
Did the story that George Floyd's family listed "$1,900 in assets on a welfare application" despite receiving $50 million four years ago originate on an actual news site? No, that's not true:A meme making that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on March 10, 2025, on a page titled "America's Last Line of Defense" with a comment that read:
These people stood on the White House lawn, with Biden watching, and conned America into believing George Floyd wasn't a criminal. Now they're broke and looking for the taxpayer to bail them out.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Mar 18 07:58:11 2025 UTC)
The text in the image read:
George Floyd's Family Got Nearly $50 Million Just Four Years Ago.
Last week they listed $1,900 in assets on a welfare application.
In reality the Floyd family settled with the city of Minneapolis for $27 million (archived here) and the story about the welfare application comes from a satire source: the image included a disclaimer that said, "Nothing on the page is real":
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustrations. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.