A viral image purportedly showing the cover of TIME magazine is being shared on social media claiming that the magazine wrote 'impeachment' as the title in its August edition featuring United States (US) President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
This comes in the backdrop of the US withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban taking control of the country.
However, we found that the viral cover has been altered and the 23 August edition of the magazine, which is the latest one, does not feature Biden and Harris.
CLAIM
The text in the viral cover mentions, "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris —Changing America's history."
The claim along the viral cover reads: "Is it time for Joe to go?"
You can view the archived version here.
(Source: Facebook/ Screenshot)
The image shared by a Facebook account called 'Shall not be infringed' had garnered 150 shares at the time of writing the article.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We searched for the recent edition of TIME magazine and found that the edition released on 23 August does not feature US President Joe Biden on its cover.
The latest edition of the magazine was released on 23 August.
(Source: TIME/ Screenshot)
The web version of the 23 August edition of the magazine can be viewed here.
Cover of 23 August edition of TIME magazine does not feature Biden and Harris.
(Source: TIME/ Screenshot)
Further, we conducted a Google reverse image search on the viral image that led us to the 21 December 2020 issue of the magazine titled as 'Person of the year.'
Cover of 21 December 2020 issue of TIME magazine.
(Source: TIME/ Screenshot)
The cover of the 21 December 2020 edition can also be seen in the gallery of covers of the editions released in 2020.
The gallery of TIME editions released in 2020.
(Source: TIME/ Screenshot)
On comparing the viral image with the cover released in December 2020, we found several similarities and differences that suggested that the latter has been altered to create the viral one.
For instance, the text on Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris is same in both the cases.
Next, the cut outs of Biden and Harris have been altered to add the head gear and burkha respectively.
Left: Viral image. Right: 2020 TIME cover.
(Photo: Altered by The Quint)
Also, the official cover has 'time.com' written at the bottom right, however, 'ildonaldo.com' is mentioned in the viral one.
Evidently, an altered version of TIME magazine's cover was shared by social media users falsely claiming that the magazine mentioned 'impeachment' in its cover on US President Joe Biden.
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