How sure can we be of images of Aleppo shared on social media?

Published December 15th, 2016 - 11:47 GMT
Young Aleppo reporter Bana al-Abed checks her Twitter account (Thaer Mohammed/AFP)
Young Aleppo reporter Bana al-Abed checks her Twitter account (Thaer Mohammed/AFP)

The world has watched in horror as events have unfolded in Aleppo this week.

As regime forces retake the regime-held districts of the city, there have been reports of militias allied to Assad’s regime executing civilians on the spot. Meanwhile, young women have suggested they will commit suicide for fear of being raped and desperate residents have pleaded for international help under an unceasing artillery barrage.

Social media has served as an effective tool to allow those outside the region to witness the suffering of Syrians, and to hear their accounts first hand. Bana Al-Abed, a seven-year-old girl who has been reporting the struggles of daily life in East Aleppo to her Twitter following of 300,000, is a clear example of the power of social media in reporting on war.

However, the social media reporter is not held to the same standards of accountability as the traditional journalist. Individuals rarely give sources for their information or images, and when a claim is shared hundreds of thousands of times it gains a certain credibility, regardless of its origin.

When the stakes are so high for the civilians of East Aleppo, trapped without food, water or medical supplies, it is crucial that we investigate the integrity of claims made on Twitter and Facebook.

One page on Facebook, “Masterpieces of Political Literature”, has alleged yesterday that some social media users have been sharing pictures taken during other conflicts labeled incorrectly as being recent images from Aleppo.

An entire album of images fabricated in record time about what is happening in Aleppo... Why does the petrodollar media lie to Arab viewers?? Where are the ethics, credibility and sanctity of truth in the news??

The album compares recent social media posts about suffering in Aleppo with old news articles about events in Gaza, Mosul and elsewhere in Syria which allegedly use the same photos.

When the Loop looked into the contents of the album, it was unable to find a number of the alleged social media posts and news reports, indicating that they either never existed, or have since been deleted.

Nonetheless, worryingly, some of the posts did appear to have drawn their photographs not from Aleppo, but rather from previous incidents elsewhere in the region.

One graphic set of photographs, which shows the body of a young child with extensive head injuries, has been retweeted over 800 times under the caption “Save Aleppo”. However, the same image can be seen in an article on the “Sola Press” website dated July 7 2014, which describes casualties of the bombardment of Gaza by Israel.

Meanwhile the following image supposedly from Aleppo was shared in April:

Yet, the same image is used in an article on the Arabi 21 website from March about events in Iraq’s Mosul.

This image of a doctor crying, supposedly from Aleppo, was tweeted on Tuesday:

Even the doctors in Aleppo are crying because of their helplessness

It seems, instead, to come from events in Gaza from 2014:

This little girl running among bodies caught people’s attention yesterday on Twitter:

However, it appears in fact to be a screenshot from the music video for the song “The Arab Spring” by singer Hiba Tawaji:

An image of two rescue workers carrying the lifeless bodies of children from rubble has been widely shared by those commenting on events in Aleppo. However, this same image is included in an article from a Turkish newspaper from January 2015 on the bombardment of Gaza by Israel.

It is not just on social media that images have been mislabeled as depicting the Syrian war. At a recent UN Security Council meeting, the Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Bashar Jaafari held up a photo of a soldier helping a woman, claiming it was from Syria. "This is what the Syrian army is doing in Aleppo," he said. However, it soon emerged that the picture was in fact of an Iraqi soldier in Fallujah.

In this complex web of unattributed images, it is difficult for ordinary social media users to identify the correct origins of a particular photo. There is, of course, the possibility that some media reports, including those referenced here, have themselves misleadingly used pictures. What is important is that tweeters ensure that news and images have come from verified and trustable media sources before unthinkingly sharing them.

It seems wrong, and an insult to the estimated 500,000 who have died in the Syrian conflict, to share incorrectly attributed depictions of distress, when there is so much real suffering going on.

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