A picture was found circulating on social media showing TIME Magazine cover page displaying President Gotabya Rajpaksa as “The World’s Worst President”. He was labelled a war criminal, a racist, a fraud and a thief.

At the time data was retrieved the tweet had 63 Retweets and 334 likes.

Debunked Source

https://www.twitter.com/SharminiDNS/status/1513497725819531268

Fact Check

In order to verify we checked for cover archive of TIME Magazine’s official website and found that TIME Magazine never published a magazine cover showing Gotabya Rajapaksa. There were also further deficiencies found in the edited picture such as a bar code, TIME Magazine never uses a bar code on their magazine. Spelling of the Sri Lankan president’s name is also wrong; his name is spelled as “Gotabya Rajapaksa” while on the cover it is spelled as “Gotabya Rajapaksha”.

Source

https://time.com/vault/year/2022/

Rating

Propaganda

Conclusion

Our research confirmed that the shared image is doctored and false. Ever since Sri Lanka has had an economic fallback, the hate directed towards the ruling party and the President of Sri Lanka, Gotabya Rajapaksa, is evidently growing on social media. The spread of disinformation and propaganda against the president is reflecting agony of the people caused by the current economic crisis in the country.

ABCDE Framework-Based Analysis

Actor	Independent twitter account is involved in disseminating fake news.
Behavior	TIME Magazine cover page picture was posted displaying President Gotabya Rajpaksa as “The World’s Worst President”.
Content	Social Media post.
Degree	The hate directed towards the ruling party and the President of Sri Lanka, Gotabya Rajapaksa, is evidently growing on social media. The spread of disinformation and propaganda against the president is reflecting agony of the people caused by the current economic crisis in the country.
Effect	The spread of disinformation and propaganda against the president is reflecting agony of the people caused by the current economic crisis in the country.