Sam Jones, the American influencer who outraged almost the whole of Australia when she snatched a baby wombat from its mother. I really don’t know what an influencer is, I am guessing a social media identity who possesses a relatively large following. Whilst her online persona is Sam Jones, she is really Samantha Strable from Montana who posts online about hunting.

She has 91.6k followers and had only made 143 posts when I checked. It took me longer to find her Instagram page than it should have, samstrays_somewhere wasn’t really where I was looking though. She posts about fishing, hunting, and horse riding so apart from being an attractive woman, I am not seeing how she is an influencer. 

When it came to the wombat joey she picked up and ran off with, sure she made a mistake, but what a huge backlash. She was receiving death threats, this is getting a bit silly. If she just picked up the joey and got it straight back to its mother, it would not have blown up as it did. Instead, she ran towards the vehicle with the joey and mother screeching, her Australian boyfriend Louis Sixt who was filming and laughing really did not receive the same level of hate. 

Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese got involved, Albo said “take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there” that I didn’t actually think was helpful. Whilst she issued an apology of sorts, she did not do this well either as she had a shot at farmers, the government and just about everyone else. She is a social media follower, she wanted to make a short video to publish for likes to gain more followers. She could have done it so much better, mistakes were made, but really, the backlash was too severe. The very online world she lives in and publishes content in turned out to be a whole lot more fickle and toxic than she expected.