Gardening Disinformation and Social Media
How do we combat the barrage of bad information being posted everywhere with no critical thinking skills coming along for the ride?
I joined Facebook the first time somewhere around 2007. I had been on MySpace for several years already and of course blogging with the best of them on Web 2.0 for years before that. If you remember Facebook in the beginning it was much different than it is today. And even still, I felt overwhelmed and hated being connected to so many of my former high school peers and family, even back then. It was great until it wasn’t.
I took a huge break and put my account into hiding in 2009, only to resurrect it in 2010 when we thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. I continued onward, posting there frequently as well as continuing on my blog and via Twitter (*sigh*, I miss old Twitter) until 2015 when I nuked my Facebook account for good. The algorithms were well underway by then and I was in my first year of motherhood and everything felt so overwhelming. I also didn’t want to see all of those high school peers and I got kicked off of a local mothers group for pointing out some terrible misinformation being passed around there. Soon after I got my first iPhone, a hand-me-down from my dad, and joined Instagram. I’d wanted to join for a few years by that point but it was still only available in app form and not via website then. So many of my Twitter friends had IG and would share their photos to Twitter and I was feeling left out.
Instagram was still good at that time. In fact, it was amazing. I loved it and enjoyed using the app and it didn’t feel addicting. There were no Stories or Reels, only photos and people used those built in filters to slap across their photos and then post. Of course, Instagram devolved, getting ads, adding other features and well, we know what Instagram is like now. Instagram killed blogging, though it’s making its comeback in newsletter form.
I got back onto Facebook in 2019 after some gentle peer pressure from some hiking acquaintances so I could see some Florida Trail related groups. Having been away for five years, I was shocked at how Facebook had collapsed in that time. I mean, I had heard about it from friends and family who were still on and the occasional article about how it was a dumpster fire, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so bad. I tailored my account for only groups, never posted to my feed (that changed a year ago), and kept connections to a minimum. I didn’t even accept my husband’s friend request for several years. I spent a lot of time on Facebook in the last year for the state park advocacy I did and it was by far the most time I’d been on that place since 2015. I was glad in December 2023 when things blew up with that (badly, sadly) because it meant I could basically stop using Facebook as often. I’m still toying with the idea of leaving again but yeah, some of those groups are actually good.
And yet…
So between all of that social media usage, in the last 14 years we’ve seen our newspaper and magazine empires crumble. That happened for a variety of reasons, but a huge part of it is lack of readership. Circulation plummeted because people could just get on Facebook or Instagram and find out the information there instead of buying a $5-10 magazine or weekly newspaper to read, usually well-researched and verified information. Suddenly the information was FREE FREE FREE! And not always well-researched or verified.
Meanwhile, we saw the rise of the social media influencer and the gardening world did not escape that unscathed. Those who knew how to game the Instagram algorithm grew their accounts tremendously, sometimes touting sketchy practices and home remedies that anyone with access to Google and some common sense could debunk. Many got book deals. I tried to play that game on my garden podcast IG account for years, attempting to showcase native plants and educate those who followed the account. It was too much work and I gave up. I wanted to educate via podcast, which was enough work in itself, and work that I enjoyed at one point. But I didn’t want to have to also be saying “LOOK AT ME” or “LOOK AT MY GARDEN, HERE’S A SHINY NEW THING” to get eyeballs over to the podcast website or make a new listener out of someone. Of course, now people are coming out of the woodwork to announce that the conversion rate of IG followers to making new podcast listeners, blog subscribers, or art and book purchasers is very little. Surprise! IG doesn’t want you to leave their app and they will punish you for it.
Over on YouTube it’s similar, though I have never spent as much time on YouTube that I have on other social media apps. And YouTube is different in that aspect because it isn’t the same gushing firehouse of information you get from scrolling unless you are watching Shorts. But the influencers and the bad information are still rampant. I tinkered with the idea of taking YouTube seriously for the podcast a few times, uploading videos and even creating and mixing a Short (within this last year) from one of those Very Well Known Garden Influencers when she gave out some just absolute bad information that I had to debunk. I got some eyeballs on that video but then realized I would have to do a lot more of that to, again, get the eyeballs on my channel and gain subscribers and gain listeners and…well, was it worth it? No, it wasn’t. I would be combatting bad information for years—decades.
In the last two days I have seen this post from “Vicky Kauffman” on Facebook come into my feed via two very different people. At first I was going to ignore it because ugh, another day, another person hating on insects. But then I was curious, who is Vicky Kauffman? Is this some gardening person I don’t know about? She’s blue-checked, so maybe it’s someone who knows what they are talking about.
No.
