The latest installment of Instagram-induced facepalming has been brought to you by users who have been sharing selfies taken at the scene of the world's worst nuclear disaster. And now, Craig Mazin, creator of HBO's Chernobyl, which is about the 1986 reactor explosion at the Soviet nuclear power plant of the same name, has stepped in and asked people to stop.
In his tweet, Mazin asked people to conduct themselves with respect and to remember "a terrible tragedy occurred there." Find a selection of those he's likely referring to below.
Chernobyl is near the city of Pripyat in what is today Ukraine. According to CNN, since the HBO show aired, the number of tourists flocking to the 4,000-square-kilometer "exclusion zone" around the plant has risen by about a third. Approximately 4,000 people are estimated to have died as a consequence of the disaster, both in the immediate aftermath and due to related illnesses.
This isn't the first time people have been reminded not to use scenes of devastation as a means to up their online clout. Earlier this year, the Auschwitz Memorial asked visitors not to take posed pictures along the railway lines on the approach to the concentration camp.
Similarly, in 2017, artist Shahak Shapira launched a website called Yolocaust, which gathered selfies taken at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and directed image removal requests to the email address undouche.me@yolocaust.de.
