On October 22, Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that “many” of the pictures of police violence shared online during Catalonia’s contested independence referendum on October 1 “have been proven to be fake pictures.”

Open sources confirm that a number of images were indeed taken from earlier confrontations, and a number of claims made about participants were false. However, many dramatic images, both still and video, are authentic. The focus on fakes thus undermines the genuine evidence of police violence, as well as the reporters and researchers who documented it.

The claim

Dastis’ initially argued:

I think, by now, many of those pictures have been proven to be fake pictures, and if there was any use of force, it was a limited one, and prompted by the fact that the law and order agencies were prevented from discharging the orders of the courts.

Challenged by Marr on whether “those pictures that people saw of Spanish police intervening aggressively in polling stations are all fake pictures”, Dastis clarified:

I’m not saying that all are fake pictures, but some of them are, and you know, there have been a lot of fake news and alternative facts here. (…) If there was at all — according to the pictures, there was — some use of force, it was not a deliberate use of force, it was a provoked use of force.

Dastis’ precise claim was therefore that some of the images circulating of violence and its victims were fake, but that there was some use of force, and that use of force was “provoked”.

Fake images

The first claim is true as far as it goes: a number of images which allegedly showed the victims of police violence had, indeed, been taken from earlier incidents and misattributed. This is one of the most common methods of generating fake content and is widely known from countless crises, elections, and other political moments.

Spanish fact-checking group Maldito Bulo (literally, “damned hoax”) exposed a number of fakes during and after the referendum.

For example, on October 1, Twitter account @PersianRose1 shared a video described as, “Spanish police attacking Catalan voters.”

Tweet from @PersianRose1, archived on October 2, 2017. (Source: Twitter)

The Maldito Bulo team pointed out that this footage came from an earlier confrontation, identifying the police force as Catalonia’s “Mossos” and dating it to a Spanish general strike of 2014.

Translated from Spanish: “NO. This video of a charge against a child which is doing the rounds is not from today. It’s from 2014, and shows Mossos charging in the general strike.” (Source: Twitter)

In fact, both attributions appear to be incorrect. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Spanish outlet Ceres TV on November 15, 2012, in the context of a general strike the day before. A comparison of stills from the @PersianRose1 tweet and the Ceres TV video confirms the match.