Let’s Fact Check That Taylor Swift Private Jet Usage Story
Yard’s “study” got a lot of things wrong. Fight your confirmation bias.
For the next ten years, people will be citing a shoddy study that they just read the headline of:
“You know, Taylor Swift is the worst celebrity for using private jets.”
Recently, Yard Marketing agency published a story listing the 10 celebs who were the “worst” offenders for private jet usage. It went viral. Congratulations to the author at Yard, that’s a marketing agency’s dream.
I put “worst” in scare quotes because I found their article bad. It was outright inaccurate in several places and drew its data from a biased source, @celebjets. @CelebJets only tracks 21 celebs, so Swift is “worst” out of those 21. Yard did not look at @CorporateJets and @ElonJet, other automated Twitter accounts run by the same person.
Now, I do not excuse private jet usage. Private jets emit more than 33 million tons of greenhouse gases according to this 2020 study. That’s more than Denmark, which is a country of 5.8 million. Celebrities shouldn’t use private jets to fly 30 miles up the road when a car would work just as well.
But I have a few bones to pick with this study and the framing of it.
