A prank video of a man appearing to urinate on meat in a store has been shared tens of thousands of times in Chinese social media posts that falsely claim the incident is real and involved a “Muslim immigrant”, triggering attacks against the community. The creator of the video — who has posted several similar pranks online — told AFP it is “totally fake”. A spokesperson for the supermarket chain seen in the footage said it received no complaints about any such incident in its stores.
“Muslim immigrant in the Netherlands said ‘we don’t eat pork’ and then peed on the fresh pork section of the supermarket,” reads the caption of a Weibo post written in simplified Chinese on December 18, 2023.
The accompanying video has been viewed over 38,000 times and shows a man appearing to urinate on meat in a store.
A male voice can be heard in the clip, saying in both Dutch and English: “Dude, you are too radical. Only because he doesn’t want to eat pork? Wow! We don’t eat pork.”
The video was also shared hundreds of times alongside a similar false claim in Chinese-language posts on Twitter here, here and here.
It was also shared in Dutch posts that state the video took place in an Albert Heijn store, the Netherlands’ largest supermarket chain.
Many of the users sharing or commenting on the video attacked the Muslim community, for example on Facebook here and here.
The video also circulated in posts in English and French, and was published by several websites under misleading headlines here and here.
But the clip was originally shared as part of a series of prank videos, the creator of the video told AFP.
Angela Stoelinga, a spokesperson from Albert Heijn, told AFP on December 20, 2023 they conducted internal research after seeing the video and found “no reports of nuisance” in any of their stores.
Staged video
A keyword search found the earliest version of the video was posted on December 15, 2023 to Instagram and TikTok by a user called “Buurtwachtt”.
View this post on Instagram
Further searches on the user’s Instagram profile found several other videos of a similar man appearing to urinate in other places, such as in a gym (archived links here and here).
The user, 22-year-old Danny Derix confirmed he was the creator of the video.
“The person you see in the video is my friend. This was recorded on December 13, 2023. It was taken in the Netherlands in a grocery store (Albert Heijn XL) in Zaandam,” he told AFP on December 20, 2023.
Zaandam is a city north of Amsterdam (archived link).
Derix said the video was “totally fake”, explaining that he used a urinating sound effect to create the clip.
“The intention was to show the world how easy it is to make and spread fake news as the truth”.
On December 21, 2023, Derix uploaded a 15-minute YouTube video titled “I was fooling the whole world”, explaining how and why he created the prank clips (archived link).
“It is to show that anything can be fake on the internet. We want to make it clear to people how easy it is to spread fake news or a fake video,” he says.
