Image of a crowd raising the Palestinian flag at Atletico Madrid's football stadium is AI-generated.

Amidst the ongoing unrest between Israel and Palestine, false news and misinformation are spreading widely on social media platforms. Recently, a viral image accompanied by claims that it shows fans of Atletico Madrid displaying a large Palestinian national flag at the team's football stadium has caught our attention.

Social Media Posts

On October 19th, the Facebook page "Troll Football Pakistan" shared a picture of the flag of Palestine at a football field, featuring the symbol of the Atletico Madrid football team. The caption accompanying the post was "Thank you Atletico Madrid fans." This post garnered over 200,000 likes and was shared more than 9.8 thousand times.

Source | Archive

In addition to this, we also found the same image circulating on other platforms such as Twitter (X) and Instagram.

Regardless, we discovered that the image in question is not a genuine image, but rather an image generated using artificial intelligence (AI).

Fact-Check

We have utilized AI-based image verification tools, specifically Huggingface and Hivemoderation. Both platforms consistently yielded results suggesting that the image in question was highly likely generated using AI.

In addition, when examining the various elements in the image, we found that some parts of the image do not look realistic, such as the abnormally long arm and the missing hands.

Upon further investigation, we discovered an article on the website Indiatoday that raised doubts about a Twitter user named "Atletico Universe" (X), who was among the first to share the image in question. The owner of the account confirmed to Indiatoday that they created the image using the Bing Image Creator program as a display of their support for Palestine.

Summary

The viral image of the crowd raising the Palestine national flag at Atletico Madrid's football stadium is not a real photo, but rather an image generated using AI. The Twitter (X) account owner, "Atletico Universe", also confirmed that they created the image using the Bing Image Creator program.

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