Las Vegas: The fake photos shared after tragedies

At least 50 people have died and hundreds have been injured in a mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Revellers attending an open-air music festival fled the scene in panic as a gunman, named by police as 64-year-old Nevada resident Stephen Paddock, opened fire from the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay Hotel.

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As emergency services raced to the scene, the response on social media was similarly rapid.

Among the sympathy, the shocking eyewitness video and the desperate scrabble for information, photos which falsely claimed to be victims or attackers began to circulate.

It's a depressingly familiar formula. Tragic news of mass shootings and terrorism is seemingly always followed by a flurry of false information peppering social networks with misdirection or misunderstanding.

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And many of the same photos crop up again; tragedy memes played for laughs and retweets, even as the real victims still lie dead, dying and injured.

Probably the most well-known of these memes features an image of US comedian Sam Hyde. His image has been circulating again following the attack in Las Vegas. CNN mistakenly included his image reporting on a college shooting in Oregon in October 2015.