A viral video (here, here, and here) containing two clips featuring former President of the United States, Barack Obama, is doing the rounds on social media. This video allegedly shows ‘Leaked footage of Barack Hussein Obama addressing and explaining the toolkit to the NGOs financed by his Foundation and Soros foundation… – in Obama’s own words about how countries are destabilised.’ We verify this claim through this article.
Claim: Viral video is leaked footage of former US President Barack Obama sharing tactics used in destabilising countries to the NGOs financed by his foundation.
Fact: The original videos of both the clips in the viral video are available in the public domain. They are part of two different speeches delivered by President Obama at two different venues. In the first one, he was talking about how social media is being used to spread disinformation and weaken democratic institutions. In the second speech, he was talking about the ideology that believes that people are too small-minded to govern themselves. Short clips from both these speeches were edited to make it look like he was giving inflammatory speeches to the NGOs financed by him. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search online, and we learned that both the video clips shared in the viral video are available in the public domain and are not some secret, leaked videos. We also found that both the videos were clipped from President Obama’s speeches and were being shared out of context to make it look like he was giving inflammatory speeches to the NGOs financed by him.
Clip 1
This was clipped from an hour-long speech (here and here) given by President Obama at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and The Obama Foundation. This was his keynote address.
The portion of his speech seen in the viral video appears at around the 31:10 timestamp. Here, he says, ‘You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorising that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won.’
The viral video just shared this small portion of his speech, removing the context in which he said this. In his address, he spoke about disinformation and the challenges to democracy in the digital information era. He also spoke about how authoritarian regimes use social media platforms to ‘turn their own populations against groups they don’t like.’ Throughout his speech, he spoke about how leaders in some countries are using disinformation spread through social media to weaken democratic institutions.
Clip 2
This was taken from a speech that President Obama gave in 2014 at the Palais Des Beaux Arts in Brussels, located in Belgium. You can see this original full-length speech here, here and here. We observed that the lines he delivered in the second clip appeared at around 1:25 and 3:17 timestamp.
The first part of this clip, where he says, ‘the international order that we have worked for generations to build.’ is part of a sentence which is, ‘We meet here at a moment of testing for Europe and the United States, and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build.’
The second part of this clip, in which he says, ‘Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, ….’ was part of a bigger sentence which is ‘.. Those ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power. This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign. Often, this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others, and that individual identity must be defined by “us” versus “them,” or that national greatness must flow not by what a people stand for, but by what they are against.’
After going through the speech, we found that Obama was talking about two types of governance ideologies. One was the American ideology, which believes that ‘power is derived from the consent of the governed, and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding.’
The second one was that ‘ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.’ In this speech, he was just presenting his thoughts on these ideologies but was not telling others that he believes in the idea that ‘ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.’ You can find the transcript uploaded on the official US government website here.
To sum up, clipped speeches of former President Obama are being falsely shared as a leaked video of him presenting tactics to destabilise countries to the NGOs funded by him & George Soros.
