Fact Check: President Trump Did NOT Send Tweet about George Floyd's Family Being Honored to Hear From Him

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fact Check: President Trump Did NOT Send Tweet about George Floyd's Family Being Honored to Hear From Him Fake Tweet

Did President Trump send out a tweet claiming the family of George Floyd was honored to hear from him and that to die by a knee to the neck "looked to painful"? No, that's not true: the screenshot of the tweet circulating on social media was fake, Trump did not send the tweet.

An example of the screenshot can be seen in a post (archived here) from Marvin Williams on May 31, 2020 who commented "This is a really strange guy......". The text in the fake tweet read:

I spoke with George Floyd"s family. There voices told me they were honored to hear from me. I told them that I don't want to see another black man die by a knee to the neck. It looked to painful. Ther's better ways to die. No way is good, but that was very bad.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Facebook screenshot

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun May 31 17:25:03 2020 UTC)

Lead Stories checked President Trump's twitter account and found no mention of the phrase "There voices" (archived here). We also checked ProPublica's Politwoops ("Politwoops tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office.") to make sure this wasn't a deleted tweet and no results showed up there either (archived here). We also found no trace of the Trump Twitter archive.

A capture of Trump's Twitter account taken by the Internet Archive shortly after the time the tweet was allegedly sent (8:25PM on May 29, 2020) also does not show the tweet.


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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