Does a combination of former President Barack Obama's portrait and its mirrored version produce an image of a goat-like figure? No, that's not true: The image was digitally manipulated. The altered picture was shared by an account with a long history of spreading false claims.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, by @ShadowofEzra on June 12, 2024. It opened:
This is what you see when you mirror the paintings of King Charles and Barack Obama.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Jun 13 14:30:15 2024 UTC)
The post featured the 2018 portrait of Barack Obama (archived here) painted by African-American artist Kehinde Wiley (archived here) for the National Portrait Gallery.
The portrait incorporates many allusions (archived here), but a goat is not one of them.
Lead Stories recreated the experiment described in the entry on X, but the result was different from what the post claimed: An easily recognizable, much lighter-than-the-background goat-like figure simply did not appear at the intersection of the two versions of the portrait.
The True Media tool detected "substantial evidence of manipulation" with "82% confidence":
(Sources: True Media screenshots taken on Thu Jun between 13 14:33:48 2024 and 14:34:06 2024 UTC; composite image by Lead Stories)
One of the first appearances of this digitally altered image of Obama took place in mid-May 2024 on a football forum in the "Bring Us Your Memes Thread" (archived here).
The manipulated image invoked a conspiratorial narrative about satanic elites worshipping the goat-headed deity Baphomet (archived here).
Posts implying purported links between Obama and Baphomet have gone viral before. For example, Snopes reviewed some of those in 2018.
The @ShadowofEzra paid account with the blue checkmark on X -- whose post is the focus of this fact check -- has been active on Telegram, too. It asked (archived here) followers there to downvote community notes on X aimed at flagging false or misleading content. While doing so, the account referenced Pizzagate, which is another conspiracy debunked numerous times:
(Source: Telegram screenshot taken on Thu Jun 13 16:43:15 2024 UTC)
The linked account on Telegram spread other false claims: For example, it posted unsubstantiated speculations about Russian submarines in U.S. waters (archived here), a variation of which was debunked by Lead Stories here.
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Barack Obama can be found here. Stories about politics are here.