No, “Vicky Kaufmann” is a “Digital Creator” account who has 54K followers and follows 0 people. Her website link redirects to a MLM supplement type website that is sketchy as hell. Alongside this post about bagworms are posts with recipes, a post about coyote mating season and to watch your dogs, cheerful memes, and mostly just b.s. that is meant to drive traffic to the account, get re-shares, and hopefully get people to find that link to the MLM site. The account posts things that people will say, “oh, that’s interesting!”, hit share, post it to their feed, and not think twice about any of the information within it.
I’ll get back to the bagworm issue soon, but I still want to tackle this concept of these creator accounts, of which “Vicky Kaufmann” is one of thousands, likely millions across the Meta-verse. We know that shareables were and are touted heavily because they can easily be shared to Stories and other venues. They create a short synopsis of information that basically memeify what you/they are trying to convey, so in your scrolling or swiping you can see the information, pick up a few snippets that are meaningful and then move on to the next slide or post. It’s no wonder that these accounts are flourishing, both bot-driven or with real people running them. You take something that is potentially somewhat true without any context and soon it is click-bait and off into the world.
There are some decent ones out here, though, so it isn’t all bad—just mostly. You really do have to swim through a river of trash laden information before you can get to the real facts. And yet, as I’ve been trying to spend less and less time on Instagram in the last two months and have altered how I use the app (muting all Stories, posting to my feed only, rarely, and I’m still trying to figure out how to make it Old IG), I realize even all of these “good” memes and posts I’ve shared in the past to Stories are still just ephemeral pieces of trash data points that will not be digested how they ought to be.
It’s all part of the enshittification of the internet, the decreasing quality of various online platforms, primarily social media but also including search engines. I had to dig to find resources that were legitimate to counteract some of these memes because half the time these memes have been regurgitated into click-bait blogs or even YouTube videos by “influencers” and if you don’t know what you are looking for or at, it is all too easy to think the first few hits are true. And I’m not even going to dive into what is coming with what AI is going to do/already doing to this garden information and everything else on the internet.
Back to the bag worm post.
“Vicky” did not come up with this post on her own. I put the text into Google and originally it included “your CWPD arborist” and somehow it has morphed into “an arborist” over time. At least two other FB accounts have shared it before, a Polk County (WI) Information Center (shared 16K times) and Kopps Greenhouses (NY) (242 shares). My guess is this post has been around and around and around on FB a few times before “Vicky” picked it up and made it her own.
Let’s dissect what was written in the text:
If you see these hanging in your trees, remove them before the spring!
First off, there is no information on what species of bagworm this is. iNaturalist is pulling up 19 species of bagworm moths in the United States, with only one being listed as introduced. The most common is Evergreen Bagworm Moth, Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis, which is what this image is of. But there are several other common species, including the introduced one, that abound and I guarantee you 99% of the people seeing this meme won’t be able to identify which species they are looking at if they were to actually “remove them before the spring”.
This is a bagworm cocoon full of hundreds of eggs.
Ok, let’s learn a little bit about this particular species’ life cycle. It’s actually really interesting and I didn’t know anything about it either.
Adult bagworms will often go unnoticed in the landscape, especially the female, because she is enclosed in her bag and inside of her pupal casing throughout her life. In many species of bagworms, the adult female’s wings and appendages are greatly reduced to vestigial mouthparts and legs, small eyes, and no antennae or wings. The female remains in a caterpillar-like state, mates, and then becomes essentially an egg-filled sac. The male bagworm emerges as a freely flying moth that is hairy and charcoal black. His membranous wings measure 25 mm in length (FDACS 1983). Neither the male nor the female adult feeds. The female lives a couple of weeks, while the male lives only one to two days (Rhainds et al. 2009).
-via UF IFAS
And yes, they do lay hundreds of eggs…
Shortly after mating, the female lays a large egg clutch (500-1,000 eggs) inside of her pupal case enclosed within her bag. The eggs are smooth and cylindrical in shape and laid in a mass that is covered in a waxy, tuft-like layer (Peterson 1969). Bagworm eggs will overwinter.
If they hatch, they can defoliate the tree, and nearby trees, and can cause significant damage.
This is where things get Very Scary for the average homeowner or gardener. It’s made to sound like this bagworm species is out to eat every plant in your yard and one morning you will wake up to find no leaves on your trees and your shrubs picked clean. What’s the reality?
Well, yeah, like every other caterpillar species, its larvae have to eat plants. That’s how the life cycle works. Caterpillars eat plants, birds eat caterpillars, birds eat other birds, and so on and so on. Rarely do caterpillars completely defoliate an entire tree or an entire forest and then it is usually something that is truly an invasive species such as the spongy moth. And even then, trees often bounce back unless it is a repeated defoliation from year to year.
