It's great to see the outpouring of support for the victims of Hurricane Harvey. But many well-intentioned people are sharing phony photos.
The damage to Houston is devastating, and some of the pictures we have been seeing of rescues will pull at your heartstrings. But not all of them are real: some are hoaxes that you should not be sharing.
Many people now use tragedies as a way to get social media likes and to get a post of theirs to go viral, according to the Washington Post. Unfortunately, it works.
The most shared fake hurricane Harvey photo -- with over 100,000 retweets – was a shark swimming down a Houston freeway. Except it wasn't: it is a photoshopped photo.
Ditto for the airplanes underwater at Houston Hobby Airport; that was a mockup of what flooding could possibly do to New York airports.
The family fleeing in a floating refrigerator? That's from an older flood.
And former President Obama dishing out meals to Hurricane Harvey vicitms? That was a Thanksgiving meal 2 years ago.
And the supposed picture of Hurrricane Harvey approaching from the sea? It was also claimed to be Hurricane Matthew, Ike, and Katrina...and it wasn’t real in any case.
