In the wake of Hurricane Florence photos began circulating of a hog farm under water, with dead, bloated pigs bobbing about.
Some of these photos were incorrectly captioned, claiming they were taken in the aftermath of Florence. (The posts received hundreds of thousands of shares on Facebook before being rated by third-party fact checkers.) The aerial photos were actually taken after Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
However, one photo of floating dead pigs that circulated is hard to describe as “false” because it went around without a clear caption clarifying where the photo originated. “Y’all stay away from that pork for awhile” the caption read, receiving 92,000 shares on Facebook.
Because so many other photos of animals stranded after Florence were circulating in the way of the hurricane, many of the 3,200 comments believed this was a photo of pigs who drowned during Florence.
In fact, the photo comes from Thanh Hóa, a city in Vietnam, after catastrophic flooding in 2017. But the caption does not claim the image is related to Florence flooding. So what is a fact-checker to do?
Does the timing of the image (posted just after Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas) change the context enough to warrant a “mixture” rating? Or should the image and caption be treated as separate from the complete misunderstanding of the thousands of shares and commenters?
The caption suggests that this photo was recent: “Y’all stay away from that pork for awhile.”
Thus, it deserves a mixture rating seeing as how the pigs died in 2017 and not recently as the caption suggests.
This highlights one of the ways in which photos can be used to guide individuals into believing they regard X when really the context was Y.
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