Anyone care to comment on this photo from the Paris unrest?

[Generic Other]

I saw it on the Twitter page of a man who is tracking outside influence by foreign nationalists trying to create panic and chaos in Paris.

Link to tweet

[PJMcK]

1. The woman's amusement(?) is disturbing

I'm interpreting the photograph like this: the police or soldier is using tear gas and people are being affected by it. Meanwhile, a young woman is sitting in a burger shop while watching people being attacked with a dangerous gas. She's using her phone to video the attack to add to her Facebook page, no doubt,

Why is she smiling?

By the way, she doesn't have any food or drink in front of her. Did she simply seek refuge in the fast-food joint?

Yeah, the photo captures a distressing aspect of our current age.

[Generic Other]

3. I thought she was a fast food worker

but I think you are right. She's FBing her "experience." The man on the street seems to be a decorated soldier. Poor Paris. What a mess.

The Twitter account is tracking some of the foreign nationalist bots retweeting fake news.

[dalton99a]

2. Elliot Alderson's analysis is very interesting

[Generic Other]

4. Yes!

He seems to have sniffed out some rats. And deplorables too!

[Denzil_DC]

5. It's hard to comment meaningfully because we can't see the context of what the woman's smiling at.

If we're to suspend judgement on what's happening on the streets, we need to beware of an isolated photo whose provenance we don't know. I don't know Paris well enough to be able to identify whether it was really taken there, and if it was, I can't tell when.

It's obviously been deliberately framed, maybe cropped.

It's an odd image, right enough, the serene cafe scene indoors with the masked guy and what's presumably teargas billowing around outside. But that's just a whacking great expanse of plate glass between the woman and whatever is going on outside. She doesn't seem concerned at all.

That in itself's odd, because when there's been civil unrest in cities in the past, outlets like McDonald's and Burger King have been targets.

[marble falls]

6. American tourist?

[FSogol]

7. Isn't she obviously taking a selfie? N/t

[betsuni]

9. Yes.

[JI7]

10. yup

[Denzil_DC]

8. In the context of "outside influence by foreign nationals", the source of that photo is interesting.

I did a quick Google search for Burger King riot, just to check whether I was mistaken about that chain being targeted in the past (I wasn't).

The third result was this, from three days ago (my bold):

Selfie while Paris burns? Woman’s Burger King snap ‘captures spirit of the era’

As “urban warfare” grips the streets of Paris a photograph of a woman in a Burger King, who is incongruously grinning from ear to ear while tear gas swirls outside, is being hailed as the perfect encapsulation of modern times.

...

However, all of that appeared to be of little concern to the woman who was snapped happily surveying the scene from inside the fast-food outlet while seemingly taking pictures on her smartphone.

Clouds of teargas, the masked man, the Burger King signage and the woman’s toothy smile give the striking scene a baroque feel and it has clearly struck a chord with many as the photo garnered more than 120,000 Reddit upvotes and nearly 4,000 comments in one day.

The moment was captured by Russian journalist and photographer Ilya Varlamov. “Rarely does a photo so accurately capture the spirit of an era,” the viral Reddit post reads.

https://www.rt.com/news/445662-burger-king-photo-paris-riot/

This article's from RT.

[CloudWatcher]

11. I'm not going to say "fake" ... but ....

With that much tear gas, that close, I would expect anyone in that Burger King to be running in the other direction.

Given that it's from an RT photographer, I have my doubts.

[Denzil_DC]

12. To be fair, Ilya Varlamov doesn't seem to be an RT photographer.

He's not hard to find on Google, and has been described as a "Russian opposition blogger".

RT lifted his photo from Reddit.

A translation of his Russian Twitter feed is here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://twitter.com/varlamov%3Flang%3Den&prev=search

He seems to get around. He was deported from Azerbaijan (then quickly de-deported, seemingly because it was a "mistake" ) early last month: http://www.turan.az/ext/news/2018/11/free/Social/en/76368.htm

[Generic Other]

15. Wow

You guys are on this.

