The 1971 May Day Protest Kissing Photo – Fact Check

A Twitter account with 320,000 followers was among many accounts to tweet the image, calling it one of the “most beautiful photos ever taken”.

According to that Twitter account, History Lovers Club, the photo showed a couple kissing amid the carnage of the 1971 May Day protests that engulfed the United States across several days. The photo is below.

Despite the caption, and despite the number of people sharing it across social media, the magic of the photo is lost when those killjoy facts get in the way, as they so often do.

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In reality, the photo is far more contemporary than the caption claims, dating back only a handful of years, not decades. And this isn’t a “natural” photograph either, instead it was entirely staged. A simple photo search reveals the photo was actually part of an advertising campaign called “Never Hide” produced for the Ray-Ban sunglasses company. You can see the whole image below, where the Ray-Ban logo was cropped out.

Twitter accounts like History Lovers Club are notoriously unreliable, scraping the Internet for “interesting” images that ultimately wind up being published from their Twitter account, more often than not with fake captions. We discuss these Twitter accounts in more detail here.

In the meantime, take such Tweets with more than just a pinch of salt.