According to the website lagauchematuer.fr (whose name means ‘the left-wing killed me’), the French state will receive 100 million euros from the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB) to purchase hotels to house asylum seekers. This is not true: two separate news stories on the Société Nationale Immobilière (SNI), a subsidiary of France’s Deposits and Consignments Fund, have been merged and altered.

An article in Le Figaro, entitled “Accor sells 62 F1 hotels for the Samu social“, refers to the Accor hotel group’s decision to sell 62 hotels in its F1 chain to the SNI. These would be managed by France’s SAMU Social, a humanitarian emergency service operating in several cities across the country. The SAMU Social was already periodically using the hotels to house emergency guests, but the fact that these people were housed alongside paying guests sometimes caused problems. The hotels will now focus solely on emergency accommodation for anyone in need, regardless of their residency status, nationality, age, gender or family situation.

The loan from the CEB has nothing to do with the sale of the hotels. In 2015, a 100-million-euro loan was granted to Adoma, a subsidiary of the SNI which helps people in difficulty (such as precarious workers, people on the minimum social benefits, asylum seekers or migrants) to find housing. The money aimed particularly to strengthen the SNI’s “reception and shelter capacities for asylum seekers and refugees”.

These two stories only have the SNI in common. They were merged to exaggerate the means available to assist asylum seekers in France.

Partisans of François , a member of the UPR (Republican Popular Union), shared an infographic on Twitter purportedly originating from Agence France-Presse (AFP) that showed Asselineau amongst the principal runners in the French presidential election.  

The image tweeted edited in image-editing software. It did not come from AFP.

The infographic places François Asselineau as one of the main candidates in the French presidential election of 2017. The infographic however had nothing to do with AFP. It is an edit of AFP’s original infographic in which Asselineau does not appear.

Screenshot of the tweet (http://archive.is/otP1Z)

The image of the edited infographic looks like a low-resolution screenshot. The font used used under François Asselineau’s photograph is also different to that used for the other candidates.

Contacted by CrossCheck, AFP declared: “An AFP watermark (which appears highlighted on the infographic in the tweet) is added when we post an infographic on the web or on social networks. It is a copyright for the content that we diffuse for free on networks, as opposed to what we sell to our media clients. This watermark proves that the fake version is a montage made from one of AFP’s infographics.”

Original infographic (AFP)

Agence-France-Presse shared the original infographic with CrossCheck. This infographic was used by several media outlets – such as Challenges; François Asselineau does not appear in it.

Editorial note: AFP is a CrossCheck partner.