Fact check: Did 'giant' shark wash up on the Outer Banks?
A Facebook post with several images claimed that a great white shark beached just off the North Carolina coast.
"A giant great white shark found washed out on the Outer Banks beach, North Carolina," the caption said. "A team of onlookers doing their best to push it back into the ocean." Photos in the post show a beached shark and people trying to move it back into the ocean.
The March 28 post was from Coastfish TV, which is listed on Facebook as a video creator in Australia.
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Officials said it didn’t happen.
"Fake news," said Chris Fischer, founding chairman of Ocearch, a nonprofit shark-tracking organization.
"No white shark on the beach in OBX," he wrote in an email to PolitiFact, using a common abbreviation for Outer Banks. "That’s an old pic from a stranded shark that has been modified."
The images in the Facebook post are credited to OBX Photos.
The images appear in a March 25 post on OBX Photos’ Facebook page, which includes a location of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. The post caption is nearly identical to the post we’re fact-checking.
We contacted OBX Photos but got no reply.
A spokesperson for the Kill Devil Hills Police Department told PolitiFact that there was no great white shark beaching.
Indeed, the Facebook poster later seemed to admit it was a fake.
In another Facebook post the next day, Coastfish TV wrote: "The jury is still open for many after several images of a beached Great White Shark goes viral on social media. Some say it's fake while other swear it's as real as it gets. Let's take a look at an article published by 'Spectrum News' back in 2018." The post included one of the photos from the initial post with text across it reading, "Real or fake?"
That 2018 Spectrum News story was headlined, "Shark in viral photo did not wash up on the Outer Banks." That photo was taken in 2014 at Whitecrest Beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, the story said.
Claire Wardle, a Brown University expert in misinformation and verification, told PolitiFact the images shared in the Facebook post likely were generated by artificial intelligence.
There was a great white near the Outer Banks, though. Ocearch, which tags and tracks great white sharks, tagged a great white in 2020 that it named Breton and found him again surfacing off the Outer Banks on March 25 and March 28.
Breton is a 13-foot, 1,400-pound male, according to the group.
Great white sharks, which inspired the shark in the "Jaws" movies, are found in cool, coastal waters around the world, according to National Geographic.
Great whites, the largest predatory fish on Earth, grow to an average of 15 feet in length, though some exceed 20 feet and weigh up to 5,000 pounds.
Officials said a great white shark did not beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so we rate the claim False.
