An altered photograph, which purportedly shows a young United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the former editor of Chinese daily Global Times, Hu Xijin, is doing the rounds on social media.
The claim states that the two were 'in love' when they were young. The post comes after Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, following which China reacted with fury.
Shortly after Pelosi landed, AFP cited Taipei as saying that a total of 27 Chinese warplanes flew into Taiwan's air defence zone on Wednesday, 3 August.
Reacting to the aggression, Pelosi said that China is trying to isolate Taiwan, but that the US will not allow it.
This photo, which is now viral, has been created by using two older pictures of the individuals.
CLAIM
The claim with the viral photo states that the picture shows Nancy Pelosi and Hu Xijin, and some of the claims even go on to identify them as 'lovers.'
An archived version of the post can be seen here.
(Source: Twitter/ screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We separated the two pictures and conducted a reverse image search on both of them using Yandex, a Russian search engine.
This led us to an article published by The Washington Post on 25 March 2020. The article was about Pelosi and it carried pictures from her younger days.
One of the videos in the article carried a picture in which Pelosi was with her family.
The image in The Washington Post article.
(Source: The Washington Post/screenshot)
The reverse image search also led us to another article by an American publication, National Vanguard, from 25 March 2021.
The report carried the same group picture with a caption that mentioned that the image showed young Nancy Pelosi with her father, mother, and five brothers.
The image carried by National Vanguard.
(Source: National Vanguard/Screenshot)
We compared the viral image with Pelosi's family portrait and noticed that they were the same.
Pelosi's image was taken from a family photo.
(Source: The Quint)
WHAT ABOUT HU XIJIN'S PHOTO?
Next, we ran a reverse image search of Xijin's photo on Yandex and came across his tweet from 1 August 2020.
He had shared the photo and mentioned the anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and that he had served in the military for 11 years in his twenties.
We compared the viral photo with Xijin's photo and found out that they are the same pictures.
Xijin's old picture was merged with Pelosi's old picture.
(Source: The Quint)
Further, we found no reports about Pelosi and Xijin's 'love story.'
Evidently, two different photos of Pelosi and Xijin were merged together and shared with a false claim that the two were 'in love' when they were young.
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