Old Photos Passed Off as Fresh Blood
A 2018 BBC investigation found images from an old domestic-violence case and a foreign road accident recirculating on Nigerian social media as proof of farmer-herder massacres. The recycled pictures spread as the real conflict was killing more people than the country's jihadist insurgency.
In June 2018, the BBC reported that graphic photographs circulating on Nigerian social media, and presented as evidence of recent massacres between farmers and herders, were neither recent nor, in some cases, Nigerian. “Fake pictures circulating on social media, which users are falsely claiming depict inter-communal violence, are inflaming already high tensions in Nigeria,” the broadcaster wrote, according to Vanguard.
Two images anchored the finding. One, showing a woman lying in a pool of blood, had first appeared online in 2011 in a story about domestic violence and resurfaced years later as supposed proof of the herder crisis, according to a review of the BBC report by HumAngle. A second, purporting to show people killed in the attacks, was not taken in Nigeria at all: it was the scene of a 2015 traffic accident in the Dominican Republic, HumAngle reported.
A pattern, not a single hoax
The recycled photographs were part of a wider stream of mislabeled visuals. In December 2020, Nigeria's former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, posted an image of a man holding a burned child that he described as a casualty of the Igangan crisis in Oyo State; a fact-check found the picture came from the crisis in southern Cameroon, according to Africa in Fact. The same report documented a doctored 2018 video that purported to show then-President Muhammadu Buhari justifying herder attacks.
Fact-checkers who tracked the images said the mechanism was consistent: an authentic-looking photograph, stripped of its origin and paired with an inflammatory caption, travels faster than the correction. “Manipulated videos and images can easily convince people of a false narrative,” Olusola Oludiran of the International Press Centre told Africa in Fact, describing how bad actors exploit public trust in visual evidence.
A conflict already deadly
The disinformation spread against a real and rising death toll. In July 2018, the International Crisis Group reported that violence between farmers and herders had killed about 1,300 people in the first half of that year — roughly six times the number attributed to the Boko Haram insurgency over the same period — and had displaced an estimated 300,000, as reported by CNN. That December, Amnesty International said clashes had killed more than 3,600 people since 2016, including more than 2,000 in 2018 alone, according to Al Jazeera.
Researchers who study the crisis argue that the false images do not merely misinform; they deepen it. By recasting a contest over land and water as an ethnic or religious atrocity, the mislabeled photographs harden communal lines and raise the risk of reprisal, fact-checkers and analysts have warned. In a country where, the BBC noted, social platforms are for many the primary source of news, an old photograph passed off as fresh blood can carry a conflict further than the events it claims to show.