This image of Indonesian President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo was doctored from a 2016 photo of him

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on September 25, 2019 at 09:05
  • Updated on October 2, 2019 at 06:08
  • 2 min read
  • By AFP Indonesia

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An image has been shared repeatedly in multiple posts on Facebook in September 2019 which purports to show Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in the house of an Indonesian citizen alongside a claim that he was inspecting recent forest fires in Riau province. The claim is false; the image has been doctored from a photo of Jokowi on a visit to islands in northeastern Indonesia for New Year in 2016.

The image was published in this Facebook post on September 18, 2019. It received more than 320 comments and 1,000 reactions before it was removed.

It shows Jokowi sitting on the floor of a house with food laid out in front of him.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post

The post’s Indonesian-language caption translates to English as: “When the flood of smoke hits, the governor and deputy governor are traveling abroad, But then who is this person? The location is a resident’s house in Riau near the forest that caught fire."

The Riau province fires have sent toxic, choking haze to parts of Southeast Asia for weeks. Jokowi visited an area hard hit by forest fires in Riau province on September 17, 2019, according to this AFP report. 

The same image was also published here, here and here on Facebook with an identical claim.

The claim is false; the image has been doctored from a photo taken of Jokowi when he visited the Raja Ampat islands in northeastern Indonesia to celebrate the New Year in 2016.

Keyword searches on Google found the photo published by the president here, on his official Twitter account, on January 1, 2016.

The post's Indonesian-language caption translates to English as: “My first sunrise in 2016 on the pier of Waiwo, Raja Ampat, the best place in the world for snorkeling -Jkw.”

Raja Ampat islands is a tourist destination in the eastern Indonesian province of West Papua. 

“Jkw” is the initials of the president’s popular nickname, Jokowi. 

In the doctored photo, the background of the original image has been replaced by the inside of a building and the photo of Jokowi has been slightly tilted.

Below is a screenshot comparing the misleading Facebook photo (L) and the photo from the Indonesian president’s Twitter account (R): 

Comparison between the misleading Facebook photo (L) and the photo from Jokowi’s Twitter account (R)

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