ratings—what?—and Google Trends data). “This Map Shows the Most Popular Food in Every State” (using Pinterest recipes specifically selected for their range). Even The New York Times has gotten awfully close to its own Map of Dubious Adorations, publishing a 50-state anthology of Thanksgiving classics in 2014, in which the effort to differentiate by state yielded questionable dishes like “grape salad.”

The truth is we’re all very boring, and our preferences aren’t all that different.

Worth reading in full.

The problem is that even though their methodologies are shoddy and their conclusions are dubious, clickbaity maps like these are popular. The competition for attention is fierce, and maps are a quick and dirty way of generating traffic. My traffic skyrockets whenever I post a link to something even remotely like these maps (xkcd is usually a safe bet), and if I resorted to posting maps like these all the time, I’d be making much more money at this. But I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.

Previously: When Maps Lie.

Maps are big these days. Blogs and news sites (including this one) frequently post maps and those maps often go viral—40 maps that explain the world, the favorite TV shows of each U.S. state, and so on. They’re all over Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and news organizations are understandably capitalizing on the power that maps clearly have in digital space: they can visualize a lot of data quickly and effectively. But they can also visualize a lot of data inaccurately and misleadingly.

It’s a must-read. [via]