There’s an image going viral on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that’s being used to suggest former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been harmed by the covid-19 vaccine. But the photos in the viral image are wildly misleading, despite the fact that they’ve been seen by over 4.6 million people.
Dr. Simon Goddek tweeted the image on Thursday, which contains four individual photos and screenshots of Ardern. Goddek’s image includes the caption, “What was in her shots, mRNA or meth?”
Where are all these photos from? The first photo was taken when Ardern was in high school, according to the New Zealand news outlet The Spinoff. Ardern is now 43 years old, so that would make the photo from the 1990s, long before the covid-19 pandemic would hit.
The second photo, inaccurately labeled “1st booster,” doesn’t appear to show up on any English-language sites, but curiously has been published on Chinese-language sites for some reason. It’s not clear when the photo was exactly taken, but it clearly shows Ardern when she was much younger.
The third photo was taken in March of 2020, according to the New Zealand news site Kavina Tonga, which was long before the covid-19 vaccines would become available. In fact, March of 2020 was when most of the world was dealing with their first bad outbreaks from the disease.
It’s hard to pin down precisely when the last image is from because it appears to be a screenshot from a video, but it’s most likely from around April 2021 because it bears similarities to videos taken around that time. All we know for certain is that the four images taken together are wildly misleading and don’t show Ardern’s progression from 2020-2023 and instead shows photos dating back to at least the 1990s.
The image that includes four photos of Ardern appears to have originated on the racist troll messageboard 4Chan, and spread from there. The image has also popped up on Bitchute, a video sharing site popular with the far-right.
Ardern, who was Prime Minister from 2017 until this past January, became a villain to many people who tried to minimize the threat of covid-19. Ardern shut her country’s borders down in an effort to stop the pandemic from entering and was largely successful, allowing New Zealanders to live for an extended period of time like there was no pandemic at all as millions around the world died. Roughly 7 million people have died from covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to the CDC, a number considered to be a vast undercount.
Goddek has received millions of views on the misleading image of Ardern, helped in part by the fact that he pays $8 per month for a blue check mark on the platform. When Elon Musk bought Twitter back in October 2022 he made a number of radical changes, including stripping so-called legacy blue check marks and allowing anyone to buy the badge for a monthly fee.
Blue check marks have helped spread untrue information in recent months, including claims that New York was setting up quarantine camps for people with covid-19, claims that there was an Ebola outbreak at Burning Man and video of an F-35 crashing in South Carolina that was actually from a video game. There have even been ridiculous claims that Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has been replaced by a body double.
Twitter has always struggled with misinformation, but the new “verification” system, which doesn’t actually verify the identity of anyone, has caused false claims to proliferate more than ever. And while the social media site’s Community Notes program allows people to correct false information that’s spreading widely, that hasn’t happened here yet. This image has received over 4 million views and has yet to see a community note added.
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