by Adam Moynihan

A photograph of an MLB player who looks identical to Cork actor Cillian Murphy went viral last weekend. If you were online then you probably saw it.

The Twitter account @CodifyBaseball posted the picture just after midnight on Friday night (GMT) along with the caption: ‘tyler glasnow looking great so far today vs. the rangers’ (sic).

By Saturday morning, the image was everywhere. The post itself has around 6k retweets, 17k likes, and it has been viewed over 32 million times.

Several high-profile personalities with large followings were among the thousands of Twitter users to ‘quote tweet’ the original post, and these new posts were also seen by millions of people.

A number of well-known media outlets including tabloids in Ireland and the UK ran articles on the story. Sports Illustrated, the largest weekly sports magazine in the USA, published a piece on their website under the headline: ‘Sports World in Disbelief Over Rays Pitcher Bearing Striking Resemblance to Cillian Murphy’.

The reaction was consistent across the board. People were amazed. Glasnow and Murphy are identical. How could this be real?

As it turned out, the answer was pretty simple: it wasn't real at all.

When I first saw the tweet, I initially assumed that it was a photo of Cillian Murphy in a baseball uniform. I guess he must be doing a baseball movie, I thought to myself. Or maybe it's a guest spot on Eastbound & Down.

But when thousands of replies and quote retweets indicated that this was, in fact, a real baseball player called Tyler Glasnow, I was confused.

It’s one thing for two people to look alike but this was different. They had exactly the same face. I know doppelgangers exist in the real world but what are the chances? I was skeptical and decided to dig a little deeper.

The first thing I did was examine the photo a little more closely. I noticed an imperfection around one of the eyes that could possibly indicate that it was doctored in some way, but I didn’t feel as though it was definitive.

Then I googled the name ‘Tyler Glasnow’. Straight away - within a second - it became very obvious that the viral image was fake. Glasnow and Murphy are not identical.

I did, however, discover that baseball fans have been saying that the pair look like one another for at least three years. In certain photos there is some resemblance, but they are not identical.

The next step was to find the original image of Glasnow that I believed had been altered to make him look like Murphy. A reverse image search pulled up no results. This led me to believe that the image was a still or a screenshot taken from a video. This might make it harder to trace.

The original tweet implied that the image was taken from the Tampa Bay Rays’ match against the Texas Rangers on Friday, June 9, so I went to YouTube to find footage.

Scanning through a few different highlight packages, I was able to find several close-up shots of Glasnow, but they didn't match up with the viral image. For one thing, the seating in the background was sloping downwards left to right in the video and right to left in the image.

This was worrying as far as my investigation was concerned as it made me think that the image might be from a different game. I was pretty sure it was fake but it would have been a big ask to sift through dozens of Tampa Bay Rays matches to prove it. Especially when I was off the clock.

At this point I decided to check how many games Glasnow had played in this season. He recently recovered from injury so he had only made three appearances.

I noticed that the Rays appeared to be wearing a throwback jersey in the viral image. They wore the same jersey against the Rangers. I did a Google image search for the other two games that Glasnow played in this year and in both games the Rays wore their regular uniforms. It now seemed likely that the image was, indeed, taken from the Rangers game.

Next, I found a database with full broadcasts of all MLB games, including the one in question. Jumping forward five seconds at a time, I scanned for close-ups of Glasnow. There were plenty but, again, the background didn’t match. I was beginning to get disheartened.

But then, in the 33rd minute of the video, the camera cut to Glasnow as he walked off the field. I almost missed it but the blurry figures in the background looked right.

I went back to the start of this close-up and slowly went forward, frame by frame, until it all clicked into place. The background, the body position, the uniform, the shadows, even the outline of the head, everything matched up perfectly with the viral image.

Except, of course, for the face.

In reality, Glasnow barely looks like Murphy at all. The still image had been doctored somehow to replace his face with Murphy’s.

I shared my findings on Twitter and a couple of the media outlets backtracked and said that Cillian Murphy fans had been "tricked". (Note how it was the fans who were tricked, not the media outlets with massive audiences, or their journalists who didn’t bother to do any research).

One paper deleted their article and the rest just left it as it was.

To be honest, I don’t think they care. They got their clicks. On to the next one.

Many of the prominent Twitter accounts who shared the fake image were alerted to the fact that it was fake. From what I can tell, the vast majority didn’t relay this information on to their followers.

It’s only a photo of a baseball player who looks like an actor. No one got hurt. But it’s a perfect example of how willing we are, even in this age of misinformation, to believe the things we see online without really questioning whether or not they’re real.

With AI becoming more prevalent and more accessible, distinguishing fact from fiction is only going to get harder.

Unfortunately, if people in the media aren’t willing to spend 30 minutes conducting basic research before spreading a lie, I’m afraid we’re fighting a losing battle.