Photographs go viral every day. Thanks to social media, photos can be easily shared with thousands of people, even if they’re first posted by people with an otherwise unimpressive social medial presence. Just one photo can get them all the clicks and recognition needed to officially go viral!
With tools like Photoshop, it’s incredibly easy to create a photo of something awe-inspiring to attract likes, shares and online brownie points. Sometimes, however, photos that we thought were genuine turn out to be completely fake. These are some of the most infamous photoshopped sensations…
1. This man was hailed a hero for “narrowly escaping death by shark”. Except there was no shark…
2. Contrary to what the photo suggests, Einstein was not riding a bike in Nevada during this explosion…
3. 2014 was a much simpler time when the Twitter believed in the existence of blue watermelons…
4. You’ll find Ireland’s Castle Island in Dublin. Only you won’t. And you won’t find it anywhere else either…
Fake photos are all over the Internet, but most of us will go our whole lives thinking that they’re real! Scroll down to be schooled on the world’s most famous fake photos…
Anyone who watched Tom and Jerry when they were a kid should remember the lion from the Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo – the lion that roared before every episode. Well, the lion in this next photo is not the Tom and Jerry lion…
5. This lion isn’t the showbiz icon the photograph on the left suggests, he was simply getting an MRI scan!
6. Like blue melons, jet black lions don’t exist…
7. I’m sure the faint-hearted are thanking God as we speak that this picture’s a fake!
8. Anyone who believed this photo was real should hang their head in shame…
Photos that turn out to be nothing but fakes can be terribly disappointing if they feature something incredible or inspiring. But do the people behind these hoaxes care about your disappointment? Nope, they’re too busy reveling in their newfound online attention
9/11 was devastatingly unprecedented which was why we were willing to believe anything remotely related to it. A lot of us believed this next photo was real…
9. After 9/11, all kinds of fake photos gained visibility but none more so than this one…
10. This would be a much cooler fake photo if you could see an imprint of the baby’s face instead…
11. I think we were all just desperate to laugh mercilessly at George Bush…
12. Heath Ledger was a joker onscreen and off, but he certainly wasn’t an avid skateboarder…
People have been duped into believing that these impressive pictures were one in a million. So whenever you see a photo gaining popularity on the Internet, and it features something extraordinary, it’s probably too good to be true. As Abraham Lincoln famously said “don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.”
