Fact Check: Screenshot Is NOT A Real Fox News Article About New Agriculture Licensing Policies

Fact Check

  • by: Sarah Thompson
Fact Check: Screenshot Is NOT A Real Fox News Article About New Agriculture Licensing Policies Not Fox Story

Did Fox News publish an article by Thomas Barrabi with the title, "Biden admin to confiscate farm equipment, 'hoarded food' under new agriculture licensing policies"? No, this screenshot appears to be a fabricated hoax. An article with this title is not found in search engines, searches of the Fox News website, in the author's portfolio of stories, or in internet archive pages. The only place where this headline seems to exist is in this screenshot published on one Facebook page.

The screenshot originated in a post (archived here) where it was published by 'Here We Go' on January 25, 2021. The post was captioned:

ATTENTION! Under Biden our Farmers will suffer! Farmers love President Trump. The nation will see how being selected by the swamp rather than elected by the people can not stand and never happen again!
#MAGAA Lets make America Great Again...Again!
The very realistic screenshot appears in the format of the Fox News app as it would be displayed on a smartphone. The banner at the top has the FoxNews logo and 'Watch TV' button. The text reads:
POLITICS - Published 22 mins ago
Biden admin to confiscate farm equipment, 'hoarded food' under new agriculture licensing policies
The future of agriculture is a top concern
By Thomas Barrabi - Fox News
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Facebook screenshot

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jan 25 21:31:05 2021 UTC)

Lead Stories conducted searches with multiple search engines, searched internet archives, did advanced searches of the Fox News website and the purported author's list of articles on both FoxBusiness.com and FoxNews.com and were unable to find an article with this headline published by Fox News. A Fox spokesperson reached by phone January 25, 2021 confirmed that the screenshot is not real.

Below are images to compare the appearance of the fake screenshot (center) to a real screenshot of an article appearing on the Fox News website when viewed with a smartphone. On the left, the advanced search on the Fox website for videos and articles with the words "confiscate farm equipment," brings up zero results.

Foxcompare.jpg(source: center image from "Here We Go" Facebook Page 1/25/21
Left and right images: smartphone screenshots from FoxNews.com 1/25/21)

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  Sarah Thompson

Sarah Thompson lives with her family and pets on a small farm in Indiana. She founded a Facebook page and a blog called “Exploiting the Niche” in 2017 to help others learn about manipulative tactics and avoid scams on social media. Since then she has collaborated with journalists in the USA, Canada and Australia and since December 2019 she works as a Social Media Authenticity Analyst at Lead Stories.


 

Read more about or contact Sarah Thompson

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