The age gap between Pelosi and Xijin should have been the first red flag: Pelosi is 82 years old, while Hu Xijin is 20 years younger.
Digital Desk: An alleged wedding photo of
Nancy Pelosi is currently making the rounds on the internet. It is supposed to
depict US House Speaker Paul Ryan with Chinese journalist Hu Xijin. However,
the entire story is a fabrication.
The visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to
Taiwan is causing a political and diplomatic uproar, with the Chinese government
already reacting harshly.
The
visit of the US delegation has also sparked debate on the internet. False
claims and fake content are now circulating, in addition to arguments for and
against the visit and US support for Taiwan. There's this story, for example,
which should not be taken too seriously.
Claim:
"When they were young: Nancy Pelosi and Hu Xijin," a Twitter user
wrote under a photo purportedly showing Nancy Pelosi and the former
editor-in-chief of China's Global Times newspaper.
The
photo was altered. It is made up of two older photographs that have been
combined: One depicts a young Nancy Pelosi, but in the original, she is not
with Xijin, but with her family. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., is also a
US politician. Pelosi, third from left, captioned the photo "With family
as a young girl" on Flickr. It was also on one of her campaign pages.
The
second image depicts a young Hu Xijin. A reverse image search yields a tweet
from the journalist himself, in which he writes about his time in the Chinese
military ("unforgettable years") and includes the photo that now
appears in the alleged wedding photograph.
Both
parts of the alleged wedding photograph can thus be traced back using archive
research and reverse image search. We also performed forensic image analysis
and discovered various colour compositions, indicating a different pixel
composition and thus a manipulation. This reveals the image to be a forgery,
which some users mistook for satire while others assumed was genuine.
The
age gap between Pelosi and Xijin should have been the first red flag: Pelosi is
82 years old, while Hu Xijin is 20 years younger.
Pelosi
is similar in age to the alleged wedding picture in this 1960 photo with later
US President John F. Kennedy. Xijin had only recently been born in 1960.
So,
why was this bogus photograph created? Internet users apparently intended this
as a joke. Hu Xijin has been a harsh critic of Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan,
and on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, he has called for
"military countermeasures" if Pelosi visits Taiwan because this is
"the only language that the US and Taiwan understand." On Twitter, he
even suggested that the Chinese People's Liberation Army "shoot down"
Pelosi's plane en route to Taiwan if she did not return. His Twitter account
was temporarily blocked as a result, and Xijin deleted the tweet.
