WS MoreOrLess: Numbers of the Year part 1.
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Hello, you're listening to More or Less on the BBC World Service and I'm Tim Harford. It's that time of year when we ask some of our favourite people to bring you some of the strangest or most striking numbers of 2014. The first person on our list of luminaries is Julian Rademeyer, the editor of the fact-checking site AfricaCheck. What was his number of 2014?
Three hundred and seventy five. That's the number of Christians supposedly murdered by Boko Haram, the militant Nigerian movement in a massacre earlier this year. And the the claim came about through an image, an image that began doing the rounds on social media networks in Nigeria, spread like wildfire. And it showed dozens of charred corpses in the baking heat, soldiers and medics with masks. And across the image was the caption, Boko Haram burns 375 Christians. It was a truly horrific image. And we set about trying to fact check that, trying to track down when this massacre had occurred, where it had occurred, given how much currency that image had gained on social media. And we put the image through various online tools, Google Image Search, a couple of basic image comparison websites, and discovered that, in fact, it wasn't of a massacre.
And the image had actually been taken four years ago in July 2010, 2,000 kilometers away from Nigeria in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What had happened was that a fuel tank had overturned. Bystanders had rushed to collect fuel leaking out of the tanker, and the fuel ignited. There were theories that someone was smoking a cigarette or lit a cigarette, and dozens of people were killed. Many of them had gathered there to watch a World Cup soccer game. And we set about comparing images, finding images of that particular catastrophe and comparing the details. There was a distinctive roof in the background. There were the uniforms of the soldiers, the Red Cross officials. And we discovered subsequently that that image has been used in a number of other instances.
wants to supposedly represent the massacre of 500 Christians in Nigeria. It's also been used in Myanmar to supposedly show the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhist monks. And it's part of a growing problem where you have images stripped of context used for propaganda purposes. We've looked at a number of claims like that through the year. One other example showed what was claimed to be a policeman stoning a gay man to death in Uganda. Uganda has extremely homophobic policies in place. That image spread like wildfire, but it had actually been taken in the Central African Republic, where soldiers had killed someone in the road and was taken by an Associated Press photographer.
So we're told the camera never lies. And of course, we know that the camera can lie. Images can be staged. Images can be digitally manipulated. But in this case, the image was not manipulated. The image was a true record. It was just a true record of something entirely different being misattributed.
It was indeed. And what was quite surprising about it is that the Boko Haram insurgency has been linked to thousands of deaths and many, many atrocities. And it seems quite bizarre that people go to lengths of faking a massacre when there's so many other real massacres that have been documented and attributed to the group.
So the number here was 375 and that was fictional. So do we know how many people Boko Haram is responsible for killing?
Well, the numbers vary dramatically, and it's extremely hard to count the dead in any conflict, particularly civilian deaths. There's a dearth of reliable data and reports in Nigeria, and there have been accusations of political manipulation of data.
Which misleading Boko Haram image went viral and how was it debunked?
Earlier this year, the country's president, good luck Jonathan, claimed that 13,000 people had been killed since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009.
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