By Ajetunmobi Umar Olansile
With the advancement in technology and emerging photo-editing applications/software, people can now manipulate multimedia contents for different reasons. Some distort an original content in order to misinform other people; some do so to cause panic; some do so to promote an ideology while some do so to spread hoaxes or to satirise, among others. This picture is an example of distorted photographic pictures. Fact-check on TinEye shows that the picture is available in about 190 different archives on the Internet. Further checks revealed that most articles published by blogsites on fraud known as ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ use the picture to complement their stories.
For instance, the early time This picture surface on the Internet was on November 30, 2010. It was used to complement a story ‘Nigeria comes 3rd in global cybercrimes survey’.
The same picture, though with an added caption ‘Where all the scam emails come from’, resurfaced on February 12, 2014 on another blog site. On September 8, 2014, the picture resurrected with another storyline. Then, it was accompanied with a story which had already been pulled down. Similarly, on February 15, 2017, Modern Ghana reused the picture as an illustration for its article ‘The Impact Crew: Sakawa Boys Akye Control’ as if the individuals therein were actually Sakawa Boys.
Further image tracing revealed that on August 28, 2017, another website re-used the picture for another distortion. The picture, captioned in Swahili ‘TEAM KIBA wakifanya yao, mambo ya ma-views’ is translated as ‘TEAM KIBA doing their own, crazy things.’
The picture came with another story on Nairaland on March 20, 2019. Therefore, the picture is a DISTORTED PICTURE that keeps coming back to life to fulfil the interest of its manipulator.
