A video of a firefighter standing in front of a burnt building which then collapses shows the aftermath of an incident in Paris which predates the recent unrest in France.
The video was not taken in Paris. The footage is from Montargis, a town 60 miles from Paris, and it was filmed on 30 June—after the recent unrest in the country had begun.
A widely shared tweet shows a video of a firefighter in France standing in front of a burnt building which then collapses. A ‘community note’ (which Twitter describes as “empowering people on [the platform] to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading tweets”) appears under it, saying “this is the result of a gas explosion in Paris last month” and linking to an article in the French newspaper Le Monde.
However, this community note is incorrect. The video was not filmed in Paris after what Le Monde described as “a very strong explosion of undetermined origin” in the capital on 21 June which killed at least one and critically injured six.
The video was in fact taken in Montargis, a town around 60 miles south of Paris, on 30 June, following a night of unrest in the area. According to another French newspaper Le Parisien, which published the same video as part of its coverage of the riots, the collapsed building was a pharmacy.
Photos of the same location from a similar angle taken by an AFP photographer on 1 July show the collapsed building later on.
While the community note relating to the video is incorrect, we’ve not attempted to fact check the original tweet attached to the video—for example, we have not tried to verify the age of the building which collapsed.
Full Fact has previously checked a separate video shared on social media with false claims it showed the 21 June explosion in Paris. That video was actually filmed in Russia in 2020.
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The original tweet with the video footage was published on 1 July, while the community note was published on 3 July. According to Twitter, the tweet itself has now been viewed over five million times, and had four million views on 3 July when the note was published.
The note says it is “currently rated helpful” as it “provides important context” and “directly addresses the tweet’s claim”.
Community notes allow contributors to write notes under tweets they believe to be misleading, and rate the notes of other contributors. Notes become visible to the majority of Twitter users (not just contributors) when they earn the status of ‘helpful’.
This note was written by a contributor who appears to have written other community notes, and when we checked a sample of these other notes they seemed to be correct. Full Fact has not been able to see any way of contacting the contributor directly.
We did email Twitter’s press office to alert it to the incorrect community note, but did not receive any response other than the same apparently automated response other journalists have recently reported getting in relation to separate press queries.
Twitter’s website says: “Community Notes do not represent Twitter’s viewpoint and cannot be edited or modified by our teams. A Tweet with a Community Note will not be labeled, removed, or addressed by Twitter unless it is found to be violating the Twitter Rules, Terms of Service, or our Privacy Policy.”
Community notes are written by Twitter users who have signed up for access. They also need to have not recently violated Twitter rules, and must have an account that is at least six months old and has a verified phone number.
The riots in France have become the subject of significant online misinformation over the last week. Full Fact has written about a number of false or misleading posts, including claims zoo animals were released onto the streets of Paris, a fake press release claiming the French government was turning off the internet and photos and videos from different dates and locations being mislabelled to say they show recent unrest.
For help dodging misleading claims on social media, see our guides to how to spot misleading videos and images online.
Image courtesy of Joshua Hoehne
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