December 04, 2018

Syria - 'Activist' Posts Fake Picture - Fact Checkers Fall For It

The war on Syria brought up dozens of propagandist. Asaad Hanna is one of them. His screeds were published in the disgraced Guardian, on TRT World, Time, AL-Monitor and elsewhere. He is introduces himself as "a Syrian civil society and human rights activist and an economics graduate from Damascus University" and as "a member of the Free Syria Army Northern Division's political office".

Yesterday at 9:46 utc he tweeted a picture:

The Syria Campaign is the U.S. organization that runs the Al-Qaeda clean-up and propaganda squad the White Helmets. It copied the photo from Asaad Hanna's earlier tweet and tweeted it as if it were the original source.

The Syria Campaign Verified account @TheSyriaCmpgn - 14:34 utc - 3 Dec 2018 A brave person took this photo from central Damascus. It shows chained young men being watched by a regime soldier. The photo has gone viral among Syrians with many saying the men were being forcibly conscripted into the army. Is this the safety Assad promises the Syrian people?

The Integrity Initiative, the recently exposed British government financed organization that is supposed to "counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe " and to "improve the technical competence" of journalists "to deal with disinformation" retweeted it.

Other 'fact checkers' also fell for it.

As many other pictures distributed by the propagandists of the fake revolution in Syria the photo is obviously photoshopped.

The distance at which the persons are 'fixed' to the 'chain' does not make sense. And why is the hand of the person with the red sweater in the background on then left in front of the 'chain'? That is physically impossible.

Here is the original.

Even supporters of the opposition denounced this fake.

There have been a number of similar photoshopped pictures (scroll down) in circulation. Most of them are easy to detect. But even the so called "fact checkers" still fall for them.

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h/t Tim Hayward

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Posted by b on December 4, 2018 at 9:38 UTC | Permalink

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