We came across multiple posts on the social media platform X about the following topic:
The posts suggested that the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron had had an affair together, as evidence by pictures of illicit intimate affection.
The posts are accompanied by up to three photos each, showing the two leaders seemingly exchanging physical expressions of affection such as a caress on the neck, a kiss on the cheek, and with their faces close together and their foreheads touching.
One of the posts had recorded 20.8 million views according to X’s metrics at the time of writing, and we found reposts of the images on newer posts in recent days that continued to rack up tens of thousands of views.
A Mix of Real and Fake Pictures
When we conducted reverse image searches on the images, we found that two of the three images, those with Macron’s hand on the side of Trudeau’s head and of the men embracing, were real.
While we were unable to track the exact photos in the post, stock photos from around the same time pointed to the pictures having been taken in May 2019 and in June 2019 respectively, both following meetings between the two leaders at the Elysee Palace in Paris.
The expressions of ‘affection’ between the two in these two pictures appear to be a combination of being a customary greeting, an indication of the familiarity between the two leaders, and part of Macron’s preferred form of greeting, often leading to media frenzies.
Previous instances of fevered reactions in the media emerged after Macron kissed Trump in 2018 in his first visit to the White House, and more recently after a kiss with French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera following the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
The third and most intimate picture, of the two touching foreheads, could not be identified. The image was identified as a ‘fotomontaggi’ (photomontage) by the Italian newspaper Il Giornale D’Italia. Writing in 2023, the paper suggested that a surge of such pictures and satirical content targeting Trudeau’s convivial relationship with Macron had emerged to jokingly explain the Canadian PM’s recent separation with his wife, Sophie Gregoire.
However, the origin of the image appears to have been even earlier. Dpa-factchecking, a fact-checking service of the German Press Agency, wrote about the images in the post in 2022, and noted that the origin of the third manipulated image appeared to be Tumbler Posts from July 2017.
Appearing in two posts by the same user, the post includes the hashtags, fanfic (which means fanfiction), fanart and alternative reality, pointing towards the edited image being an intentionally photoshopped artificial creation.
A closer look at the edited image also reveals blurred lines and strange contours typical of a photoshopped image. Dpa-factchecking found that it was likely that Trudeau’s frame with his ‘amorous gaze’ in the edited image were taken from a photo in 2016 of him with his then wife.
Dpa-factchecking also found that the image was adapted in part from a picture of the two at a G7 meeting in Sicily in 2017. The image above on the left is the real image, and the foreground had been retained in the photoshopped image on the right.
A review of recent news revealed that the current upsurge in the images appears to have been triggered by a meeting between the two leaders following Macron’s arrival in Canada on 26 September 2024.
Persistent Accusations around Infidelity and Sexuality
While investigating the images in the post, we found that accusations of infidelity and of homosexuality towards world leaders using altered images were a common occurrence, which has become more common with the emergence of AI.
A search for images of ‘Macron kissing’, for instance, returned multiple image results from OpenArt, the art platform for OpenAI, as well as from Stable Diffusion.
We also found posts on X where images of the French President on vacation play fighting with friends while topless on a yacht along with one photo in which Macron and his friend were sharing a kiss on the lips.
The false image of the men kissing was found by the factchecking organisations Full Fact and Logically Facts to have been a frame from an AI-generated video, though the other images were found to be authentic.
A New Threat
A closer look at the intimate moment between Macron and Trudeau may therefore reveal the flaws in the photomontage and that the image is false.
However, the use of AI, while not present in the original post, presents a new avenue for false information to appear more quickly and more convincingly when repurposing satirical or artistic content for disinformation, or when manipulating real photos and mixing false content into a series of existing photos.
More caution may be required by readers to identify such imposter images in the future.