The coordinator of La France Insoumise, Manuel Bompard, announced this Friday, June 28, that his party has initiated “an emergency procedure for the dissemination of false information against Renaissance.” A system put in place by the majority in 2018.
Will the majority be victims of an anti-fake news procedure that they themselves put in place? During the legislative debate opposing him to Jordan Bardella and Olivier Faure, Thursday June 27, Gabriel Attal worked to denounce the supposed omissions of the New Popular Front on its tax program. And, for this, drew out a simulator supposed to reveal the consequences for retirees of the progressive CSG reform desired by the alliance of the left. The simulator in question was put online by Renaissance, the same day, at the URL Maretraitenupes.fr. The tool was immediately criticized by left-wing leaders, denouncing errors, bugs, but above all the fact that the simulator is based on a CSG scale that does not correspond to the program of the New Popular Front.
On Friday morning, La France Insoumise responded by engaging “an emergency procedure for disseminating false information against Renaissance”, as announced this Friday morning by the party coordinator, Manuel Bompard, on his X account (ex-Twitter). And to denounce a simulator “lie” Who “is based on calculation methods that do not appear in the New Popular Front’s programme and gives completely incoherent results that could mislead voters.”
Only one emergency procedure for the dissemination of false information during an electoral period is provided for by law: the “fake news summary”. Introduced into the electoral code in 2018, it was to help fight against the manipulation of information, while disinformation maneuvers had influenced the results of several elections, particularly abroad, during the same period (we think of Brexit or the election of Trump in 2016).
Article L.163-2 of the electoral code thus provides that “the interim relief judge may be contacted for the dissemination of false news likely to affect the sincerity of the vote disseminated through an online communication service”, recently indicated to CheckNews Sophie Briante-Guillemont, doctor of law and author of a thesis on electoral disputes. More specifically, the provision aims “inaccurate or misleading allegations or imputations of a fact likely to alter the sincerity of the upcoming election disseminated in a deliberate, artificial or automated and massive manner through an online public communication service”.
Once notified, the interim relief judge has forty-eight hours to rule. And if he grants the applicants’ request, he prescribes “all proportionate and necessary measures to stop this dissemination.” The judge must first verify that all the cumulative conditions are met. The information must be revealed “inaccurate or misleading,” which seems to be the case here. Whether “likely to alter the sincerity of the upcoming election”, so the legislative elections, the first round of which is held on Sunday. Let them be broadcast “in a deliberate, artificial or automated manner […] through an online public communication service” (in this case, a dedicated site including a simulator created especially in the context of the campaign). But it is also necessary, and finally, for the diffusion to be «massive», which could for example depend on the number of connections recorded on the site.
