Digitally-created image viral as Shahrukh Khan’s lookalike discovered in Kashmir

An image of a young boy who looks strikingly like Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan is circulating on social media with the claim that the boy is from Kashmir.

Jammu & Kashmir Youth Congress member Aabid Mir Magami posted this image and wrote, “Kashmiri boy is taking rounds on Social media who looks Like as Bollywood Badashah @iamsrk”. This tweet has been retweeted over 500 times since December 13. (archived link)

Several people have shared this image on Facebook and Twitter.

Digitally created image goes viral

Alt News looked up for media reports on a child from Kashmir who looks like Shahrukh Khan. However, there were none. But we did find reports by India Today and Hindustan Times about Khan’s lookalike. None of them had the level of facial similarity as the boy in the viral picture.

We performed a reverse image search using InVID browser plugin and found that a similar image of Khan was published by Getty Images. As per the caption, the image is from the 55th Cannes film festival held on May 23, 2002.

Both the images are identical except for the fact that in the viral image Khan looks several decades younger. The viral image has been made using a photo editing app called FaceApp that allows you to add various filters on a portrait image such as smile, beards, gender, face swap, age, hairstyles and others.

We downloaded FaceApp and applied the ‘young age’ filter on the Getty Images photo. Below is a comparison of the original image with the viral photograph and the one created by Alt News on FaceApp. The viral image has been adjusted for brightness, saturation and contrast.

Thus, an image of Shahrukh Khan from 2002 was edited and shared with the false claim that a Kashmiri boy looks just like him. The viral image was edited using software that changes a person’s features to make them look younger, old, etc. The application also allows the user to change the gender of a person, as shown below.