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| - Fact Check: French farmers use tractors against police? Nope, this video is from 2015
India Today Fact Check found that this video is more than eight years old and from Belgium, not France.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is more than eight years old and from Belgium.
As French farmers continue to protest, seeking better remuneration for their produce and protection against cheap imports, a video of tractors pushing a law enforcement vehicle and tractors dispersing straw into the air is being widely shared.
An X user wrote, “Farmers continue to resist, French Farmers Tractor pushes armoured vehicle out of the way then they spray fertiliser on Macron's thugs. Support your farmers.” Its archive can be seen here.
India Today Fact Check found that this video is more than eight years old from Brussels in Belgium, not France.
Our Probe
A reverse search on the viral video’s screengrab led us to the official YouTube channel of elDiarios, an online newspaper based in Spain. The longer version of this video was uploaded to the channel on September 7, 2015. The video’s title suggested that this was a protest in Brussels, Belgium.
We then reverse-searched the other part of the viral video, where a tractor can be seen dispersing straw at the police. We found that the video was published on September 7, 2015, by the official YouTube handle of the Associated Press. As per the video report, protesting farmers used a tractor to “spray straw at police during confrontations at a demonstration in Brussels to demand EU action to counter slumping prices.”
We then found multiple media reports about the 2015 farmers’ clash with police in Brussels during protests against falling dairy prices. As per Al Jazeera’s report, thousands of farmers protested, demanding the European Union to counter slumping prices of milk and pork.
Thus, it’s clear that an eight-year-old video from Belgium was falsely shared as the ongoing French farmers’ protest.
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