Social media users share footage of police escorting protesters, many of them in wheelchairs, out of a building, suggesting it was footage of the Jan. 6 protests at the U.S. Capitol. The video is actually from a demonstration in September 2017.
More than 35,000 social media users have shared the video on social media since the January 6 protest at the Capitol (here, here). Captions on the shared video include: “Everyone shot at the American CAPITOL and how they all got past it” (here) and “Trump supporters with disabilities are arrested for storming the American Capitol”.
The video actually shows Capitol Hill police officers removing protesters who were protesting on September 25, 2017 during a Senate hearing on the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. This can be seen from Reuters photos taken during the 2017 protest that match the video here, here and here. In the video, protesters can be heard singing: “No cuts on Medicaid, save our freedom.” Some of the protesters can be seen in this C-SPAN video (here).
A Reuters report from the time, seen here, describes how the police arrested 181 protesters, mainly from a disability rights group, and forcibly removed 15 of them one by one from the trial room.
Reuters recently dismissed other allegations regarding the identity of 6 January protesters (here, here) and old photos falsely pretending to show 6 January protesters (here, here).
VERDICT
Missing context. The video shows a protest during a Senate hearing in the Capitol in September 2017, not the protests in January 2021.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.