AI-generated image depicting raid victims as communist insurgents misleads online
- Published on May 15, 2026 at 11:00
- 3 min read
- By Ara EUGENIO, AFP Philippines
After 19 people were killed in a raid at an alleged communist stronghold in the Philippines in April 2026, social media users circulated an AI-generated image of the purported individuals posing with flags associated with insurgent groups in the country and some left-leaning organisations. The image contains visual artefacts indicative of synthetic content and the person who took the original photo told AFP that it was taken six months before the raid.
The Tagalog-language Facebook post shared on May 2, 2026 -- showing a group of smiling people holding several banners, including flags associated with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA) -- warns the public against joining communist insurgents.
"This is the photo taken days before the encounter in Negros. Do not be recruited! And do not surrender to the ideology of the NPA and the groups that support it."
The CPP and the NPA have been engaged in a long-running insurgency for nearly 60 years, with the aim of overthrowing the government through guerrilla warfare, primarily in rural areas.
Nineteen people, including two US citizens, were killed in the April 19 military raid on an alleged communist stronghold in Toboso on Negros island in west central Philippines (archived link).
More than 300 residents fled their homes as gunfire rang out across the remote sugarcane farming region. Only one soldier was wounded during the firefight, which the military has denied was a massacre.
A probe has been launched by the country's Commission on Human Rights in response to calls from various rights groups that most of the casualties, including the two Americans, were civilians engaged in community work, rather than "combatants" as claimed by the government's anti-insurgency task force (archived link)
The circulating image became a lightning rod for "red-tagging," a decades-old strategy to smear or silence critics in the Philippines by linking them to communist rebels trying to overthrow the government (archived link).
"A group of communists," one user's comment read.
Another said: "And to think they kept saying they were just researchers".
Similar posts circulated across Facebook.
But the image has been digitally altered.
AI-manipulated image
An initial review of the photo noted several visual inconsistencies characteristic of digital manipulation.
A person with disproportionate limbs can be seen at the left corner, at the back. Some of the flags appear to be held by floating hands, while a woman in black at the centre of the image appears to be holding two banners at once with her distorted left hand.
AFP ran the clip through the DeepFake-o-Meter tool developed by the University at Buffalo, which showed that two of its detection models indicated high confidence that the image was likely AI generated (archived link).
A subsequent reverse image search on Google led to an unaltered version of the photo uploaded to Facebook on April 29. The users name has been withheld by AFP for safety reasons.
While the composition of the two images is similar, the original photo does not contain any communist or activist flags that were added in the manipulated version. Everyone in the group also appear physically different from the AI-generated image.
Aside from journalist RJ Ledesma, seen on the far right, it is unclear if the others were killed during the raid. The two US citizens who were killed -- Lyle Prijoles and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem -- are also not seen in image.
The post, written in a Visayan language which is spoken in the central Philippines, expressed grief over the Toboso killings, specifically naming Ledesma and another confirmed casualty, University of the Philippines student Alyssa Alano, who does not appear in the group photo (archived link).
When contacted, the user told AFP on May 12 that the photo was taken in October 2025, six months before the raid in Toboso.
The user, a sugarcane farmer, also mentioned that the photo was not taken in Toboso but in a neighbouring town.
"I told them it was for our keepsake because they stayed overnight at our place and listened to our grievances as sugarcane farmers," the user said, adding that the group was visiting to learn about issues faced by the community amid an ongoing land dispute with a major oil plantation seeking to replace farmland in the area.
AFP has previously debunked misinformation targeting activists in the Philippines.
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