Twitter Users Hijack Syria's #SummerInSyria Campaign With Grisly War Images

A social media campaign from Syria’s state news agency asking people to share pictures of their summer has backfired as users instead share photos of the country’s bloody conflict.

The English-language wing of the agency asked users to “snap us your moments of summer” using the hashtag #SummerInSyria. But many users have been using the same hashtag to share photos of bomb-site wreckage and injured civilians from the country’s four-year-old civil war:

Even the U.S. Embassy in Syria got in on the action, posting a picture of a bombing to Twitter.

The conflict, which began in 2011 as President Bashar al-Assad brutally cracked down against pro-democracy demonstrations, has killed more than 210,000 people and displaced half the country’s population, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

 

 

Write to Nolan Feeney at nolan.feeney@time.com.