Fact Check: Digitally altered photo of US truck goes viral as Russian support for ex-Pak PM Imran Khan
India Today AFWA found that an old image from the US was digitally altered to show the face of former Pakistan PM Imran Khan alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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India Today Fact Check
This photo was digitally altered. In the original photo, shot in California in 2008, the truck’s white rear door had no photo on it.
A photo went viral on Twitter that showed the face of former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan printed on the rear door of a truck alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Ousted but not defeated... Spotted in Moscow few days ago," the viral tweet read.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the claim to be false. An old image from California in the US was digitally altered to show the face of Khan alongside Putin.
AFWA Probe
A reverse search of the image on Google led us to several media websites that used this image over the years. But in these reports, the truck's white rear door was plain white, sans stickers or photos or prints.
Among the top results was a BBC report from June 2021 titled "The valuable car part gone in 60 seconds." The piece on the theft of catalytic converters from cars was accompanied by a few images for representation. We found the now viral photo among these stock photos along with the caption "A shift towards electric cars will help solve the problem."
While there was no clue about the whereabouts of the photo here, BBC credited Getty Images for the photo. We reverse searched the viral image again with "Getty Images" as a keyword.
This led us to the British-American visual media company’s website where the same photo was captioned, "A traffic jam on a California freeway."
This confirmed that the image was not shot in Moscow as claimed in the viral tweet.
We were also able to find the image on the stock photography website iStock which had the same caption but mentioned the date of upload as well — April 09, 2008 — proving that the photo was more than a decade old.
This helped us conclude that the faces of Imran Khan and Vladimir Putin were digitally added to a 2008 photograph from the US, and not from Moscow, Russia.
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