With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake.
This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes.
The fakes come in three varieties: 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy, 2) Photoshopped images that are straight up fake, and 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photoshopped pictures being trotted out again.
This is an example of the first category. This photo of the George Washington Bridge was taken in 2009 and is sold on Getty Images, Eliot Bentley points out.
Here we see an example of the third variety: an old, Photoshopped image that's been cropped up for more than half a decade. This Statue of Liberty shot was actually created by merging a supercell image from Nebraska with one from New York. Snopes had long ago done the investigation on this.
Here we see midtown Manhattan in a real photograph ... taken in 2011. This photograph first ran in the Wall Street Journal, as sleuthed by IsTwitterWrong.
Here we see the Old Guard, which guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The photograph is absolutely real, but it was taken in September, as the Old Guard's Twitter feed has been pointing out this afternoon.
Not every stunning image is fake, though. Here's one from Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood. The person who took this photograph, Nick Cope, has confirmed that it was taken today. And there is corroborating evidence both from local officials and journalists that Red Hook streets are flooding, particularly in this warehouse district (which I actually know well).
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Updates (These Will Be Rolling)
Below, we see a still from movie, The Day After Tomorrow, which has had a New York TV logo superimposed on it to fool people.
Thanks to @nathanjurgenson, @edyong209, @discoverymag, @neve_science_wx, @kathyf, @KateRoseMe, @harmonicait, @NigadamaSoup, and @sebprovencher for their help rounding up images.
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