The real issue here, like most of these “pests” we see posted in these gardening memes, is an economic one and a beauty standard one. The horticulture industry has to survive with “perfect” plants so that they can sell them, and homeowners don’t want half of their arborvitae or junipers browned because of bagworm predation. Is there some cause for concern? Yes, probably in some instances. Is there a need to panic about seeing some bagworms that naturally occur in a natural environment, doing what they do in the cycle of life? Absolutely not. Insect damage happens.
They prefer evergreens, but will attack almost any tree. Be on the lookout.
Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis can feed on over 50 families of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs. Common hosts include juniper (Juniperus spp.), arborvitae (Thuja spp.), live oak (Quercus virginiana), Southern red cedar (Juniperus silicicola), and willow (Salix spp.) (FDACS 1983). Other hosts include maple (Acer spp.), elm (Ulmus spp.), pine (Pinus spp.), Indian hawthorn (Raphiolepis indica), ligustrum (Ligustrum japonica), and viburnum (Viburnum spp.). One of the authors has received unconfirmed reports of common bagworm as an economic pest of Adonidia palms (Veitchia merrillii) in south Florida (S.P. Arthurs 2016).
Again with the “Attack”…*sigh*. Though, I am personally ok with them killing every Indian hawthorn and Japanese privet they come across. I’ll cheer them on!
Area parts of this post true? Yes. Were there a lot of caveats? Hell yes.
I’ll end this long essay with some highlights from Nancy Lawson’s fabulous post the other day, Is Your Yard Undergrown? If you haven’t read it yet, go read it as soon as you are done with this newsletter. As always, Nancy puts into words many of the things I’ve tried to write about here and talk about on the podcast but she does it so much more eloquently. As she says in her subtitle, “We need to take the language back.”
“Pest/nuisance” (and their reductive counterpart, “beneficial”):
The word “nuisance” is baked into a booming industry of “nuisance wildlife control operators,” most of whom rely on blind acceptance of their characterizations of mammals, snakes, and even many birds as inherent nuisances. This disrespect leads to draconian measures—including drowning, poisoning, and cruel forms of trapping—for “getting rid” of animals who are just trying to live their lives in increasingly human-dominated environments. “Pest” is most commonly invoked by gardeners who perennially seek to divide the world around them into “good” or “bad.” While researching my first book a decade ago, I asked entomologists about the origins of its supposed antithesis: the unfortunate phrase “beneficial insect.” It was simply a marketing term, they conceded, designed to encourage people “to like at least some insects.” Understandable, I suppose, but a laudatory adjective for one group of organisms automatically casts aspersions on all the rest. Under the “pest vs. beneficial” framework, animals are considered “guilty” and worthless until proven otherwise. - via The Humane Gardener
I’m not sure what the path forward in for this pile of misinformation that is being propagated on the internet. The easiest way is to stop sharing it, even if it is a pithy, seemingly “good” meme to share. Stopping to ask if it is true before sharing is one way. For the good information, like “Leaving the Leaves”, one way is to reframe it with your own photo and information—making an actual post about your leaf pile and writing about how you have seen an increase in fireflies or insects, or what-have-you in your own yard. It isn’t necessarily going to go viral or be as sharable as the meme you might have forwarded, but you are likely to have a better impact with your friends and family sharing your own personal anecdotal evidence than anything else will.
You can call out the bad information, too. It might not mean anything, but the more people are called on the b.s. the less they are likely to continue promulgating it. Some of them know exactly what they are doing, like the one Texas-based garden influencer who was sharing some outdated and bad advice and did not like being called out for it. A few DMs with some other fellow gardeners later, I came to find out this guy operated in bad faith frequently. Unfortunately, he had a large following and most people didn’t bother to fact check anything he was saying.
I don’t have a solution for the bad search engine issues. Use your smarts and try to sort through it. Don’t watch the reductive videos on YouTube and skip giving the regurgitated blogs and websites any views for ad revenue.
I wish I could say Buy Magazines (or even books) but even the mainstream ones still out there are a shell of their former selves, sometimes also regurgitating internet pieces and memes. If you have a reliable garden magazine you read, please share. *Cries in Martha Stewart Living and Garden Design*
I’d love to know what y’all do to combat gardening mis/disinformation, if anything. Hit reply to this email (if you read that way) and let me know or if you read via Substack, leave a comment.
Solidarity with all of you gardeners out there!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature. She hosts Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and formerly The Garden Path Podcast.
This is SUCH a needed call out. Thanks, Misti, for always seeking the truth and not being scared to share it.
Hi Misti, Great article. Are you saying *Cries in Martha Stewart Living and Garden Design* is good or bad. Don't understand your CRIES reference.