South Korean posts drum up patriotic outrage with AI image of upside-down flag
- Published on August 14, 2026 at 03:58
- 2 min read
- By Hawon Jung, AFP South Korea
As South Korea celebrates the anniversary of the peninsula's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, social media users attempted to manufacture outrage with an AI-generated image they falsely claimed showed fireworks at a local festival that insultingly displayed the national flag upside down. The image was originally shared with an AI label and was tagged by a detection tool as synthetic. Moreover, a recording of the fireworks event shows no such display occurred.
"Another upside-down Taegeukgi, this time at Songdo fireworks," says Korean-language text on an Instagram image shared on August 11, 2026, referring to a district in the port city of Incheon, west of the capital Seoul.
"At this point, it seems intentional."
The image shows what appears to be firework bursts shaped like the South Korean national flag -- called Taegeukgi -- in the night sky. But the circle in the middle of the emblem shows blue on top of red, instead of the other way around, and the trigrams are also incorrect.
The image surfaced after a recent political controversy in Incheon ahead of the August 15 Independence Day celebrations.
The city government displayed a street banner showing a woman holding the flag overhead (archived link). The angle of the picture made it appear as if the woman was holding the flag upside down.
Critics claimed it was an attempt to disparage the national flag, with some social media users accusing officials of being North Korean sympathisers or communists (archived here and here). The city government removed the banner as the controversy grew.
The purported fireworks image was also shared in similar Instagram, Threads, YouTube and X posts that claimed it occurred during the opening celebrations for the August 8-15 Songdo Beach Festival (archived link).
"This is crazy, I'm furious!" reads a comment on one of the posts, while another says: "This is intentional and must be deliberately planned."
But no such display occurred at the fireworks festival, and the circulating image is AI-generated.
'Did not happen'
The image was watermarked with the Instagram handle "issuemag_" in several of the false posts, and a subsequent keyword search found it was shared by the account on August 9 (archived link).
Its caption says it was generated by AI "to help (readers') understanding".
An analysis by the Hive Moderation detection tool also found the image was likely to contain AI-generated content (archived link).
A spokesman for Incheon's Yeonsu district, which organised the festival, told AFP on August 12 the fireworks were "never intended to display the national flag" and were instead meant to show spinning, ball-shaped bursts with mixed, shifting colours (archived link).
"The firework bursts might have looked like a national flag symbol when viewed from a certain angle, but it was never intended to show the national flag," he said, adding the firework depicted in the AI-generated image "did not happen" during the actual event.
The district office directed AFP to a full recording of the show -- shared on a YouTube channel that posts footage of fireworks at regional festivals (archived link).
A review of the footage, about four-and-a-half minutes long, shows that at no point was the firework depicted in the AI-generated image shown.
AFP has previously debunked other false claims portraying South Koreans as communist sympathisers.
Copyright © AFP 2017-2026. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
