Indian Media Outlets Misreport Old Video Of French President Emmanuel Macron Being Slapped As Recent

A viral video of French President Emmanuel Macron getting slapped is going viral across social media. The video, which shows a person in an olive-green shirt slapping Macron, is going viral with the claim that the French politician was slapped recently.

Claim:

The video shows Emmanuel Macron walking up to a crowd of people. A person in an olive green shirt can be heard saying something and then slapping Macron across the face. The French President's bodyguards rush to defend Macron and shove and restrain the protester in retaliation.

The news agency Asian News International published an article on November 21, 2022, which reported that Macron had been slapped "again".

The ANI report states, "In a similar incident on June 8, last year, a man slapped President Macron across the face during a visit by the French leader to the country's southeast." Quoting a report in the New York Times, Macron was approaching a small crowd of people in Tain-l'Hermitage, a town in the Drome region of France.

The news agency tweeted the viral video as well on November 21, 2022, which was deleted later on.

The report by ANI was picked up by news outlets such as TV9 Bharatvarsh, News 18 Uttar Pradesh, Hindustan Times, Times Of India, Amar Ujala.

Fact Check:

The Logical Indian fact-check team verified the viral claim and found it to be false. The viral video is from June 2021.

We first used InVid's Keyframe Analysis tool to isolate the keyframes of the video. We then conducted a reverse image search on the keyframes using the Yandex search engine.

We came across this result on Instagram, a video showing Macron being slapped by seemingly the same person in an olive green shirt. The video was uploaded by user 'congotoglobal' on June 8, 2021, with the caption, 'The French President Emmanuel Macron receives an unexpected slap from a crowd member'.

We then conducted a keyword search to find when the incident took place. Notably, we found no global news media outlets which stated that the incident took place recently.

We came across a report by the BBC titled, 'France President Emmanuel Macron slapped in the face,' published on June 8, 2021. The report details how a person in a green T-shirt slapped Macron as he walked up to a barrier in Tain-l'Hermitage, outside the city of Valence, France.

As per the BBC report, the person in the olive green shirt reportedly shouted 'Down with Macron-ism' as he slapped the French president. Reportedly, Macron returned to the barrier after the incident and interacted with the crowd briefly. The BBC report also noted, "President Macron is currently on a tour of France and had just visited a hotel school in Tain-l'Hermitage."

After a keyword search on YouTube, we came across videos uploaded by DW News (uploaded June 8, 2021) and Reuters (uploaded June 9, 2021), which showed Macron being slapped. The videos were shot from different angles, but both show similar actions of Macron walking up to the barrier and stopping to interact with the crowd before being slapped by the person in the olive green shirt.

To geolocate the video, we used the cue from the BBC report to conduct a keyword search for 'hotel school in Tain-l'Hermitage'. The keyword search led us to School Hotelier De Tain L'hermitage, located in Tain-l'Hermitage, which is a commune in Drôme in southeastern France.

In Street View mode of the hotel school, we identified some landmarks of the location, which can be seen in the viral video as well.

We also compared the viral video with the video uploaded by Reuters and DW News. We found several similarities such as the same bald bodyguard, the same masked woman in a black suit seen escorting Macron, and the same woman in a pink cap seen in both videos. Also, the three security personnel standing alongside Macron in the viral clip are in the exact position in the Reuters news clip from 2021.

We also came across a video by TRT World, which contained a small segment of an interview with the person in the olive green shirt. The person can be seen clearly in this video and is the same person as the one who slapped Macron in June 2021.

In our Fact Check, we also came across a tweet by ANI, which retracted the tweet and the report. The tweet is captioned, "Correction | This story has been retracted, the viral video is an old video which was circulated again. Error regretted."

Conclusion:

We found that the viral video is from an incident in June 2021. Macron was slapped by a bystander in as he was visiting Tain-l'Hermitage, which is a commune in Drôme in southeastern France. The incident took place in June 2021 and has been misreported by Indian news media outlets as recent. Hence, the viral claim is false.

If you have any news that you believe needs to be fact-checked, please email us at factcheck@thelogicalindian.com or WhatsApp at 6364000343.

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