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Water Park Changes Breastfeeding Policy After Woman’s Viral Facebook Post

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Water Park Changes Breastfeeding Policy After Woman's Viral Facebook Post

  • This month, a Georgia mother visited Rigby’s Water World in Warner Robins, Georgia. 
  • She said staff told her to stop breastfeeding her 11-month-old son in a now-viral Facebook post.
  • After online backlash, Rigby’s updated its policy to allow breastfeeding in the pools, a park rep told Insider.

A Georgia water park changed its breastfeeding policy after a mom said she was barred from nursing her son in a lazy pool earlier this month. 

Tiffany Francis shared the incident at Rigby’s Water World, in Warner Robins, in a now-viral Facebook post on July 14.

As of Wednesday, her post has garnered over 1,100 comments and reactions.

Francis said she thought staffers were joking when they told her to stop breastfeeding

Francis told Insider her family visited the water park on July 14, and at one point, she began to nurse her son to sleep in the lazy river because motion helps him sleep. However, she said she was approached by a lifeguard who told her she wasn’t allowed to nurse in the pool.

Francis added that she was shocked because she’s breastfed her son in the lazy river several times as a seasonal ticket holder.

“A lifeguard was sitting up in a little chair and said, “Ma’am, you can’t do that,'” Francis said. “I looked around and was like, ‘Is he joking?'”

After being confronted by two lifeguards, Francis told Insider she asked if there were specific rules stating she couldn’t breastfeed in the lazy river. 

“I knew they had a huge placard of rules at the front door, and so she [one of the lifeguards] said, “Yeah, the rules are up front.” I got out immediately and went up there to look, and there was nothing about that,” Francis said.

Francis told Insider she eventually spoke to the general manager, who reportedly said she was barred from breastfeeding “as a courtesy for others.” In her Facebook post, Francis wrote the general manager suggested it was because no food or drinks were allowed in the water. 

“I told him it was illegal, and I guess he didn’t realize or didn’t think about it at the time,” she said. 

According to the state’s law, breastfeeding “is an important and basic act of nurture which should be encouraged in the interests of maternal and child health. A mother may breastfeed her baby in any location where the mother and baby are otherwise authorized to be,” per Georgia’s Breastfeeding Coalition.

A woman and baby swimming

Tiffany Francis (not pictured) shared her experience on Facebook.

Orbon Alija/Getty Images



At that point, Francis said she asked for a refund on her season tickets, which, according to her, Rigby’s Water World denied. She told Insider she left the water park feeling “completely humiliated.” 

“I was literally shaking walking out of there, just trying to get out as fast as I could,” she added.

The same day, Francis said she wrote about her online experience as a cautionary tale for other mothers who plan to visit the water park. 

In her Facebook post, Francis wrote that most people wore “very little clothing” at the water park that day, “but my son and I were offensive.” 

A Rigby’s Water World representative told Insider they never intended to embarrass Francis

People’s Angela Andaloro reported Monday that after Francis’ Facebook went viral, a Rigby family member responded to Francis’ Facebook post and acknowledged that breastfeeding was important, but “an exposed breast in a water feature without a covering could be seen as indecent (we wouldn’t let another guest do the same).”

The family member added that family rooms, shaded seats, and an admin building at the water park could be used as alternatives, according to the outlet.

On Tuesday, a representative for Rigby’s Water World confirmed to Insider that its policy is now updated and allows mothers to breastfeed anywhere in the water park. They added they had no intention of embarrassing Francis, and the staff is now educated on the revised policy.

However, Francis told Insider the apology doesn’t move her. 

“I don’t feel a sincere apology at all, but they said, ‘Oh, well, we’ve said sorry,'” Francis said. “And they’ve changed their unwritten policy to say you can now do something that was already legal.”

Francis also acknowledged that she’d received an outpouring of support from people but also faced a stream of hate. 

“I told one person yesterday, I was like, ‘If you’re going to say something to a breastfeeding mom, make it positive, because that’s something it’s going to stick with them forever,'” she said. “It sticks with you because it’s a very sensitive topic.” 

Francis said more than anything; she’s shocked mothers were still navigating public breastfeeding in 2023. 

“It’s crazy that this is even still happening to people in this day and age,” she said. 

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Individual + Team Stats: Hornets vs. Timberwolves

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CHARLOTTE HORNETS MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us on X: Facebook – All Hornets X – …

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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

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What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem


It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description. 

But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.  

Consider:

The forgotten novel

Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.

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Snow Crash.

You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change: 

In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.

Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.  

Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users. 

But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.

Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.

Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Meta Quest 3 comes out on October 10 for $500.
Meta Quest 3.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse. 

Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.

Duct-taped to yet another buzzword

Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.

But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.

But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.  

Roblox leads the rise of user-generated content.
Roblox.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.  

Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For 

GamesBeat’s creed when covering the game industry is “where passion meets business.” What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you — not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

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Social media blocks are “a suppression of an essential avenue for transparency”

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In this photo illustration the word censored is seen displayed on a smartphone with the logos of social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube in the background.

Once praised as the defining feature of the internet, the ability to connect with physically distant people is something that governments have recently been seemingly intent on restricting. Authorities have been increasingly pulling the plug, putting over 4 billion people in the shadows in the first half of 2023 alone

Social media platforms are often the first means of communication to be restricted. Surfshark, one of the most popular VPN services, counted at least 50 countries guilty of having curbed these websites and apps during periods of political turmoil such as protests, elections, or military activity.

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