Back to Africa Check

‘This is Kenya?’ No, photo is of highway in Turkey

On 23 March 2019, Kenyan boxer Fatuma Zarika beat Zambia's Catherine Phiri to retain her WBC super bantamweight championship title. The clash took place in Nairobi.

But social media users from the two countries were soon debating who really won the fight.

It quickly degenerated into an online faceoff with citizens from both countries taking turns to troll each other.

Both sides used online tricks to show off their respective republic’s achievements.

Photo falsely captioned before


One Kenyan user posted a photo, supposedly of a dual-carriage highway in Kenya, on a Zambian Facebook group with over 280,000 members.

“I just wanted to tell you... this the road linking our city Kisumu to our people’s president home in Bondo Town... this is Kenya,” he captioned the image.

Kisumu is the capital city of Kenya’s Kisumu County, and Bondo a town in Siaya County.

The photo has been published online with a false caption before. In 2018 it was posted on Facebook with the claim it was of the “Hazara Motorway” in Pakistan. Earlier in 2019 it was widely shared in India to supposedly show progress made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The claims were debunked by fact-checkers at Alt News, Agence France-Presse and SM Hoax Slayer.



Mersin Antalya Highway in Turkey


A reverse image search reveals the image is of a highway in Mersin province in southern Turkey.

The Facebook page Civil Engineering Discoveries posted the photo in 2018, captioning it as Turkey’s Mersin Antalya Highway.

A Google search for Mersin Antalya Highway returns a YouTube video showing similar sections of the road. It can be found on Google Maps as state road D-400 in southern Turkey.

Africa Check took a closer look and successfully pinpointed the place where the photo was taken, near a mosque along Mersin-Antalya Yolu Road. – Dancan Bwire (16/04/19)




 

Republish our content for free

Please complete this form to receive the HTML sharing code.

For publishers: what to do if your post is rated false

A fact-checker has rated your Facebook or Instagram post as “false”, “altered”, “partly false” or “missing context”. This could have serious consequences. What do you do?

Click on our guide for the steps you should follow.

Publishers guide

Africa Check teams up with Facebook

Africa Check is a partner in Meta's third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media.

The content we rate as “false” will be downgraded on Facebook and Instagram. This means fewer people will see it.

You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how.

Add new comment

Restricted HTML

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <h6 id>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
limit: 600 characters

Want to keep reading our fact-checks?

We will never charge you for verified, reliable information. Help us keep it that way by supporting our work.

Become a newsletter subscriber

Support independent fact-checking in Africa.