South Koreans fall for satirical magazine cover teasing president over foreign policy

This article is more than one year old.
Published on May 4, 2023 at 07:18
Updated on May 4, 2023 at 08:21
3 min read
By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea

A satirical Time magazine cover story describing South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol as "The Doormat" who is working to "make his country dependant on the United States and Japan" has been shared repeatedly on social media. The image, however, was first posted on a satirical website that labelled it a fake cover. A Time spokesperson told AFP the magazine it did not publish the purported cover, while AFP found no trace of such an image on the magazine's website as of May 4.

"Suk Yeol featured on the cover of this week's Time magazine, called a doormat," reads this Korean-language claim shared here on Twitter on May 2, 2023.

The tweet features a Time magazine cover, dated April 27, 2023, that shows a portrait of Yoon alongside an English-language headline that reads, "The Doormat" and "Yoon Suk-yeol wants his country to become a dependant country of the United States and Japan".

Korean text overlaid on the image goes on to explain the meaning of the English expression "doormat", reading "definition: an idiot who cannot stand up to others".

Screenshot of the misleading claim shared on Facebook. Captured May 3, 2023.

Similar claims were shared on Facebook here, here and here.

Comments left in the posts indicated some users were misled to believe the image showed a genuine Time magazine cover.

One user wrote, "Amazing, he appeared on the Time magazine cover being called a doormat?"

"What a national embarrassment," wrote another.

But the image is not a real Time magazine cover of Yoon and was initially shared as satire.

Satirical image

A close examination of the doctored image shows it includes various elements that indicate it is not genuine. These include the words "By AI" seen on the bottom left corner, text that reads "Made by the national committee to save us from this fool" on the bottom right and the letter "S" next to the word TIME.

A reverse image search on Google found the image was first posted on a website called "Yoon Time", which features a countdown of the time left in Yoon's term and satirical images and posts about the president (archived link).

The page on this website that first shared the doctored image on May 1 is titled "Time magazine cover featuring President Yoon Suk Yeol (fake)" and includes a disclaimer that reads: "This is a fake cover".

Those disclaimers were cut out when the satirical cover was shared on social media.

Below is a screenshot of the satirical post that shared the doctored image with the disclaimer seen at the bottom of the post, highlighted in blue by AFP:

Screenshot of Yoontime.com post featuring the doctored image

Inauthentic cover

A spokesperson for Time magazine told AFP that the doctored image "is not an authentic Time cover."

No matching cover could be found on the magazine's online database, and no edition of the magazine was published on April 27, 2023 -- the date on the purported cover featuring Yoon (archived link).

The magazine is published bi-weekly, with editions coming out on April 24 and May 8 (archived links here and here).

AFP previously debunked similar false claims about Yoon being featured in Time magazine features, including another doctored cover calling him "The Executioner" and a claim that he was included in Time's list of leaders likely to harm the world.

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