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…