Former US President Barack Obama was arrested in 2019 and held in Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
This is false. Mr Obama was not arrested, and the video used to support the claim is taken from his visit to the prison where Nelson Mandela was held.
Viral posts claiming to show video footage of former US President Barack Obama imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay detention camp are false. The video actually depicts his visit to the prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years.
The posts all feature variations on the claim that the former US President was “arrested” and held in the prison on 29 September 2019, and link to a short clip of Obama standing in a cell.
But this clip was filmed in 2013—when Obama was still in office—during a visit to the Robben Island prison, near Cape Town in South Africa, in which Nelson Mandela was held for most of his 27 years of imprisonment during the apartheid era.
The same clip can be found in this video uploaded to YouTube by the Guardian on 2 July 2013, more than six years before the viral posts claim he was arrested.
Videos of this trip were also shared at the time by the official YouTube page for The Obama White House and Associated Press, as well as featuring in multiple news reports
Nelson Mandela—who would later become President of South Africa—received a life sentence in 1964 for sabotage. Ultimately, he served 27 years of this sentence, spending 18 of them at Robben Island, and the rest in Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison before his release in 1990.
False or misleading claims about politicians can affect people’s opinions of individuals, parties or how they choose to vote. We often see these types of claims spread widely online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Barack Obama was not arrested and held in Guantanamo.
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