I found a post on Facebook claiming that ice flowers were forming on the Songhua River in China. The images looked almost too good to be true, so I decided to fact check it. This was posted on January 1st, 2023. It says that according to China’s People’s Daily newspaper the formation of the flowers usually occurs in late autumn or early winter. It claims that “Netizens can’t stop gushing over the amazing photographs.”
- The first thing I did was verify if the Curly Tales were reliable. I noticed that they had a blue check mark, however you can buy blue checkmarks. This means that the blue checkmark does not mean they are verified. They have 3.5 million followers, and they give tips about food and travel experiences in India.
I checked their YouTube account and found a description of their channel. They claim to be India’s No.1 food and travel channel. Looking at their YouTube account, they only post things about Indian food and travel. This means that they are NOT experts on the field in which they were commenting on. The frozen flowers were found in China NOT India. This is a good indication that the post could be fake.
2. Secondly, using Snopes.com, I found an article that talked about ice flowers being fake. The rating was fake, claiming that AI was used to create the images. In the article on snopes.com, the author Aleksandra Wrona mentioned that the same images were also shared on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X. I also found more about Aleksandra Wrona on Snopes.com, proving that she is a reliable author.
3- Using TinEye, I did a reverse image search on the images, and it showed that the images were originally shared on reddit. I searched if reddit was a reliable source and found that since anybody can post, there is often a lot of conspiracy theories and fake news shared.
4. I used Illuminarty, which checks if images are AI generated. The AI percentages were fairly high, meaning that the images were most likely AI generated and not real. The first image is 84.4% AI generated and the second one is 79.5% AI generated.
5.Fifthly, I searched “ice flowers in frozen river hoax.” Many articles came up that said the images were AI generated. Here are some of the articles that came up : hkbu.edu.hk, telugupost.com. I also did a Wikipedia search for HKBU and found that they are a reliable source. I could not find a Wikipedia page about the telugupost.com, but on their website they fact check lots of articles and were founded in 2016. The author of the telugupost.com is Satya Priya who has more than 4 years of experience fact checking. The fact that multiple articles came up when I added the word “hoax” into the search, also leads me to believe these images could be fake.
Wikipedia page about HKBU:
HKBU Website:
Telugupost.com:
About Satya Priya:
6. Using another website called Baidu, I found more images of the ice flowers. They were much smaller and described as white feathers. Doing a quick Wikipedia search, I found that Baidu is one of the largest AI companies in the world, meaning these images are also not real.
Wikipedia page about Baidu:
Based on many sources the ice flowers found in the Songhua River in China are FAKE.