Social Media Posts
Facebook posts claiming to be the photograph of the century were viral, along with a picture that described extraordinary scenery. The claim narrates that a lioness and her cub were crossing the African Savanna, but the cub was in great difficulty. An elephant realized this discomfort and decided to carry the cub to the pool of water with the lioness walking calmly beside the elephant.
A Twitter user also shared the image.
The original post gained so much popularity among users, and there were over 12000 shares on Facebook. Some users commented on the example shown, while others responded this was fake.
Fact Check
We did a simple “Google reverse image search” and observed that this image had been circulating heavily over the internet.
The image with red letters across the image stating “FAKE” drew our attention, and we checked the image. A person named Craig Charles did a fact check on September 2018 and concluded this to be a fake, and he has shown the images of the lioness and the cub separately.
We observed that a web page called latestsightings.com had claimed how they had perfected this image to go viral and reach millions of people. In the article “How to make your April Fools go viral,” they stated, “right since the start of Latest Sightings in 2011, we have always stayed away from anything that can cause controversy (news stories, religious based holidays, and politics) so making an innocent April Fool’s joke is always a highlight for us as it can get our whole community involved”.
And indeed, we found that the website did similar April fool’s images
Below is the original post by Latest Sightings – Kruger, who posted this edited image on 1st April 2018, which has been shared over 59,000 times!
Further investigation revealed this tweet from Nadav Ossendryver, associated with the Kruger Sightings account, on 2nd April 2018. “Yesterday, I shared an April Fool’s joke that went super viral. It reached a total of 6million people with an engagement coming in every 0.5 seconds!”
Below is a photo comparison of the original and edited versions used to create this unique artwork
Of course, keeping up with the April fool’s traditions, Kruger Sightings had posted a doctored image on 1st April 2019 as well!
We did a simple keyword search to determine if a photograph was named “photograph of the century.” We found that while there have been many instances where top photographs have been awarded, there was not a single instance where one photograph was identified as the best photograph of the century.
සිංහ මව පසෙකින් සිටියදීත්, සිංහ පැටවා තම හොඬවැලේ තබාගෙන ගමන්කරන ඇතාගේ ඡායාරූපයේ ඇත්ත කතාව!
Conclusion:
It is clear that the post “This is the best photograph of the century” is an edited image used by the “Kruger Sightings” social media team as an April fool’s joke on 1st April 2018.
Really sorry to believe and share this content .Will be careful herein after