4 Reasons Not to Use Stolen Images to Make a Political Point

The problem is, the people in that picture are the fictional Dunphy family, from the show Modern Family, which you may know involves a same-sex married couple raising a child. When Sehorne discovered the source of his blatant copyright infringement, he reacted in a completely reasonable manner and blamed it all on the television show, saying he would never tolerate "wickedness as sodomy or even TV" in a rambling Facebook post that proclaims his innocence of the imaginary crime of watching gay people on television while freely admitting to his very real crime of stealing images that don't belong to him and selling them in his book:

Facebook via gawker.com
Due to the smooth baldness of his head, the point was able to *whoosh* over it at double speed.

The caption, which translates to "We are all al-Sisi," is supposed to represent Egypt's unanimous support for the general, indicated by the sea of Egyptian citizens all bearing his marginally contemplative visage that seems to suggest he was trying to determine the best place in his office to put a gumball machine when the initial photo was taken. Unfortunately, keen-eyed journalists quickly noticed that the poster was a badly Photoshopped copy of an ad for the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.

David D. Kirkpatrick, HBO
In fairness, we could see Larry David leading an oppressive regime.

The backgrounds of the two images are exactly the same, and some of the figures are even wearing the same clothes. In fact, the only changes al-Sisi's PR team seems to have made were to crudely Photoshop in more male figures to cover up all the women in the original ad, because women's opinions don't matter.

This recent political ad for a Russian mayoral incumbent contains a testimonial from a woman named Anya about how she feels safe walking around in her city thanks to the mayor's incredible leadership, including such memorable quotes as "I now have confidence ... that no one will attack me or rape me." Evidently this mayor is Russian Batman.

Anyhow, beneath the testimonial is a picture of Anya, thanking her awesome mayor and urging us to vote for him. Problem is, the woman in the picture isn't Anya -- that's actress Emilia Clarke, best known for her current role as the perpetually naked dragon princess Daenerys on the HBO series Game of Thrones, because apparently HBO is the only source of media in the Eastern world. Anya doesn't even exist. So if you think about it, in the mayor's defense, she is totally safe from harm.

Pixland/Pixland/Getty Images
Unless the fan-fic community finds out about her. Then all bets are off.

But the danger of grabbing random images to promote an agenda doesn't just extend to mistaking TV character screen grabs for stock photos ...

The news media scooped up the story and spread the picture all over the world, applauding these two brave athletes for their courage and making them stars of the gay rights movement.

CBC News

Slate.com

There is only one minor problem: Neither of those two women is gay. They are heterosexual and both married (to men), and they had to rush to the press to remind everyone of that. Not a single news agency bothered to do any fact checking or basic research into Russian culture before running the "Gay Heroes" headline -- otherwise they'd have realized that Russians kiss each other all the time. It's a cultural thing. It doesn't matter if it's the president and the patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox church:

02varvara.wordpress.com

Or the premier of the Soviet Union:

AP
"The Cold War's ending; let's heat things up."

It's just a common formality, and it took us less than a minute to look that up and find both of those pictures. Because news agencies around the world couldn't be bothered to do the same, they wound up associating two professional athletes with a movement that, in their home country, could get them fined, banned from ever competing in another race, or thrown in freaking prison (or even all three). Yet when history books look back on the controversy, we have a feeling this iconic image will get lumped in with all the past's other badly misunderstood symbols.