After the ouster of former President of Syria Bashar al-Assad, social media is abuzz (here, here, and here) with a photo that allegedly shows a Syrian prisoner who saw sunlight for the first time in 13 years. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo of a Syrian prisoner who saw sunlight for the first time in 13 years.
Fact: This is a screenshot from an AI-generated video made by a TikTok user named ‘sanzaaru.’ Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword and reverse image search. Through this search, we found many news reports on the Syrian rebel forces freeing prisoners from Saydnaya prison, where several political prisoners were detained for many years. You can find those visuals here, here, and here.
However, we did not find any reports about this alleged Syrian prisoner seen in the viral photo, who saw the light for the first time in 13 years. During this search, we found an ‘X’ post that contained a video of this person crawling through an underground tunnel.
The viral photo is a screenshot from this video. The video contained a TikTok watermark that reads @sanzaruu. Taking this as a hint, we looked for @sanzaruu on TikTok and found the same video uploaded to their page. Further, this video was uploaded a few days before the people from Saydnaya prison were freed.
There are many such videos on their channel. In the bio section, ‘sanzaruu’ made it clear that all the videos on their page are generated using Artificial Intelligence.
To sum up, a screenshot from an AI-generated image is falsely shared as a real photo of a Syrian prisoner seeing sunlight for the first time in 13 years.
