Recycling of infox on gold trafficking in Mali by the French army
Audio 03:33
The false seizure of gold.
© RFI
By: Sophie Malibeaux
8 min
We come back to an infox that has already been published and dismantled many times, and which continues to circulate on social networks, provoking reactions of hatred towards France.
No wonder, because the propagators of this infox claim to show the images of a shipment of gold stolen by France in Mali.
In reality this is not the case, the lie is all the more blatant as it is repeated identically, with the same images, more than a year apart.
Publicity
Infox is hammered, repeated, recycled, even though all the evidence invalidating it has been provided, it is the main source of the disinformation conveyed on the internet and social networks.
Thus on November 29, 2020, the presenter of the online channel
Universal News Tv
claims to present images supposed to show "
How the Malian customs officers were able to stop the smuggling of gold from French soldiers
".
And to clarify, "here is what happened this weekend".
We then witness an inspection scene of what looks like a shipment of unmarked gold bars.
And many Internet users - hundreds of thousands on various networks - see these images for the first time and relay them on Twitter.
A whole debate ensues on the plundering of Africa by France, a discussion organized by this online channel, which presents itself as "
a tool for informing and educating the public
".
The debate comes in reaction to
the interview granted on November 20 by President Macron to
Jeune Afrique
magazine
.
The speakers, on the set of Universal News TV, purely and simply accuse Emmanuel Macron of being involved in this gold trafficking, without any evidence.
A diverted and recycled video
The same video was already circulating during the summer of 2019. Our colleagues from the
Observers of France 24
by doing in-depth research were able to find and discuss with one of the characters present in the image, an Italian intermediary who confirmed that the scene had was filmed in Ghana in June 2019, that it was the inspection of a cargo as part of a commercial transaction that had not resulted due to the questionable origin of the ingots.
We can also see the front page image of a Ghanaian daily dated June 10, 2019.
The same images were also relayed in other contexts, in August 2019, presented here as an interception in Niger, or in the DRC, with allegations targeting the Tchisekedi family.
None of this being true.
These images, even if they did not reveal everything behind the filmed operation, do not point to the culprit.
Neither the French soldiers in Mali nor the others.
Infox and anti-French propaganda
The fact that this online media could have relayed the infox by mistake or negligence is more than doubtful, because it suffices to type "the gold of Mali" in a search engine to find the result of the work
of many
fact checkers.
media, who have spotted for over a year the fallacious nature of the accusations made from this video.
Everything indicates that the channel in question broadcasts the infox on purpose, knowing full well that these documents have no informative value on the contrary.
The presenter and his guests not very interested in the reality of the facts, use it as the starting point of an anti-French argument, which - by the way - constitutes the business of this media followed by more than 4 million of people.
From one show to another, its speakers pour into conspiracy of anti-Semitic inspiration, citing both Macron, Rothschild the Talmud and the Illuminati, with a take in favor of Turkish President Erdogan, whose behavior is cited for example, within the framework of the tensions which punctuate the relations between Paris and Ankara, in particular on the subject of West Africa.
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