Fairfield police say viral video of looted Walmart isn't local

The aftermath of a tornado that struck a Walmart store in Georgia on January 12, 2023. (Social media image)

The Fairfield Police Department says a video circulating on Twitter is wrongly claiming to show the aftermath of looting inside a local store.

The video, posted to the Twitter account of a user called “4Mischief,” claims to show a significant amount of damage inside the Walmart Supercenter in Fairfield, with the user claiming the short video clip was proof that “Democrats are destroying America.”

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Fairfield Police Department said the 4Mischief account was “not a reputable source of information” and the claims made in the tweet were “absolutely untrue.”

“There has been no such incident in Fairfield, California,” the police department said.

The video clip has been circulating on various social media platforms over the last few weeks. In some posts, users on Twitter and elsewhere wrongly claim the video shows damage to a Walmart in Baltimore caused by looters.

The claims arise following a decision by Walmart to close several Chicago-area locations, which has led to incorrect reports that some stores there have been looted by unruly activists (the videos and images actually show stores that were ransacked nearly three years ago).

In the case of the clip purporting to show the Fairfield Walmart, the video in question actually shows damage caused by a severe weather event in January, when a tornado caused significant damage inside and outside a Walmart store in Georgia, Solano NewsNet has confirmed.

The video was first posted to TikTok in mid-January, where users correctly connected the clip to tornado damage, but didn’t say where the tornado originated.

Further investigation showed the clip was filmed at the Walmart location in Griffin, Georgia, with interior photos of the store matching the layout of the store seen in the video.

The erroneous claim surfaced on the same day Twitter decided to pull blue verification badges from tens of thousands of accounts belonging to law enforcement agencies, news organizations, journalists and businesses, a move that caused some confusion and has led to an increase in unverified and erroneous reporting on the platform.

The move to unwind the legacy Twitter program comes seven months after technology mogul Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a deal valued at $44 billion. Shortly after the deal, Musk said Twitter’s blue verification badge would be removed unless an account agreed to pay for Twitter Blue, a subscription product that costs $8 a month or $80 a year.

An email address used by reporters to send questions to Twitter automatically responded with a picture of poop. Musk fired Twitter’s media relations team as part of a wave of mass layoffs last November.