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| - Fact Check: Viral pic of semi-naked men accompanying kids to pride parade is PHOTOSHOPPED
A picture of two semi-naked men with two toddlers at a pride parade was digitally manipulated.
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India Today Fact Check
This photo has been digitally manipulated. The original photo features no children — just the two men holding a pride flag.
Historically, children have been a key part of the right-wing anti-LGBTQ moral panic. Anti-queer groups have, over the years, falsely conflated queerness with child sexual abuse and paedophilia, using the “safety of children” as a cover for bigotry.
An example of this is a photo that was shared on Twitter on February 1. Likely from a pride parade, it shows two men dressed only in leather garter belts, walking with two toddlers. One child could be seen piggybacking a man. The other child walked between the two men, holding a pride flag.
“This is NOT about human rights! At this point, it’s about saying NO to freaks, perverts, narcissists and paedophiles,” read the tweet that was retweeted more than three thousand times at the time of writing this.
AFWA found that the viral image was digitally manipulated to feature children.
AFWA Probe
With the help of a reverse search, we found that a different version of the same photo was carried by multiple websites over the years. We noticed, however, that in those photos, children were not present. Instead, the two men could be seen holding a pride flag. The oldest version of the original image we could find was from 2013.
In a higher-resolution version of the photo, we noticed that the street where the two men were walking featured boards that contained the words "Brasserie" and "Observatoire". The former is French for “Brewery”, and the latter is French for “Observatory”. This hinted that the photo may have been from a pride march in France. The architecture visible in the photo hinted that it may have been, more specifically, from Paris.
We searched for the words "Observatoire" and “Paris” on Google and this led us to a photo of Hotel Observatoire Luxembourg in the French capital. We matched photos of the hotel with the viral photo and they appeared similar. Using Google Maps Street View, we looked at the area around the hotel — Boulevard Saint-Michel street in Paris — and found it bore many similarities to the viral photo.
Thus, we were able to conclude that this photo was likely from a pride march in Paris, either in or before 2013, and that the original photo did not feature any children.
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