Claims of a Florida man using a nuke to power his home may sound believable but it's fake
An already debunked claim involving a Florida man using a nuclear weapon to power his home is circulating the web again.
The original claim came from an image posted to Instagram on Nov. 15, 2022. The image showed a fake CNN story with a headline stating “Florida man arrested for using a lost US nuke to power his home for more than 27 years.”
Also depicted in the image was the mugshot of a wide-eyed man cropped and pasted next to an underwater photo of a man in scuba next to the supposed nuclear weapon. The post has received over 6,000 likes and has since been labeled as an altered video.
Category 6 hurricane? No, a Category 6 hurricane won't hit Florida despite what 'time-traveling' TikToker says
The source of the regurgitated claim is unclear but Google Trends shows a 5,000% increase in searches around the topic.
USA Today fact-checked the original story and found what most already suspected — the image is altered. However, given the wide range of Florida Man stories, no one would be faulted for initially believing the headline.
Here’s what’s behind the claim.
The fake story about a Florida man using a nuke to power his home was fabricated
No, this claim isn’t the result of a hilariously crafted generative AI image prompt. It’s just good ol’ Photoshop. The fabricated story never appeared on CNN’s website and the news network confirmed to USA Today that it never published such a story.
“This image is fabricated and was not reported by CNN,” spokesperson Sydney Baldwin told USA TODAY.
Disney World drinking age: Debunked again: No, Disney World isn't 'officially' removing its drinking age requirement
The mugshot is real, but it doesn’t show a Florida man. It’s the mugshot of a 55-year-old man who was arrested in New York in 2016 on the suspicion of harassing a woman at an Albany bus stop.
The underwater image is also several years old. According to 2014 reports by the German news outlet DW and War History Online, it shows one of many World War II-era bombs that have been found in waters off Germany's coast.
Images of news stories with altered headlines are a common meme format and a source of misinformation
Images of altered news headlines combined with unrelated and out-of-context images have existed like some sort of meme-ified Frankenstein’s monster for about as long as the internet has existed, underlining the importance of clicking beyond a headline to verify its claims.
In 2022, there were a number of fake news stories using distressing images to push wild claims around everything from the war in Ukraine to “herbal abortions.”
But fake news stories have been around much longer than the internet. Barbara J. Starmans, a freelance writer and the author behind The Social Historian, wrote about several fake stories throughout history that encompass claims about life on the moon in 1835, fake news stories about Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s and even fake news stories about World War I.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Florida man using nuke to power home claim is recycled fake news story
