Post fabricates claim about Biden offering jobs picking cotton for $300 an hour | Fact check

The claim: President Joe Biden is offering Black people $300 an hour to pick cotton

An Oct. 5 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows two photos, one of President Joe Biden and another of a man holding an armful of cotton in a field.

“Joe Biden is offering Black people $300/hour to pick up cotton!” reads the text in the photo.

It received more than 200 likes in one day.

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Our rating: False

The claim originated on a satirical account, but the Instagram post makes no reference to that. There is no evidence that such a program exists.

Claim originated on satirical Instagram account

The post is rooted in an obvious reference to the pre-Civil War link between slavery and the cotton industry. By 1850, nearly 2 million of the nation's 3.2 million enslaved people were growing and picking cotton, and that added up to 2 billion pounds of cotton each year by 1860, according to the National Park Service.

The claim originated on an account that describes itself as producing “the best memes and fake news posted daily.” The social media user who operates it told Paste BN in an email that it was satire and was not true.

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A July 24 post claiming Biden announced “new ‘cotton picking’ jobs for people” received more than 10,000 likes. Another post on Aug. 4 went further, setting the pay rate for those purported jobs at $300 per hour. That post received more than 30,000 likes.

The more recent Instagram post, from a different account, contains no indication it is satire.

It is an example of what could be called "stolen satire," where posts written as satire and originally presented that way are reposted in a way that makes them appear to be legitimate news. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, which is what happened here.

There's no evidence to support the outlandish claim of paying the equivilent of $600,000 per year for picking cotton.

There is no mention of such a proposal on the White House’s website where such announcements would appear. It surely would have been covered by legitimate media outlets, but no coverage of that type exists.

Paste BN reached out to the social media user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.

Our fact-check sources:

• Hoods News, Oct. 5, Email exchange with Paste BN
• The White House, accessed Oct. 6, Search Results

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