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Two-year old video claims to show Biden body double, but offers no evidence
If Your Time is short
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Claims that President Joe Biden has been replaced by a body double are unfounded.
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This video was taken more than two years ago.
As grainy nighttime video footage shows an unidentified masked man wearing walking in a parking lot, flanked by what appear to be police officers, a woman can be heard yelling.
"Hey, Joe," she says as the masked person turns around, arms raised. "Are you the body double? It’s the body double. … Where’s the real Joe?"
A Sept. 23 Instagram post captions the video with a date — "9/20/2023" — and the word "hmm."
Comments on the post range from claiming the video shows a President Joe Biden impersonator to false allegations that he has been dead since 2020.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Featured Fact-check
We’ve tackled multiple claims that the president has been replaced by a body double, and they are unfounded. We did not find where this video originated, or credible sources explaining what’s happening in it. But we also also found no evidence to support this post’s suggestion that the video shows a Biden body double; the video offers no evidence to support its claim.
The video also isn’t from Sept. 20, which some viewers might guess, considering everyone in the video is wearing a face mask.
It’s been online for at least two years. Someone shared it on Instagram in September 2021.
Although we can’t confirm that the person in the post is Biden — neither the White House nor his campaign immediately responded to PolitiFact’s questions about the video — the man’s gait resembles Biden’s in clips of the president walking at the White House from 2021.
We rate claims that this video shows Biden’s body double in September 2023 False.
Our Sources
Instagram post, Sept. 23, 2023
Instagram post, Sept. 16, 2021
Refinery29, The Biden White House Has Really Embraced The "Silly Little Walk," March 26, 2021
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Two-year old video claims to show Biden body double, but offers no evidence
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