Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the focus of fake news and conspiracy theories circulating on social media this week.
Earlier this week, Ukrainian authorities spread a strange rumor that Vladimir Putin did not visit the occupied city of Mariupol and sent a body double due to the different chin sizes in three photos.
But the Italian fact-checking website, openFactChecking, has refuted this theory.
They prove that the photo without a double chin is from 2020. The other two were taken by a pro-Kremlin broadcaster in Mariupol. One time he makes a face, which explains the double chin, the other time he looks completely different again, minus the double chin, a few minutes later.
But could Putin use a double? Such rumors have circulated since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but have never been substantiated.
Putin on his knees to Xi?
The Russian head of state received his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Moscow.
A photo on social media shows Vladimir Putin kneeling in front of Chinese people and kissing their hand.
But this image is fake – it was generated by artificial intelligence or AI.
How do we know?
Several social media users have noted that the setting of the room where they both met differs from the social media post. We know they met in a room that looked different, while the image that circulated on Twitter shows a completely different rug and furniture.
There are other details that give us some clues that it is not real. For example, look at Putins. It’s blurry and doesn’t look realistic, which is usually a good indication that an image has been AI generated.
Because although artificial intelligence is very advanced, it still has a hard time recreating details like human hands.
Moreover, here you can see that Vladimir Putin’s head is unusually large compared to his body.