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On April 25, on her Twitter account, a woman who presents herself as a Danish doctor posted a photo montage, viewed more than a million times. The goal ? Compare two versions of the same shot, showing a bombed city at night, as well as the top of a burning tower.
Where does the intox come from?
On April 25, on her Twitter account, a woman who presents herself as a Danish doctor posted a photo montage, viewed more than a million times. The goal ? Compare two versions of the same shot, showing a bombed city at night, as well as the top of a burning tower. Each image has a different caption. The first reads: “Belgrade 1999”. The second, whose meaning has been reversed, bears the mention: “kyiv, 2022”. In legend, the Internet user laughs: “Trust the media”. And accompanies his remarks with a clown head emoji.
Why is this wrong?
This Twitter account, which tries to point out media manipulation in images of the war in Ukraine, is not the first to relay this montage. He appeared from last June on Facebook. Beginning of March 2023, another netizen shared it again. By denouncing, there too, the “conspiratorial media and governments” which operate, according to him, a global staging.
However, a simple reverse image search reveals that this photo refers to the bombing of a building in Belgrade on April 21, 1999, during the Kosovo war. That day, the famous tower Usce is hit by NATO air strikes.
Above all, this research demonstrates that the cliché, when reported by the press, serves well to illustrate the events in Belgrade. And not those of kyiv, which occurred twenty years later.
The only exception, rather anecdotal: this Bosnian article, published in February 2022, which actually integrates this image into a slideshow on the war in Ukraine. Nothing to talk about, therefore, of mass manipulation.
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