False: Image of white man with ‘Black Lives Matter’ flag standing on the back of two Black people is digitally manipulated
A Reddit user on Oct. 20 posted an image of what appears to be a white person with a “Black Lives Matter” flag in his hand standing on the back of two Black people on a beach.
The post has over 600 upvote counts and 22 comments as of this writing. Another post on Reddit with the same image garnered 300 upvotes.
However, the image is digitally manipulated. The “Black Lives Matter” flag is digitally added to an older picture.
The image without the flag can also be found on Reddit. It is titled “Russians on Vacation” and was uploaded in June 2014.
The same image in a higher resolution is also found on this webpage satirically poking fun at Russian tourists.
The “Black Lives Matter” flag in the doctored image, on the other hand, is nearly identical to the flag seen in this photo from an article published on The Mercury News on June 23, 2020.
The photo showing the flag was taken by Karl Mondon, a staff photographer from the Bay Area News Group, at the Levi’s Stadium, home court of the San Francisco-based American football team 49ers.
Annie Lab has also geolocated the beach and determined the original photo was taken in Anapa, Russia.
This user-uploaded photo on Google Map street view shows Therapeutic Beach in Anapa, Russia. It features the same buildings and landscape seen in the image in question.
This image of a white man seems to be source material for a variation of other doctored images and memes (also here).
Geotagged posts on Instagram such as here and here also showed people interacting with Black men on the beach in Anapa.
Анапское Черноморье, a local news outlet based in Anapa, the same city where the original image is captured, reported black people strolling along the beach, offering tourists to be photographed together then asking for a fee.
The “Black Lives Matter” movement began in 2013 in the United States, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot an African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012.
In 2020 the movement saw a global wave of demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
