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Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke July 21, 2022

This isn’t a real NBC News headline about a Biden impersonator exploiting immigrants

If Your Time is short

  • This wasn’t a real story on NBC News. The man pictured is a London-based Biden impersonator, not a Texas farmer. 
 
See the sources for this fact-check

Accompanying an image of a white-haired man in a suit smiling for the camera is what appears to be a sensational NBC News headline: "Texas farmer arrested for using illegal immigrants for free labor by pretending to be Joe Biden and threatening to deport them." 

The image looks like a screenshot from NBC’s website.  An Instagram post sharing the image includes this commentary: "Free labor? It’s called slavery." 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

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(Screengrab from Instagram)
 
We reached out to NBC about the post but didn’t immediately hear back. However, we found no evidence that this story is authentic. 

It doesn’t appear on NBC’s website, nor in Google search results where you can find echoes of old headlines even after they’ve been deleted on a news outlet’s site. Looking more broadly online, we didn’t find the story on any credible sites. The headline does appear on sites that look like — but are not — news websites, as well as on meme pages. 

We did a reverse image search for the supposed farmer in the post and found that he’s no farmer at all but a Brooklyn-born impersonator of President Joe Biden. He lives in London. 

We rate this post False.

 

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