What was claimed
Zia Yusuf was named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2026.
Our verdict
False. Mr Yusuf does not appear on this list.
Zia Yusuf was not included on Time magazine’s 2026 list of 100 most influential people
Posts liked thousands of times on Facebook claim Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf was named by Time magazine as one of its “100 most influential people in the world”.
This is false. The TIME100 list for 2026 was released earlier this month, and Mr Yusuf is not on it. Nor does he appear on any of the magazine’s previous versions of the list.
Some posts include an edited image that appears to show Mr Yusuf on Time magazine’s front cover. But when Full Fact put the picture through Google’s large language model (LLM) Gemini it told us it had a SynthID digital watermark, indicating the image was generated or altered with Google AI.
We’ve previously seen similar posts falsely claiming Reform UK leader Nigel Farage MP was named on the TIME100 2025 list.
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We’ve contacted Time magazine about this claim, and will update this article if we receive a response.
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 false because Zia Yusuf is not included on Time magazine’s TIME100 list for 2026.