This story implies that we are facing invasion by people so dangerous that many right-wing conservatives are advocating we meet the migrants not with the normal process for processing claims of refugee status, but with bullets.

Why is Facebook allowing this to continue to be shared? It is false. It’s a DMCA violation — the photo is an editorial picture owned by Getty Images being used out of context and without a license.

Photographs have an under-appreciated power. They don’t merely represent the facts of a situation; they underly the emotional memory of an event. Consider the famous photo of the naked child running from a napalm attack in Vietnam.

May 17, 2018 — Vietnam war survivor Kim Phuc Phan Thi, also known as ‘Napalm Girl,’ stands in front of her iconic 1972 Vietnam War photograph showing her running on a road after being burned in a napalm attack near Trang Bang. Photo: Robin van Lonkhuijsen

It is difficult to think of the Vietnam War without recalling this photo. That recollection changes everything — including how we interpret other information about the event.

Consider this photo from Iraq that shows a soldier, face blackened from battle and bleeding from a cut on his nose, smoking a cigarette.

Photo: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via WIkimedia Commons

I recall wondering at the time whether that photo would be the symbol of the invasion of Iraq. Or perhaps it would be the one below taken by the late Chris Hondros at Tal Afar, after a car came a little too close to a checkpoint. The car hadn’t been full of terrorists but contained a husband and wife and their two children. When the Marines opened fire — which they did exactly as they were trained to do when someone doesn’t stop for a checkpoint — the parents were killed, almost liquefied by the high-powered projectiles that peppered their sedan.) This image is from the aftermath.

Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

In my younger years, I yearned to be a photojournalist. I was okay, though I never had the skills of greats like Chris Hondros or Robert Capa. But I did learn the power that a photograph has that the written word rarely does — the power to make a moral demand on the viewer, a demand to act.

The photo that Ginni Thomas shared and that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others are allowing to be misrepresented at a massive scale, is dangerous. If the networks are sincere in their claims that they are responsible corporate citizens, they must act. Not tomorrow, not in a few hours. Right now.