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Photo tampering


This is a photo of Dylann Roof who was identified as the shooter responsible for killing nine people at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Evidence quickly emerged that he was a white supremacist who had likely targeted the church because of its significance to the black community. Among the evidence was a photo showing him wearing a jacket with patches representing the former apartheid-era Rhodesian and South African flags—both of them popular symbols among white supremacist groups. A manipulated version of the photo began appearing on Facebook and various blogs in which these patches had been replaced with a patch representing the campaign logo from U.S. President Barack Obama, as if to suggest that the shooter was actually an Obama supporter.

In this case I think it was highly inappropriate for someone to have changed the patches on the killer's jacket to seem like he was something else then just a white supremacist. Incidents like this manipulate people into thinking other things and then they begin to target different types of people. Some people who saw the manipulated picture probably got the wrong idea that "oh he's a Obama supporter, so we should be careful of those people" and assumptions like this are what creates biases and hatred among people.


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