As European youth engage in demonstrations regarding school conditions and the rising cost of living, a surge of viral videos has emerged on social media platforms. These videos, often captioned to suggest widespread civil unrest or systemic collapse, have been scrutinized by fact-checkers who found that the footage does not accurately represent current events in Europe.

Investigations by France24 have traced several widely shared clips back to their original contexts. For example, footage purportedly showing recent European demonstrations was identified as being filmed during protests in Argentina. Other videos circulating online, which were presented as evidence of current civil disorder, were found to be older clips from a 2017 protest in Poland. Additionally, some content depicting military preparations in Portugal was falsely repurposed to imply an imminent escalation of domestic unrest.

Experts suggest that this trend of recycling old or unrelated footage is driven by a desire to generate clicks and influence public perception regarding the scale of current protests. By stripping videos of their original context, social media users can create a narrative of 'chaos' that may not align with the reality on the ground. While the protests regarding living costs and education are documented, the viral videos being used to illustrate them are, in several instances, demonstrably false.