TVE debunks three viral riot videos: they're from 2023, 2024 and 2025

TVE debunks the viral riot videos: they're from 2023, 2024 and 2025

A video of police vans being stoned on a street at night. Another of a car and a bus on fire. A third, aerial shot of a monastery in flames. All three have been circulating on social media in recent days presented as recent riots in Europe. And all three are false. VerificaRTVE has traced their origin and dated each recording: none corresponds to the unrest of recent weeks. The pattern repeats itself with almost industrial precision: a real image from an earlier episode is taken, its context is changed, and an urgency label is added.

The Hague, February 2024. The first hoax shows a group of people stoning police vehicles with fire around them. The messages placed it in the Netherlands during mass riots, attributing them to an alleged break-in at an Opera building. A reverse search leads to the protests of 17 February 2024 in The Hague, outside the Opera Conference Centre on Fruitweg street. Dutch media documented clashes at the time between supporters and opponents of the Eritrean government, with four officers injured and several police vehicles set on fire. Nothing to do with what was being claimed.

Dublin, November 2023. The second video, showing a car and a bus on fire and people running, was spread as rioting in response to a stabbing. The footage has been circulating since 23 November 2023 and corresponds to the unrest that night in Dublin after a knife attack in which four people were injured. The Irish police said at the time that the protests were driven by a far-right faction and that their origin lay in misinformation about the attacker's identity. Geolocation places the images near the O'Connell Bridge.

The monastery that wasn't burning because of riots. The third hoax is a nighttime aerial shot of a building on fire, presented as a 400-year-old monastery set ablaze by rioters in Italy. The images are of the fire at the Monastery of Bernaga, in the north of the country, on 12 October 2025. Reports say 22 nuns managed to escape and that an investigation points to a short circuit as the main hypothesis. No rioting, no vandalism.

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The urgency business

The mechanism is always the same and it costs little to detect. An authentic recording is dug up, its date is removed, a word that triggers alarm is added —urgent, massive, now— and it's published. Verification requires a reverse search and geolocation; disinformation takes thirty seconds. That asymmetry explains why the hoax travels faster than the correction, and why the far-right label appears again and again in the messages amplifying these recordings.

The public debate over these episodes has split in two. Some argue that public broadcasters perform an essential function by dismantling each decontextualized video piece by piece, while others respond that the same institution doing the verifying is the one building the narrative about who is stirring up the riots. Both things can be true at once, and that is the problem.

What can be verified and what can't?

Of the three videos, what can be verified is the date, the place and the original context. What doesn't hold up with the same solidity is the political attribution of each riot: in Dublin the police spoke of a far-right faction; in The Hague the conflict was internal to the Eritrean diaspora. Lumping both cases into the same ideological bag is as misleading as changing their dates.

The question left hanging is not whether hoaxes exist —they do, and they are documented— but how many of the labels attached to them would withstand the same reverse search that is applied to the video.