In the wake of the devastating cyclone and floods that have swept parts of the country, images of stranded villages and destroyed homes have gone viral on Myanmar’s social networks this week.
But some of them aren’t real. Or at least they’re not from this disaster.
Take the above image of a young girl neck-deep in water, clinging onto a tree, which was shared widely on Facebook.
It’s actually from the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. All you need to do is download an extension for Google called ‘Search by Image’ which lets you use the search engine to look for any picture on the web.
After that’s installed, when you see any image, you can right-click and press ‘search image on Google’.
If it’s not real, you might see a screen like this:
When you scroll down through the search results, you can see that the image was posted in 2013, and earlier, so it can’t possibly have been taken this week.
Tutorial over – enjoy de-bunking!
