No, There's Not A Shark Swimming On The Freeway In Houston

But the Internet has it's own ideas how that might look.

As thousands of people await rescue in Texas on Monday as heavy rains poured into the area surrounding Houston, the US was in the midsts of one of the most dramatic flooding disasters in its recent history.

Yet while there was scores of pictures emerging of catastrophe and solidarity, it wasn’t enough for some on social media who were sharing images that were just not true.

Most striking was the image depicting a shark apparently swimming freely on one of the city’s freeways. It is, put bluntly, a fake.

The tweet where the ‘story’ appears to have emerged has been shared thousands of times.

Many people went with ‘not’.

 

The Washington Post, Buzzfeed News and The Daily Beast among many others called it out.

In fact, the image was first shared during Hurricane Matthew which battered the Florida and Georgia coasts last year, and was dubbed a hoax at the time.

Many others on Twitter were not taking it especially seriously.