No, this Hunter Biden story wasn’t ‘front page news in Australia’

A recent Instagram post claimed that Australian news outlets gave front-page treatment to a story about a laptop that belonged to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. 

"Biden ‘child porn’ shock," the headline says in an image in the post. The subhead that follows: "Hunter becomes the hunted amid claims of underage pics on his laptop." 

"This was front page news in Australia!!" a description of the image says. 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

There’s a clue in the picture that this wasn’t front-page news: the number 27 in the top left corner that looks suspiciously like a page number. 

The story, written by James Morrow, appeared in the Australian tabloid The Daily Telegraph on Oct. 22, 2020. (Two days earlier, we published a fact-check on unproven claims about Hunter Biden and child pornograpy.)

We found the front page of that edition of the tabloid on Twitter. The Daily Telegraph shared it on Twitter. The Biden story, which The Daily Telegraph had previously tweeted, isn’t mentioned. 

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The story ran in at least two other publications in Australia, Northern Territory News on Page 22 and the Townsville Bulletin on Page 23. Both those publications and the Daily Telegraph are connected to News Corp Australia. 

We found no evidence that such a story about Hunter ran elsewhere on front pages in Australia.  

We rate this claim False.

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.