Golden Gate bridge moved to Lisbon overnight!!

People living in Lisbon were surprised to see the Golden Gate bridge connecting their city with the highway to Porto and Spain this morning. To decrease trade deficits with Portugal the state of California decided to sell the Golden Gate bridge to Lisbon and shipped it to the Portugese city overnight.

If you look closely you’ll see that, in this case, both pictures are real but show different bridges.. These two bridges (Golden Gate Bridge on the left and the 25 de Abril Bridge on the right) are just look-a-likes and the resemblance is uncanny. So we’re sorry to break it to you, but no bridge was shipped to Portugal.. think about the logistics to start with.

We wrote this story to show how fake news websites often use photoshopped imagery and fabricated pictures to fool you into believing crazy stories. Like we tried to fool you with our crazy story. Take this picture for example:

“On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur went down over eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. U.S. officials have stated that the plane was shot down, based on intelligence capabilities monitoring the area. Shortly after the downing of that airliner, the image displayed above was circulated via Facebook and other social media sites with captions identifying it as a picture of the “crashed” Flight 17.

However, the image displayed above has nothing to do with that tragedy (a fact which should be obvious given that eastern Ukraine is nowhere near a tropical beach). It’s a screen shot from the 2004 pilot episode of the ABC television series Lost (in which survivors of a plane crash are forced to work together in order to survive on a seemingly deserted tropical island) that someone has altered by replacing the logo and markings of the fictional Oceanic Airlines used in that TV series with those of Malaysia Airlines.” – Snopes

Another example is this fake picture of a shark supposedly swimming in the streets of Houston after Hurricane Irene:

Scary stuff, right? So what can we do to verify imagery online? There are a couple of tools you can use to check images and find out whether they’re real or not:

Google reverse image search (a great way to find the source of an image)

– Izitru (a tool that can detect whether a image is edited or not)

Reversee (a reverse image search app that allows you to crop images and utilizes different search engines)

But the best tool to use is our common-sense: Stories which are too crazy to be real, are often just too crazy!

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