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There is progress.
It used to take a year or two for post-mortem reports on foreign interference, online manipulations, and the influence of bad actors targeting global elections and violent world events.
We now know about malicious campaigns within a day or two, sometimes hours. As European countries increase resources to defend against information warfare, we are seeing results in real time.
Paris
I spent much of last year in France and witnessed dozens of protests. None of them violent. In advance of the 2027 elections, influence operations were expected to escalate.
Last month, Emmanuel Macron cautioned: "In recent weeks, the Russian hybrid threat against Europeans and France has intensified.”
The French leader understood why: “The intent is to intimidate us and break our effort to support Ukraine. The result will be the exact opposite. We are not intimidated because we know that our security today and tomorrow is at stake in Ukraine."
Within a day of the violence on Saturday in France, French intelligence reports indicated foreign interference on multiple fronts, including Russian state-linked operations that weaponized viral footage of clashes and arson across French cities.
In response, EU regulators and digital defense agencies launched investigations into pro-Kremlin operations aimed at accelerating violence in France. EU officials are probing online actors who spread misleading content and fake videos to millions during the nation’s protests.
What began as domestic grievances over education and cost of living escalated with foreign influence networks boosting extreme violence, maliciously aiming to show Western democracies as failing.
In an investigation on X, I identified a cell of accounts claiming to be from South Asian countries declaring in unison that French democracy is “already dead.”
French investigators said that malicious content reached nearly ten times the audience of direct state reports, and this fact echoes what we learned two years after the US 2016 election about how Russian propaganda spread six times faster than factual reporting.
France’s foreign digital interference agency, Viginum, indicates that “state-aligned actors systematically exploited real images of violence to fuel polarization.”
This matches my previous investigations that reveal how Russia does not invent the crises, but comes to the scene to pour accelerant on it.
Coming for Social Media
Under the EU Digital Services Act, European agencies have the right to hold social media platforms accountable for distributing coordinated, manipulated content by foreign state actors, and the investigation just launched in the EU while garner evidence.
I recently reported that France had increased its cybersecurity and digital defense spending with a €200-million emergency fund, in addition to increasing its 2027 defense budget to €63.4 billion, doubling the budget from 2017.
Within hours after the initial burst of violence, we were getting reports of FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference).
French historian David Colon, the author of Infodémie, a new book about disinformation as a pandemic, told Bette Dangerous on Sunday about reports citing “police and territorial intelligence sources” indicating that “the mobilization of vandals was also spurred, intensified, accelerated, or instrumentalized by influencers and bloggers supported or amplified by foreign powers. Iran, Algeria, and Russia are notably cited by the press and by a former Prime Minister and an Interior Minister.”
He said on Sunday that he observed accounts “affiliated with the Russian informational operational pattern Storm1516. Yesterday, only a few French-speaking accounts relayed and weakly amplified the chaos in the French streets. Since last night, major English-speaking influencer accounts have in turn come into play and are concentrating their attacks on the President of the Republic.”
Colon also reminded me that the “United States is an actor in the informational threat today.”
We saw evidence of this directly from the White House, in postings exploiting the French protests, and in Trump’s Monday statement at a rally in Kansas that France has been “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists.” This of course, is contrary to his opinion about America’s J6 violent insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government and bludgeoned police officers who defended the Capitol. He called the US violent protestors “warriors” and “hostages,” before releasing them all from prison.
Colon also noted that protests occurred in “Albania, Belgium, Italy, and France: four countries that support Ukraine and are consequently targets of the Kremlin, four countries that at the same time have varying degrees of friction with Iran.”
The speed of the evidence of FIMI is welcome, because time delays in previous elections and world events caused do-nothing responses.
Midterm Manipulations
I have written multiple, comprehensive reports about threats to the upcoming midterm elections in the US.
Most recently, I identified the 2020 election deniers that Trump has placed in power.
I cautioned with evidence that Trump and his loyalists will try to steal the elections.
In this moment, we still have the ability to access factual information — we may have to surf through a tsunami of malinformation to find it — but facts are still accessible. We now know more quickly how we are being fed manipulations, which also means that we are able to help others discern more quickly fact from malicious fiction.
As the US elections approach and elections in Europe heat up, we are going to be served FIMI as we have never seen it before. It’s important to stay close to trusted sources to discern reality from influence campaigns.
We each have an opportunity to get smart and savvier, and help others see that destruction of global democracy is the end game of these foreign threat campaigns. And when these campaigns are identified as run by a country like Russia, it’s important to keep in mind that no one wants to immigrate there, no one goes there to seek a better life. It’s a country that offers no protection for human rights and dignity.
That the US is aligning with such a country should offer a degree of urgency.
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