This photo does not show the models from the viral 'distracted boyfriend' meme

This article is more than one year old.
Published on March 22, 2021 at 15:31
Updated on March 23, 2021 at 13:21
2 min read
By Mayowa TIJANI, AFP Nigeria

A picture of a man and two women attempting to recreate a viral meme has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, alongside claims that it shows the original models, only 10 years later. This is false: the recently-shared image was taken at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and does not show the original people from the meme.

The claim is based on the now-famous "distracted boyfriend" meme, which surfaced in 2017 and has become a frequent template for jokes. It shows a man pursing his lips at a passing woman while his companion, presumably his girlfriend, looks at him in disgust. The original picture comes from a stockphoto site.

The misleading post, shared more than 1,400 times here on Facebook, features a picture of three people recreating the "distracted boyfriend" scene.

It claims those in the image are “the actual people from that meme, 10 years later!”

A screenshot taken on March 17, 2020 showing the false post

The Facebook claim originated here on Twitter, where it has been retweeted more than 250,000 times since it was posted on March 13, 2021. Other Facebook pages have shared it here, here and here.

Stock photo

AFP Fact Check studied digital time stamps and used a reverse image search to find the source of the original picture.

We discovered it was uploaded by Antonio Guillem to iStock by Getty Images on November 2, 2015, with the description “disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl”.

A further search for more information on Guillem led to this Wired.com interview where he confirmed his now-famous picture was taken in 2015 – not 10 years ago, as claimed.

Recent image does not show original models

This reply to the viral tweet disputed the claim with a link to a Reddit page where a user by the name of Charlie Todd confirmed three years ago that he was the man in the copycat photo. He said it had been shot at a “Know Your Meme” party at the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC (New York City).

“They had a gallery of memes hanging on the wall,” Todd wrote. “I noticed my wife was wearing a red dress so I suggested she pose in front of the girl in the photo. While I was taking her picture someone came up to me and asked if I wanted to be in it, so I hopped in. Then the girl in blue walked up and said, ‘Hey! Let me be the other girl!’ The whole thing was spontaneous and random.”

Todd’s story was corroborated by the host of the exhibition at the New York museum. In 2018, KnowYourMeme hosted a ”Two Decades Of Memes” event at the museum and inducted 10 memes into an informal Hall Of Fame.

According to KnowYourMeme, a website which documents internet memes, Todd and his wife Cody Livingston recreated the “Distracted Boyfriend” scene in front of an enlargement of the original picture, while confirming that they were not the same people from the meme.

The models who play the couple in the original image are identified only by their first names as “Laura and Mario” in an interview by New York Magazine here. You can read more about the evolution of the meme here.

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