On June 30, 2023, a video began to spread on social media platforms that claimed an Apple store had been looted in France. The claim began to spread as people across the country protested the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old in a suburb of Paris.
"The Apple store in Bordeaux was looted," a Twitter post said in German on June 20, 2023. (We translated the post using Google Translate.) Attached to the post was a video that claimed to show people running and taking products from the store at night. A URL was displayed in the video as well. (Bordeaux is a city in southwestern France.)
Plünderung des Apple Stores in Bordeaux pic.twitter.com/MKHPgsNA9A
— Alexander Wallasch (@AlexWallasch) June 30, 2023
We found unrelated tweets with and without the superimposed link, as well as Facebook posts, spreading the claim about the video.
We found that the link on some of the videos came from a Telegram account that had been sharing videos of the 2023 protests. We reviewed the Telegram account but did not find the video in question. At the time of publication, the only post about Apple stores on the Telegram account included a video that claimed an Apple store in Strasbourg had been looted, which we'll discuss later in the fact check.
The video did not depict any incident that occurred during the 2023 protests in France. Instead, it showed gilets jaune (yellow vest) protesters in 2018, after French President Emmanuel Macron announced a green tax on fuel.
We found that Le Huffington Post, the French version of The Huffington Post, posted a longer version of the gilets jaune footage to its YouTube channel on Dec. 9, 2018. The video said it had been taken in Bordeaux on Dec. 8, 2018.
In 2023 postings, the video was titled, "The Bordeaux Apple store looted during the excesses of yellow vests." (The title of the video was written in French. We translated it using Google Translate.) You could see some of the protesters wearing the yellow vests the 2018 protests were named after in the video:
Although it is not depicted in that video, at the time of publication there were reputable reports that at least one Apple store was damaged during the 2023 protests.
In Strasbourg, a city in eastern France, protesters kicked and smashed the windows of the Apple store during the day on June 30, 2023. During the writing of this fact check, footage of the Strasbourg store had begun to be posted on social media platforms like Twitter:
?DIRECT- Le Apple Store de Strasbourg à été pris pour cible, plusieurs iPhone et autres appareils ont été dérobé. pic.twitter.com/wmmW7s48bS
— La Presse Libre (@LaPresseLibre_) June 30, 2023
However, the video filmed at night dated from 2018 and was not related to the 2023 protests. Therefore, we rate the claim Miscaptioned.