This automatically translated article was originally published by Istinomer.
The original photograph was published by the weekly Vreme on Oct. 24, 2002, but Ilija Srdanović’s face does not appear in the original image. It was digitally added later.
- The photograph has been shared on social media and news websites as purported evidence of a gathering of young members of the Liberal Alliance during a visit by the movement’s leader, Slavko Perović, to Lovćenac in the late 1990s.
- A reverse image search traced the photograph to the archive of the weekly Vreme.
- It was published on Oct. 24, 2002, with journalist Vera Didanović’s article “Milo, Still.”
- A comparison of the original image with the version currently circulating online shows that the face of the young man in the relevant position was digitally replaced in the manipulated version.
- We rate the posts as misuse of visual content.
The photograph has circulated on social media and on the news websites Politika and Kurir, accompanied by claims that it shows a celebration attended by young members of the Liberal Alliance during Slavko Perović’s visit to Lovćenac in the late 1990s. A red circle highlights a young man who is identified in the posts as Ilija Srdanović, now the top candidate on the “Students’ List – Students Win.”
A reverse image search, however, shows that the photograph does not depict Srdanović as a young man. In the original image available in the Vreme weekly archive, published with journalist Vera Didanović’s article “Milo, Still” in issue No. 616 on Oct. 24, 2002, the person standing in that position has a different face from the one shown in the viral image circulating on social media.
The analysis indicates that a photograph of Ilija Srdanović when he was young was digitally superimposed onto the existing scene. The image was subsequently processed and enhanced, a characteristic that can be associated with AI-generated or AI-assisted image manipulation.
The content of Didanović’s article provides further evidence that the photograph has been misrepresented. The article discusses Montenegro’s political situation following the 2002 parliamentary elections; it does not concern a visit by Slavko Perović to Lovćenac in Vojvodina in the 1990s.
