Claim: The Economist digitally removed a flag of Palestine from its August 2024 cover story on the protests over government jobs quotas in Bangladesh.
Fact: The claim is false. The Economist neither altered the image nor did it use artificial intelligence (AI) to remove the Palestinian flag. The magazine appears to have chosen another picture from the protests. The photographer credited with the cover image said he “was not there at that specific moment” when the flag of Palestine was unfurled.
On 9 August 2024, British journalist Afshin Rattansi posted (archive) two visuals on Facebook showing a scene from the 2024 student protests in Bangladesh when demonstrators climbed atop the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace in Dhaka. The first one shows a Palestinian flag being unfurled, but the second — the 10 August 2024 cover of The Economist’s weekly edition — does not depict the flag.
Rattansi captioned his post as follows:
“Neo-Nazi linked freesheet,‘The Economist’ photoshopped the Palestinian flag out of their photo from Bangladesh. #fakenews”
On 8 August 2024, The Economist published an article titled “Bangladesh has ousted an autocrat. Now for the hard part,” archived here. The cover image can be seen on this page (archive) and the magazine shared the piece on X (formerly Twitter) here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Student protests in Bangladesh
The Bangladesh protests began in June 2024 when the country’s supreme court overruled a decision by the government led by the former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, to do away with a 30% public jobs quota for the 1971 fighters’ descendants in response to similar demonstrations in 2018. Students, who felt like their opportunities were restricted, demanded the system be made more merit-based.
The mass protests saw violence and clashes, arrests and detentions, and incidents of police firing directly at the demonstrators, which included students and teachers under the ‘Anti-discrimination Student Movement’ banner. They were also fuelled by discontent with the government and its suppression of rights. Multiple deaths and injuries were reported in the events that followed.
The government imposed a curfew and communications services were severely disrupted across Bangladesh in a move to quell the protests, according to multiple reports. Over 250 people were killed in the protests, according to Bengali-language newspaper Daily Manab Zamin. Among the deceased were police officers as well. Other sources stated that the death toll was over 400.
Eventually, Hasina — who had been in power since 2009 and previously ruled for another five years in the 1990s — resigned and fled to neighbouring India as a result of the pivotal move, which is now being called the “Gen Z revolution”. Bangladesh Army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman announced her departure and immediately took charge, while President Mohammed Shahabuddin ordered the release of opposition leader and former prime minister, Khaleda Zia, from house arrest.
A few days later, on 8 August, Muhammad Yunus, an economist and Bangladesh’s Nobel laureate, was sworn in as the interim head of the state. His advisers include Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuyain, the 26-year-old Dhaka University students who are among the leaders of the ‘Anti-discrimination Student Movement’.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check analysed the image used by The Economist for traces of AI or editing but did not find any.
We then searched Getty Images and AP Photos for images of the same scene and found multiple pictures taken by K M Asad for AFP, Rehman Asad for NurPhoto, and Najmus Sakib for Anadolu Agency. The images are available here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Another image shows Hasina’s palace before people managed to climb over it.
The only photograph showing the Palestinian flag can be found here and it is different from the one used by The Economist for their cover image. Two other images — here and here — show a red flag that is supposedly a communist flag, according to the claims by some people.
The specific image used by The Economist was taken by K M Asad and is available here in its original size while a zoomed-in version can be seen here. Responding to claims about the publication removing the flag of Palestine from its cover, the photographer clarified (archive) on Instagram that he “was not there at that specific moment” and “was taking photographs of other places”.
Asad also added that The Economist had not altered the picture he took. His full statement can be read below:
View this post on Instagram
The photographer, who posted the original image here (archive) on Instagram a day after it was taken on 5 August 2024, also shared (archive) that his visual was printed on The New York Times’ front page.
Soch Fact Check reached out to both K M Asad, who referred us to the same post shared above. We have also reached out to Rehman Asad for a comment in this regard.
Interestingly, we also came across X posts by at least four people — here, here, here, and here — who indicated that the image used by The Economist was neither doctored nor manipulated using AI. We also found two blunt responses by the magazine’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi.
Conclusively, a critique of The Economist’s choice of image, which was meant to inform a larger narrative on the Western media allegedly engaging in Palestinian erasure, only fuelled misinformation. Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the claim is false.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found multiple people with sizeable followings had posted the false claim, including the Iranian-Canadian journalist Samira Mohyeddin, Pakistani journalists Omar Quraishi and Khurram Husain, and author Khaled Beydoun, an associate law professor at the Arizona State University’s (ASU) Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.
Posts by Beydoun, who has hundreds of thousands of followers on various social media platforms, are often reshared with the same text; some of them can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Mainstream news outlets also posted the same claim here, here, and here.
The claim was also found here, here, here, here, and here on Facebook, here and here on Threads, and here, here, here, here, and here on X.
Conclusion: The Economist did not digitally remove the Palestinian flag from a picture taken during the 2024 Bangladesh protests nor did it use artificial intelligence (AI) to do so. The magazine appears to have chosen another picture from the protests. The photographer credited with the image clarified that he “was not there at that specific moment” when the flag of Palestine was unfurled and added that the flag was not erased.
Background image in cover photo: Bornil Amin
To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com