Seven days ago, a photo of eighteen-year-old Angela Merkel began circulating on the Internet – with a couple of “interventions” presented as evidence of some sort of – not specified what – conspiracy.
The original photo was published by Time in 2015, with the following description: “Angela Kasner, 18, with her friends at the New Year’s celebration in Berlin, 1972”.
Three years later, internet conspiracy theorists started claiming that Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, is next to Merkel in the photo. There are two “theories” about the third girl: one version claims the photo to feature Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of Lithuania; the second states that it is Gina Haspel, who was recently nominated by Donald Trump for the CIA director. The only thing that is true in the whole story is that the photo shows Angela Merkel at the age of 18, with two friends – neither of whom is Theresa May, Gina Haspel, or Dalia Grybauskaitė.
All versions feature similar text, which implies that the alleged long-standing acquaintance of May, Merkel and Grybauskaitė (or Haspel) indicates the existence of a conspiracy, although it has not been explained of what kind.
Childhood friends, today leaders of states? Nothing is accidental.
On Instagram, some versions are a bit more specific, featuring a photo that says that “They plan our leaders decades in advance”, although it hasn’t been clarified who are “they”.
In the version in which Merkel and May are associated with Lithuania’s President, their photos from the present have been added to the original photo, even though they already show the absence of similarity between the girl in the photo and the current British Prime Minister.
Claims about Gina Haspel do not have such “illustrations” – probably because, unlike the Lithuanian president, Haspel bears no resemblance to the girl in the photo.
The photo, likely, first appeared on Twitter, from where it was taken over by the extreme right-wing websites from Serbia, such as Vidovdan and Nacionalist. We also found it in Macedonian, Albanian, Czech and Turkish, and the fact-checking site Snopes fact-checked the Italian version:
Snopes compared this “triptych” to a real photograph of Theresa May taken in 1971, clearly showing that it is not the same person. To refute the claim that the third person is “Gina Haspel or Dalia Grybauskaitė” is meaningless in itself, and in any case, superfluous after it has been shown that Theresa May is not in the picture.
This “fake news in a photo” began to be republished on March 15, 2018, on the forum of the site run by conspiracy theorist David Icke and on Twitter, and then on blogs, social networks and obscure “conspiracy” sites in various languages. We rate it as conspiracy theory and fake news.
(Author: Tijana Cvjetićanin, Raskrinkavanje.ba)
