What was claimed
An image shows millions of people protesting in France against “WEF globalist puppet” Emmanuel Macron.
Our verdict
False. The picture was taken in Paris in 2018 after France won the World Cup.
Picture of ‘anti-Macron protest’ is actually from 2018 World Cup
4 May 2023
An image of large crowds in Paris has been shared on Twitter with the claim: “The French protests in the millions to tell WEF [World Economic Forum] globalist puppet [President] Macron to get the F out.” It has over 2,000 retweets at the time of writing. A screenshot of the tweet has also appeared on Facebook.
There have been recent protests across France against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms, which may be what the tweet refers to. But the image in the tweet actually shows celebrations following France’s win against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup final.
The image, taken by AFP, has previously been falsely claimed to show protests against Covid-19 policies.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen pictures of protests being mislabelled. A protest in Spain about healthcare was wrongly claimed to have been against the WEF’s policies.
It’s always worth checking whether content is real before you share it. We have written a guide on how to verify viral images which you can read here.
The WEF is often the subject of misinformation and we’ve previously written about false claims that it planned for a future without pets, required Davos pilots to be unvaccinated and that it said it was racist to not want to eat bugs.
Image courtesy of Wesley Tingey
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image isn’t of anti-Macron protest but of post-World Cup celebrations in 2018.