On 20 March 2023, a thread on Twitter showed Donald Trump being seized by police officers on a New York street, falling to the ground, then standing trial and sitting in a cell in an orange jumpsuit. None of it had happened. The pictures were produced by an SI (AI) image generator, and their author said so in the very first line of his thread. Within two days they had been viewed nearly five million times, and many of the copies travelling across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook no longer carried that first line.
Nobody had to unmask the author of these pictures: he had signed his work. The label was accurate. It simply did not travel with the images.
Claim: photos show Donald Trump being arrested by police in New York in March 2023.
Verdict: false. The images were generated with Midjourney version 5. Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, posted them on 20 March 2023 and presented them as generated pictures. Reuters, AFP, USA Today, Lead Stories and The Dispatch all confirmed their origin, most of them with Higgins himself. No arrest had taken place when the images circulated.
What was actually happening that week
The pictures landed in the middle of a real news story, which is the reason they spread. On the morning of 18 March 2023, Donald Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social that he expected to be arrested on the following Tuesday, 21 March, in connection with an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into a payment made to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Tuesday came and went. AFP wrote that no charges had been announced as of 24 March. A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him on 30 March, according to the update Snopes added to its own fact-check. On 4 April he turned himself in at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he was arraigned on 34 counts of falsifying business records and pleaded not guilty. PolitiFact reported that he was fingerprinted, that he was not handcuffed and that no mug shot was taken.
For more than two weeks, a very large audience was waiting for a picture that did not exist yet. Image generators filled the gap, and the real event looked nothing like what they had imagined: no street chase, no handcuffs, no jumpsuit.
One thread, clearly labelled
Eliot Higgins is best known for founding Bellingcat, an open-source investigative outlet. In March 2023 he was testing the new version of Midjourney, a tool that turns a written description into a picture. The Dispatch and Lead Stories found an earlier thread of his, dated 16 March, in which he tried to produce "realistic news images" with Midjourney's version 5, including what he called "an entirely fictional perp walk".
On 20 March he posted the thread that went viral. Its first tweet read: "Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump's arrest." He expected almost no reaction, he told The Washington Post: "I was just mucking about. I thought maybe five people would retweet it."
- The tool. Higgins confirmed to Reuters and to USA Today that he had used Midjourney v5.
- The number of images. BuzzFeed News and Ars Technica counted about 50 pictures shared on Twitter. AFP, which received a Google Drive link from Higgins, counted 124 pictures created in total.
- The story. The first images show police officers surrounding the former president in the street. Higgins then extended the plot. He told BuzzFeed News that the pictures "kind of formed a narrative", so he added a trial, a prison and an escape that ends, as Lead Stories describes it, through a tunnel to a fast-food restaurant.
- The intent. In a statement to The Dispatch, Higgins said the thread "was mainly intended to be an example of Midjourney's capabilities" and "wasn't intended to deceive anyone".
We reproduce only one of them, the copy we tested further down, with a label added on the picture itself. The fact-checks listed under this article show them alongside their analysis.
How the label fell off
Reuters rated the claim "missing context" and not simply "false", and the nuance matters. The agency observed that most social media users showed they knew the pictures were inauthentic, while others asked whether they were real. One user quoted by Reuters wrote: "Is this real? #Trump getting arrested in NY?"
The fact-checkers documented how the pictures lost their caption:
- AFP found a tweet of 21 March presenting two of the images as news of an arrest, and noted that many of the people resharing them made no reference to the fact that they were digital creations.
- USA Today examined an Instagram post of 21 March that gathered more than 70,000 likes in a day. It mixed two of Higgins's pictures with two others of unknown origin. The owner of the page told the newspaper it was a meme page that posted for humour.
- On Twitter itself, according to Ars Technica, the original images later received a community note saying they were fake.
Renee DiResta, then research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, summed it up for AFP: "the creator disclosed that they were AI-generated in his own post, but that context was lost when they were reshared."
A caption is the most fragile label there is. It lives in the post, not in the file, so a screenshot or a download leaves it behind. Nothing inside the pictures repeated it: the copy we tested (see below) shows no watermark and contains no provenance data such as the signed Content Credentials some tools now attach. Once a picture was saved and uploaded again, nothing in it said where it came from.
Not the only fake arrest that week
Several unrelated sets of pictures circulated in the same weeks, and they are often confused with one another.
| Date | What circulated | Labelled as generated? | Who documented it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 March 2023 | An image captioned as an exclusive on an arrest at Mar-a-Lago, and a fake mug shot, posted by other accounts | No. Snopes found no disclaimer on the post it checked | Snopes, PolitiFact |
| 20 March 2023 | The viral Higgins thread: arrest in the street, then trial, prison and escape | Yes, in the first tweet | Reuters, AFP, USA Today, Lead Stories, The Dispatch |
| Around the 4 April 2023 arraignment | Scores of fake mug shots, although no mug shot was taken | Often not | PolitiFact |
The 18 March image is a different case from the Higgins thread. According to Snopes, it was posted with a caption announcing an arrest and without any mention of SI. PolitiFact traced the first shares of those pictures to two accounts, one a self-described parody account and the other describing itself as an "a.i. whisperer".
