“A shark on the street” is attributed this time to Hurricane “Florence”

The photo of a shark was presented as proof that Hurricane Florence “brought sharks” to the streets in the US state of North Carolina. The same montage was used in August 2017, after Hurricane Harvey.

Several media from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia misinformed the public with a fake photo of a shark swimming in a flooded street, which Hurricane Florence allegedly brought to the shores of the US state of North Carolina.

With Hurricane Florence, sharks arrived on the streets

The Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Serbian media took this claim for granted without any verification, and using an “edited” photo, they massively shared allegations about the occurrence of sharks on the streets of American cities.

The claim that the hurricane brought sharks appears in the headlines of numerous articles. However, the text does not say anything about it, and was used as a clickbait and an excuse to publish a “shocking photo”.

The edited photo was shared by Scottish journalist and blogger Jason Michael McCann in 2017 and 2018 via his Twitter account to “troll” the Americans. The 2017 “tweet” claimed that the photo was taken in Texas after Hurricane Harvey and was shared 84,000 times, while this year’s “tweet” was shared by just over 6,000 tweeters.

In 2017, USA Today wrote, with all the misinformation, about Hurricane Harvey – including this one, while the Huffington Post wrote about this year’s “fake shark”.

The same photo appeared when Hurricanes Irene, Sandy and Matthew hit an urban zone in the US, and each time the media reported that it was a fake photo: The Star – Irene, 2011; Mashable – Sandy, 2012; BuzzFeed News – Matthew, 2016.

Due to the fabricated claim that has no basis in the text and the use of fake photos, the article is rated as clickbait and fake news.

We contacted all the websites with an impressum, and informed them that this is fake news.

(Author: Biljana Livančić-Milić, Raskrinkavanje.ba)