How a company created 75 accounts to harm Emmanuel Macron

On Saturday, an operation took place using Mediapart blogs to harm Emmanuel Macron. The attempt, involving 75 false accounts, was devilishly orchestrated and fortunately did not succeed. However, it is yet further proof, after the case of the false rumour of funding by Saudi Arabia, that Emmanuel Macron is the target of certain organisations seeking to harm him.

It all started with a Mediapart blog

The first tweet we find is from an account that provides free retweets:

This one tweets an article from the Mediapart blog, which is also tweeted by an account specially created for the occasion: Emmanuel Cahuzac.

Fake accounts

The initiative is also being tweeted by fake accounts created for the occasion:

These accounts all follow the same formula: created in April 2017, tweeting only about this case and using completely generic names.

Most use photos of former French figures, or images found on image banks:

All were created overnight:

They will be used to retweet all other people's tweets using the Tweetdeck tool:

What's most interesting is that the accounts that sent the same content via Tweetdeck at the same time, at the same second, claim to represent several candidates: Mélenchon, Fillon, Le Pen and Asselineau. The only thing they have in common is their good relationship with Russia. Is this an attempt to make people think that the Russians are behind it or something?

In the end, it will affect Fillonist/Macronist actors who will tweet the thing.

But this is above all the moment used by PepeTheCrapaud to come out of the woodwork:

A tweet he has since deleted:

All his comrades did the same: all the accounts that tried the operation disappeared less than an hour after my first message on Twitter. A sign that they are afraid of being identified and, above all, that they keep a close eye on the French-speaking Web.

A manipulative attempt to play on reactionary paradox.

The whole thing is a blatant attempt at manipulation insofar as the curve of tweets is not at all natural.

The attempt was to pick a day and time with low Twitter traffic in order to get the story to trending. Once in the trending topic, Macron and Fillon activists would take up the story to propagate and invalidate it and keep the fake alive. A common practice, known as reactionary paradoxing:

You try to get a community to react by making them shout. The community will want to punish the sender of the message, but by punishing him, it will promote the sender. This places the community in a reactionary paradox: should it react and thereby promote the message, or should it leave the message alone and 'endorse' it? An evil of the decade.

The whole propagation can be seen on this animation:

After the fabricated story of Macron's funding by Saudi Arabia, this is the second attempt of its kind using forgeries to spread propaganda. With just one week to go before the presidential election, it is more important than ever to pay close attention, because we are not immune to another operation.

https://www.reputatiolab.com/2017/03/plagiat-soir-marion-pen-sest-propagande-de-liran/