Could Hurricane Sandy be the event that propels Instagram‘s
reputation beyond brunch photos and arts-fartsy attempts at whimsy? The
photo-sharing network has certainly become a central landing
destination for shots of the storm — users are uploading 10 images per
second with the hashtag #Sandy alone.
“I think this demonstrates how Instagram is quickly becoming a useful tool to see the world as it happens –- especially for important world events like this,” CEO Kevin Systrom told Mashable through a spokesperson.
While other social tools such as Twitter and Storify have long been accepted as having become serious social platforms for hard news, Hurricane’s Sandy appears to mark Instagram’s largest presence in a major news story to date. Not all the photos are real, but the sheer number of shots sporting related hashtags is pretty staggering.
At time of writing, there were 285,000 photos tagged #sandy, 172,000 photos tagged #hurricanesandy and 26,000 photos tagged #frankenstorm. (You can get updated numbers for yourself by searching each hashtag in the app’s “Discover” tab.)
In the haste to share, however, a number of fake photos gained brief flashes of viral fame on Monday morning. A moving photo of three infantrymen in full-dress uniforms standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in a driving storm, for example, was actually shot last month.
While the scale of Instagram users sharing photos during Hurricane Sandy is massive, it’s not the first time the social network has played a large role in a breaking news story. When a controversially captioned photo of a bleeding gunshot victim outside the Empire State Building went viral in August, it raised a number of questions about the emerging role of Instagram and other crowd-sourced photos in news coverage.
What are the most striking images you’ve seen online from Hurricane Sandy? Share them with us in the comments.
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