No, Mike Tyson Did Not Stand With Palestinian Flag Before Fight With Jake Paul

The viral image showing Mike Tyson with Palestine's flag wrapped around his shoulders is likely AI-generated.

Shortly after his fight with American YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul, a photo of former professional boxer Mike Tyson, standing in the ring, with the Palestinian flag draped around his shoulders went viral on social media.

At the time of writing this report, this Facebook post had been shared over 8,500 times.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this image can be seen here, here, and here.)

Did he do that?: No, he did not. The image has likely been generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

How did we find out the truth?: When we observed the image, we noticed some issues with it.

• Firstly, the text on Tyson's shorts, on the left leg, appears to be garbled. This is also the case with text on the ropes around the boxing ring.

• Secondly, the tip of the red triangle on the Palestinian flag faces towards the border of the flag that Tyson has draped around himself.

• In reality, the tip points outwards, towards the right side of the flag.

• His facial tattoo also appears to be distorted in the viral image, where it resembles an ovoid shape instead of two lines, as seen in a video on Tyson's X account.

• These errors are consistent with the mistakes usually found in AI-generated images.

Google search: We ran a reverse image search on the viral image for more information, but saw that no credible source had shared it.

• However, we saw that the image was first shared on Threads and Instagram on 13 November, two days before his fight against Jake Paul, which was held on 15 November.

• A keyword search on Google for 'Mike Tyson Palestine' did not return any news reports or relevant results with this image, nor did any of them mention Tyson wearing a Palestinian flag.

Is it AI?: We submitted the image to TrueMedia's AI detection tool, which was confident that the image showed "substantial evidence of manipulation."

Conclusion: This photo of boxer Mike Tyson with a Palestinian flag is an AI-generated image.

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