China’s social media coverage of French riots rife with misinformation, distortion
Share
In Brief
The death of a French teenager of African descent shot by police during a roadside confrontation has sparked public clashes with police and riots across France.
Coverage of the riots by Chinese language Twitter accounts are rife with misinformation accompanied by misleading videos not taken during the riots and fake images “corroborated” by other fake images.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) checked and disproved four such widely circulated stories about the riots.
In Depth
Are animals running wild on the streets?
An article publishedby Liu Hong, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Chinese news outlet Huanqiu magazine, for the Wechat news column Jinri Toutiao on July 2 mentions that “several lions and elephants” were released from a zoo during the riots, without providing any visuals to support the claim.
After running keyword searches for “riots in France” and “zoos” across both Twitter and Facebook, AFCL found several accounts making similar claims that included various videos as evidence. Two of the most widely circulated clips were of a zebra and lion escaping from the zoo. Image searches using screenshots taken from both videos provided no results due to poor image quality.
However, a follow-up search for related stories using the phrase “zebra escape france” showed that a similar video clip of the zebra was published in a report by the UK news outlet Daily Mail on April 13, 2020.
The report states that the zebra escaped from a zoo in the Paris suburb of Ormesson-sur-Marne during a COVID lockdown in 2020 before being filmed running on the road.
A separate video spread on Twitter and TikTok with the phrase “saint denis” in the title also purported to show lions let loose during the riots. AFCL searched Google using the phrase “saint denis lion” and found that a user had posted the same video on YouTube in 2020.
Despite the edited version of the video showing only the top half of the original video’s frame, both versions have an identical name of “mardi” located in the lower left frame. The two videos’ identical lighting, framing and content confirm that they come from the same source.
Did armed French teenagers hijack a police car?
The same article on Jinri Toutiao that mentioned the animals also included a photo of armed youths driving a police car while holding a French flag, accompanied by a warning to all Chinese tourists in France to avoid areas already hit by the riots and to report any emergencies to the police.
This same photo was separately posted by a Chinese language Twitter account accompanied by a description that the protesters were armed with military weapons and had hijacked a police car during the course of the riots.
Several accounts on the popular Chinese social media site Weibo also reposted the photo, claiming that the police have turned into bandits during the riots in France.
After searching the photo through Google, AFCL found it had originally been posted online in January 2023, before the riots began. One of the results from the search was a link to the Chinese video sharing platform Douyin, where a suggested keyword “Athena movie” and a final search using the phrase found revealed that the photo was actually a still taken from the 2022 Netflix movie Athena.
The same image appears at 1:26 in the film’s official trailer, proving that the photo was not taken during the recent riots in France.
Were French youths shooting like snipers from the tops of buildings?
A separate photo circulated by Chinese netizens on Twitter shows a young man in a black down jacket aiming down from a tall building while holding what appears to be a sniper rifle, with captions added by the netizens describing the person as a teenage sniper in the riots.
AFCL searched the photo on Google and found a video uploaded by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023 among the search results.
The search also returned sources dated as early as 2022, however the links to these older search results were broken. AFCL was unable to further verify whether the video features a real sniper or is merely a prank. Regardless, the earlier posting dates of all these results verify that this image is unrelated to the recent riots in France.
Do French people enjoy sipping wine even during a riot?
Several Twitter accounts posted the same photo of a man and woman sipping wine on a street with a fire burning directly behind them, accompanied by nearly identical comments that read “French people have big hearts. …… Find a good spot to watch the action.”
The photo in fact had nothing to do with the current riots. The photo appears in a March 2023 report from the British newspaper The Independent which notes that it was taken during separate protests launched that month against French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. Many Weibo discussions at the time commented on French people’s ability to maintain calm in the face of the riots.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
