How Macron Stole the Crown Jewels and sold them on Vinted

There he was, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, caught on grainy CCTV, stuffing diamond necklaces into his suit pocket. One further swipe, and you see a group of men in safety vests doing the exact same thing.

These videos, which began circulating on TikTok over the last few weeks, appear to show the French president participating in the now-infamous Louvre jewel heist, which left several 18th-century pieces missing earlier this month. Of course the Macron videos are satire, absurd, memeified, obviously fake. The average social media user can surely tell. 

But then comes the next clip: men in safety vests, realistic-looking museum footage this time, opening safes, taking the jewels and suddenly you’re not sure anymore. You start to wonder what’s true, what’s edited, what’s AI-generated, and what’s just too good not to share.

So you swipe again. You change apps. You want something lighter.
Now you’re browsing Vinted, looking for a vintage coat and there they are again: the Louvre jewels, listed as “new without tags” brand name “Louvre,” seller location “Paris.” At that point, you know it’s fake. You repost it anyway. Because it’s funny. Because somewhere between satire and simulation, everything online feels equally unreal.

This is the status quo of AI developments and meme culture right now, a place where irony and automation feed off each other in an endless loop. We’ve entered a phase of the internet where nothing has to be real to be relevant. AI floods the feeds with synthetic material, and meme culture gives it meaning, rhythm, and punchlines. The machines produce chaos, and we turn it into culture. The result isn’t misinformation in the old sense, we now live inside a fog of constant half-fake, half-real content that just exists to keep us scrolling. Everyone knows it’s fake, but it circulates anyway, detached from truth, anchored only by engagement metrics. 

AI creates the raw slop, endless clips, fake headlines. Meme culture turns it into something shareable and ironic. Together they turn misinformation into entertainment. We know the Louvre jewels on Vinted aren’t real, but we repost them as a collective wink, look how stupid the internet is, and look how good we are at being stupid with it. The line between belief and participation has blurred. Nobody genuinely thinks Macron is auctioning off crown jewels on a secondhand app but we perform that disbelief anyway, sharing, commenting, adding captions, giving the algorithm what it wants: engagement.

In this new ecosystem, truth isn’t verified; it’s vibe-checked. The Louvre heist becomes just another content trend, flattened into the same feed as makeup tutorials, recipes, and AI-generated pop songs. And while the algorithms don’t care about truth, they do care about activity. So we keep scrolling, the algorithm keeps serving, and truth quietly disappears in the loop.

by Luisa Gabriel