Culture
Disney World got called out for editing masks onto guests' faces in photos
Guests are required to wear masks at all times, but some remove them during rides.
Walt Disney World is open for business and, unsurprisingly, some of the same guests who think it's fine to visit a theme park during a pandemic also think it's fine to take off their masks around strangers. In response, the amusement park reportedly hasn't booted them from the park but instead... digitally inserted masks on pictures of their maskless faces.
Pathetic — Disney requires guests to wear masks in the park at all times. Initially it tried to enforce the policy by refusing to provide access to photographs to any guests who weren't wearing masks on a ride — as well as everyone else on the ride even if they were wearing their masks properly. According to The Orlando Sentinel, however, that must have not been effective as Disney has now resorted to altering the photos instead.
The photo below is from the Dinosaur ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom. Look closely at the back row of riders in this picture and you can see the woman on the left has a comically large mask on her face:
Additional processing time is required to add these top-notch graphics, but reports indicate that the photos do arrive in guests' digital accounts.
That's all you can do? — There are different ways to think about this. On the one hand, Disney is trying to signal that when you come to its park, you need to wear a mask. But it's pathetic that the company wouldn't better enforce its mask policy. There are no real repercussions for violators who put workers and other guests at risk. Socially distancing is basically impossible at an amusement park like Disney — anyone who's not wearing a mask needs to be booted if Disney wants to send the message that this behavior isn't acceptable, and that it really cares about its workers.
Ultimately, however, the real failure is that Disney World has to be open at all. Not everyone is so lucky as to be able to work from home. If Congress passed significant ongoing relief for people to help weather quarantining and businesses shutting down, we wouldn't even need to waste time talking about this. Instead we're left debating how businesses should balance trying to stay open with employees worried about their own safety and trying to remain above water. It's all a complete failure of leadership.
