Is that a real photo of Sydney Sweeney in a Turning Point USA shirt? No, that's not true: The t-shirt photo that appeared on social media in September of 2025 is a manipulated copy of a paparazzo's photo taken three months earlier. Enough elements of the photo match to prove it's a fake: from the paparazzi in the background to the sidewalk in the foreground, her pose and her face.
The photo appeared in a September 14, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) on the TheDailyDogUSA page, under the caption:
Just when Sydney Sweeney couldn't get anymore perfect 😍🇺🇸
This is what the photo looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories Facebook screenshot of post at facebook.com/TheDailyDogUSA.)
The original photo was taken June 4, 2025 by Jose Perez of Bauer-Griffin, a celebrity photo agency. It was published by several outlets, including by AOL (archived here) in a carousel of celebrity fashion photos, which included metadata indicating the photo was taken at Times Square in Manhattan as she arrived for an interview on Good Morning America, (archived here) about her role in "Echo Valley".
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of AOL.com webpage and of TheDailyDog Facebook page, arranged into montage by Lead Stories for comparison.)
