The video predates the conflict that began in October 2023 and depicts football fans in Brazil.

PesaCheck

·

Follow

Published in

PesaCheck

·

4 min read

·

Nov 2

A Facebook post with a video purportedly of pro-Palestine protests in France is PARTLY FALSE.

The post reads, “France has BANNED pro-Palestinian protests. Yet MASSIVE protest in support of Palestine!”

On 12 October 2023, France banned all pro-Palestine demonstrations, citing concerns about public order. Despite the ban, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Paris on 28 October amid the ongoing war with the Israeli army that erupted on 7 October 2023.

The video in question, however, predates the October 2023 Israel-Hamas conflict.

Using InVid & WeVerify, a video verification tool, we isolated keyframes, followed by a Google reverse image search. The results established that the video is of football fans in Brazil.

The video was featured in an article published by Brazilian news website Estadão on 5 October 2023 with a title translated from Portuguese, “Fans drive buses from Palmeiras to Allianz in a party before the Libertadores game.”

According to the article, thousands of fans “accompanied the bus, singing and encouraging the squad” ahead of the scheduled semi-final between Palmeiras and Boca Juniors.

Similarly, the video was shared alongside other videos of the fans in an article bearing the headline “Impressive! The Boca and Palmeiras fans before entering the field.”

PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post with a video purportedly of pro-Palestine protests in France and finds it to be PARTLY FALSE.

This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.

Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.

This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker Peris Gachahi and edited by PesaCheck Senior Copy Editor Cédrick Irakoze.

The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.

PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.