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No, photo not of likely US president-elect Biden apologising to George Floyd’s daughter

“US president elect, Joe Biden knelt down to apologize to George Floyd daughter, over killing of father,” reads a screenshot posted on the Instagram account GossipBoyz in November 2020. The account has more than 93,500 followers.

George Floyd, a black man, died at the hands of police officers in the US city of Minneapolis on 25 May. His death was recorded in a nearly nine-minute video, and sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the US and the world.

The screenshot includes a photo of Biden on one knee, talking to a small child wearing a mask.

Nigerian senator Dino Melaye has also posted the photo, to share the same claim with his 2.2 million Twitter followers.

But does it show the likely president-elect apologising to Floyd’s daughter for the death of her father? We checked.
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Son – not daughter – of shop owner

To trace the photo’s origins, we uploaded it to TinEye reverse image search. This revealed that it has been online since at least 25 October, a week before the US election, when it was used in an ad for Biden’s campaign. 

The candidate’s official Twitter account shared the ad on 29 October. Former US first lady Michelle Obama also shared the photo on her Twitter account a few days later. 

Digging further, we found the photo on Biden’s official Instagram account, but without a caption. A second reverse image search returned hits in which it was published by credible media houses. 

The UK’s Telegraph newspaper captioned it: “Joe Biden stops at ThreeThirteen, an apparel store on the city’s Avenue of Fashion, with the help of the owner’s son CJ Brown in Detroit, Michigan, September 9.”

We used some of these keywords to locate the photo on the AP Images website.

Here the caption reads: “Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden visits with C.J. Brown, right, and Clement Brown, the son and father of the owner of Three Thirteen, as Biden arrives to shop for his grandchildren at the store in Detroit, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020. Biden is visiting Michigan for campaign events.”

Biden has spoken out on the injustice of Floyd’s death several times in 2020. But the photo does not show him kneeling to apologise to Floyd’s daughter. – Africa Check
 


 

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