From AFP Fact Check
US influencer baselessly claims Ukraine manipulated image of hospital bombing
By Bill McCarthy
“The Ukrainian Government PHOTOSHOPPED fake children’s toys into images of the hospital they destroyed in Kiev. This is worse than ZIONIST PROPAGANDA!” says a July 10, 2024 post on X from Jackson Hinkle, whom AFP has previously fact-checked for spreading wartime disinformation.
Hinkle’s post highlights a football and red toy truck in a photo of the rubble at Okhmatdyt pediatric hospital, which was hit July 8 by a Russian cruise missile that tore through its toxicology department and damaged large portions of the clinic’s surrounding buildings...
Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley (archived here), told AFP in a July 12 email that the photo shows “no evidence of digital manipulation or editing.”
He said the Ukrainian government’s use of the camera’s original RAW file further suggests it “is not fake or manipulated.” RAW files retain all of the data from the camera’s sensor, without any automatic retouching to the image...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
