Turns out Instagram influencers may not be flocking the site of the Chernobyl disaster after all

The Atlantic

The claim that the HBO limited series Chernobyl has led scores of Instagram influencers to flood the nuclear disaster site was sparked by Twitter user Bruno Zupan. On Sunday, he tweeted out four images of what appeared to be influencers on the Chernobyl site, and the tweet went viral over Monday and Tuesday (Chrissy Teigen, for instance, tweeted it out to her more than 11 million followers). The tweet prompted Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin to send a tweet Tuesday urging tourists to be respectful to the site. "But the viral tweet’s claim is false, and its premise—that photos at sites of tragedy are inherently self-serving and in poor taste—is misleading," says The Atlantic's Taylor Lorenz. "While the area surrounding the destroyed reactor has undeniably morphed into a tourist destination, and interest in the disaster has spiked since the premiere of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, the Instagram geo-tag offers zero evidence of any uptick in lifestyle influencers visiting the site. Three of the four people that Zupan chose to highlight in his tweet aren’t influencers at all." In fact, one of the viral photos Zupan tweeted is from 2010. The one person in Zupan's tweet who has enough of a following to be an influencer, Julia Baessler, said the HBO series had nothing to do with her visit. “Because of the engineering work of my boyfriend, we were able to get a special admission to go inside control room 4, which is actually not accessible for visitors," Baessler told Lorenz. "I wanted to share these stories with the world because they are full of information of a place where usually only scientists get access to." Lorenz also defended people taking selfies at the Chernobyl site, saying there's nothing wrong with posing for photos to document visiting a historic site. "Instagram, with more than 1 billion active users, has become the default way for many, especially young people, to share and document their lives," says Lorenz. "But people still struggle with how to best format their posts from solemn places."

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