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Joe Biden has not even taken office as the new president of the United States of America and has already started to be the target of various posts on social media, especially ones spreading fake news. This time there was a post on Facebook, on November 5, that read as follows: “Joe Biden, if elected, has already promised:” Either Brazil takes care of the Amazon Rainforest or we bomb its capital, Buenos Aires. “However, is a fake post.
This viral post begins by making an intentional mistake, supported by an old myth, as written by Boatos.org, a Brazilian verifier: Americans do not know which is the capital of Brazil, so Biden mistook the capital of Argentina (Buenos Aires) as that of Brazil (Brasilia). It is, therefore, an attempt to sell a kind of blunder -something somewhat recurrent in the president-elect- that does not correspond to the truth. Furthermore, the author does not mention under what circumstances, date or place, the Democratic candidate will have said that phrase.
Rumors.org did not find any statement from Biden to confirm the accuracy of this post. Neither does the Observer. By googling, you can see that the Democratic candidate almost never referred to the Amazon or Brazil in that aggressive way. However, in one of the presidential debates (the one on September 29), Biden stated that he would be willing to pay twenty billion dollars (17 billion euros), together with other countries, to prevent the destruction of that forest, as, if it were not accepted by the Brazilian government, its administration would impose heavy economic sanctions on Brazil. Even so, at no point in the debate did the leader of the Democratic Party also declare his willingness to bomb that country.
Jair Bolsonaro even highlighted this statement on his social networks, considering it “regrettable”, according to the international and Portuguese press. This Tuesday, the Brazilian president again referred to the case, highlighting the possible economic sanctions, in a speech recorded on video and available on YouTube. How are we going to react to this? Diplomacy alone is not enough. When the saliva runs out, you have to have gunpowder, ”Bolsonaro said. However, the Brazilian president made no reference to the attacks.
It is not true that Joe Biden promised to bomb the Brazilian capital if the Amazon was not protected. It is not possible to find any record of an even similar statement. The new US president recently spoke about the situation in the Amazon rainforest during a presidential debate with Donald Trump, but never declared his willingness to bomb that country if his demands were not met. The viral post was also verified by Boatos-org, a Brazilian fact-checker, which classified the information as false.
Thus, according to the Observer’s classification system, this content is:
INCORRECT
In the Facebook ranking system, this content is:
FALSE: the main content claims are inaccurate in fact. This option generally corresponds to “false” or “mostly false” ratings on fact-checker websites.
