Image: Twitter
Have you seen a photo of Queen Elizabeth II with her head bowed abnormally low as she shakes hands with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? Over the past day, this has gone viral on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But this is completely fake.
Yes, the 95-year-old queen did meet Trudeau on March 7 at Windsor Castle, her new “permanent residence”, according to the British press. She will no longer travel to Buckingham Palace and greeted Trudeau on Monday in her first face-to-face meeting with a world leader since the start of the pandemic.
But the image that became like this popular on social media the sites were photoshopped, and badly. The actual photo was taken by a pool photographer for the AFP news agency and circulated through other news organizations.
So-called “pool” photographers say that there is not enough space in a certain place to comfortably accommodate a large group of photographers. Only one person goes to the event and shares their photos with other news organizations.
Photo: Stephen Parsons / Pool / AFP (Getty Images)
You can see the original photo posted online at Getty Images and the Associated Press. The British Monarchy also posted a copy of the photo on their Facebook page.
There are other photos of Trudeau and the Queen together since Monday. And you can clearly see the queen in a less “hunched” pose in other pictures taken during their visit.
Photo: Steve Parsons / Pool / AFP (Getty Images)
It’s unclear what they talked about during the meeting, although Prime Minister Trudeau is in Europe to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
But why did someone change this particular image to make the queen look more fragile than she really is at the moment? This is likely because a popular conspiracy theory has surfaced online claiming that Queen Elizabeth actually died in late 2021 or early 2022.
The Queen spent the night in the hospital on October 20, 2021, though it’s unclear what she was being treated for and she was seen holding a cane earlier in the month. Some internet conspiracy theorists believe this is when she died and was either replaced by a doppelgänger (common for non-QA obsessed eccentrics) or all of her hospital visit photos are fake.
The Queen contracted covid-19 on February 20, 2022, another case that has intrigued internet conspiracy theorists with the possibility of an imminent announcement of her death. But she recovered thanks to the vaccine.
Queen Elizabeth II is 95 years old and could die at any moment, just like anyone else. But she’s alive and well, as far as we know right now. And while she can look quite fragile at times, be skeptical of photos online that seem out of the ordinary. It already has thousands of retweets and tens of thousands likes. But this is completely fake.