Viral Photos are fake...

Stop Sharing Those Viral Photos of the Amazon Burning

They’re fake.

ABIGAIL WEINBERG

The hashtag #AmazonRainforest was trending on Twitter Wednesday, with many users outraged that the mainstream media was not sufficiently reporting on the fires that have ravaged the world’s largest rainforest. There are very real fires burning in the Amazon and they do deserve more coverage, but there’s a big problem with this viral campaign: Most of the photos claiming to show the fires are fakes.

The Amazon has experienced more than 80 percent more fires in 2019 than in the same period last year, according to a National Institute for Space Research (INPE) report from August 2019. Many of them were started by farmers deliberately clearing land for cattle ranching, Reuters reports, and they have increased since Jair Bolsonaro, who is unsympathetic to rainforest preservation efforts, took office as president of Brazil in January.

On Monday, an ominous cloud of smoke from the fires settled over Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

But many of the viral images that purportedly show the blazes are actually from different fires.

This photo below, which has been retweeted more than 16,000 times, was posted on a climate website called ALERT in February 2019 and also appears at the 7:55 mark in this 2018 presentation about climate change. Climate website ClimateBrief credits the image to Alamy Stock Photo.

None of the photos in the viral photoset below fairly represents the current Amazon fires. The first, top left, depicts a forest fire in California and was uploaded to the US Department of Agriculture’s Flickr account in 2013. The second does depict a fire in the Amazon, but dates back to 1989, according to the Guardian. The third photo on the bottom left is a copy of the image I mentioned above. Finally, the fourth is a digital map of South American fires from news website InfoAmazonia, and while it ostensibly represents the locations and frequency of forest fires in the Amazon, it is cropped to omit the key, which shows that the shaded areas represent the frequency of fires between 2000 and 2012, and the yellow areas represent fires from 2000 to 2014.