Social media users have been sharing an image online that claims to show former President Barack Obama’s student ID card while he was at Columbia University. It includes a photograph of him with the name “Barry Soetoro” and the words ‘Foreign student’ underneath in capital letters.
Reuters Fact Check. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
Examples can be seen here and here .
One post reads: “Well well well.... look whats surfaced. Lets see how long it takes for it to be taken down. Until then, share the [expletive] out of it!” Lower down, it says: “Facebook is taking this photo down left and right. Make it go viral!”
A Google search shows that this false claim has been circulating for years. Snopes reported in 2012 that the ID card with the number shown in the image belonged to a student named Thomas Lugert ( here ).
The photo of the original ID appears on a blog that Lugert wrote about his experience at Columbia University ( archive.vn/TU4et ). The word "student" in Lugert’s ID has been altered to "foreign student" in the claim.
ID cards like the one shown in the claim weren’t introduced by Columbia until 1996 ( here ). Obama graduated with the class of 1983 ( here ).
The photograph of Obama used in the claim is from a book about his life. It can be seen on the cover of "Barack Obama: The Story" by David Maraniss ( here ).
Soetoro was the last name of Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Lolo. It may have been used in the claim to make him sound more foreign ( here )
Obama served two terms as U.S. president, from 2009 to 2017. In 2011, he took the rare step of publishing his long-form birth certificate to prove that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and rebut conspiracy theories – backed at the time by Donald Trump, among others - that he was not born in America and therefore ineligible under the constitution to be president. ( here ). Trump abandoned the ‘birther’ claim in 2016 after promoting it for five years ( here ).
VERDICT
False. The image purporting to be Barack Obama’s ‘foreign student’ ID card is a fake.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact checking work here .
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May 04, 2020 at 10:00PM
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False claim: Obama’s Columbia University ID card shows he was a foreign student - Reuters
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