Muslim advocates' photo misrepresented as Toronto councilors, fueling online hate
- Published on April 30, 2026 at 16:50
- 2 min read
- By Gwen Roley, AFP Canada
A photo in which three of the four women are wearing head coverings spread online in derogatory posts claiming the individuals had just been elected to Toronto's city hall. But the individuals are not councilors in the Canadian metropolis, according to one of the women, who said the picture was taken when they spoke at an event to discuss housing and social services for Muslim women.
"New Toronto city hall councilors. Love Canadas diversity," reads the text above a photo shared April 21, 2026 to Reddit.
The picture shows four women -- one who is Black, two who are wearing a hijab and one who is wearing a niqab -- in front of Toronto's municipal logo.
"Nobody can convince me that mass migration wasn't enacted out of malicious design," the Reddit poster wrote. Other images in the post alluded to conspiracy theories about people of color replacing white populations (archived here).
Similarly negative posts about the supposedly new Toronto city councilors spread across Facebook and X.
According to Statistics Canada, 9.6 percent of Toronto's population is Muslim (archived here).
Islamophobia is on the rise in Canada, with police-reported hate crimes targeting Muslims nearly tripling between 2020 and 2024 (archived here and here).
AFP has repeatedly debunked unsupported claims about Muslim residents "imposing" their culture on Canadians.
The claims that the photo of women in head coverings had just been elected to Toronto's city council are similarly false.
Photos attached to the list of Toronto city councilors on the municipal government's website show that one member, Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, wears a hijab (archived here and here). But she is not in the photo circulating on social media. None of the women in the picture are listed as city council members.
Reverse image searches revealed that Farheen Khan, the founder of the Women's Mosque of Canada, originally posted the photo to Instagram on April 19 to mark an event at Toronto City Hall discussing Muslim women's access to housing services (archived here and here).
"I had no knowledge of the fact that my image was being used in that way," Khan said in an April 27 interview. "The perception of that as well -- the way that the post was written -- it was very problematic."
She confirmed that none of the women in the picture were city council members and said the intention of the event -- bringing together different groups for a conversation on the gaps for Muslim women's access to social services -- was very different from a council meeting.
"I think the way in which the post was shared, it's implying that we don't have a lot of diversity in the city of Toronto and the city council, which is not accurate," Khan told AFP.
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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