Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos
Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”
Image via Twitter
DELETE
Casual eyeball use should be enough to raise questions about this photo’s authenticity, but the picture blew up online anyway last Thursday after it was shared by popular Twitter account @History_Pics.
As user @JournoJenkins67 points out, the image is actually an altered version of a decidedly skateboard-less shot taken during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night.
Images via Twitter//h/t @PicPedant
DELETE
While most of the factoids in this dumb viral image are either misrepresented or grossly exaggerated (comparing the effects of caffeine to those of heroin is an especially absurd touch), the graphic’s claim about vomiting from “overwhelmingsweetness” has the distinction of being an outright falsehood.
“This statement is not true,” nutritional biologist Kimber Stanhope told Buzzfeed. “We have studied 100s of participants in our studies who consumed beverages that contained more than 10 teaspoons of sugar, but no phosphoric acid. Not one ever vomited due to the sweetness, and I don’t remember any of them ever reporting that they felt nauseated due to the sweetness.”
Even the image’s creator doesn’t stand by its claims, telling the website he isn’t sure “exactly how accurate that infographic is for every single person,” having lifted the text from a Blisstree blog post.
FORWARD
Fake X-ray photos are pretty much everywhere online, so it was easy to be suspicious of this photo that hit Reddit’s /r/pics page on Wednesday. The picture, however, shows a real CT scan produced by researchers working at Amsterdam’s Meander Medical Center in December.
“It was not uncommon for monks to practise self-mummification but to find a mummified monk inside a statue is really extraordinary,” paleontologist Wilfrid Rosendahl, who led the imaging project, told The Telegraph in February. “It’s the only known example in the world.”
Image via Twitter
DELETE
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! encouraged Facebook users to do the latter this week when it posted this photo supposedly showing the Great Pacific garbage patch, estimated by some to cover 5,800,000 square miles.
In reality, however, the garbage patch is an area polluted by small plastic particles that are not clearly visible to the naked eye, which is why there are no satellite images of a location “TWICE the size of the continental U.S.”
As Snopes explained on Monday, the above picture actually shows a beached vessel among debris scattered by the tsunami that hit northern Japan in 2011.
