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The creators of the deleted pages lied about their identity and ran a large number of accounts that occasionally published content hostile to Emmanuel Macron.
The case is unpublished. It has, however, gone almost unnoticed. Facebook has removed early November six pages and a dozen Instagram accounts publishing content in French and presumably driven from abroad for political propaganda purposes, falls The world Wednesday, November 28th.
Franceinfo summarizes what we know about it.
How were these accounts located?
On November 4, the US Federal Police alerted Facebook about a list of suspicious activity accounts. Two years after the scandal of Russian interference in the US presidential election and two days of mid-term elections in the United States, the case is taken seriously.
Facebook inspects the activity of these accounts and announces in a statement published on November 5 to have suspended them because of a "inauthentic and coordinated behavior". Which means that the authors were lying about their identity and that the pages were all held by a single group of people, contrary to what they claimed.
A week later, the social network teams give more details about the operation. They indicate that 99 Instagram accounts have been deleted, 36 Facebook accounts, as well as six pages. The majority of them posted English language content, but a dozen Instagram accounts and six Facebook pages published French text and images. If this element goes unnoticed, "Yet this is the first time that Facebook reveals that it has removed French-language ghost pages broadcasting propaganda"written The world.
What did they publish on social networks?
After removing the suspicious pages, Facebook has communicated the list of accounts concerned to the experts of the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab), an organization "with whom Mark Zuckerberg's company has forged a partnership to badyze propaganda operations", precise The world.
As these suspicious accounts were removed, the researchers in this organization were unable to view all of the published content. So they had to be content with the traces left on the search engines. In their report published Wednesday (in English), these specialists list 11 Instagram accounts and two Facebook pages "portrayed themselves as organizations or individuals, variously situated on the political spectrum (…) and who were controlled centrally".
While the traces of the two Facebook pages seemed to focus on feminist issues, on Instagram, three accounts (@une_camerounaise_fiere, @femme_combattante, and @moonlight_en_france) posed as black women, another for a militant nationalist (@espoir_de_france) while another (@action_verte) focused on environmental issues. In most cases, in the midst of innocent publications, there were messages hostile to Emmanuel Macron.
How big was this operation?
At first, rather weak. According to researchers at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, at least 135,000 people were in total subscribed to these suspicious activity accounts. The most followed Instagram account, @les_femmes_musulmanes, had just over 34,000 subscribers, but the others had only a few thousand followers.
For these specialists, Facebook cut the grbad under the feet of these accounts by removing them while they had "not yet a big impact" and were trying "actively build their audience", for example by accompanying their publications with # follow4follow or # like4like, which are often used by Internet users looking to win subscribers.
Who could have driven this propaganda campaign?
The specialists at the Digital Forensic Research Lab are careful not to designate suspects with certainty, but point out that two clues point to the methods used by Russia to try to influence previous elections. The method described above to try to attract subscribers, first, but also "the importance of themes if not political, at least social, which sometimes are far from consensus in French society"written The world.
These accounts no doubt behaved like those created in the troll factories observed in the past, but this behavior has not only been observed in Russia's operations.Researchers at DFR Lab
These specialists also noted that on one of the photographs shared by one of these false accounts on Instagram, the word "spider web" written in Russian appeared. "It may be totally fortuitous, but it is nonetheless notable in the context of suspicions that this network was led by Russia", they note.
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