Partly False: That Video Does Show an Albanian Protest — But Not Against a Kushner Development Deal

A video spread widely online with the claim that it showed Albanian citizens rising up against a luxury coastal development backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. That claim is partially false. The video is real, and the development discussions were real — but the two things were never credibly connected.

Reuters Fact Check confirmed the footage does show a genuine protest in Albania, but found the crowd was responding to separate political grievances, not a resort project. AFP reached the same conclusion after its own investigation, finding no substantiated link between the protests shown and any Trump family-backed development.

Here's what was actually true: Politico and The Guardian both reported in September 2020 that Kushner-linked entities were in talks about a luxury resort development on the Albanian Riviera. That part of the story has real reporting behind it and is not in dispute. The problem is that someone stitched that real story onto an unrelated video and presented them as cause and effect.

Snopes rated the specific video claim as misleading for exactly this reason — two true things were combined to imply a third thing that was never established. It's a common manipulation tactic: take a real event, attach it to a real controversy, and let people's existing assumptions fill in the gap.

This kind of misinformation is hard to catch because it doesn't require inventing anything from scratch. It just requires presenting real pieces out of context. When you see a video paired with a political claim, it's worth asking: who verified that this video shows what the caption says it shows?