Washington: Republican representative Paul Gosar, whose history of inflammatory social media posts has made him Internet infamous, tweeted a doctored picture of Barack Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in an apparent effort to criticise the former US leader's Iran policy.

The tweet, sent on Monday afternoon, US time, is captioned, "The world is a better place without these guys in power" and features a fake photo that was debunked more than four years ago. In the falsified image, Obama and Rouhani are posing, hands clasped and smiling, in front of two American flags and a poorly altered Iranian one.

But Obama and Rouhani never met in person – and, while Obama left office in 2017, Rouhani is still in power. The real photo was taken at a 2011 meeting between Obama and then Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh.

It's at least the third time in two months that Gosar has tweeted conspiratorial messages or misinformation. In November, he posted an acrostic to his account that spelled out the phrase "Epstein didn't kill himself," an oft-memed claim referring to the death of jailed financier Jeffrey Epstein. The day after, in a now-deleted tweet, Gosar boosted a conspiracy theory suggesting that George Soros' son was the whistleblower who triggered the House's impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.