A Good Reason To Post Screenshots of Text Instead of Actual Text

I was reading Hannah Ritche’s blog post on how many lithium ion batteries are recycled. The main gist is that the commonly cited 5% figure is the result of a lot of broken telephone rather than any emperical basis.

It’s interesting that instead of using blockquotes, she posts pictures of screenshots instead so that search engines don’t take the quotes out of context. There’s a problem I sometimes run into with Google where it doesn’t understand context (including jokes) so it will make an answer from a snippet even if the source material is critiquing the snippet’s answer.

Applied to this post, googling “What percentage of lithium-ion batteries are recycled?” has 5% in a snippet linking to an article refuting that statistic—the title of the post is even The 5% rate and other untruths about battery recycling and yet the 5% seems authoritative. Note that Hannah’s article builds off of this one.

Because of that, Hannah decided to use screenshots instead of quotes so search engines and LLMs wouldn’t use it as fact given what she’s trying to do. It’s wild how we have to do shit like this.