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There’s a new type of online finger-wagging I’m seeing more and more often: social-distance shaming. Here in St. Petersburg, Florida, I’ve seen Nextdoor posts chastising patrons at packed bars, but I haven’t seen anything like this picture of a New York subway car packed in the midst of a statewide shelter-in-place order.
The city’s residents have been warned to stay home for weeks, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo formally signing a state-wide “stay-at-home” order on March 20 that banned all non-essential businesses from conducting in-office work and stopped all “non-essential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason.”
Yet the photo, shared on Facebook April 2, showed an overcrowded NYC subway car along with a caption that seemed almost unbelievable during a time of extreme social distancing.
In this case, the post isn’t far off — the image is real and was taken just three days earlier on March 30, during rush hour on a Bronx-bound train.
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Alex Mahadevan is a senior multimedia reporter at MediaWise. He can be reached at amahadevan@poynter.org or on Twitter at @AlexMahadevan. Follow MediaWise on TikTok.
