We came across the following post from 2 July on Twitter, where it had gained over 313,000 views:
The post initially depicts a woman posing for a picture with the Eiffel Tower in the background, before an explosion suddenly goes off in the vicinity of the French landmark.
Further scenes show more explosions and smoke rising over Paris as unidentified fighter jets fly overhead, and confused and alarmed voices of people are heard. The last few seconds show the Eiffel Tower itself under attack.
The post was shared by an account that had been ‘verified’ since April 2023, carrying a blue tick. These were previously used to denote accounts of significance such as governing authorities, media and celebrities, but can now be purchased for a subscription after being ‘manually authenticated’ by individuals.
The account profile claims to be located in Delhi, India, and positions itself as a media account reporting on ‘latest News, political stories, entertainment news, (and) sports news’.
The video is presented as a representation of events transpiring in France as a result of riots since the beginning of July in addition to protests. These had been sparked by a video which showed a 17-year-old boy of Moroccan-Algerian descent being shot dead by police at a traffic stop.
A ‘Futuristic Film’ From the Past
When we investigated the origins of the clip in the Twitter post by doing a keyword search, we found that it had been addressed by some media sites and factcheckers, mostly in India. These include the factchecker organisation BOOM and the Indian media sites India Today and the Quint.
According to these sources, the video was fake and not a true representation of events in France. They asserted that the video was CGI-generated and had been created by the Government of Ukraine to simulate a Russian attack on a European capital in order to persuade NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
When we looked up official accounts of Ukrainian authorities, we found that the video had been indeed been posted 12 March, 2022 by the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine as well as the Verkhovna Rada, the Parliament of Ukraine.
The version of the video released by Ukraine was also longer, including a quote attributed to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy that read, “We will fight to the end. Giving us a chance to live. Close the sky over Ukraine or give us air fighters. If we fall, you fall.”
While this clearly indicates that the video in the Twitter post is not an authentic representation of events in France, the Indian organisations are mistaken when making the further assertion that the Ukrainian government had created the video themselves.
When we searched for the origin of the video, we found a report in Forbes that quoted the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation as saying that the video had been created by ‘some Ukrainian creative guys’ who wanted to help with the war effort by producing photos and videos, and that the Government did not mind reposting them.
Another article in the French newspaper Le Monde carries an interview with Olias Barco, a French film director living in Kyiv, who claims to have made the video with the assistance of another French producer, Jean-Charles Levy.
Barco claims that he did so in order to give an ‘electric shock’ to bring awareness to the West about the war in Ukraine. He also stresses that they were not paid or funded. The detailed account was backed up by the US-based factcheck outlet VERIFY, which has a strong track record of accurate factchecking.
The video was therefore not created by the Ukrainian government. It was created independently without any funding from the Ukrainian government in March 2022, and was later shared by Ukrainian government bodies. It is false that the explosions shown in the video are related to the protests and riots in France in July 2023.
Disinformation Networks Converge on French Protests
In the process of researching the video in the Twitter post, we found several examples of images and clips of chaos that had been falsely linked to the France protests and later debunked.
These included masked men in violent clashes and burning garbage near the Eiffel Tower, a video of a famed library in Marseille supposedly burning, wild animals running on the streets, rioter ‘snipers’ on rooftops targeting civilians, and cars exploding after falling from parking garage rooftops.
All these examples were debunked after being found to have been videos from different locations around the world, from an earlier point in time under different circumstances, or even captures from movie sets.
It is notable, however, that several of them appear to have originated from India with captions in Hindi or accounts made in India, like the Twitter post above. Social media has played a key role in amplifying Hindu-supremacist sentiment and fuelling Islamophobia in India, with members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) often directly instigating such views. Disinformation and propaganda transmitted on social media have been directly linked to pogroms in which several people have been killed in India in recent years.
While this is unlikely to be the only group seeking to manipulate information about the protests, the Twitter post generated in India is likely to be linked to Hindu-supremacist and Islamophobic movements as the protests have centred around the treatment of minorities in France, many of whom are Muslims.
French state broadcaster France 24 has also noted that pro-Russian accounts and French far-right politicians have been disseminating disinformation related to the protests.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that while the most extreme scenes of chaos in France have been falsified, there have been many instances of violence. A Reuters report from 9 July, for instance, quoted the interior minister as saying that over 3,000 people had been arrested and over 2,500 buildings had been damaged during the unrest.
