Media Culpa

Peach Fuzz is Pantone’s Color of the Year 2024 – here’s how to use it in Canva

Each year, Pantone’s Color of the Year is revealed to the design and creator community —a single hue that, in the eyes of the global color authority, encapsulates the spirit and trends of the time. For 2024, the choice fell upon Peach Fuzz, a gentle peach tone that is both warm and carries a modern elegance, according to Pantone.

The color was chosen as a counterweight to a time of turmoil, a warm and welcoming color that “conveys a message of compassion and empathy”.

So if you want to adjust your content according to the proposed color trend, here’s an easy way to get started.

Finding templates in Canva by color

If you are using the content creation tool Canva, it is very easy to create content with that fuzzy peach feel. By dragging the image above into an empty image in Canva, the color picker tells us that Peach Fuzz has the hex code #FEBE98. Now you can start adding elements to your images with the same color.

There are of course already a number of templates in Canva that you can use and you can search for templates by color. Just add the code #FEBE98 into the color picker and you will get several suggestions for templates with the same mood.

Color Palettes

Next step may be to create a palette based on the Color of the Year 2024. Go to Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Upload the image from Pantone and Canva suggests a number of palettes based upon the peachy original. If you find the one below a bit dull, there are others to choose from.

Another tool for creating palettes is Adobe Color Wheel. Here’s an example of a palette that was generated with Peach Fuzz as a reference.

Now you can start to incorporate (if your brand guidelines allow) these colors into your content production for 2024.

Oh, and there’s even a $30 color of the year coffee mug for the real enthusiasts…

Swedish health care company created fake Communications Officer profile

Vårdinnovation, a controversial Swedish health care company, created a fake Communications Officer because management didn’t want to be personally exposed in media. The company recently went bankrupt because of an alleged bribe scandal, created the profile Sara Johansson on LinkedIn with more than 500 contacts, for a press spokesperson that did not exist.

“Sara Johansson” only responded to media requests by email and has been quoted in several Swedish media in recent months. But she does not exist. Her profile picture on LinkedIn is most certainly created by an AI software like the one behind the site www.thispersondoesnotexist.com which creates realistic photos that look like a real person, but is not.

In an interview with SVT Skåne, Eliot Higgins, CEO at Bellingcat, a site for investigative journalism says that the image is most probably computer generated. The white background, the hair cut and the fact that she only has one earring are signs that the image is fake. A reverse Google image search produces no results. In a preliminary police investigation, Vårdinnovation’s CEO Damon Tojjar confirms that Sara Johansson “is a joint communication account that Vårdinnovation has so that they do not have to be exposed in the media themselves”.

Synthetic media and deep fakes

Synthetic media, or artificially produced media, will become more and more common, but this is the first instance we know of in Sweden where a spokesperson for a company simply was completely fake.

If you are interested in deep fakes and synthetic media, I strongly recommend these two podcasts:

Making Sense – The information apocalypse. Sam Harris meets author and journalist Nina Schick who writes a lot about AI.

Brave New Planet – Deep fakes and the future of truth. Podcast with Dr. Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Fake Hurricane Dorian video goes viral on Twitter

Whenever there is a major event, news story or a natural disaster like the hurricane Dorian, someone is going to try to take advantage of it to gain followers and reach on social media. Do you remember the fake photo of “Frankenstorm” hurricane Sandy, that looked like it would destroy all of Manhattan? Completely fake of course, but that didn’t stop people from sharing it more than 626,000 times on Facebook. Incredible!

This was back in 2010, and although Facebook’s algorithm has changed and it might be a little harder to get that kind of virality today, we as users probably haven’t become much smarter.

As hurricane Dorian approached the coast of Florida, a Twitter account tweeted a video that appeard to show an enormous hurricane about to hit Miami Beach.

The tweet has gotten more than 1.7 million views, 35,000 retweets and 76,000 likes in one day, despite the fact that it is obviously fake. It looks fake and it is very easy to fact check, especially if you know that hurricanes originating in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise. In the fake video, the hurricane spins clockwise.