[Denzil_DC]

16. Well, I found your OP and this thread interesting, but I'm not sure my bit's going anywhere!

I haven't dug enough into Varlamov's background any more than I posted above.

It's possible he's just what's claimed, his Twitter profile says he's a "Journalist, architect, photographer, founder of the Urban Projects Foundation" - that organization seems legit, but I haven't dug deep.

If you're somewhere stuff like this is happening, you do sometimes see shots that you think sum up a situation, rightly or wrongly. I once nearly got arrested in France the morning after a general election. I was walking past the losing candidate's local town office and saw the window'd been smashed. Through it, I could see a poster which read "Stop Violence", which I thought was ironic. I was trying to take a photo of the poster through/framed by the broken window without the reflection getting in the way when a woman dashed out of a side door with a phone at her ear and grabbed my arm. I had to do some quick talking (luckily I have enough French) to explain what I'd been doing and that I wasn't responsible!

Whatever's behind the photo and no matter whether it's of a real situation, misrepresentation or whatever, it's what people make of it when it's passed on that matters (Elliot Anderson just says it's "cool", and unless I misunderstand him, he's just including it to explain the traffic in one of the clusters in his graphic; the photo reportedly went heavily viral from Reddit, so it was likely just picked up by RT, but they did at least identify/credit the photographer, which people on social media can be very bad at doing).

I still find it odd that the woman's apparently sitting happily near a Burger King window while a riot's apparently going on outside. Burger Kings have been targeted in the past.

[Generic Other]

18. Anderson doesn't seem to think that cluster was one of the suspicious ones

but the photo is striking. I was more drawn into the discussion of how these bots operate as he demonstrated in his thread the number of tweets, countries of origin and nationalists leanings. He even said Trump followers. Alarming to think there are any in Europe.

[Denzil_DC]

19. Yeah, I followed the photo up because it intrigued me.

Something about it still seems strange, but people sometimes do strange things, so who knows?

As for the bots, you see evidence of them every day if you spend any time on Twitter etc. I'm still not convinced we don't overplay their importance, but sometimes small, repetitive nudges are all it takes to push things along in a certain direction.

[msongs]

13. broken link nt

[Generic Other]

14. The original link that caught my attention

Link to tweet

Brice Couturier
Among 600 Twitter accounts known to promote Kremlin views, the top hashtag now is #giletsjaunes, the French name for the so-called Yellow Vests protest movement,

Eliot Alderson replied on Couterier's thread. He sets out to prove that foreign nationalist bots are tweeting to spread panic and chaos.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

More from Eliot Alderson
For 3 days, I'm capturing the English tweets with the #GiletsJaunes hashtag. Based on 34K tweets, I made this cool retweet interaction graph.

I decided to capture the English tweets with the French hashtag #GiletsJaunes for a reason. The goal is to see if foreigners want to influence the perception of the world on the yellow movement. They are tweeting the French hashtag and not the English hashtag #YellowVests...

I can continue like this during hours. As you can see a lot of people (nationalists from everywhere, Trump supporters, ...) with different interests is seeing the yellow vest movement as an opportunity to create the chaos. They used to spread the same fake news or to exaggerate.

[Denzil_DC]

17. Works for me. n/t

[roamer65]

20. The sooner we in the West realize that a lot of this stuff is Sino-Russian agitprop the better.

SCO is our enemy, not our friend.

[lunatica]

21. I've seen hundreds of people texting or looking at their iphones

who are clueless about what’s going on around them.

She looks like she’s taking a selfie and my guess is she’s texting a friend she wants to send it to.

Disturbing but in a different way.

I notice these things because I put my iPhone away when I go places. If I need it for something I will use it but then I put it away again.

[Generic Other]

22. I walk across a campus daily

Only the rare student is not staring at their phone. No such thing as eye contact or smiles.