President Obama Dismantling Statue of Liberty-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
President Obama is dismantling the Statue of Liberty because it offends Muslims.
The Truth:
There’s no truth to reports that President Obama wants to take down the Statue of Liberty, or that Muslims find the Statue of Liberty offensive.
Those rumors started with a post that appeared at Departed, a website that publishes reader-generated content, back in March 2016.
The story appeared under the headline, “Obama Says ‘State of Liberty is Offense to Muslims,’ and Wants to Remove it.”
The post opens with an ill-conceived sentence that states Obama “would therefore agree to sign-the Statue of Liberty would be “immediately closed” and then links to a 2010 video of the president talking about the Statue of Liberty.
The post has been viewed more than 225,000 times, and it has been shared nearly 100,000 times on Facebook. The story resurfaced in July 2016 when the website Southern Conservative Daily re-reported the post as breaking news.
Again, these posts don’t cite any sources and there’s no credible evidence to suggest that they’re true. Given that, we’re calling this one fiction.