North Korea uses Photoshop to defeat the corona virus
North Korea has photoshopped face masks on corona virus propaganda images, an expert claims – while supreme leader Kim Jong Un is depicted without anyone showing that he doesn’t fear the disease.
Multiple photos of North Korea’s response to the COVID-19 threat were sent to Stuart Gibson, an associate professor of forensic science at the University of Kent, for expert analysis.
Gibson, who has 24 years of experience in image processing and wrote software to detect fake photos, said he thought all seven images were “probably counterfeits.”
One fake image shows two women working in a factory loom, while a colleague is standing by a machine in the background.
According to Stuart Gibson, a forensic science teacher, the resolutions on the masks of the two women working in a North Korean factory are lower than the rest of the picture. This, he says, suggests they were copied and pasted
Dr. Gibson said, “I look at the face masks and their resolution is certainly lower than the resolution of the rest of the image, which tells me they were copied and pasted.
“Especially when you look at the lady on the right: the top edge of that face mask is very grainy.
“They tried to smooth it out, but you can still see the pixelation there.”
He continued, “The best thing is that the figure in the background has no legs.
Gibson added, “The best part is that the figure in the background has no legs” (shown)
“If they’d taken the legs down a few more pixels, they might have gotten away with it, but you can clearly see that there is a hole – that number is superimposed.”
Another photo shows a woman in a white apron working on a machine, but there is something shocking about the photo.
“Here you have the added difficulty that the face is three-dimensional and the mask is wrapped around it, and in some fakes it doesn’t really exactly follow the shape of the face.”
Pictured: An undated photo of a woman working on a loom wearing a photoshopped face mask in North Korea
Dr. Gibson said, “With many of these images, there is not a single light source that makes it quite difficult to tell exactly why the lighting is wrong.
“But the mind is very good at detecting something that is not quite right.
“That photo is almost certainly a fake. I think that’s probably because the exposure doesn’t match the rest of the image.
“This photo was taken with a lot of natural light, and perhaps the mask was superimposed over an image photographed in different lighting conditions.”
In some of the images pumped out by the North Korean regime, the lighting and contours of the face make it clear they are counterfeits, Gibson said
While the regime broadcasts the photoshopped images, the supreme leader and chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea still refuses to be depicted in one photo.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December, the North Korean dictator has been photographed countless times, often with his subordinates wearing protective face masks.
The images show President Kim in stark contrast to his officials, setting him apart from the general soldiers with their black face shields.
Kim Jong Un and the ruling Kim family are the culmination of the personality cult in North Korea, which has existed in the closed country for decades.
Supporters of the sect have a fanaticism about Kim Jong Un that is so strong that many see the leader as a god of divine power, often played by the ruler’s propaganda machine.
The images of him without protection show him as a strong man, immune to the deadly consequences of the disease.
The dictatorship is guided by an ideology of self-reliance called Juche, and recent propaganda boasted that North Korean factories produce tens of thousands of masks every day.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is depicted without a mask as military officials today put on protective equipment on a training ground in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)
In this photo of the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects an unmanned military exercise at a secret location in North Korea on Monday.
A photo released by the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 3, 2020 shows Kim Jong Un (center) attending an unprotected fire drill, unprotected from the corona virus, in a secret location in North Korea
At a time when neighboring South Korea is short on face masks, the North may hope to highlight the success of its self-reliance, despite having insufficient supply of its own.
It is also possible that Pyongyang tries to make propaganda created before the crisis, reflecting the latest guidelines, which forbid anyone without a mask from entering public places.
The regime continues to deny that COVID-19 is present within its borders, but unconfirmed reports leaked to the foreign press tell a different story.
A source in the army of the north told the South Korean Daily NK newspaper that 180 soldiers had already succumbed to the virus, with most of the deaths occurring near the closed border with China.
Another 3,700 soldiers were quarantined, she added. Meanwhile, a government official in Seoul told Chosun Ilbo newspaper that Kim Jong-un Pyongyang had fled to escape the virus on her way to Wonsan, a coastal city.
The faked photos were discovered after rumors spread in neighboring South Korea that the government had donated face masks to the north, even as its supply declined.
The rumor was firmly denied by the Seoul government.
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