Photographs circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp as evidence of a “record-breaking river of people” at the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna’s “Jana Satana” rally in Anuradhapura are misleading — one is a 2025 photograph taken in Bangladesh, and several others were generated by artificial intelligence, according to a fact-check published by Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka.
The rally itself was real. It was held at the Anuradhapura Municipal Council grounds on 12 September 2026, and was broadcast live through mainstream media and the party’s own social media pages, with drone footage and official photographs published. The viral images are not in any of it.
The Bangladesh photograph
The first tell was a signboard written in Hindi in one of the images — unlikely in Anuradhapura. A reverse image search traced the photograph to an international news report from 2025.
It shows the launch rally of the National Citizen Party (NCP) on 28 February 2025, on Manik Mia Avenue in Dhaka, Bangladesh — the new party formed by the student leaders who led the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina’s government, launched near the Bangladeshi parliament before thousands of supporters. Fact Crescendo verified the provenance against The Guardian’s coverage of the NCP launch and the image’s catalogue entry on Alamy, which credits it to Habibur Rahman.
The AI tells
Other photographs presented as the Anuradhapura rally carried signatures of machine generation:
- crowds appearing behind the stage, where no audience would stand
- identical people repeated in different parts of the same frame
- spelling errors on the signage of shops in the background
Fact Crescendo ran the images through several AI-content detection tools, which confirmed they were artificially generated.
A second fabricated image
A separate photograph circulated claiming to show SLPP politicians and a Buddhist monk seated around a table of liquor bottles. No credible outlet had published it.
That image was also found to be AI-generated. The fact-checkers point to inconsistent and oddly positioned fingers and hands on the figures near the steps, and to lighting that does not hold together — the way light falls on the bottles and glasses, and their reflections, does not match the ambient light of the surroundings.
The distorted-hands artefact is the oldest and most reliable AI image tell; the lighting-mismatch test is the one that generalises best to newer models, which have largely fixed hands.
Why the live broadcast settled it
The method here is worth noting, because it is cheap and repeatable. A political rally of any size in Sri Lanka is now streamed live by the party and covered by mainstream outlets from multiple angles. Any dramatic crowd photograph that cannot be located anywhere in that footage is, on that basis alone, suspect — before any reverse image search or detection tool is applied.
The fact-check was written by B. P. Hansani and rated the claims “Misleading.”
Note on the sourcing of this report
Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka is the originating fact-checker and the only outlet to have investigated these specific images; this article carries a single source for that reason. The Guardian report cited above is from March 2025 and is linked as corroboration of the Bangladesh photograph’s provenance, not as reporting on the Sri Lankan rally.
Readers should also note that several content-farm sites republished a thinner version of this fact-check on 21 September without naming the fact-checker, the rally date, the Dhaka rally or the AI tells — the details that make the finding checkable.
Not reported
The fact-check does not say how widely the images spread, whether any SLPP official or party account shared them, whether Facebook applied any label, or which AI detection tools were used and what confidence they returned. Nor does it identify who created the images — the question of origin remains open in every such case, and attribution is rarely possible from the image alone.
