Internet hoaxes and “fake news” come in many different shapes and forms, and some of the most viral often come in the guise of photos.
Whether those photos were digitally altered or attached to fake captions, many have managed to spread virally across cyberspace fooling thousands. We outline the most popular during 2018.
Hat tip to Buzzfeed, Gizmodo and Hoaxeye (@HoaxEye) for their help.
A sweet tale, certainly. But that photo of an elephant carrying an exhausted lion cub to water was sadly fake. The photo of the elephant itself was real, but the lion cub and the lioness walking alongside had been digitally added by a prankster. If only!
In January 2018, Michael Wolff released the controversial book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that claimed to be an insider look inside the Trump administration. At the time, Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were in the middle of a rather cantankerous Twitter tit-for-tat about the size of red buttons. Consequently, many were amused by this photo of Jong Un reading the book with a wide grin adorning his face. But alas, the photo was totally fake.
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We’re not entirely sure why someone would take an old photo of people evacuating a hurricane and then go on to attribute it to a completely unrelated hurricane years later, but here we are. According to a caption, this viral photo claimed to show thousands of Americans escaping Hurricane Florence in September 2018 on the I-95. It doesn’t though, since the photo dated back to 2005 and shows people on the I-45 escaping Hurricane Rita.
When it comes to prolific fake photos used on social media, this is certainly up there. What the photo really shows is Mark Freidland, the Creative Director for Couture Communications who created the golden envelopes for the 2016 Oscars Ceremony, which is what he’s posing with here. However the photo is persistently stolen by Facebook scammers to promote fake competitions, namely ones that claim to offer free holidays. Many scammers even go as far as digitally adding different faces to Freidland’s body.
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Hurricane Michael hit the United States in October 2018 damaging large parts of Florida. As it hit, the above photo went viral claiming to show the hurricane as it moved through Panama City Beach. It doesn’t. It was taken a few miles down the road in Pensacola Beach, 3 months before Hurricane Michael hit US shores.
An impressive image, absolutely. This image spread prolifically during the latter part of 2018 when the state of California was ravaged by out of control wildfires. But it’s not a photo, rather it’s a composite of at least 3 different photos. The firefighter, the trees in the foreground and the fires in the background come from different photos, as HoaxEye tracked down here.
In mid-2018 this photo of performer Divine and Donald Trump with now ex-wife Ivana, and depicts Divine clearly looking rather unimpressed with the couple just behind. However it’s another composite image, since the image of Divine and the Trumps had been taken from two different photos from two unrelated events and subsequently merged together.
In 2018, UK far right activist Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) was arrested for contempt of court, spurring various protests in London. The above photo purports to show one such protest. You probably have guessed that it shows nothing of the sort.
It was taken 13 years before Robinson was arrested and it’s not London. It’s Liverpool, and shows football fans coming out for their teams open top bus parade after they won the Champions League that year. The bus is even visible in the bottom left of the photo. While Robinson’s arrest did really spark protests, the number of those attending were comparatively small when compared to the above photo.
In July 2018, the FBI arrested Maria Butina, on espionage charges. According to authorities, she was working on behalf of Russia and had attempted to develop relationships with various influential people inside the United States. As such, a photo of her in the Oval Office with the president during the Trump administration certainly wouldn’t look very good, especially considering the various investigations that the White House was/is facing at the time.
However, despite the captions attached to the above photo, the woman wasn’t Maria Butina at all, with many suspecting the woman is actually just an NSA staffer.
The most popular fake quote image of 2018 belongs to Winston Churchill himself, who absolutely never said this about anti-fascists.
And that’s it! How many did you see in 2018?