Video shows “protesters at Harvard replace American flag with Palestinian flag.”

Amid rising tensions from college campus protests nationwide, some social media users claimed pro-Palestinian protesters took down the American flag.

In a video, shared April 30 on Facebook, three people wearing black and white keffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress, hoisted the Palestinian flag over the John Harvard statue at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the flag rose, protesters gathered in Harvard Yard chanted, “Down, down with occupation. Up, up with liberation. Free, free Palestine.”

The Facebook post’s caption said, “Absurd: Woke protesters at Harvard replace American flag with Palestinian flag.”

(Screengrab from Facebook)

Other Facebook posts made similar claims. These posts were 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 and Instagram.)

These posts are misleading. The protesters at Harvard did not “replace” the American flag with the Palestinian flag.

Harvard University’s media relations department said in an April 27 statement that “the American flag was not flying on University Hall at the time the other flags were raised.”

According to Harvard’s procedures, the American flag is raised on University Hall, where the video was taken, at 7 a.m. Monday through Friday and lowered at 4 p.m. “for proper storage,” the university said.

The Harvard Crimson, the college’s student newspaper, reported that protesters raised three Palestinian flags in Harvard Yard after 6 p.m. on April 27, a Saturday, so the American flag was not flying then.

The Palestinian flags were taken down soon after they were raised, the Crimson reported.

Harvard said the flag raising breached university policy and the flag raisers will be disciplined.

We rate the claim that protesters at Harvard “replaced” the American flag with the Palestinian flag False.