Social media's latest viral trend challenge shows no signs of slowing down with the #10yearchallenge having racked up close to four million hits on Instagram.
Users have been posting pictures of themselves from 2009 alongside photographs from 2019 to highlight how things have changed in the last decade.
The latest player to the party is the tallest building in the world, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa which posted a throwback image to ten years ago when it still hadn't opened its doors to the world, next to a recent night-time shot. The picture, which has already racked up over 68,000 likes is credited to @tgfromdubai, and is also a good depiction of how Downtown Dubai has developed in the last decade.
Royal treatment
Dubai royals have also got involved with Sheikha Maitha Al Maktoum taking things a step further when she threw things back 20 years in her Instagram story. Tagged #KnightLife, the picture highlighted the Dubai princess's equestrian, Olympian and martial art achievements over the years.
Sheikha Latifa Al Maktoum meanwhile used the challenge to highlight the plight of the planet, sharing a widely-available picture (that actually dates to 2015) of a starving polar bear underneath a shot of a healthy one, demonstrating the impact that global warming is having on the world's wildlife.
Other posts have been just as thought-provoking featuring everything from marine conservation to the pondering of the privilege of ageing.
The dark side
While most people have looked at the challenge as nothing more than a meme, some users have pondered the darker side of it.
A tweet by author and tech expert Kate O’Neil, quizzed whether such a mass of freely-shared data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on ageing, helping tech giants get better at recognising people and raising privacy concerns.
Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
— Kate O'Neill (@kateo) January 12, 2019
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition
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