Russian propaganda has a new target. The Newsguard organization, which specializes in the fight against disinformation, alerts in a publication on the waves of Russian disinformation which have affected France in recent months. “A Russian propaganda operation which previously targeted the elections in the United States and Germany has a new target: France,” she writes.
It is the Storm-1516 operation, led by John Mark Dougan, an American activist Pro-Kremlin, who is maneuvering. Newsguard identified “five false stories from December 2024 to March 2025”. These info “were disseminated in 38,877 publications on social networks, generating 55.8 million views,” explains the organization. “In comparison, during the previous four months, France had only been targeted by a single story, disseminated in 938 publications on social networks, and accumulating 845,000 views. »»
“This is one of the most important operations noted on France,” said China Labbé Échoes, editor -in -chief of Newsguard.
Brigitte Macron targeted
Among these five false information: a Chadian migrant admitting to having violated a 12 -year -old girl in France, the purchase by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky from a bank for an amount of 1.2 billion euros or even “a video supposed to show a former student of the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, accusing him of having sexually abused him at the age of 12”.
-This assault by French networks arrives then that “Paris is one of the main supporters of Ukraine in the West,” notes Newsguard. It is part of the attempted to discredit Ukrainian power, already affected by an info multiplication. In March, the Clear Story News site – Russian site of influence linked to John Mark Dougan – for example reported false information that Volodymyr Zelensky used the money given by the United States to pay Western journalists in order to say Donald Trump.
One of the techniques used is the use of Russian sites presenting themselves as information sites or the allocation of false information to real media. Recently, a false “one” of the British weekly The Economist thus sounded the alarm against the “apocalypse” and the third world war which would trigger in the event of UKRAINE military support. This torrent of lies contributes to the distrust of the general public towards real media and targeted governments.
AI represents “a new disinformation risk”
Newsguard adds that artificial intelligence amplifies the phenomenon. His analysts “found that the main generative AI chatbots gladly repeated these false stories on France, reflecting a new disinformation risk”. On 11 platforms of AI interviewed by the organization concerning an alleged homosexual relationship by Emmanuel Macron, “five of them repeated false information, as if it were a proven fact”, report the echoes.
“France is a privileged target,” warned Prime Minister François Bayrou, speaking of “massive interventions coming from Russia at the end of March”. France “is, after Ukraine, the most targeted country in Europe by attempted manipulation (of information) from abroad,” he added, “we seem in peace and yet we are already at war”, a “singular war” which “to be virtual or hybrid, is no less real. It is information war ”.
