FACT CHECK: Did Joe Biden’s Thanksgiving Address Receive Only 1,000 Views?
A viral Instagram post claims President-elect Joe Biden’s Thanksgiving address received only 1,000 views online
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Verdict: False
While a screen grabbed tweet did appear to show 1,000 people watching the address on Twitter live at one point, the tweet did not account for other streams. Multiple major media outlets hosted streams that each garnered over tens of thousands of views as Nov. 26
Fact Check:
The image, which shows a pro-Trump Twitter account, has circulated in the days since Biden delivered an address on Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving. The screen grabbed tweet reads, “Sleepy Joe Biden had a whopping 1,000 viewers for his special LIVE Thanksgiving message, where were the other 79,999,000 people?”
A review of various online streams of Biden’s address by Check Your Fact found that it received more than 1,000 viewers online. (RELATED: Were 6,000 Fraudulent Votes Found For Joe Biden In Arizona?)
Biden’s address was streamed live on various platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. An archived version of the Biden campaign’s YouTube stream from Nov. 25 shows the video having over 36,000 views. The same video has over 109,000 views at the time of publication.
News outlets such as USA Today, CNBC, CBS News and PBS NewsHour also streamed the speech on their respective YouTube channels. For example, CNBC’s stream showed over 29,000 views the morning of Nov. 26, according to an archived version of the YouTube video. Streams from CBS News and PBS NewsHour garnered some 72,300 and 21,700 views, respectively, by Nov. 26, archived pages on the Wayback Machine show.
Biden aired the address on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. At the time of publication, the version on Biden’s Facebook page has over 583,000 views, while the version on his transition team’s Twitter account has over 79,500 viewers.
The inaccurate claim likely originated from a tweet showing what appears to be a screen grab of 1,000 people tuning into Biden’s Thanksgiving address live on Twitter at one point. One America News Network and President Donald Trump amplified the claim that his address only drew 1,000 viewers.
That tweet, however, failed to take into account all the various news sites that simultaneously streamed Biden’s speech. We rate this claim false.
