It began on the evening of Sunday 25 May, when Emmanuel Macron arrived in Vietnam with his wife, Brigitte, at the start of an official tour of Southeast Asia. As the pair disembarked at Hanoi airport, a few press agency cameras caught a fleeting moment: Brigitte Macron’s hand moved toward her husband’s face. He appeared […]
Jean-Marie Le Pen's lifelong obsession with Holocaust denial was strictly off the agenda at his carefully staged funeral and burial. A few days after the January 7, 2025 death of France's extreme right patriarch at the age of 96, Le Pen's clan assembled in La Trinité-sur-Mer. It was the village where the Front National founder […]
A relentless Kremlin campaign of disinformation and destabilisation aimed at bringing Marine Le Pen’s pro-Putin extreme right party to power in France has failed - for the moment. The upset result in the snap legislative elections placing the Rassemblement National (RN) in third place among parliamentary parties is a significant blow to Russian interests. Even […]
As France prepares to vote in the snap legislative elections’ runoff, with Marine Le Pen’s extreme right, Putin-admiring movement pushing at the gates of power, conspiracy theories are running amok. A clutch of notorious propagators of narratives spanning pro-Kremlin conspiracies, anti-vax theories, climate change denial, QAnon, and Holocaust negation have already been elected outright in […]
The French Embassy in South Africa has used humour and sarcasm to unmask a propaganda video fake being spread by official Moscow accounts purporting to feature a so-called “French soldier/mercenary” being “captured” in Ukraine by Russian forces. The video had been spread by conspiracist accounts claiming Western/Nato forces are already on the ground in Ukraine […]
A unique product "100 per cent Made in France" has gone global. Except there is no cause for celebration in Paris. The successful export is a vile slander, catapulted across social media by an international extreme right cabal that spans the Atlantic and specializes in French-bashing. Picking up on the repugnant falsehood accusing Brigitte Macron, […]
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is grappling with online attacks targeting him from multiple directions. The DFRLab identified a cryptocurrency scam that impersonated a French newspaper Libération to publish a fraudulent article critical of Attal, which was boosted via Meta ads. It also appears that Russia activated its Doppelganger disinformation operation against Attal, employing suspicious X accounts to amplify […]
Russia’s strategic move to engage Africa-friendly figures in spreading its propaganda has given rise to a network of Pan-African influencers. This group significantly shapes the pro-Russian narratives in West Africa, particularly advocating for the reduction of French and Western influence in the Sahel, while promoting Russian involvement in the region. A central figure in this […]
On Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron (from La République En Marche! party) was reelected for another five-year mandate with a 17-point lead over his far-right competitor, Marine Le Pen (from the National Rally party). Le Pen conceded in a live televised speech shortly after the results were announced. In a near-simultaneous campaign email, she […]
