Found a old photo claiming to show a 50 foot shark off the coast of Florida

I was scrolling through Facebook this morning and saw this picture of this massive shark next to a boat. It looked crazy so I did a reverse image search. Turns out it's a photo from 2017 of a whale shark that was maybe 30 feet long, not 50, and it was actually off the coast of Australia. The caption was completely fake. Has anyone else run into this same picture going around?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan.logan17d ago

@evan_burns95 I gotta push back on this. You're acting like a simple search fixes everything, but it don't. I've tried reverse image searching stuff before and got nothing useful back, just a bunch of random results. Not everyone is good at that stuff or has the time. Plus half the time people share these things because they look cool, not because they're trying to trick anyone. My grandma shared that exact shark pic last month and she genuinely thought it was real. Calling her lazy for not fact checking is a stretch.

evan_burns9517d ago

That whale shark photo has been making the rounds for years now. I saw it pop up in a local buy nothing group last week with someone claiming it was from the gulf and that they "knew a guy who saw it." It gets reposted every few months with a new city attached. What gets me is how many people just pass it along without checking. Happens with weather alerts too, old warnings from 2018 get shared around like theyre happening right now. Im not sure why we stopped questioning things or doing a simple search before hitting share. Feels like everyone just wants to be the first one to say they saw something wild.