Also, many of the replies to the tweet point out that it is not true and even link to sources that debunk the claim of the tweet.

The same video has also been shared several times on Instagram, but has since been taken down.

The computer animated video was first posted to Instagram in May 2019, several months before hurricane Dorian started to emerge. You can see the video here:

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Ett inlägg delat av ♏TheGlitch♏ (@theglitch.og) 18 Maj 2019 kl. 8:24 PDT

Why do we share fake news on social media?

So why do we keep sharing stories that are so blatantly false? There are probably many reasons why this happens. Research into why people share fake news show that “Individuals tend not to question the credibility of information unless it violates their preconceptions or they are incentivized to do so”. There is also a tendency to view unique content as “too good not to share”.

In other words, there is no incentive to fact check something that looks so cool. Some may not even care.

There are many ways you can fact check social media posts, by googling and checking hashtags. You can take a screen shot and do a reverse image search on Google, that often reveals that the footage is older than what it appears to be. And as always, if it looks too good too be true, it probably is fake.

How I increased ranking and traffic with Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great free tool provided by Google to help businesses optimize their sites for search. You can use it to understand how your blog or website performs in Google search and what you can do to improve traffic and ranking. I have a travel blog that I would like to get more traffic to and I have been using Google Search Console for a while to see how I can improve my blog.

What you can learn from Google Search Console

This tool can help you improve your SEO through for example what keywords your site ranks for, what position you have in search results for those keywords, how much traffic your site gets from specific queries, and what other sites have linked to your content.

Improved results

In November 2018 my travel blog did not get much traffic from Google so I have been tracking its performance in Google Search Console ever since. By submitting a sitemap to the tool, I have helped Google crawl and index my site in a more effective way. Then I have been studying what search queries I rank for and some that I could rank better at. I have also started to try to get more external links to my site, through different activities.

Other steps I have taken is to add more content and links in order to improve the over all performance of the site.

The results:
Increased traffic: web search clicks (last 3 months) is up by 3000%, ok it is from a very low level but I am happy that it is going quickly in the right direction.

Increased total impressions: up by 3000%, also from a low level.

Increased average CTR: up from 2.7% t0 3,1% which means that when my blog shows up in search results, users click more often on my links.

Increased average position: up from 40.3 to 29.5 which means that on all the words and phrases that my blog ranks in Google, it has climbed an average of more than 10 spots.

Increased number of internal links: up from 26,000 to almost 54,000.

Decrease in number of external links: down from 2580 to 2360. Interestingly, the drop is mainly due to a huge drop in links from one of my other blogs, possibly due to a drop in the number of ranked pages on that blog. I must investigate.

All in all, by studying the results of my travel blog in Google Search Console, I have been encouraged to make ongoing changes and to add more quality content. This has helped improve the performance of my site just as I had hoped for.

You can have a look at my travel blog here and read tips from my trips to different destinations such as San Francisco, Singapore and Milan.

Champions League streaker Kinsey Wolanski’s Instagram suspended

During last night’s Champions League final in Madrid between Liverpool and Tottenham, model Kinsey Sue Wolanski ran onto the pitch in a tiny swim suite. Wolanski is the girfriend of Russian born Youtuber and prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, who has a history of streaking as well.

Gained more than 2 million followers

Right before she ran onto the pitch in Madrid, Wolanski had 316,000 followers on Instagram. That has skyrocketed to about 2.5 million followers earlier today.

Instagram is also full of copy cats who try to look like her account in order to gain followers. One of the fake accounts has grown from 73,000 to 114,000 followers in less than a day, so it pays off apparently.

Instagram has supspended Kinsey’s account

However, Kinsey Wolanski’s real Instagram account @kinsey_sue is nowhere to be found right now. A few hours ago, Vitaly posted a photo on his Instagram story where Kinsey says her account has been hacked. More likely though is that her account has been suspended by Instagram, due to her sudden fame being a result of a criminal act.

Footnote: I’m @kullin on Instagram.

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Ett inlägg delat av Hans Kullin ✈︎ (@kullin) 21 Apr 2019 kl. 3:17 PDT