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This may, in fact, backfire in a couple of ways:

1. It may reduce societal pressure to isolate by making it seem only a minority of people are actually doing it (much like the broken windows theory)

2. It fuels distrust in media outlets. Deservingly so, even if machiavellianly this choice seems to serve the greater good.

"Misuse" is something of a judgment call though. Pretty much any photo makes choices of perspective, framing, etc. There are certainly cases of clear distortion but, especially in the context of distancing, arbitrary photos--even with "'normal"-ish focal lengths can tell very different stories depending upon where the camera is pointed.

If you're standing 100 feet away to use a movie-magic trick to make two objects seem next to each other when they're very much not, you're (edit: probably) being dishonest.

edit: when that standing next to each other is attempting to introduce a narrative that people are doing something contrary to what they're actually doing

Yes we agree with each other.