Social media have proven useful in popular uprisings around the world. But with a lack of context and verification or driven by a desire to push an agenda, these platforms can also be used to paint false scenes of what’s actually happening on the ground.
Case in point: the anti-government protests in Venezuela.
While there’s plenty of footage accurately depicting the streets of capital city Caracas, there was no photoshopping or editing needed for those on either side to manipulate opinion.
Since opponents of President Nicolás Maduro began taking to the streets of Caracas earlier this month, at least 13 people have been killed and more than 150 injured.
Maduro has all but blocked media coverage deemed to be in opposition to his government and has used state-run media to denounce his opponents.
Several photos purporting to be from the protests are from other demonstrations – some of them from years earlier, such as this 2010 photo. According to Global Post, the giveaway is that this Agence-France Presse depicts the Metropolitan Police, which were replaced with the Bolivarian National Police in 2009.
O’Riordan said one such example is an photo of a woman, wearing a blue bra, being dragged and stomped on by Egyptian military men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.
“That was one of the most famous social media images of all time. To see that being reposted was a bit odd,” O’Riordan said.
“If you feel that something is off or almost too dramatic to be true, it often usually is when it’s being widely shared,” O’Riordan told Global News in a phone interview. He said viewers need exercise a degree of skepticism.
It’s all too easy to just click and share the image, he said. “It’s a regular occurrence. We see it almost daily in our work.”
Many Twitter users are often quick to dismiss bogus images themselves, but that doesn’t mean everyone is wise to misrepresentation.
Some of the false images shared on Twitter were retweeted and shared thousands of times.
“I suppose it’s a human weakness, in some cases, where the context is played down because the instance is so dramatic,” he said.
This photo from June 2013 protests in Rio de Janeiro, spurred by a transit fare hike, has been retweeted more than 7,400 times since Feb. 16.
Then there’s the a five-year-old image of a government rally in Caracas, tweeted on Feb. 15. It came from an account that appears to belong to Jorge Luis Rodríguez, mayor of Caracas’ Libertador district.
There was a massive pro-government rally in the capital last week, but it was three days after Rodríguez’ tweet.
At the Feb. 18 demonstration, thousands of people who were reported to be members of the country’s oil workers’ union donned the red caps and flags of Maduro’s United Socialist party and rallied outside the presidential palace in Miraflores.
(The image above was tweeted from the verified account of Venezuela’s TelesurTV and retweeted from the verified account of President Nicolás Maduro)
READ MORE: Competing rallies grip Venezuela after days of violence
But the image tweeted from the @JRodriguezPSUV account, which has more than 22,200 followers, was attached to a message that translates to mean “#WeAretheArmyofPeace Since the fascists intend to destabilize the country, we fight for peace and life,” was posted days prior to that.
As PolicyMic noted, in the top left corner of the image there is a giant Pepsi balloon atop a building. That balloon is no longer there: Rodríguez had it taken down in 2010.
One of the things to look out for is who is sharing images, O’Riordan said.
This image of two rows of bodies, purportedly student protesters killed in the city of Maracay, was shared on Twitter on Feb. 16.
The image is from Aleppo, Syria, was taken in 2012 and has more bodies in it than the total number of people confirmed dead as of Feb. 24. The poster, Jonathan Mora, is located in Mexico, according to his Twitter account.
He said doing a reverse image search using Google images or search engines such as TinEye will help viewers determine the origins of the picture.
Here are some images from the most recent scenes of protest in Venezuela via The Associated Press and Getty Images
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