After the arraignment, PolitiFact reported scores of fabricated mug shots, shared by supporters and by opponents of the former president alike.
The clues that worked in 2023
The newsrooms that examined these pictures listed visual flaws. They do not all concern the same image, so we attribute each one.
- Hands and limbs. The BBC pointed to an arm that was much too short and to an officer's hand that looked more like a claw. Henry Ajder, the specialist it interviewed, said that zooming in often reveals inconsistencies such as the number of fingers. On the separate 18 March image, Snopes noted an officer without an index finger, and PolitiFact saw officers who appeared to be missing fingers.
- Text, badges and uniforms. Higgins gave USA Today his own checklist: "Text is nearly always nonsensical, and logos and badges are often a mess. If you look at uniforms of the police you'll notice they are all slightly different." The Washington Post described the badges in his images as blurry and indistinct. PolitiFact found a jumble of meaningless numbers behind the fake mug shot.
- Faces and focus. The BBC noticed a bystander with a blurred face, hair that was out of focus around a sharp face, and waxy skin tones.
- Gaze. In one picture of a chase, the BBC observed, the officers are looking in a completely different direction from the man they are supposed to be pursuing.
These clues have an expiry date. They describe the generators of early 2023. Del Walker, a character artist quoted by AFP, warned at the time that such red flags "can be improved in future AI updates or easily edited in image editing software". That is what happened: current generators draw far more convincing hands and text. A picture with five clean fingers on each hand proves nothing today.
What our SI detector says about a public copy
Wikimedia Commons hosts several pictures from this series, marked as public domain because they were generated by a machine and sourced to Higgins's tweets of 20 March 2023. We took one of them, a 1024 x 1024 pixel JPEG of about 100 KB showing a man in a dark suit and blue tie being held by several uniformed officers in front of a marble building. In this copy, the lettering on the officers' caps is an unreadable scribble and the hand that grips the man's waist is a pale, shapeless patch. We uploaded that one file to our SI image detector on 8 October 2026.
Result: 99% likely SI. The classifier found the statistical patterns of an SI-generated image in the pixels of this copy.
Metadata: no camera EXIF data, no Content Credentials, no SI tag in the XMP. Nothing in the file says how it was made.
What the test covers: one copy of one image from the series, as stored on Commons. We did not test the other pictures, the 18 March image or the mug shots.
That is now four viral images tested in this series: the fake Pentagon explosion photo, the Pope Francis puffer jacket image, the burning Hollywood sign and this one. The site returned "likely SI" for all four. Four pictures do not make a statistic, and any detector can be confidently wrong, including ours. Before you check for SI with any tool, ours or another, decide that the score will be one clue among several. Our article on how accurate SI detectors are explains why two tools can disagree on the same file.
What happened to the author
Two days after the thread, Higgins lost access to the tool. He told The Washington Post that he had been locked out of Midjourney's server on Wednesday 22 March without any message from the company about which rule he had broken. He told AFP the same day: "I don't have access to their services anymore."
"I suspect it was pushing my luck when I did the thread," Higgins told BuzzFeed News. Midjourney did not answer the requests for comment sent by Reuters, AFP, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News, and Ars Technica wrote that the company had not confirmed the ban. BuzzFeed News reported that the word "arrested" was now blocked in prompts. Ars Technica ran its own test the same day and found that prompts containing the former president's name appeared to be blocked as well.
Why this case still matters
Sam Gregory, executive director of the human rights organisation Witness, told The Washington Post that the episode showed "a giant step forward in the ability to create fake but believable images at volume". One person with one subscription had produced more than a hundred pictures of an event that never took place, and the caption that said so did not survive the first repost.
Gregory also named the longer-term risk, the same one that researchers describe when they explain what a deepfake is: "The aim may not be to convince people that a certain event happened but to convince people that they can't trust anything and to undermine trust in all images."
How to check a picture of breaking news
- Ask whether the event is confirmed. Open two or three news agencies or major newspapers. A major arrest, an explosion or a resignation is reported within minutes. Silence is a strong signal.
- Go back to the first post. A reverse image search or a search of the caption often leads to the original upload. In this case it led to a thread whose author said the pictures were generated.
- Compare with the plain facts. Does the place, the clothing or the procedure match what reliable reports describe? The real arraignment involved no handcuffs and no mug shot.
- Read the picture, knowing the limits. Hands, text, badges and background faces were useful in 2023 and are far less so now. Our guide to spotting SI images lists what is still worth examining.
- Use a detector last. Treat the score as one opinion to weigh with everything above.
.jpg){kind=link}