How a fake image went round the world in a few hourspublished at 17:30 British Summer Time 19 August
17:30 BST 19 August
Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist
We reported earlier how we know an image purporting to show leaders waiting in the White House was an AI-generated fake.
We’ve also been looking at how the image spread – being shared by users across the world. Putting it into Google’s image search function returned hundreds of results. We took the first 250 shares from those – there were many more.
The earliest copies of the image we’ve seen were posted by Dutch-language X accounts on Monday afternoon, UK time, while the earliest posts with large numbers of views were from pro-Russian accounts – that notched up 1.3 million views.
The most-viewed copy, of all those we have seen, was posted in the early evening and eventually seen 2.2 million times, leading to a wave of posts over the next hour.
Those sharing it posted mocking captions, across Twitter and Telegram, in languages including English, German, Italian, Belarusian, Russian, French, Arabic and Polish. This added another 1.7 million views.
At around 19:00, starting on Ukrainian Telegram and a fact-checking Discord community, posts started pointing out that it was generative AI. These included posts by Ukrainian channels Trukha and Insider UA which gained a million views in total.
Russian Telegram accounts, including a military commentator, a pro-Kremlin blogger, and a breaking news channel, pointed out that it was AI-generated to more than half a million users. Meanwhile, conservative political US accounts on X began to share it with the acknowledgement it was AI-generated.
From 20:00 to 22:00, the most-viewed and shared copies we have seen were dominated by people who post fact-checks and verification. Among those who posted was Marek Magierowski, the former Polish ambassador to the US and Israel, who said: “Congratulations to all those who took the bait.”