Kenya’s president is not on TIME’s ‘most influential persons’ 2023 list

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on April 27, 2023 at 12:25
  • 1 min read
  • By James OKONG'O, AFP Kenya

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Just a day after US-based TIME magazine published its list of the 100 most influential people of the year, a purported cover was shared online featuring Kenya’s President William Ruto as one of those selected. But this is false: Ruto was not on TIME’s 2023 list, nor did his portrait appear on the magazine’s cover. The image of the fake cover was digitally altered. TIME has also dismissed the claim as fake.

“New York based TIME Magazine (@TIME) has just listed Kenya's President Dr. @WilliamsRuto among the 50 most influential persons in the WORLD…(sic),” reads a tweet published on April 14, 2023.

The purported magazine cover, which features a photo of Ruto, conspicuously does not have a date.

Screenshot showing the false claim shared on Twitter, taken on April 26, 2023

The same claim also appeared on Facebook (here and here) and elsewhere on Twitter.

Ruto was elected Kenya’s fifth president in August 2022 and sworn in on September 13, 2022 (archived here).

But TIME has not featured him on its cover and did not list the president as one of the most influential people in the world.

Fake cover

On April 13, 2023, TIME magazine published (archived here) its list of the 100 most influential individuals in the world in 2023. Ruto does not feature anywhere in the top 50 or 100.

The TIME list traditionally only features 100 people, not 50 as the posts claim.

The magazine has featured famous people on its cover since March 1923 and Ruto is not included in the magazine's vault of covers (archived here).

TIME also told AFP Fact Check that "the cover page is fake".

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