October 30, 2012
As Hurricane Sandy approached land on Monday, social media
users were desperate for the kind of drama that was shown on CNN with Anderson
Cooper or FOX News with Shepard Smith. As
spoofers launched their hurricane photo schemes, the sharing frenzy
ensued. Over ten separate fake images
went viral, passed off as current Hurricane Sandy photos. “As of 5:00 p.m. EST, there had been over 7.1 million tweets in the past 24hours about the storm. And that was
before it made landfall.” At
least for the evening of the storm and night following, the fake photos
dominated over any current and real photos.
Snopes.com has debunked 10 photos in the following report:
Now the morning after, dozens of professional photographers
have had time to release scores of authentic and striking storm watching and
damage photographs. ABC currently has 131
photos in this online photo album: East
Coast Hit by Superstorm Sandy
On Monday, Kevin Systrom, the founder and chief executive of
Instagram told The New York Times that there were “10 pictures a second tagged with
#sandy or #hurricane flowing through the service. In total, more than 230,000 images are using
that hashtag".
