They say the camera cannot lie. Regardless whether or not this was originally
meant literally or has always been laced with irony, now more than ever it is
clearly a falsehood, never more so than with the almost ubiquitous use of
Photoshop. We have become used to seeing magazines, movie posters and
billboards featuring film stars, models and celebrities whose images have been
Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives and these sort of images seem to
take up a significant portion of our Facebook News Feed too.
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| The picture on the left won a photography competition run by Nikon, but was subsequently shown to be an example of Photoshopping. Picture: Facebook. |
There is one that has been doing the rounds for a while and
which popped up again recently that purports to show a CCTV camera outside a
house where George Orwell once lived. Oh, the irony, the post proclaims, a
surveillance camera outside the one time home of an author whose most famous
work features the all seeing eye of Big Brother. Being somewhat sceptical about
the nature of this, I reverse Googled it[1],
and guess what? Yes, the house pops up on Google (it's on the Portobello Road
in Notting Hill) but if you look at Street View, there is no CCTV camera. There
may be some CCTV cameras in the area, but the nearest is apparently about 200
yards away.
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| This picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook. |
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| Same house, sans CCTV camera courtesy of Google Street View. |
Apart from the blatant Photoshopping of images to introduce
imaginary CCTV cameras, another fairly common sight on Facebook is the picture
with a caption making some outrageous claim, like the one below.
Again, a quick check searching on Google for the image
reveals that this incident has been somewhat exaggerated. The school, in
Maldon, Essex, did indeed prohibit the pupil wearing the wristband, but solely
because it violated the school's dress code, which says that children "are
not allowed to wear jewellery, and that includes wristbands, for health and
safety reasons because they could get caught." Whether you agree with that
or think it is "health and safety gone mad" is a completely different
matter from the fact that they did not ban it being worn in case it offended
Muslims.
Similarly, the story that Tesco refused to serve a soldier
in uniform for fear of offending Muslim customers is another hoax.
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| ...anything but the truth. |
Tesco were sufficiently concerned to issue a denial,
pointing out that they don't even have a store in Oak Street, London. In actual
fact, if you check your A-Z or Google Maps, you will find that in the whole of
London there is only one road called Oak Street, it's in Romford and there is
no Tesco there.
If your Facebook News Feed is anything like mine, I've no
doubt you also come across stories from time to time warning of scams,
carjackings, frauds and other nefarious goings on. You probably saw the
story that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was giving away millions of dollars
to random Facebook users. This one was perhaps too big for anyone to swallow
and it was quickly debunked, but other stories, stories that have more credence
but which are essentially untrue, spread through social media with incredible
speed and spread; here are a few I have seen recently.
There's the one about the rat urine for a start. The story
alleges that a family (unnamed) on a picnic (location not disclosed) fell ill
after drinking from soft drink cans contaminated when rodents urinated on the
lids and that one of them died from Leptospirosis, a potentially fatal illness
contracted by exposure to the urine of diseased animals. This story began
circulating in 1998 and while it is probably prudent to give a soft drinks can
a clean before drinking directly from it, there is no evidence that the events
described in the story have ever happened.
Likewise there is the tale of a lady being approached by a
man in a shopping centre car park and being asked if they would like to sample
some perfume, perfume which turns out to be some substance that induces
immediate unconsciousness resulting in the victim being robbed. Now this story
dates back to 1999, when a woman in Alabama claims to have been the victim of a
robbery that was perpetrated in this manner. Toxicology tests on the victim
found no trace of any drugs and there are no credible reports of people being
robbed in this manner. Outside the pages of fiction it is unlikely that an
airborne drug, in the outdoors, could immediately incapacitate someone, well
not without similarly incapacitating the person delivering it..unless they were
wearing a gas mask, which might provoke some suspicion on the part of the
victim, don't you think?
Then there is the story of the woman who is driving along
when she is pulled over by what she initially assumes is an unmarked police car.
Concerned that this may be a carjacking, the woman attempts to call the police
using her mobile phone, but has no signal. Quickly, she dials 112 and is
connected to the police, who rapidly surround her and the other car; the man in
the unmarked car, the story alleges, is a convicted rapist. This story has been
debunked by Dorset police (the incident described was supposed to have happened
in Dorset)[2]
and while it is true that calling 112 (or 999) from your mobile will connect to
any available network if your provider's network is not available, if
there are no networks available at all, then there's no way of making the call.
Some stories do have a grain of truth, however. But even
these suggest that a single incident, that may have happened many years ago, is
still occurring regularly. Take the tale of the courier and the unexpected
gift. This states that the victim receives a phone call from a courier company
telling them that a package is being delivered for which they have to sign.
Shortly afterwards a courier arrives with a basket of flowers and a bottle of
wine, but because alcohol is involved and the courier must prove delivery to an
adult of legal drinking age, a small credit card payment is required. The courier
produces a Chip and Pin device, takes a nominal payment and hey presto, the
victim's card is cloned and their bank account emptied. This actually happened
to a number of people in Sydney, Australia in 2008 and subsequently a man named
David Hennessey was charged with stealing A$30,000 from various local
residents. Since then no similar events have been reported but the story
continues to circulate, with various other Australian cities, together with
cities in Canada and Asia being named as locations for comparable frauds, so
while the warning may have had some validity eight years ago, its continued
repetition makes it outdated and redundant.
Finally, there's the tale of Dorval, a suburb of Montreal,
where in 2015, the mayor is supposed to have refused to remove pork from the
menu in school cafeterias despite demands from Muslim parents to do so. This is
just a subtly altered version of a similar story set in Belgium that is equally
untrue. The city of Dorval denied such claims on their website and the mayor of
the town of Ath in Belgium was moved to make a similar denial when the story about his town began
circulating in 2013. Neither mayor ever received any such requests to remove
pork from school canteen menus.
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| From www.ville.dorval.qc.ca |
Apart from the obvious harm and distress that urban myths
like these spread when they get shared and start to become widely believed,
they can be also like the boy who cried wolf, and real warnings may be
dismissed. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction, after
all so much information on the internet gets plagiarised and checking for the
veracity of a story can be tricky; just because two apparently independent
websites report the same story doesn't make it true. Too often one site may
publish a story based on false information on another site without enough
checking taking place.
They say that the only thing you should believe in a
newspaper is the date, and that you should check that first. Same goes for the
internet.
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