Ramadan Mubarak!
Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him. (Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis / ProPublica)
Murphy didn’t know it, but he was in the crosshairs of one of the most prolific and notorious members of a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them. While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app’s slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.
‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood (Suzanne Heywood / The Guardian)
For the next three years we circled the Pacific. We were hit by another cyclone, and saw places like Tanna Island in Vanuatu, with its live volcano, remote Tikopia Island in the Solomons, and Marovo Lagoon in the New Georgia Islands, with its swamps and wood carvings. Meanwhile, I kept trying to study, hiding inside a sail to work so no one could find me to ask me to do more chores, and sending lessons back to the school whenever we reached a port that had a post office. I was trapped on Wavewalker against my will, with parents who didn’t seem to care how isolated or unhappy I was. I had no obvious way to get away – I had no money and no longer remembered any of my relatives or friends back in England. But, somehow, I trusted that if I educated myself enough it would help me escape.
Hundreds of Boxes of Dates (Sheffield Online)
If you have any suggestions for future words to feature, contact us on our socials or at editor@globalcomment.com
Image: Ashkan Forouzani