Case Study 4.2: Verifying Two Suspicious “Street Sharks” During Hurricane Sandy Tom Phillips is a senior writer at BuzzFeed UK1. He previously worked for the UK newspaper Metro2, was an international editor at MSN3, and most recently helped launch UsVsTh3m4, an experimental social-focused “startup” for Trinity Mirror. In his spare time, among other things, he runs Is Twitter Wrong?5, an occasionally successful attempt to do real-time fact checking on viral images and tweets. He tweets at @flashboy6. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey, I was running a blog called “Is Twitter Wrong?” an experiment at fact-checking viral images. When a major natural disaster hits an area densely populated with heavy social media users - and media companies - one result is a huge number of images to sift through. Telling the good from the bad suddenly shot up the editorial agenda. One particularly viral pair of images showed a shark supposedly swimming up a flooded New Jersey street. I teamed up with Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic to try to verify these images. One aspect of the images, shown below, is that they were strange enough to make you suspicious, yet they weren’t implausible enough to dismiss out of hand. In the end, and they 44