There’s a Tumblr image post going around encouraging people in Baltimore to call the “Hypothermia Hotline” if they see a homeless person struggling with the sub-zero temperatures. Though the post has gotten tens of thousands of reblogs, the Baltimore Hypothermia Hotline isn’t actually a real thing. The number in the image leads to a mental health crisis hotline that has probably spent the last few days swamped with misdirected calls.

However, I think the post itself is an excellent illustration of what I mean when I say Tumblr excels as a platform for spreading art. The design behind the misleading post, whether intentionally misleading or not, is actually very interesting.

I censored the number out because I know at least one of you would call it, and they’re probably dealing with enough calls right now. Let’s just talk about the image itself, though.

Getting the most obvious stuff out of the way first, there’s the very fact that it is an image. Though the relevant parts are just text, the artist packaged them in a picture that has a nice layout and a good color/font choice. Its text is larger than any ordinary text on the page, which draws attention. Being an image also means its content won’t get cropped off by a cut when reblogged, which would negatively affect its spread.

And look at the text itself. Beyond being very polite about what it’s asking (“take the liberty”), there’s the whole fact that it specifically addresses people in Baltimore. Personalizing something like that can have a huge effect; not only is it effectively speaking directly to you if you live in Baltimore, but it makes it feel like spreading the post would actively help people in Baltimore. It ties it all to a very real location without the cold removedness that would be conveyed by a more general “call your local emergency hotline”. Even in fiction writing, I’ve heard at least author comment on how positively readers react when seeing their actual hometown mentioned in something.

And the post’s concept! It’s new and fresh; you won’t see any other posts out there stressing the importance of calling the Baltimore Hypothermia Hotline for people in need. This is because the Hypothermia Hotline doesn't exist, sure, but that originality still guarantees this is something new and important-sounding that people haven’t heard of before. 

And then there’s the decision to keep the artist’s name and portrait in the image. The person who posted it to Tumblr could have just cropped that out and cited the source via link, or made the artist’s name into a smaller signature in the corner, but they chose not to. Not only is this showing that the message is strong enough to have already spread between social networking sites, but - let’s be honest - the fact that the creator is black and female is probably helping the post gain traction on Tumblr, where there is a very strong backlash against the preponderance of white, male creators. And, like naming Baltimore specially, there is that entire humanizing element, showing that this message is coming from an actual person. You want to reblog it. You see Iconoclasticbeauty’s smiling face and want to help her get her message out there.

These are all elements that go into making impactful and popular artwork. It’s original, it’s relatable, it’s in-your-face and aesthetically pleasing, and the very act of reblogging it makes you feel like you’re doing good in the world. Sure, the content of the image is inaccurate and does nothing but clog up a suicide hotline, but that doesn’t change its appeal as a work of art.

I don’t mean to say that Iconoclasticbeauty’s image was engineered by a villainous person purely to spread misinformation through thousands of Tumblr reblogs. More likely than not, it was just a perfect combination of site-specific design elements mixed with a piece of accidentally incorrect information. But considering that this image’s spread is causing actual harm, it drives home both how effective Tumblr is at spreading things based on their artistic merit and how dangerous it is to get information from a site designed to do that.

There are people out there - both on Tumblr and in the scary outside world - who will use these same tactics to intentionally hurt others. They will use aesthetics, they will use your social biases, and they will do it all while making you feel like you are doing the right thing. If you are one of the individuals who helped spread that original image with the incorrect number, please take it as a lesson to be more careful with your reblogging next time.