Poetry in a pandemic: Facebook faces up to the crisis

This short film uploaded by Mark Zuckerberg takes a moment to reflect on the importance of real people and real faces to our lives, with a poem read by gritty UK spoken word artist, Kate Tempest, and visuals that don’t flinch from the horrors of the Coronavirus crisis.

https://www.facebook.com/4/videos/10111740748617451/

It was created with Droga5 and will run on TV as well as digital channels. The message is “We’re never lost if we can find each other,” and there is a link to Facebook’s Covid-19 support channel.

Facebook Live, which always struggled to take off, has suddenly become popular as live-streaming surges in the lockdown, and people are turning to Facebook for everything from exercise classes to online conferences. In the US, the number of US users watching live video on Facebook went up by 50% in March compared to February.

Zuckerberg wrote in his post: “We made a short film ‘Never Lost’ to honor the solidarity and resilience of so many people coming together during this time. Thank you to everyone doing your part.”

Radio 4 has also turned to poetry, introducing a daily strand on its Today programme every morning, with correspondents picking favourite verses to help us through.

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About Emma Hall

Emma Hall is a journalist and editorial consultant and is the former Europe Editor of Ad Age, where she covered European marketing advertising, digital and media stories. She has written for newspapers including the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph, and was previously a section editor at Campaign. Emma started her career in New York as a researcher for a biography of Keith Richards.