Photograph
It’s one of many false content circulating on social media as France grapples with fresh riots, this time after a 17-year-old boy died at the hands of a police officer who tried to flee. He was caught driving without documents. , on the outskirts of Paris.
One image, shared mainly by far-right supporters’ accounts, appeared to show a group of armed youths, one of whom wearing a veil and carrying a French flag, driving a van belonging to the country’s police officers. Beside her, another person drives a motorcycle with the front wheel raised.
In one Tweets In which the film goes viral, the author – who describes himself as “the most censored man on YouTube” – asks, “Can you imagine what the traditional Western media response would be if this happened in Putin’s Russia?”
This content had 3600 shares and was viewed almost 700 thousand times in the last three days. In another account, it was described as “the picture of the day” in France and reached 400 thousand views and 2500 shares before being deleted by the author, who clarified that the photo was merely “illustrative”. Confusion in the French capital.
facts
After the death of Nahel Merzouk, a young man of Algerian and Moroccan descent who died in a police chase on June 27, it turns out that the photo is not a picture of the ongoing protests in France. Moreover, it has not caught on in any of the protests in the country in the past months.
A simple reverse search for the content is sufficient, putting it into the Google image search engine or tools Tinie (which finds the first appearance of an image on the Internet), to reveal that it is a scene from the movie AthenaIt is slated to premiere in 2022.
In the film available on that day on stage Streaming Netflix and carried out by the French Romain Gavras, “A boy’s tragic murder sparks all-out war in Athena’s society, with the victim’s older brothers at the center of the conflict.” Despite the obvious parallels with the Nahel Merzouk case, the film was released more than nine months before the new riots in Paris.
This is one of the misinformation circulating on social media in conjunction with the protests in France. In another post, captioned: “What’s going on in France?”, an image appears to show several cars falling from a vertical car park.
But the same fact-checking exercise reveals that this is a scene from another action movie: the eighth in the saga Furious speedSince 2016, and filmed in Cleveland (USA). Tweet Down here.
Another example is a video that purports to be a “demonstrator in a position,” according to false content Sniper [atirador furtivo] With a gun stolen from the police”. According to the BBC, which investigated publications circulating on Telegram, the images were already posted on Twitter in March last year. Although they appear to have been captured in the suburbs of Paris, it is not known from what context or whether the weapon is genuine, and they are much older than the riots of recent days.
Misinformation is used to create new misinformation. On Sunday, the French government publicly denied a press release announcing restrictions on internet access to curb the spread of fake news and reduce violence on the streets.
The alleged document includes the logo and contact information of the French Ministry of the Interior. But both the office and the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs on Sunday clarified that the press release was false and that the government had not decided to impose restrictions on Internet access: “This document is incorrect, no decision of this kind has been taken”, they wrote. Twitter.
French President Emmanuel Macron has already publicly advocated that social media play a “significant role” in the protests, as they can encourage violence in the streets and incite public opinion against police officers.
“Snapchat, Tiktok and many other violent gatherings serve as places where violence is organized, but there is also a form of imitating violence that leads, for some young people, to lose touch with reality,” the French head of state said. In reports to the country.
In the same speech, Macron said that most of those protesting in the streets were “young or very young”, accusing that “one gets the impression that some of them are trying on the street what they saw in the video games while intoxicated”. President French. And, although the government denied that it was restricting access to the network, Macron confirmed that it was working with the main social networks to limit the proliferation of violent content: “I believe that these sites are responsible”, he appealed.
Judgment
Returning, then, to the image from which this triage of facts began: the images showing a group of youths holding a van owned by French authorities during protests in Paris inspired by the deaths of 17 people are false. A young boy during the chase police officer. They’re actually from a movie that premiered on Netflix last year. They are one of many examples of misinformation surrounding the riots in the French capital – which Emmanuel Macron has already come to condemn, accusing publications on social networks of calling for violence.
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