Picture doesn’t show Australian Navy ramming ‘illegal immigrant’ boat

Hundreds of people have shared Facebook posts falsely claiming to show two Australian Navy ships ramming “a boat loaded with illegal immigrants that did not respond to requests to stop”. 

The posts, which have also been shared on X (formerly known as Twitter), add: “The illegal immigrants were all returned, the crew members arrested and the boat scrapped.”

They also say “that’s the way you do it!”—implying that similar tactics should be used in the UK.

But this picture doesn’t show ships from the Australian Navy or a boat carrying migrants. As we have written before, when the same false claim went viral in 2020, the picture was taken in 2012 and actually shows a flare-up in tensions between China and Japan over a small group of islands in the East China Sea. 

The two large vessels are Japanese ships, with the smaller boat carrying a group of Chinese activists who were arrested by Japan after planting Chinese and Taiwanese flags on a small islet.

The islet is part of a tiny group of uninhabited islands controlled by Japan, where they are called the Senkaku Islands, but claimed by China, where they are called the Diaoyu Islands (they are known as the Diaoyutai Islands in Taiwan). 

But while the image does not show this, it is true that Australia does turn back people undertaking an “unauthorised boat voyage” to the country, or otherwise returns them to their home country or moves them to a third country for processing. 

This is carried out under Operation Sovereign Borders, which has been live since 2013 and is run by Australia’s military. 

The Australian government does release monthly updates on Operation Sovereign Borders, but the overall picture of the number of people turned back is incomplete. Between December 2013 and June 2018, the government said 810 people had been turned back or subject to an “assisted return”. 

Misleading images are some of the most common kinds of misinformation we see online, but they can sometimes be hard to spot. It’s always worth checking if a picture shows what the post says it does before you share it—we have written a guide on how to do so here.

Image courtesy of Associated Press