While Twitter continues its spiral into the billionaire black hole that is Elon Musk’s ego, some members of the Twitter community continue to try and use the platform to spread information about and awareness of more important things going on in our world. Actor Rainn Wilson, best known for his portrayal of Dwight in the American sitcom version of The Office, did just that.
Wilson has a very large Twitter following, numbering in the millions. On Thursday, Wilson used this platform to draw attention to an issue that continuously gets pushed to the back of the line but affects everyone living on our planet: climate change. Wilson spoke out on behalf of environmental advocacy group Arctic Basecamp to talk changing weather conditions brought about by human-driven climate change.
With world leaders heading to Egypt for the COP27 climate summit, Wilson used a simple technique to increase awareness—changing his social media account name. Wilson changed his name to “Rainnfall Heat Wave Rising Sea Levels Wilson." Along with linking to a fun website for generating and creating similar names for this purpose, Wilson also had ideas for changing other well-followed celebrity social media account names, as well.
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"As a cheap little stunt to help save planet Earth, I've changed my name on Twitter, Instagram and even on my fancy writing paper. I'm an Arctic risk name changer, which is going to be a game changer," Wilson said before giving out some other names for influencers and celebrities with big social media accounts. Some of the ideas included “Cardi The Arctic B Melting,” “Amy Poehler Bears Are Endangered,” “Samuel Earth Is Getting Hot As L. Jackson,” and “Harrison Why Not Drive An Electric? Ford.”
Ironically, while Wilson was able to change his account names on social media sites like Instagram, he was not able to on Twitter because … Elon Musk’s mishandling of the site has been pretty historic. But the point has been made and Wilson’s “cheap little stunt” has been picking up viral steam across the information superhighway.
Later on, Wilson tweeted out the ArcticRisk Name Generator. My Twitter handle is @wallein. This is what I got!
Holy crap, what an amazing week! Where do we even begin this week's episode of The Downballot? Well, we know exactly where: abortion. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap Tuesday's extraordinary results, starting with a clear-eyed examination of the issue that animated Democrats as never before—and that pundits got so badly wrong. They also discuss candidate quality (still really important!), Democratic meddling in GOP primaries (good for democracy, actually), and "soft" Biden disapprovers (lots of them voted for Democrats).