What was claimed
A picture shows a giant shark leaping out of the water.
Our verdict
This picture has been digitally manipulated, and has been circulating online since 2016.
Picture of huge shark is fake
28 June 2022
Hundreds of people have shared a picture of what appears to be a huge great white shark leaping out of the ocean.
While many of the comments have praised the photo, apparently under the impression it had been taken by a photographer, it has been digitally manipulated.
The picture has been written about many times before by other fact checkers. In 2016 a number of viral social media posts, including a tweet from the band Bastille, incorrectly described it as National Geographic's photograph of the year, taken by a man identified in some posts as Bob Burton.
The claim was so widely shared that in 2016 National Geographic published an article debunking it, which said: “The man, who goes by the alias Bob Burton, claimed (falsely) to have taken National Geographic's photo of the year (an award we don't have) of a shark leaping out of the water (which is clearly fake).”
The picture appears to have originally been posted online by a Russia-based illustrator, who has posted a number of other shark pictures to his Shutterstock, some of which are clearly identified as 3D illustrations.
Image courtesy of Marcelo Cidrack
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because it has been widely debunked as an altered picture.