Fakes

Inside the Color Factory: My Chat With a Photo Colorizer

Dana Keller is a colorizer. He takes old black-and-white photos and applies his digital paintbrush, transforming them into a new work of art. Colorization of old photos isn’t new, but it’s becoming increasingly popular on forums like Reddit’s r/ColorizedHistory, where people share their colorized creations. But how do these new works affect our understanding of…

Are Colorized Photos Rewriting History?

There’s been an explosion in the number of colorized photos lately. People find old black-and-white photos online, and meticulously add color to give us a new perspective on history. But recently one colorized image caught my eye after it was tweeted by the notoriously inaccurate HistoryInPics. It’s a stunningly colorful view of the Golden Gate…

11 More Fake Viral Images

Another day, another fake image getting passed around as real. Today we have everything from posing puppies to sketchy satellites to underwater trains that are just too good to be true. Always remember the first rule of viral image safety: be aware before you share. 1) Is this Los Angeles during the 1994 blackout? Much…

Mind-blowing video shows how humans are basically bad copies of amoebas

Vsauce, the master answerer of life’s toughest questions and professional blower of minds, tackles something so philosophical in his latest video that you’ll start to wonder what in the hell our purpose is on this Earth. And if it’s any different than a purpose of a rock. It starts with the discussion of art and…

No, That’s Not the Oldest Message In a Bottle. This Is.

Recently a 101-year-old message in a bottle was found off the coast of Germany. The bottle was tossed into the Baltic Sea back in 1913 and was discovered this year by fishermen (pictured above) who then donated it to a local museum. Just about every news outlet is saying that it’s the oldest message in…

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Fake

The fakes just keep on coming. And frankly it’s hard to keep up with all the internet-fueled deception. Today we’re taking a look at a few more dubious images that you may have seen floating around the web recently. Punking Putin? Airplane selfies? Rocket to Uranus? Fake, fake, and definitely fake. 1) Is this a…

15 Faked Miniature Photographs

Tilt-shift photography wasn’t invented to transform real world scenes into small scale models, but who’s complaining? Here are 15 faked miniatures, by you. https://gizmodo.com/shooting-challenge-tilt-shift-1542972565 Winner: Tiny Texas Tech My first Shooting Challenge. Stadium architecture always fascinates me. Photo of Jones AT&T Stadium on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. Camera: Canon EOS…

9 Albert Einstein Quotes That Are Totally Fake

As Albert Einstein once said, “Don’t believe every quote you read on the internet, because I totally didn’t say that.” Today would have been Einstein’s 135th birthday, and to celebrate, we have nine quotes incorrectly attributed to Einstein that you may have seen swirling around the internet lately. They’re all fake. 1. The definition of…

24 Hours of UberFacts: So Many Lies, So Little Time

With about 6.3 million Twitter followers, UberFacts reaches millions of people with little nuggets of trivia every day. Unfortunately, many of those “fun facts” are completely wrong or misleading. I dredged up every UberFacts tweet from yesterday—all 64 of them, from midnight to midnight PST—and did a bit of fact-checking. The results weren’t encouraging. (Buzzfeed,…

That Fake Hoverboard Was Just a Funny or Die Stunt

Funny or Die has finally admitted to being behind that confusing fake hoverboard video that went viral yesterday. And we’re still not quite sure why they made it. “If we inspired on person to get into the hover sciences, I consider that a victory,” Christopher Lloyd says to the camera. “Here’s to hoverboards being actually…

What Is This Fake Hoverboard Company Actually Promoting?

In 1989 the director of Back to the Future II went on TV and declared that hoverboards were real. “They’ve been around for years, it’s just that parents’ groups have not let the toy manufacturers make them,” Robert Zemeckis insisted. “But we got our hands on some and we put them in the movie.” This,…

What Cold War Nuclear Weapons Can Tell Us About Art Fraud

The identification of fakes and forgeries is a basic issue that has always raised controversy. This is unsurprising, of course–the enormous sums garnered by top paintings would turn to dust as soon as a question as to their authenticity arose. To determine whether a painting is original or not, the expertise of critics and art…

It’s Ridiculously Easy to Troll Google Maps With Fake Listings

Trust the listings you find on Google Maps? You shouldn’t, because it’s dumb easy to fake them. That’s what Google Maps exploiter Bryan Seely demonstrated for me this morning. And while trolling politicians with dick jokes is never not funny, there’s also a whole sub-community of scammers turning Google Map’s little bugs into cold, hard…

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

The internet can be a tough place to distinguish fact from fiction. Who has time to fact-check all those beautiful, weird, and sometimes horrifying pictures? Well, we do. Today we have ten more images you may have seen tossed around on social media recently. And all of them are lying to you. 1) Is this…

A Century-Old Prosthesis So Advanced Even an Expert Thought It Was Fake

In our quest to rid the world of fun and joy, we’ve done a number of posts fact-checking viral images. Sometimes we’ll come across an image that just doesn’t smell right, and enlist the help of experts to determine its authenticity. And sometimes, even the experts aren’t quite sure. That was the case recently with…

8 Viral Sochi Olympics Photos That Are Total Lies

Thousands of images are pouring out of Sochi in the lead-up to the Olympics. And things don’t look great. There are unfinished buildings, a lack of winter weather, and an abundance of trash. But don’t believe every image you see. Like so much of what gets passed on social media these days, a lot of…

Inside the Fakes Factory: My Chat With a Viral Image Creator

It’s an astounding sight: Buddha carved into a tall rock formation at the Ngyen Khag Taktsang Monastery in China. People talked breathlessly about how they visited the place, saw it with their own eyes. Except that they didn’t. Because it’s a fake. And this is the guy who faked it. The creator of this photoshopped…

Viral Sensation @HistoryInPics Is Run By Two Teens

Over at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has uncovered the two people behind the enormously popular (and often factually inaccurate) Twitter account @HistoryInPics. Turns out it’s operated by two very ambitious teenagers. https://gizmodo.com/12-more-viral-photos-that-are-totally-fake-1502231257 The history photos account (along with others like @EarthPix) is run by 17-year-old Xavier Di Petta who lives in Victoria, Australia and 19-year-old…

Some jokester started a new historical pictures account on Twitter today. But unlike the dozens of inaccurate history accounts floating around, this one is intentionally (and hilariously) wrong: @AhistoricalPics

12 More Viral Photos That Are Totally Fake

Can you spot the fakes? Hundreds of amazing images wash over our greedy eyeballs each and every day, clogging our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Many of them are fakes, lies, or both. Like these! No, Nikola Tesla wasn’t a swimming instructor. And Teddy Roosevelt never rode a moose. https://gizmodo.com/7-more-fun-fact-photos-that-are-total-lies-1480737089 But did John Lennon ever…