On May 22, the Kremlin media accounts on Twitter and Telegram began to publish the same photo depicting a large explosion near one of the buildings of the US Department of Defense in the Washington suburb of Arlington. This was reported by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the TV channel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation Zvezda, radio NSN and others. Captions for the photo are extremely sparse: there are no official comments, the details are unknown.
However, attentive users immediately began to notice some oddities. For some reason, there is only one photo of the explosion on the network; for some reason, no one took it from other points. A powerful explosion occurred next to a metal fence, which for some reason was completely unaffected by the blast wave. But the most surprising thing is the lamppost, which, in the best traditions of the paradoxical engravings of Moritz Escher, is located both in front of the fence and behind it.
Such a strange mistake could hardly have been made by a man; Apparently, this is the work of a neural network.
However, the photo soon disappeared from the RT channel, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that the Turkish journalist Yunus Paksoy, who works in Washington, posted a photo in which there is not a trace of a smoke column over Arlington.
A Pentagon spokesman said there was no explosion.
Apparently, for the first time, the photo appeared early in the morning on American social networks; the original tweet with her was deleted soon after. The US stock market fell noticeably against the background of the news about the explosion, however, not for long: a few hours later, when it became clear that the photo was fake and there was no explosion, the value of the S&P 500 index recovered. It is possible that the impact on the stock market was the original purpose of the fake.