Disaster, duplicity and deception
Posted: March 12th, 2011 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Back stories, Ethics | Tags: Ethics, Manipulation | 9 Comments »God only knows how someone could watch scenes like those which played out live on TV yesterday, showing a tsunami striking Japan, and then go about doctoring photographs of such a disaster for their own twisted entertainment.
As the tsunami made landfall in the north of the country TV pictures show it didn’t so much as blink. The ocean swamped low-lying farmlands at a speed too great for those on the coastal motorways to outrun it but cruelly, just slow enough for them to be able to try.
And within minutes started the falsifications, misrepresentations and internet hoaxes.
Most major news incidents these days are followed quickly by an avalanche of photographs distributed by the public through means like Twitter and Facebook, and they are often first off the mark. Indeed in the case of yesterday’s tsunami there were pictures on Twitter more than an hour before anything became available through the news wire services.
But as was the case following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Haitian earthquake, the recent North Queensland cyclone and a list as long as your arm of other disasters, you just don’t know if what you’re looking at is real. There will be dozens of pictures claiming to be what they’re not, and scores more that are simply Photoshop fakery.
So when it comes to social media sourced photographs we are forced to take the view, at least in the first instance, that if a picture seems too good to be true then it probably is.
You do your own investigating and you wait for third-party corroboration (or otherwise) to help you decide. And after time the internet tends to self-correct these things, too.
The photograph’s standing as a document of record has always been pretty solid. But social media abusers are issuing it a bit of a challenge right now and there are many cases of publishers taking the bait. In most instances that’s because they’ve placed the desire to be first above an insistence on being right.
The Kobe earthquake of 1995, misrepresented on Twitpic as a picture from yesterday’s earthquake.
If you were in a position to shoot this one, you wouldn’t have been in a position to post it to the internet afterwards.
Probably real (and possibly a dust storm in Australia), but not Japan and not yesterday’s tsunami.
This is just amateur-hour, but some are taken in by it.
Another misrepresentation.
Likely to be a real a tropical storm off Queensland with water spouts from 2009, but certainly not the very first picture of the 2011 Cyclone Yasi as the person who posted it to Twitpic claimed at the time.
Not Haiti as claimed. Real, just repurposed.
The rest were published as depictions of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. They’re real photographs but what they actually show are tourists gathering to watch the results of a tidal bore on the Qian Tang Jian River in Hangzhou, China.
It’s not difficult to see a scenario whereby a lot of damage could be done very quickly..
There have been no confirmation from any of the major news sources northe USGS about the eruption.
The video was posted this morning, but it is not from the past few days.
The video is from January. Unfortunately, many were commenting on it as if the volcano actually erupted last night.
Comments have been disabled.
The tweet:
Large Volcano Has Just Erupted In #Japan This Morning: http://bit.ly/ezUalT
It’s instances like this which erode the credibility of legitimate news sources.
Someone scanned a photo of a tornado going by the Statue of Liberty. Tweeted it, and Time.com picked up the photo and retweeted it. It went out of control after that. The photo was originally shot in 1976.
Seems we all should be vigilant of misrepresentation.
Here’s the Link to the story:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/09/trick_play_statue_of_liberty_t.html