SVT : Beauty tips and celebrities will make the French vote out Macron - Russia v. Macron
SVT : Skönhetstips och kändisar ska få fransmännen att rösta bort Macron
On Sunday, the French will go to the polls – an election that a pro-Russian disinformation campaign wants to influence in favor of the right.
Over a thousand bots spread propaganda
Propaganda is spread on the social media platform X by a pro-Russian bot network known as "Doppelgänger". A campaign monitored by the Russian opposition analysis group Antibot4Navalny.
With the help of their data, SVT can determine that 108 unique articles have been spread by just over a thousand pro-Russian bots over a period of two weeks. Articles that want to convince the French to vote for the right-wing parties in the upcoming elections.The influence campaign continues and uses various tools in addition to the news articles with Russian propaganda. Among other things, pictures of various celebrities with fake quotes are spread.Pro-Russian bots are spreading pictures of singer Taylor Swift with a fake quote in which she calls the upcoming Olympic Games in France a political and shameful project. Pictures of Beyoncé are spread with a false quote that Macron is a puppet controlled by other countries.Macron is vilified and the right is rewarded
SVT's analysis shows that the main purpose of the ongoing disinformation campaign is to denigrate French President Macron and at the same time lift the right-wing nationalist party National Rally.Out of 108 articles analyzed, Macron is mentioned 63 times, of which 59 times in a negative context. According to the pro-Russian propaganda, Macron cares more about the war in Ukraine than solving France's own problems.The National Rally, the party's former leader Marine Le Pen and the current leader Jordan Bardella, are mentioned a total of 62 times, never in a negative context.Pro-Russian propaganda is also sneaked into articles with beauty tips
THIS IS "DOPPELGÄNGER"
Doppelgänger is spreading Russian narratives whose main goal is to weaken Western support for Ukraine and create discord among Ukraine's allies.The campaign is named after the strategy of using fake copies of trusted news sites to spread the messages. The copies are almost identical to the originals and are intended to deceive the reader that the sender is genuine.The messages are also spread via proprietary pro-Russian propaganda sites and sometimes with the help of genuine news articles that are shared further, if they are in line with the Kremlin's narrative.
