(Image source from: www.devdiscourse.com)

Days after the crash of Indonesian Lion Air flight 610, Indonesia warned social media users on Tuesday against circulating hoaxes, as rescue teams searched for human remains from an atrocious jet crash.

A series of mendacious stories have been making rounds online since the Lion Air plane plunged into the sea off Jakarta on Monday with 189 people on board.

"For all of us, please don't spread photos of victims and hoaxes. Please be wise," Indonesia's disaster mitigation agency spokesman, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, tweeted.

Sutopo, who has made a name for himself as a straight-talker, highlighted a number of pictures and videos that are making the rounds.

They included Facebook postings showing a photograph of a baby in a life jacket supposedly rescued from the plane's wreckage.

One of the posts - which was shared about 5,000 times in the first 24 hours - gave made-up details over the apparent rescue.

"There are many social media posts that claim to show an image of a baby who survived the flight JT610 plane crash," he said.

"This photo, in fact, shows a baby who was rescued from (a boat) that sank on Tuesday, July 3, 2018. So this information is a hoax. Please don't spread hoaxes."

Search and rescue agency officials have all but ruled out finding any survivors from Monday's disaster. Indonesia has a long-standing problem with internet hoaxes, and fake news is never far behind after a catastrophe.

The country has one of the world's sizable online audiences, with a population of 260 million people and one of the world's highest social media usage rates.

In the days after a tsunami swamped the coastal city of Palu in late September, numerous false stories began circulating, causing police to make a number of arrests.

Hoaxes were also rampant during a quake disaster on the island of Lombok in the summer.

Sutopo warned this week against other pieces of fake news, including images of passengers with air masks on and a video of people screaming, both falsely claiming to show the final few minutes before the crash.

Sutopo said they were in fact taken on different flights "some time ago" during turbulence and all passengers survived.

A video on YouTube that claims to show the jet crashing into the water was actually of a hijacked Ethiopian Airline that crash-landed in the Indian Ocean in 1996, he said.

A misleading image of plane debris found by rescuers dates back to a Lion Air accident in 2013, near the runway of a Bali Airport, he said.

-Sowmya Sangam