A morphed image of a TIME magazine cover featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the text 'Delete Fascism' is viral on social media. The image is doing the rounds with a narrative that the iconic magazine termed the Prime Minister of India a fascist.
Narendra Modi was featured as the 100 most influential people of 2021 compiled by TIME in September, 2021. Read the article here. TIME has been critical of Modi earlier and referred to him as India's Divider In Chief in a magazine cover in 2019.
The viral image shows a cover of TIME magazine dated October 25 / November 1, 2021, a close-up image of PM Modi and a message that reads 'Delete Fascism?' with options of 'Delete' and 'Cancel' listed below the message. It appears to show a 'delete' command that reflects on a smart phone.
A Twitter user captioned a tweet with the fake cover as "We are happy, we found the delete button, here you go #SaveIndiaFromBJP"
See the archived post here.
Other Twitter users also posted the same image. Check the archive here.
BOOM was unable to find an article titled 'Inside The Damage' by an authore Billy Perrico on the TIME website. Instead, we found Billy Perrigo, a staff writer of the magazine.
Also Read: No, PM Modi Did Not Call Himself A Pathan's Child
Taking this as a cue, we checked Perrigo's Twitter handle and found the original magazine cover with Mark Zuckerberg.
The cover has the same date as the viral fake cover with Narendra Modi's image on it. The original article reads, "How Facebook forced a reckoning by shutting down the team that put people ahead of politics." TIME tweeted the cover image and link of the same article on October 8, 2021 as well.
Below is a comparison of the real and fake cover. NDTV's report on the latest TIME cover can be read here.
