An image of Hyderabad’s greatest flood, the Musi flood of 1908 is going viral on the internet. The viral image has been posted by multiple users, across multiple social media platforms. The image was posted reportedly on 10 June.
A user on facebook with the username ‘Adv Shafeeq (Shafeeq Bhai)’ posted the image with the claim “Musi River Floods 28 September 1908. A rare historical photograph showing the catastrophic floods that submerged parts of Hyderabad, claiming over 15,000 lives and reshaping the city’s future”.
Some other users also posted the same image with the similar across Instagram and Facebook. It can be viewed here, here and here.
Fact Check
DFRAC conducted detailed research on the viral image and confirmed that it was FAKE. To come to this conclusion we checked the official Hyderabad government accounts and found nothing. We also searched for any media report containing a similar image but came up empty-handed. After taking a close-up look at the image we noticed the ‘Meta AI’ watermark at the bottom. This watermark is only present in pictures generated by Meta AI. Lastly to confirm we posted the image on an AI image detector website and it was confirmed that the image is indeed AI-generated.
Also through a website named ‘npr.org’ we found that the technology of colored photography was not widely spread in India until the 1960s and 1970s. So all the photos of the great ‘Musi flood’ were documented in Black and White only.
Conclusion
Hence, it is confirmed that the viral image is FAKE. The image is not captured by any real camera. Rather it is an AI-generated image through Meta AI.
