False claim about world’s tallest man from South Sudan published with altered image
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on November 19, 2021 at 12:21
- 2 min read
- By Mary KULUNDU, AFP Kenya
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“Meet Joshua Ladu, a South Sudanese man ranked as the tallest person in Guinness book of records. His height stands at around 9’8 FT (sic),” reads the Facebook post from April 2020.
Shared recently, and more than 2,000 times overall since it was published, the post includes an image of what appears to be an extremely tall and slender man in a blue shirt.
The claim has also appeared in Facebook posts here, here and here.
However, the claim is false.
Tallest men
“Joshua Ladu” is not registered as the tallest living man on the Guinness World Records website.
That honour belongs to Turkish national, Sultan Kösen, who stands 2.51 metres (8 feet 2.8 inches) tall, while the title of “tallest man ever” is held by Robert Pershing Wadlow, an American whose last recorded height was 2.72 metres (8 feet 11.1 inches).
Manipulated image
While AFP Fact Check was not able to locate the original image, a similar picture of the man without any apparent distortion was shared in the comments section.
A forensic analysis of the manipulated picture using a filter from the verification tool, InVID-WeVerify, showed a “disruption in the JPEG compression grid”, meaning there is a likelihood the image was distorted.
This distortion shows up as large blue pixels after running it through the forensic filter. See below.
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