A badly edited image depicting President Donald Trump “rescuing” hurricane survivors has been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook.
New York Times reporter Kevin Roose highlighted the Photoshopped image purported to show the president rescuing a man during Hurricane Florence.
As Roose pointed out, the real photo was of rescuers helping a man in Central Texas in 2015.
Roose noted that the image has been shared over 275,000 times on Facebook.
A photoshopped picture depicting Trump rescuing people during Hurricane Florence has been shared 275,000 times on Facebook. The original is from Texas flooding in 2015.
— Kevin Roose
“Tellingly, the President is pictured wearing a suit and no life vest — an unlikely scenario in a dangerous flood,” added the fact-checking site Snopes. “Presidents also generally do not personally take part in rescue operations after disasters.”
“The image, unsurprisingly, was digitally altered,” they added. “The original can be found on CNN‘s website and depicts three rescuers with the Austin Fire Department reaching out to help a man clinging to a chain link fence out of the water.”
“And though the president has thrown paper towels at hurricane victims, you could argue that a MAGA hat isn’t the most helpful thing to offer a person stranded in waist-high water,” adds HuffPost‘s David Moye.
Roose questioned why Facebook does not have a system to root out such fake images.
Facebook already uses image hashing/fingerprinting to prevent repeat uploads of e.g. revenge porn. Seems like it would be easy to prevent fake photos from going viral.
— Kevin Roose
