In the lead up to the August 2022 Kenyan election, a video began to circulate of Barack Obama unveiling a huge portrait of Kenyan presidential candidate William Ruto. Packaged as a BBC news report, a headline in the video stated that Obama had endorsed Ruto as his preferred candidate in the polls.
Fact-checkers at PesaCheck, which describes itself as ‘Africa’s largest indigenous fact-checking organization’, shared a post on their website describing how they had taken ‘key terms and frames from the video and conducted an online search’ and discovered that the video was doctored. The original clip, they found, showed Obama pulling down a curtain covering a portrait of himself, not Ruto, at a 2018 event in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
