ismatu gwendolyn
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ismatu.bsky.social
ismatu gwendolyn
@ismatu.bsky.social
ismatu writes essays at threadings.io | you can listen to said essays via their podcast, threadings. peace.
To be clear… THIS place also looks like Facebook did when I was twelve years old. Less celebrities, more people telling me how they want to see members of the political party they oppose be beaten up in the streets. Neither outcome bodes well.
It is… alarming how much Twitter looks like when I was twelve years old on Facebook. I used to be able to scroll for thirty minutes and get news broadcastings from around the world. Now, no matter how many times I click “not interested,” it’s news from celebrities and engagement farm memes.
May 17, 2025 at 11:22 PM
anyways. i got work to do. short form social media fractures my ability to focus in such obvious ways. it was never the best way to get global news, was it?

peace.
ig
May 2, 2025 at 11:26 AM
It is… alarming how much Twitter looks like when I was twelve years old on Facebook. I used to be able to scroll for thirty minutes and get news broadcastings from around the world. Now, no matter how many times I click “not interested,” it’s news from celebrities and engagement farm memes.
May 2, 2025 at 11:22 AM
I imagine this is how adults of Sierra Leone felt watching Siaka Stevens prime Sierra Leone for war— the gutting of any and every Public Health Service, the filling presidential cabinet with cronies. We always think war means guns, which means we catch on way too late; war always starts with policy.
February 8, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Haven’t made a video about Trump’s executive orders because I want to focus my lens on news outside of the states, and news outside of the acute panic.

Difficult a bit as a public health person, because there’s a lot of reasonable acute panic over public health concerns exacerbated by those EOs :)
January 30, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Twitter is the social media site I mourn the most. Public health Twitter was so massively helpful as an undergraduate/graduate student in the field. It was a phenomenal conglomeration of research about our ongoing pandemics; many users didn’t transfer to bluesky. How do I fill this gap in knowledge?
January 25, 2025 at 3:42 PM
On TikTok: The media strategy used in the USA when a media outlet operates against the will of the empire: acquire, gut, sterilize, and re-release. This removes the teeth from the source and provides its user-base with a gummy, nutritionally-devoid alternative to suck on + maintain addiction to. 🧵
January 22, 2025 at 9:24 PM
This will be another place where I post and go. Engaging with short form media (even written short form media) where there’s a heavy center on US electoral politics shortens my attention span and limits my gaze on the world.
January 21, 2025 at 4:52 PM