Attention, Floridians: The state of our state today is wet enough. Please stop posting old photos.If you've been on Facebook or Twitter these past couple of days — in other words, if you haven't been living under a wifi-less rock — you've no doubt seen photos of local flooding. Photos, perhaps, of a couple floating in inner tubes along Bayshore or paddling a kayak. Photos, perhaps, that news outlets used last year, or the year before. Or the year before that.
That isn't stopping anyone — including news outlets and local politicians — from posting the photos as if they took them this morning. And once a great flood photo gets posted on social media, it's like getting red wine out of white carpet: Impossible.
Wayne Garcia, a former Creative Loafing news and politics editor who now teaches journalism at the University of South Florida, criticized the reposting of old photos on his Facebook page this morning. He noted how some of the most widely shared photos "go back to 2012 or 2010," but "everyone, including TBO and the mayor, have retweeted as if they are current breaking depictions of the Bayshore."
(Note: If you are interested in checking out some dramatic flooding photos taken in the aftermath of today's floods, check out this cool photo essay photographer Todd Bates took earlier today.)
Garcia recommended that everyone do a quick google image search using sort-by-date option before posting.
Egregious examples he pointed to included a shot from June (with the cars on the sidewalk) and the aforementioned shot of two people rafting along Bayshore appeared on Izismile.com in June 2012 in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Debby.
Oh, Internet.
If a five-second image search seems too inconvenient, here's a tip: If you didn't take it, don't post it.
For Garcia, the news media's irresponsible sharing of photos taken years ago is far worse than that of the casual social media user. But people responsible for providing the public service of filtering out rumor and inaccuracy for the general public really ought to know better.
"It i s so easy for people on social media, either knowingly or unknowingly, to Google for pictures and think they are sharing legit breaking news," Garcia said in a Facebook message to CL. "But I was really surprised by the lack of institutional memory, because I remembered all three of these photos from previous incarnations."