Social media posts claim a photo of protesters commandeering a police van was taken during riots in France in summer 2023. This is false; the image is from a 2022 French film.
"France 2023. You've been warned," says a July 2, 2023 tweet sharing the picture, which shows several black-clad figures leaning out of a police van -- one brandishing a firearm.
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Other posts with the photo circulated elsewhere on Twitter, including in French and German.
The claims come amid protests in France over the fatal shooting of Nahel M, a French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent, by a police officer during a June 27 traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Rioters have set cars ablaze, looted businesses and clashed with police across Europe.
Out-of-context photos and videos have spread widely in social media posts falsely claiming they show the unrest.
Similarly, the police van image does not depict the riots -- it comes from the Netflix movie "Athena" (archived here), which premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.
A reverse image search uncovered social media posts about the film with screenshots of the same scene, which appears about six minutes into the movie and in the official trailer (archived here).
© AFP
The French-language movie, directed by Romain Gavras, shows France descending into civil war following riots over police violence. It centers on a housing project in a Paris suburb where riots break out over the death of a young man in police custody.
AFP has fact-checked other out-of-context visuals related to the 2023 French protests here and here.
