Fact or Fake: Recent Episodes
FRANCE 24 English
FRANCE 24’s Europe team digs through news stories around Europe to shake out the truth from the trash. You can also catch the segment in our Talking Europe show on Saturdays from 12.10 pm Paris time.
As Ukraine is not a member of the European Union for now, it cannot benefit from its cohesion funds. But Kyiv receives strong support from the EU in the form of financial, humanitarian and military assistance. We take a closer look at what the bloc has done to help its neighbour since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion.
Since February 24, 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion has had a huge impact on Ukraine, but also the European Union. To tackle inflation and other economic consequences, the EU has taken measures to try to shield its inhabitants from the cost-of-living crisis. We take a closer look.
People often think about efforts within a country to reduce inequalities. But what about border regions? They have different rules, different legislations and yet they are very much part of the EU's cohesion policies. FRANCE 24's Sophie Samaille and Luke Brown take a look.
Spain is one of the main beneficiaries of the EU’s levelling up policies. But how exactly are the cohesion funds used in the country? FRANCE 24's Sophie Samaille and Luke Brown tell us more.
The EU's cohesion policy is financed by member states. Richer EU countries pay in more to help the bloc's poorest regions catch up. But does that mean that richer EU nations are getting a rough deal from the bloc's cohesion policy? FRANCE 24 sorts the fact from the fake.
One in six Europeans is aged between 18 and 29. The demographic was particularly hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and despite the economic recovery that followed, youth unemployment levels remain high. The EU has a few programs in place to help them. We tell you more in this edition of Fact or Fake.
EU cohesion policy puts a lot of emphasis on economic development, but it also makes sure that environmental criteria are at the forefront of new economic projects. So how does it work? We tell you more in this edition of Fact or Fake.
Georgia Meloni is worried Brussels by her positions. She wants to revisit the post-covid stimulus package. Does it change something for the European cohesion policy ?
Created to reduce the gaps and inequalities between the different regions of the European Union, the bloc's cohesion policy was caught out by the unexpected arrival of Covid-19. But did it fail to act against the pandemic? We take a closer look.
Cohesion funds (ERDF, ESF+, JTF) and structural funds: are you unfamiliar with these words or acronyms? Our Europe team explains these concepts to help you understand what EU cohesion policy is. At currently €392 billion, it's a third of the EU's budget.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, over 7 million people have fled the country. Multiple reports have outlined the specific difficulties that African refugees faced as they attempted to cross the Polish border and enter the European Union. Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille take a look at a Facebook post falsely claiming that refugees from Africa were shot at by Polish police.
In an online video, a train is seen transporting tanks. Claims on social media have suggested that these images show Finland sending military equipment towards the Russian border. The video was seen by some as a sign of imminent conflict and an escalation of the war in Ukraine. FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille take a look at the video in more detail.
Last month, Giorgia Meloni, the president of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, strongly criticised EU defence policy, claiming that no country is meeting its defence spending commitments. FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille look at some defence spending figures to debunk this claim.
On March 23, as leaders gathered for multiple summits in Brussels, the Hungarian justice minister claimed that the EU had not helped the country after Budapest "stopped migration in accordance with international conventions". Sophie Samaille and Georgina Robertson take a closer look at the claims.
In March 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed that the UK has taken in "more vulnerable people fleeing theatres of conflict than any other country in Europe." FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille unpack some of the key figures about refugees in Europe.
Posts on social networks have propagated the theory, based on claims by French doctor Didier Raoult, that vaccination has increased Covid-19 infections. FRANCE 24’s Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille look at some of the statistics and investigate in this week's show.
In one of the final televised debates before the first round of the French presidential election, the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon claimed that if he were elected, he would become the head of the European Union for six months. FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille look at what it actually means to be at the helm of the Presidency of the Council of the EU and how long the French presidency will last.
The false claim that Slovakia opposes NATO and is instead turning toward Russia was made using a video posted on Twitter on March 10. However, the video takes out of context a protest involving Slovakian MPs from nationalist parties about an agreement between Slovakia and its NATO partner, the United States. Georgina Robertson and Sophie Samaille have the story.
In mid-January, French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour said that English should no longer be used in EU institutions post-Brexit. However, English remains an official language of both Ireland and Malta. FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson takes a closer look at what languages are spoken in Brussels.
After a clip from a press conference was published online, questions were raised on social media about the European Medicines Agency's opinion on Covid-19 booster vaccines. Elements of the presser were taken out of context and the EMA's full message got lost in some of the posts. FRANCE 24's Georgina Robertson looks into the reports. Spoiler alert: the EMA recommends that EU citizens complete their primary vaccinations.
September 26 was an historic moment in Germany. That day, voters went to the polls to choose who would succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor after almost 16 years at the helm. But the election campaign was littered with fake news. We take a closer look in this edition of Fact or Fake.
Does France really have to pay back €67 billion for the EU's Covid-19 recovery fund, even though it's only receiving €40 billion? The claim was made by former Socialist French presidential hopeful Arnaud Montebourg. We take a closer look in this edition of Fact or Fake.
Greece has a prominent role within the European Union on the issue of irregular migration. There have been allegations that Greece and other EU member states' border officials have been involved in so-called migrant “pushbacks”. Fact or fake? We find out.
The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine has been a source of tension between the United Kingdom and European Union, especially concerning the number of doses each party was due to receive. The UK was able to start administering the drug much faster than the EU, but why was it able to do so? The Fact or Fake team takes a closer look.
Vaccines have been the subject of much fake news in Spain and elsewhere around Europe. Our team has looked into these false or misleading stories and studied the impact they have had on the management of the health crisis.
