Published on
A video has gained significant traction online, purportedly showing the streets of Paris in turmoil following a recent riot.
Posts on X say that the clip shows scenes from the French capital in recent days, and question why there appears to be no reporting on it in the media.
Another post, meanwhile, compares the scenes to missile strikes in the Middle East, as the Iran war continues, before pushing the blame onto French President Emmanuel Macron.
These posts have been seen hundreds of thousands of times — some with even more than one million views — and liked and reshared thousands of times.
They’ve even been picked up by fringe news outlets, such as Greek website Pellain, which published a story based on one of the most viral X posts featuring the headline “This is not Beirut or Tehran. This is Macron’s France.” (Αυτή δεν είναι η Βηρυτός ή η Τεχεράνη. Αυτή είναι η Γαλλία του Μακρόν.)
However, the posts are misleading because they’ve been taken out of context. While they do indeed show the streets of Paris following a riot, they’re not recent and actually date back to December 2022.
A reverse image search of a still from the video takes us to multiple news reports from the time, explaining that the footage depicts protests in Paris in the aftermath of a deadly shooting that targeted the Kurdish community.
Three people were killed, and others were wounded, in an attack that the French authorities say was a racially motivated hate crime.
William Malet confessed to the killings, saying that he had a “pathological hatred” of foreigners, and remains in custody while the case moves through the French legal system.
French media reported in July 2025 that investigative magistrates had referred the case to the criminal courts on racist but not terrorist charges.
The protests that followed the shooting boiled over after the French government dismissed terrorism as a possible motive for the killings, with some accusing the Turkish state of being involved. Turkey denies this.
Protesters overturned cars, started fires, and clashed with riot police, leading to several arrests and injuries on both sides.
The timing of the shooting was particularly sensitive because it happened just before the 10th anniversary of the murder of three other Kurdish activists in Paris in 2013.
In that case, three women’s activists were assassinated in the capital’s 10th arrondissement. The main suspect died in 2017, prompting the authorities to close their investigation into the matter.
The families of the victims filed a new complaint, and a new probe looking at the possible implication of Turkish agents was launched in 2019. Nevertheless, the crime remains unsolved.
French Response, the anti-disinformation arm of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has also confirmed that the video circulating now is from 2022 rather than 2026, and denounced its current circulation on social media as “framing” rather than “evidence” in a reply to a now-deleted post sharing the clip.