Is the photograph of British police kneeling before Muslims true?

In August 2024, Internet users began to distribute a photo allegedly taken in the UK. It was claimed that it depicted London police officers kneeling in front of Muslims. We decided to check if this photo is genuine.

The photo was distributed on Telegram channels on August 16. Many bloggers considered it the “best illustration” of UK migration policy. For example, member of the Russian Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights Kirill Kabanov wrote, that this is a photograph “from the streets of today’s London,” and proposed to hang it in Russian police stations, “so that it would be visually clear to everyone how uncontrolled migration could end.” This image with similar comments was also shared by the channels “The world today with "Yuri Podolyak""(1.7 million views at the time of writing this analysis), Zergulio (608,000) and the channel of a VGTRK employee Andrey Medvedev (123,000).

July 29 in British Southport there was a tragedy: A young man armed with a knife broke into a dance class and killed three children, eight more minors and two adults were wounded. The attacker was soon detained, and across the country spread rumor is that he is a refugee from the Middle East. In an attempt to stop the outbreak of pogroms and clashes between right-wing radicals and Muslims and the police, the court decided to make it public The name of the criminal turned out to be 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of immigrants from Rwanda, who was born in Great Britain. Still unrest continued for several more days. So at the time the viral photo was spreading, the topic of relations between the police and Muslims in the UK was more than relevant.

“Verified” was unable to find in the British media either this image or a description of the incident that would help understand what is happening in the image. There were also no collective apologies from the police to the Muslim community in Great Britain.

The most obvious assumption that may arise is that the photo was taken using artificial intelligence. When creating images that contain people, neural networks have a hard time generating human limbs and small details of appearance.

The most typical example is the fingers, of which in such images there are more than necessary, and sometimes they take on a strange shape. The man standing in a police uniform on the left has the index finger of his left hand flowing into his right hand. And the man in Muslim clothing, who is standing on the right, has an unusually long thumb.

Another noticeable detail is the legs of the police officers. In the lower left corner you can see a leg, the owner of which is difficult to determine - none of the depicted police officers can have it in this position.

Finally, the faces of people standing in the background also look unnatural—some of them are distorted and lack symmetry.

Fact checkers from the project Logically Facts, which specializes in exposing fakes created using artificial intelligence, checked the image using several special programs and came to the conclusion that the photo, apparently, was generated by neural networks. Service Hive Moderation estimated this probability at 99.8%, Hugging Face - in 85%, Illuminarty AI - in 77.3%.

The earliest post with this image that "Verified" could find was a post by social network user X with the nickname RadioGenoa, posted on August 15 at 08:41 Moscow time. The picture is accompanied by the caption: “How AI sees London.” This blogger has already enjoyed artificial intelligence to create images that promote racist, anti-immigrant and transphobic narratives. Soon, the photograph with British police officers began to be spread as if it were real by British, and then Russian, social media users.

Cover photo: social networks

Not true

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