The "evidence" for the claim ignores some other key elements & facts.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has shared an image onto social media of what he labelled 'obscene' vandalism - an election poster being graffitied with a swastika.
The Member for Kooyong, who is Jewish, shared the picture yesterday - just days after opponent Dr Monique Ryan also had a poster graffitied with a swastika.
"It doesn't matter which political group is on the receiving end, it's just not on. Our community deserves better," the Treasurer said.
However, despite bipartisan condemnation on Twitter, some people have claimed that the swastika was photoshopped onto the Treasurer's forehead on the poster.
The "evidence" of this? Pixelation around the swastika.
We're not going to pretend we're graphic design experts. That being said, here is what we can say about this claim:
The same pixelation can clearly be seen around other parts of the image - notably the text & the Liberal logo.
There is no suggestion either of those things were digitally added on.
Here's one explanation that gives some more information:
"JPEG artifacts are caused by compression when an image is saved in the .jpg format. Each time an image is saved in this format it is compressed and “non-essential” data is discarded. The result of compression is that an image can suffer from blockiness, mosquito noise (around edges) and color degradation."
For the record, we used the reverse image tool on Google to see if we could find a swastika that exactly matched the one on the poster - we did not find one.
We also have seen some suggestions to actually find the original poster - however, due to the fact that the swastika would likely be removed by now, and the fact that the fence the poster is on may belong to private residence, we are not working to track it down.
As we stated before, we are not graphic design experts. However, using factual information, we can say that the claim that the swastika was "photoshopped" by Josh Frydenberg is inconclusive & the supposed evidence ignores pixelation that is seen throughout the image of the poster.
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