Fact-Check Dispatch: High-end handbags swept up in ‘Made in China’ storm, Easter bunny’s Christian roots, and spaceflight sparks hoax claims
Issue 16 of the Spotlight Fact-Check Dispatch
U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China have ramped up to 145%, prompting consumers to look for ways to circumvent the incoming high prices and leaving them open to fake products and scams.
Over the weekend, people around Europe were unwrapping chocolate eggs after a visit from the Easter bunny. But some commentators still found a way to spin the holiday negatively with theories that supermarkets were removing Christian references from their seasonal treats.
And last week, a long-running conspiracy theory made its return: are we being duped about space missions?
Here’s our fact-check dispatch.
Are European luxury goods really ‘Made in China’?
News of the steep tariffs now being faced by Chinese exporters to America sparked a major trend on social media apps: apparent Chinese factory workers ‘spilling the tea’ on the luxury brands that are secretly manufacturing their goods in China and passing them off as made in Europe.
The hugely viral videos are an advertisement, telling potential customers: buy direct from us to beat the tariffs and skip the insane markups being applied by major fashion houses.
And for many social media users, they are entirely believable. In one video, a man holds what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag – which can retail anywhere from $10,000 to the hundreds of thousands – and tells viewers they can buy the handbag for just $1,400, crucially without the Hermès logo, “because more than 90% of the price is paid for its logo”.
Many viewers of this content know that these brands deny their products are made in China. Despite this, many of them choose to believe the goods being advertised by manufacturers are real anyway, as can be seen in reaction videos and forums where people discussed making a purchase.
The story was covered by a number of Spotlight fact-checkers, including Catalina Marchant de Abreu from France24, who included a case study of a Dior bag that costs $6,000 in a boutique, which a TikTok user said they could make for $300, as well as the most famous video in this trend, the man seen above showing an Hermès Birkin.
“This Chinese manufacturer claims that many high end products – for instance here he shows the infamous Birkin bag – is actually made in China,” Marchant says.
In fact, “at least when it comes to the major players in the luxury fashion industry such as Hermès, with purses that as they claim can reach up to $38,000 or more, you'd actually expect labelling to be truthful,” Marchant says.
“At Hermès, according to their website, our objects are produced in France, mainly produced in France across 60 different production sites, while the network, they say, is supplemented by 12 other manufacturers in other countries, including Switzerland, Italy, the UK, the U.S., Portugal and Australia. However, not China.”
Louis Vuitton, which was also the subject of some of these videos, “say their leather goods are exclusively produced in their workshops located in France, Spain, Italy and the U.S. – not China”.
“Also, while these videos on TikTok claim that luxury bags are made in China, that is very unlikely under the strict labelling regulations that exist in the U.S. and the EU. To be labelled Made in France, for instance, the product must have undergone its last substantial transformation in France, meaning that 45 to 50% of the unit cost price must be acquired in France,” Marchant adds.
Over on Belgium’s VRT, Ellen Debackere, Tom Buytaert, and Dorien Vanmeldert looked into the claims of manufacturers promising to sell consumers genuine versions of iconic designer handbags.
They write: “According to experts, the chances are slim that these manufacturers actually work for luxury brands like Hermès. They may be counterfeit products. It remains difficult to trace the route a fashion product takes. Some brands do have their products, or parts of them, made in China. Consumers should also be careful: not only can customs stop counterfeits, but scams also lurk around the corner.”
For BBC Verify, Jake Horton also broke down some of the main claims being made in the viral videos, citing Louis Vuitton and Gucci’s description of where their products are made, and inviting on a supply chain expert who said “it’s not as easy as some of these videos make it”.
Despite this, “there’s no clear guidelines on how much of a product needs to be made in Europe for that label to apply, so some production could happen in places like China, even for luxury goods,” Horton reports.
BBC Verify also received a direct comment from sportswear company Lululemon – another brand featured in the videos – which said that about 3% of its finished goods are made in mainland China. The company added: “Lululemon does not work with the manufacturers identified in the online videos and we urge consumers to be aware of potentially counterfeit products and misinformation.”
This story highlighted the risk for consumers when buying online, especially as counterfeit products and the platforms they’re sold on become ever-more convincing.
Renaming the Easter bunny
There were complaints in Germany that chocolate bunnies on sale for Easter were being renamed, with an alleged removal of any reference to the Christian holiday.
A far-right German politician, Johann Martel of the AfD, was among those who boosted the claim, writing in a viral post on X: “The sitting bunny is forcing out the Easter bunny.”
Matt Ford from Deutsche Welle looked into the claim and found it to be false. While it’s true that Lidl sells a chocolate rabbit called a ‘Sitzhase’ (sitting bunny) by its own brand Favorina, it also sells other products that “specifically highlight the Easter theme”.
Lidl told Tagesschau’s Pascal Siggelkow that it describes some chocolate bunnies in Germany as ‘sitting bunnies’ in order to clearly distinguish them from other products, but added customers can also find products which use the specific term “Easter bunny” — and Ford found a range of Lidl products that specifically reference ‘Oster’, or Easter.
Ford from DW also looked at Aldi’s offering. As well as offering a ‘sitting bunny’, they also sold a ‘Stehhase’ (standing bunny), which explains why they would need to specify the former by its sitting position rather than calling it, simply, an Easter bunny.
As for whether the removal of Easter from some products is a recent development, Ford found that it’s not. “Well-known German supermarkets and brands have been using alternative names for chocolate Easter bunnies for decades,” with Milka’s ‘grinning bunny’ dating back to 1973, while Lindt’s famous ‘golden bunny’ has been around since 1952. Ford even found an ad for a ‘sitting bunny’ in a local newspaper in Germany as far back as April 1938.
If you’re wondering about the roots of this theory and why it matters in the broader German context, Ford explains it best. “[Johann Martel] used this claim to bolster the AfD's racist and Islamophobic platform, which insists Germany is becoming more Muslim and less Christian.”
Many convinced celebrity spaceflight didn’t actually happen
Six women lifted off from a launch site in western Texas on Monday, April 14, for what would become the first all-female spaceflight in over 60 years. The flight was widely viewed and commented on, not least because pop star Katy Perry was on board.
Amid all the celebration and derision about the impact of this flight – some hailed it as a giant leap for women and space tourism while others questioned the environmental and ethical credentials of sending rich celebrities to space – there was also plenty of disbelief that the flight was even real.
An image showing what appeared to be a glimpse of a mannequin arm in the window of the capsule, wearing a blue space suit like those worn by the women for the flight, turned out to be an old picture from a test dummy mission in 2017.
Some others wondered why the capsule looked so clean on its return, when many other space vehicles have come back to Earth covered in black burn-marks.
There was an explanation by astronaut and aeronautical engineer Beth Moses – who worked for NASA and is now with Virgin Galactic – about how suborbital rockets don’t reach the same velocity as orbital ones like the SpaceX Dragon.
She wrote in a post on X: “In both cases, there is a lot of friction and thus heating as the vehicle encounters the molecules in the atmosphere, first just a few but then many more as the atmosphere gets thicker closer to Earth. But the velocity of an object coming back from orbit is much higher than a suborbital object, as is the heating.”
Since humans first started venturing to space, the topic of whether missions really ever happened has become one of the mainstays of conspiracy theory culture. As this story shows, sometimes the theories are rooted in wrong captions and simple misunderstandings about the complex science involved in space travel.