What was claimed
A picture shows the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, wearing a hat with the slogan “Make America Mexicana Again”.
Our verdict
This picture isn’t real and was likely created using artificial intelligence.
Picture of Mexican president wearing a ‘Make America Mexicana Again’ hat is fake
An image which appears to show Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, wearing a hat with the slogan “Make America Mexicana Again” has been circulating on social media.
But the picture isn’t real and was likely created using artificial intelligence (AI).
It circulated in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. The hat in the image closely resembles President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats.
Dr Felix Simon, Research Fellow in AI and News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, said the image “bears various hallmarks that are typical of poor-quality AI-generated imagery”.
“For example, the font on the cap is irregular and AI image generators often still struggle with depicting text. The image is very blurred and smooth, which again is something one sees often with AI-generated images. Finally, there is an artifact around the left part of the glasses.”
Gina Neff, Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University London and executive director at Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy also noted a “difference in the crispness of the fonts in the top line of the printing on the hat versus the bottom and the G in ‘great’ is tilted at an angle”.
Some early posts featuring the image also show it with a watermark for ‘Grok’, the generative AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s startup xAI, in the bottom-right-hand corner.
Closer inspection of images of President Sheinbaum also reveals that her teeth are differently spaced in the picture circulating online.
Full Fact could not find any other images or reporting of President Sheinbaum wearing such a hat, and a representative of the Mexican presidency told Reuters the image was fake.
Before sharing content you see online, it’s important to consider whether what you are seeing is genuine and comes from a trusted source. Our guides to spotting AI-generated or otherwise misleading images online can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the picture isn’t real and was likely created using artificial intelligence.