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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHoula massacre picture mistake
Last weekend the news agenda was dominated by reports from Syria of more than 100 people being massacred in the town of Houla.
For about 90 minutes on Sunday, the BBC News website illustrated its story about what had happened with a picture of shrouded bodies in neat rows, with a child jumping over one of the rows.
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Except that it's not from this incident at all, but was taken almost a decade earlier, in Iraq, by professional photographer Marco Di Lauro, who works for Getty Images.
The picture was first spotted as it circulated on Twitter, the social networking site, on Sunday, apparently sourced from activists in Syria, triggering our process for checking user-generated content.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2012/05/houla_massacre_picture_mistake.html
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)This photo kerfluffle is a good illustration why.
In the Middle East conflicts, it seems more a tool of propaganda for people to advance their causes.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)knows that, and publish it in the press, or even on DU, without checking the source. This happened re Libya also. People claiming to be 'rebels' used Twitter, breathlessly sending tweets about what was happening on the ground, but even ordinary people questioned who they were and where they were, and eventually those doubts were verified when the most prominent of them disappeared. After people began to question if they were even in Libya at all.
Those with an interest in controlling the news, use the social media and people should know that. So, I'm not sure why a credible news agency would take something from Twitter as fact. This photo was questioned last week, airc. There are credible journalists on Twitter. But it seems this was taken without question from an unknown source. Very foolish.
Twitter is like any other form of social media. Or like the local Mall, you need to set it up to follow people who are credible if you want to use it as a source of news. No one should use an unknown source. The fault is with the news agency, not Twitter.