No, this still isn’t proof former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya

Former President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. 

But nearly eight years since he left office, some social media users continue to baselessly claim he was born in Kenya. 

A Jan. 5 Threads post is among them: It features an image of what looks like a "certificate of birth" from "Coast Province General Hospital" in "Mombasa, British Protectorate of Kenya." 

The child’s name is "Barack Hussein Obama II" and the purported document bears much of the same information as Obama’s authentic birth certificate from his birth at the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital" in Honolulu, such as the time and date of his birth. 

We previously fact-checked a fabricated birth certificate used to argue Obama was born in Kenya. That document was fake and those claims were false. That’s also true here.  

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

In March 2017, Malik Obama, Obama’s half brother, posted the purported birth certificate on X. 

"Surely. What’s this?" Malik Obama said. Malik Obama, a vocal supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, is estranged from Barack Obama. 

But as Snopes noted, writing about the X post that year, this was "a scan of a long-debunked forged document."

Featured Fact-check

Facebook posts

stated on December 15, 2024 in a post

A video shows President Joe Biden saying, “There are no drones over the United States.”

Mombasa, for example, wasn’t part of Kenya when Obama was born; it was part of Zanzibar until December 1963.

Other news outlets have also raised red flags, such as the date given for Obama’s mother’s birth: "11/29/1942." Kenya formats its dates day/month/year, as does Great Britain; when Obama was born in 1961, Kenya was still under British rule. 

Unfounded rumors about Obama’s citizenship have circulated since his first presidential run. In June 2008, the Obama campaign responded to those rumors and released a copy of his Hawaii birth certificate, posting the document online. That fueled even more claims, this time that the document was fraudulent. 

FactCheck.org reporters went to Chicago, where Obama’s campaign headquarters was based, to hold the document and examine it closely. They concluded that it was legitimate. 

In October 2008, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, then director of the Hawaii Department of Health, issued a statement saying that he and the registrar of vital statistics "who has the statutory authority to oversee and maintain these types of vital records" had personally seen and verified that the health department had Obama’s original birth certificate on record. 

Janice Okubo, a health department spokesperson, told us that birth certificates evolve over the decades, and there are surely differences between what Obama’s looked like when he was born and how the documents look today. 

As we’ve reported, if there had been a plot to forge a birth certificate so that Obama could run for office, it would have originated the day he was born. 

Will Hoover, who wrote a 2008 story for the Honolulu Advertiser about Obama’s childhood in Hawaii, told PolitiFact that he reviewed microfilm archives and found two birth announcements for Obama. One was in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, 1961, and the other was in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the next day. They both said the same thing: "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4." The health department submitted both announcements; not Obama’s family.

"Take a second and think about that," PolitiFact reported in 2009. "In order to phony those notices up, it would have required the complicity of the state Health Department and two independent newspapers — on the off chance this unnamed child might want to one day be president of the United States."

We rate claims this purported birth certificate is evidence Obama was born in Kenya Pants on Fire!