Testing for Manipulation: A Case Study from Colombia

On April 17, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro took to Twitter and wrote “Manipulations of the extreme right. Lies as the basis of politics. Here, Camilo proves photo manipulation.” He referred to a tweet by the journalist Camilo Andrés García, who shared an analysis by Ghost, a filter used in conjunction with other image analysis tools, to support his doubts about the authenticity of a photo of a man in camouflage standing by a road in the Colombian countryside. This man, wearing a red bandana, stands in view of a flag of the far-left National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerilla group which fought the government in a long-running conflict which has seen hundreds of thousands of Colombians killed. While a 2016 peace agreement saw another guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) come to terms with the Colombian government, peace talks with the ELN are ongoing, with Petro previously pledging to bring total peace to Colombia. President Petro, himself a former guerilla, has been described by international media as the country’s “first leftist president”. Meanwhile Paloma Valencia, who first shared the image on Twitter on April 15 and another photo two days later, is a senator for a right-wing opposition party. On April 17, Valencia also shared video footage of armed men entering a town. Fact-checking website ColombiaCheck asked Bellingcat for help in verifying the photo and assessing claims about its possible manipulation. The website’s editor José Sarmiento explained the political context of the claim, noting that Petro’s “total peace” approach of negotiating with illegal armed groups has angered Colombia’s right-wing. He added that Valencia has been one of the leading voices against such processes and that she argues that armed groups only use them as opportunities to grow stronger. “The idea behind her tweet was to show that Petro is letting this happen because they believe that as a former guerilla man himself he is close to subversive criminals, a common right-wing narrative that has usually been fed by using disinformation”, said Sarmiento in an email. Using a few simple online tools and techniques, Bellingcat could confirm the photo’s location and found no clear signs of digital manipulation. Here’s how we did it.

Finding the Right Spot

It’s important to note that recycling old images or videos is a more common method of spreading disinformation than sophisticated image manipulation. This is why a reverse image search should always be the first step in verifying imagery. When dealing with images appearing on social media, it is wise to find their very first appearance – this allows you to compare it with later, and often more popular, iterations which could be shared by actors with varying agendas. The earliest instances which Bellingcat could discover of this image being shared online also came from April 15, by the Twitter user Esteban Merchan.

The second image, which Valencia shared on April 17, was first posted by the Twitter user @Soy_Jerome that same day, but was deleted shortly after.

It’s also crucial to geolocate the imagery: determining where it was taken by comparing it with reference material. Valencia gave a lot of information in her Tweets. But geolocation means that we don’t have to take her at her word when she wrote in the April 15 Tweet that the photo was taken at an intersection of the Pan-American Highway near Totoró in Cauca province. In an April 18 Tweet she added that the precise location was nine kilometres’ drive from Paniquitá. Helpfully, Google Street View from 2019 is available for the highway between Totoró and the city of Popayán, which passes an intersection with the road to the aforementioned town of Paniquitá. By following the