How years-old photo of bleeding officer is being used to stoke fears about migrant caravan

The image is shocking: A Mexican policeman in riot gear bleeds profusely from gashes on his head. The culprits, according to posts spreading virally on social media, were members of the migrant caravan making their way north toward the U.S. border - and delivering violence along the way.

An early version on Facebook on Sunday says beneath this image, "And WE are supposed to believe these are just poor, helpless refugees seeking asylum??? I am 100% behind POTUS deploying our military to protect our border and keep them out."

But the post - shared by tens of thousands including Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas - is misleading in key ways, starting with the photograph itself. It's not from any incident related to the migrant caravan that has emerged as a potent flashpoint in the intensifying midterm congressional election.

The photo of the bloodied policeman was taken during Mexican student protests in 2012, according to Snopes, a fact-checking website. The post, say several researchers, is just one example of the false content spreading rapidly as the midterm congressional election nears - despite promises by Facebook and other companies to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, when disinformation and fake news ran rampant across social media.

"Many of the worst sources of political news and information are now covering the movements of the immigrant caravan," said Phil Howard of Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project. "Social media is awash with pictures that portray an angry mob heading for the US border ... This kind of the event is easy for junk news outlets to turn into a sensational news story."

In a statement, Facebook said: "In this situation, while it's something we should have caught sooner, we were able to identify and address duplicate versions of this photo that were being shared elsewhere on Facebook; thanks to a 'false' rating from one of our third-party fact-checkers on this photo, we've been able to demote these duplicate posts in News Feed."

Trevor Davis, the researcher who brought attention to the misleading nature of the posts featuring the bloodied Mexican policeman, started analyzing information related to the caravan Monday night. On Tuesday - the same day that Snopes labeled the image as "miscaptioned" - Davis wrote an article on Medium noting the wide spread of the Facebook post, including the role played by Ginni Thomas. (She did not immediately reply to requests for comment from The Washington Post).

Davis, a research professor at George Washington University, found that more than 50 Facebook posts with the same picture of the bloodied policeman had been shared at least 113,000 times.

The same image by itself or as part of a montage appeared on Twitter more than 10,000 times. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Davis also highlighted Thomas' post on Facebook, saying, "The media won't share THIS, will they? It is an invasion, and thank GOD for President Trump."

"This is really dangerous stuff," said Davis, who has worked in the past for Democratic Party causes and founded CounterAction, a disinformation research project.

He said the misleading image changes the emotional tenor of the debate around the caravan, by providing apparent visual evidence that the migrants heading north are violent and clashing with police along the way.

"The emotional pull of the still photograph shapes how you interpret events," Davis said. "It changes the tone of it. It becomes about violent thugs beating their way through Mexico."