Looting footage from George Floyd protests, not Black Friday sales

"That's one way to celebrate Black Friday," says a November 26, 2023 post sharing the clip on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The post comes from Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right commentator who has previously spread other misinformation, including mispresented looting videos.

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Screenshot from X, formerly Twitter, taken November 27, 2023

Similar posts spread across X and other platforms -- including Facebook, TikTok and Rumble -- in the days after the November 24 retail event, which customarily takes place after Thanksgiving and attracts large crowds of bargain-hunting shoppers.

The annual frenzy for discounts has seen brawls and other violence break out over the years. But the clip circulating online is several years old and unrelated to "Black Friday."

Chicago Sun-Times journalist Ben Pope, who covers the Chicago Blackhawks professional hockey franchise, first posted the footage to X on May 30, 2020, reverse image searches show. He geotagged the video to Chicago and said it showed a "Nike store on Michigan Ave smashed and completely looted" (archived here).

"I personally took that video back in 2020," Pope told AFP in a November 27, 2023 email.

The store is part of a popular Chicago shopping district known as "The Magnificent Mile."

Google Maps Street View imagery shows a storefront and surrounding buildings that match those in the video (archived here).

Photos published in local news reports depict the same shattered window glass and dismantled plywood seen in Pope's footage (archived here and here).

The reports say the looting took place as protesters marched in downtown Chicago on May 30, 2020 to decry the killing of Floyd, a Black man whose death at the hands of a white police officer in the state of Minnesota sparked similar demonstrations nationwide.

AFP has debunked other posts misrepresenting footage from the 2020 unrest here, here, here and here.