(Aerial photo courtesy Paul Weatherman)
It’s been 2 1/2 months since West Seattle photographer Paul Weatherman took that aerial photo of the June 6th Black Lives Matter protest in The Junction; we featured it in our coverage. But today, it’s turning up on some social-media feeds, mislabeled and uncredited. This first came to our attention last night when a reader pointed out that President Trump had retweeted someone’s tweet claiming the photo was from a protest about mail-in voting:
(Screengrab from our phone last night)
Though the original tweet was apparently meant as a joke – for one, our state has had mail-in voting for years, and for two, the tweeting account describes itself as humorous – the presidential retweet drew corrections, pointing out the photo had appeared in our June story.
We mentioned all this on the WSB Twitter account last night and were just going to leave it at that until we got an inquiry this morning from an organization identifying itself as a “Facebook fact-checking partner.” The email noted that the tweet has been reposted on THAT platform, and they wanted to verify the actual source/truth of the photo. So we thought we had better make a note here too.
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