One issue causing real concern about public health is fake news around Covid-19 vaccines. In France, anti-vaccine sentiment is already high, with 46% of people hesitant to get jabbed in December 2020. Among the fake news circulating most widely: the claim that US billionaire Bill Gates is planning to implant us all with 5G microchips along with the Covid-19 vaccine. Fact or fake? Our team has debunked it for you.
The UK has been deploying the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 since early December 2020. At that time, Matt Hancock, the British health minister, claimed that his government had been able to move faster than its EU neighbours because of Brexit. This has been debunked by our Fact or Fake team.
British farmers were some of the most fervent supporters of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. They had, on average, been receiving £27,000 (€34,000) a year each from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. But fervent supporters of Brexit insisted that things would be even better once the UK started on its new path. Our team has been sorting out the fact from the fake.
"European Parliament votes to create 'BERLIN TIME' that UK could be forced to adopt". That was the colourful claim from British tabloid the Daily Express on March 26. The article claims that MEPs have voted to "advance plans to shift to Berlin time in 2021". Although some elements of the article are correct, no specific time zone is being imposed in the EU. We tell you more.
This story originated with a false declaration by the head of the European election candidate list for France's far-right Rassemblement National party, previously known as the Front National. During an election rally, Jordan Bardella claimed that the EU's international trade treaties were allowing imports into France of "hormone beef, genetically modified salmon and chlorine-washed chicken". Actually, none of these products are commercially available in the EU, neither home-grown nor as imports.
Multiple articles have been published in various languages, claiming that Sweden has banned mandatory vaccinations. They appear to come from a communiqué put out by the controversial American alternative therapy lobby group that calls itself the National Health Federation. According to the various stories, this ban was inspired by a claim that mandatory vaccines went against the Swedish constitutional right to choose one's healthcare. So what actually happened? We tell you more.
On February 17, the British tabloid The Sun on Sunday claimed to have uncovered a "secret" EU plan to avert chaos if the UK leaves the bloc on a no-deal basis. The Sun on Sunday describes this as "key documents quietly slipped out by Brussels". The UK's former Brexit minister Dominic Raab then tweeted the story, asking "why so little coverage"? The answer is that the so-called "secret plan" wasn't in fact a secret at all. We tell you more.
This is a recurring piece of fake news in Georgia, where more than 80% of the population follows the Eastern Orthodox traditions. It seems to have originated on the Georgian news site Mediacity.ge in late 2016. Mediacity claims that the European Parliament's foreign relations committee adopted a resolution equating the Orthodox Church with the Islamic State group. In reality, the resolution calls on EU institutions to beef up their responses to propaganda sponsored by the Russian government.
Is Turkey joining the EU? That was a claim made back in 2016, in one of nearly 1,600 pro-Brexit adverts run by the official Brexit campaign, "Vote Leave" and two associated campaigns, "BeLeave" and "DUP Vote to Leave". At the time the advert was produced, Turkey was involved in accession negotiations. This means it had applied to be a member and was negotiating with the EU - but the process is not a guarantee of membership.
Is France about to hand over its Alsace and Lorraine regions to Germany? This claim was widely shared by web users in January 2019 as France and Germany prepared to sign a new cooperation treaty. It originated with a now-deleted video, made by French MEP Bernard Monot – a former member of the far-right National Front party, and now with the politically similar France Arise movement. The text of the treaty is publicly available, and it contains no mention of territorial handovers of any kind.
This story was put about by an American conservative activist called Charlie Kirk on December 3, 2018 – and retweeted by US President Donald Trump. Kirk’s tweet lists claims about the Yellow Vest movement in France, including that the phrase "We want Trump" was being chanted in Paris. But as AFP Fact Check have pointed out, this video is not from France, and is not even a recent recording. We tell you where the video really comes from.
In this episode of Fact or Fake, we focus on a Swedish website with close ties to far-right and anti-immigrant groups. In November 2018, it published several false claims about the UN migration pact. Among them was a petition claiming the UN text would "consider illegal immigration to be a human right". The website also falsely claimed that negative reporting on immigration would be banned. We take a closer look.
On October 30, 2018, one of Italy's Five-Star Movement's official Twitter accounts tweeted a video with an Italian translation of Jeroen Dijsselbloem. He's the former head of the Eurogroup, which shapes eurozone policy. He gave the original interview in English to TV network CNBC. In the tweeted video, the Italian voiceover says Dijsselbloem is "openly inviting the markets to launch an attack on Italian finances." In the original video, however, Dijsselbloem makes no such statement.
Have British MEPs "forgotten" their staff? This story originated in the UK’s Daily Express newspaper. All British members of the European Parliament are supposed to stop working as MEPs once the UK leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. The newspaper claims that the contracts and salary payments of all 73 of them will continue for three months after that date. It also contends that MEPs' staff will receive no such redundancy payments. But there are three major problems with the report, as we explain.
Russian business news website Gazeta.ru reported that Angela Merkel publicly snubbed Theresa May at the informal EU summit in Salzburg on September 20, 2018. The article states that the German chancellor deliberately "humiliated" the British prime minister by refusing to shake her hand. According to the website, Merkel was taking revenge for Brexit. But the two women had in fact met and spoken earlier in the day - and therefore had no need to say another "hello" at this later point.
For a couple of weeks, a photo has been doing the rounds on certain European news sites. It shows a credit card, with the logos of the European Union and the United Nations refugee agency. According to websites including Voice of Europe and Slovenia's Nova 24, this card is distributed to undocumented migrants to finance their travels across Europe. We've checked the claims – and they're totally false.
In this episode of Fact or Fake, we look at a claim made by Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. At the end of September 2018, he asserted that charity rescue ships were bringing "hundreds of thousands of immigrants each day" to Italian shores. Salvini made the comments in an interview with the right-wing French news magazine Valeurs Actuelles. We've checked, and the numbers are vastly exaggerated.