Did Mike Tyson drape a Palestinian flag around his shoulders around the time of a boxing match? No, that's not true: Tyson's publicist confirmed that the photo of him appearing to wear the flag was "a fake." Online image analysis tools suggest the viral image may be the product of artificial intelligence.
The photo appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on November 14, 2024. The caption read:
Mike Tyson poses with the Palestinian flag before his historic fight tomorrow.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Nov 18 16:17:17 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories reached out to Tyson's representatives about the picture. In an email to Lead Stories received on November 18, 2024, Tyson's publicist, Jo Mignano, said:
This is a fake photo.
The post on Facebook does not specify when the picture was supposedly snapped, only that it was taken "before" Tyson's fight against Jake Paul in Arlington, Texas, on November 15, 2024 (archived here). Lead Stories ran a reverse image search on Google Lens on November 18, 2024, and found no reliable news reports about Tyson wearing a Palestinian flag -- only social media posts featuring the same photo and analyses by other fact checkers.
(Source: Google Lens screenshot taken on Mon Nov 18 18:23:54 2024 UTC)
Had Tyson actually donned a Palestinian flag, news media would likely have covered it due to attitudes surrounding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that broke out on October 7, 2023 (archived here).
Lead Stories ran the image through TrueMedia.org's AI-detection tool, which found "substantial evidence of manipulation" (archived here).
(Source: TrueMedia screenshot taken on Mon Nov 18 16:28:26 2024 UTC)
A similar tool on the AI Detect Content site found that the image was 51 percent likely to be "AI generated/deepfaked":
(Source: AI Detect Content screenshot taken on Mon Nov 18 16:53:14 2024 UTC)
More Lead Stories fact checks on claims about Mike Tyson can be read here. Fact checks about claims related to sports are here.
