A video showing people dumping packets out of trucks in the middle of a desert has gone viral with the claim that it shows how Arab countries are dumping French products.
However, we found that the video in question was an old one from 2016 and showed authorities dumping around 80,000 packets of expired chicken which was not fit for human consumption.
CLAIM
The viral clip was captioned, “फ्रांस के सामान का बायकॉट, अरब देशों में कुछ इस तरह हो रहा है, ये सब देख कर, फ़्रांस जल्द ही पागल होने वाला है।” [Traslation: This is how Arab contries are boycotting French products, France is going to go crazy soon after seeing this.]
This clip comes amid widescale protests against French President Emmanuel Macron over his statements about Islam and Prophet Mohammed following the beheading of a french teacher in Paris on 16 October 2020.
Macron made a statement in which he vowed not to “give up cartoons” depicting the Prophet Mohammed citing freedom of speech. Macron had to face a lot of criticism for his statement, and several Muslim-majority countries called for a boycott of French goods.
The video was also shared widely on Facebook with similar captions.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We broke down the video using InVid Google Chrome extension and conducted a reverse image search.
While going through the search results, we came across a news report from 17 November 2016 published on Al Arabiya news, titled “Video shows Saudi Arabia getting rid of 80,000 packs of ‘spoiled chicken’”. The report had a screengrab from the same viral video.
The report added that “these packs of expired chicken were confiscated inside 25 refrigerated trucks prior to their distribution inside and outside al-Qassim district.”
We also found a video in the story that had a longer clip of the incident. The video was posted on 16 November 2016.
The story was also published in Al Riyadh newspaper.
Evidently, an old and unrelated video was used to claim that it is part of the recent protests against France. We have debunked several other stories with incorrect information about the protests in France which can be found here.
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