Is an image of a woman in a swimsuit that reads "Not A Dude!" used in a social media post a real photo? No, that's not true: There is an early version of the image that proves that the woman in question did not have "Not A Dude!" on her swimsuit. Versions of the picture without the message have been widely shared on the internet for years.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X, formerly known as Twitter, on January 3, 2024. The post showed the image of the woman in a swimsuit that read "Not A Dude!" on the crotch. The post was captioned:
Female athletes are clapping back and I'm absolutely here for it.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Jan 11 17:24:10 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories performed a Google Lens reverse-image search (archived here). We came across another X post that claimed to show the image without the words on the swimsuit (archived here).
Using that image, Lead Stories did another Google Lens reverse-image search (archived here). A matching image appeared on Pinterest that was published there in 2015 (archived here).
Lead Stories tried to find the origin of the image and the swimmer in the image. We will update this story if that information is located.
