Earlier today I was searching for live information coming out of NYC about Sandy. The first place I checked was Instagram because if I was there I would be gramming up a storm.

After searching IG for #newyork my feed became flooded with regram after regram of this picture:


Then it was all over Facebook along with an image of soldiers guarding the Tomb of the Unnamed Soldier in the rain paired with a caption stating they were enduring Sandy's wrath as their duty to stand guard.

I was instantly skeptical that these were real, however I scoured the internet trying to find the truth.

Then I came across a BuzzFeed article that confirmed my suspicions that these pictures was fake and outlined 10 other Sandy picture lines.

Don't fall for these people's photoshop trickery!



USA Today's Mark Smith, Senior of Social Media Marketing, offers up this advice for picking out a fake:

(from his Facebook) A tip on photo-sleuthing for you as we see more and more Photoshopped Sandy images. You can take an image file and drop it into the search bar of Google Images. Just drag and drop. Google then searches the web for similar images, tracking down everywhere online it's been published before. This is what the search for the viral photo of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (which was actually taken in September) looks like.

Here's my advice:

• Don't get caught up in the hype with these types of things
• Think about the likely hood of what you're seeing
• Do some research to validate
• There's a 90% chance that what you're seeing is fake