Fakes here! Fakes there! Fakes everywhere! Today we have five more photos you may have seen passing through the giant digestive tract known as the internet recently. But don’t be fooled. These are all fake.
1. Is this a photo of empty store shelves in Venezuela?
This photo went viral last week when some people claimed that those empty shelves were a product of Venezuela’s socialist policies. The embarrassing part? It’s not a photo from Venezuela. It’s from Texas.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin recently wrote an article criticising presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders and his quest for what she characterised as Venezuelan-style socialism. When The National Review originally posted the story, it included the image above — a dirtied up version of the original photo, which you can see below. But as the blog Little Green Footballs points out, the pic actually comes from a Walmart in Austin, Texas.
Apparently the photo was taken in the lead up to Hurricane Rita in 2005, as anxious shoppers stripped the shelves of nearly everything. So it’s an understatement to say that The National Review‘s original caption for the photo, “Venezuela’s vibrant economy”, was more than a little misleading.
As Malkin points out on Twitter, she didn’t choose the photo, The National Review did. Her column is syndicated by a number of different news outlets and each chooses their own art to accompany any given post. Now the question is, where did The National Review pull the image from?
Picture: National Review
2. Is this a Six Flags amusement park in Texas underwater?
The recent flooding in Texas has been devastating to local communities. We’ve seen some chilling photos come out of the Lone Star state. But the photo above isn’t one of them. The image actually shows an Atlanta theme park that was flooded back in 2009.
Yes, the photo is real. But like so many images that we see floating around social media after natural disasters, this one doesn’t show the thing it purports to show.
Fake image via McCartyConnor
3. Is this Ted Cruz trying to find a clitoris?
We’re just 525 days from the 2016 presidential election, so you know what that means… BRING ON THE POLITICAL FAKES!
The latest in political fakery? In the photo above, Ted Cruz supposedly points at an illustration of a vagina, unable to identify the clitoris. If such an image sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. This fake was make by a chucklegoof site known as 16 Inch City.
Other gems from this Chicago-based knock off of The Onion include, “Rahm Emmanuel vows to destroy Jesus” and “BREAKING: Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to be re-named ‘Ugly Person Express’”. Classy stuff, 16 Inch City.
Fake image via @ChiefElk by 16inchcity
4. Is this Jimi Hendrix playing an accordion?
I guess 2015 will be known as the year that OldPicsArchive overtook HistoryInPics as the Worst Twitter Account Ever™. At least when HistoryInPics gets called out for posting garbage, it only rarely posts that image again. OldPicsArchive doesn’t seem to care. Take, for example, this old fake that keeps popping up.
No, that’s not really Jimi Hendrix playing an accordion in his boxer shorts. It’s a crudely done photoshop job. The original photo is on the right. For whatever reason, people love to photoshop accordions into Hendrix’s hands. Just take a look at this one from a website called Worth 1000.
Fake image via OldPicsArchive
5. Is this a photo from the Texas floods?
Hold on to yer butts — we have another fake photo from Texas. When a news station in Houston asked viewers for photos from the flooding, they received a number of breathtaking shots. But one image that they wound up publishing looked a little out of place.
Is the photo above from the flooding in Texas and Oklahoma that has claimed the lives of 28 people? Nope. It’s a screenshot from the original Jurassic Park movie.
Fake image via Reddit and KHOU