Steven Spielberg is gaining notoriety on social media this week, and it remains clear on whether it was a good thing or not. An Internet humourist named Jay Branscomb decided to poke fun on a photo of the Hollywood director posing near his prop triceratops by adding a caption that would have riled up animal activists everywhere and share it on Facebook.
His caption read, "Disgraceful photo of recreational hunter happily posing next to a triceratops he just slaughtered. Please share so the world can name and shame this despicable man."
Several social networks appeared to have missed the fact that the animal is a movie prop for a 20 year-old movie and that dinosaurs had long since been extinct hundreds of millions years ago. However, it never stopped users to lambast and call out Spielberg for his supposed trophy image.
The image, which has been reshared 30,000 times, had attracted 10,000 comments and counting with some calling him "inhumane," "animal killer" and the real reason behind the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Interesting enough, the backlash on Spielberg recalls a similar case in Texas cheerleader Kendall Jones, whose photos of her posing next to slain lions, leopards, animals and a rare African white rhino had attracted social media attention. Facebook has since responded people's calls for the removal of her photos, which was in clear violation of the social media's rules regarding graphic images that encourages or glorifies violence.
A spokesman has told tech news blog Mashable, "We remove reported content that promotes poaching of endangered species, the sale of animals for organized fight or content that includes extreme acts of animal abuse."
Jones has since defended her actions, and insisted that her hunting expeditions were in the name of animal conservation and science. She ranted also on her Facebook page, "Just want to THANK all of my supporters for their continued encouragement and backing! I will continue to hunt and spread the knowledge of hunting and wildlife conservation. Our 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, has been labeled by many as the Father of Conservation. He helped create and establish the United States Forestry Service, which would later become the National Forest Service... But he was a hunter too, right? He killed the same species that hunters now chase today under a mound of anti-hunting pressure. Yet, how can it be possible that someone can love the earth, and take from the Earth in the name of conservation? For some folks, they'll never understand. For the rest of us...we were born that way. God Bless Teddy."
