On June 5, a Facebook account, known for frequent sharing of disinformation, posted a photo claiming that employees of a kindergarten dressed young children in military uniforms and handed them a poster calling on Zelenskyy to sign a military contract.
The photo that, according to the Facebook user, shows Ukrainian children in military uniforms is fabricated and has signs of artificial intelligence. The photo can only be seen on low-trust Russian-language propaganda pages.
To verify the claim, we tried to find the source of the photo’s origin. It turned out that the photo first appeared on LiveJournal, a blogging and social networking platform, on June 1 – International Children’s Day. According to the accompanying text, it is a continuation of the anti-Ukrainian humor caricature, “To the Last Ukrainian.”
The LiveJournal website was created in the United States in the 1990s, but in 2016 its servers were moved to Russia. Since then, the platform has been repeatedly referred to as a source of spreading inaccurate information.
Since June 1, the photo has also appeared on various unreliable Russian blogs and sites, but all without reference to the source.
In addition, a detailed examination of the photo has revealed inaccuracies characteristic of artificial intelligence – specifically, unnatural shapes of children’s hands and other deformations. We have also verified the photo using several tools that help identify AI-generated images (1, 2).
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Visual anomalies
Prepared by Alex Kurasbediani
Myth Detector Laboratory
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