00:04You're watching Euronews' fact-checking show, The Cube.
00:08Egypt's World Cup exit sparked more than a debate over refereeing.
00:12The Egyptian Football Association filed a complaint with FIFA after the match,
00:17which it lost to Argentina.
00:19It accused French referee François Letixier and his officiating team of serious refereeing mistakes
00:25and called for his exclusion from the tournament.
00:28But the fallout didn't stop on the pitch.
00:31Within hours, social media was flooded with allegations that the match had been fixed,
00:36with some linking Letixier to Israel as part of a wider conspiracy that Israel influenced the game's outcome.
00:43One widely shared screenshot appears to show Letixier's Wikipedia page
00:47describing him as having grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family.
00:51When the sentence later disappeared from the page,
00:54users claim the information had been deleted to cover it up.
00:57Wikipedia's edit history shows this is not the case.
01:01This edit was added to Letixier's original page on 8th July,
01:05linking French magazine Le Point as a source.
01:08But there was no mention of Letixier being Jewish here, nor in any other official sources.
01:14Wikipedia's history also shows that his page was vandalized after the match
01:18to include baseless claims that its result was paid for by Argentina and FIFA.
01:24Because Wikipedia is openly editable, these temporary changes were captured in screenshots and presented as fact.
01:32And they weren't the only claims leveled toward Letixier without evidence.
01:36Another post said FIFA had removed Letixier from the rest of the World Cup because of Egypt's complaint.
01:42And another alleged he received a mysterious payment hours before the game.
01:47But these claims are unsupported, name no investigation, and are not backed up by any official announcement.
01:53music
01:54magazine
01:56Legenda Adriana Zanotto
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