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What was claimed
A picture shows an anti-Reform rally in Wigan ahead of the Makerfield by-election.
Our verdict
The picture is fake. The image has been generated with AI and doesn't match the geography of Wigan town centre. It also contains AI glitches and an invisible SynthID watermark.
A picture supposedly showing a huge anti-Reform rally in Wigan ahead of the Makerfield by-election has been circulating on social media.
The image has been widely shared on X with the caption: “Huge crowd in Wigan tonight for ‘Rally Against Reform’ Makerfield says NO to Nigel Farage.”
But the picture, which has also been posted on Bluesky and Facebook, and appears to show a crowd of thousands, isn’t real. It has been generated with artificial intelligence (AI).
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We know that this isn’t a real image of a rally in Wigan in Greater Manchester for several reasons.
Firstly, the large open square depicted doesn’t really exist, although some named landmarks correspond to real spots in Wigan.
One of these landmarks is the Galleries shopping centre building, but this has now been demolished as part of a £135 million redevelopment of the town centre.
Currently much of the area seemingly depicted in the image is a construction site and not publicly accessible. And even before it was knocked down it didn’t look as depicted in the image.
Aside from the geographical mistakes, the image also contains a number of glitches which are hallmarks of AI content.
Some of the signs being held at the supposed rally, such as for the TUC union contain garbled text. And some of the banners being held seem unrelated to a political protest, such as for ‘The Sealed Knot’ which is an English civil war re-enactment society, and for MENSA—an organisation for people with high IQs.
Additionally we found the image contained an invisible SynthID watermark, meaning it was generated with OpenAI’s tools, such as ChatGPT or Codex.
While several Stand Up to Racism protests and leafleting events have taken place in Wigan against Reform in recent weeks, this is not a genuine image of these events, which have reportedly been attended by around 60 people.
We have also fact checked an AI image of Labour’s Makerfield by-election candidate Andy Burnham which has been shared ahead of polling day on18 June.
Before sharing content like this which you may come across online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a reliable and trustworthy source. Our Full Fact misinformation toolkit has guides to spotting AI content and misleading pictures.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because this isn’t a real image of an anti-Reform rally in Wigan, it’s been generated with AI.
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Image courtesy of Rigby Financial.
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