At the start of March, a wild rumour rang out across the web with the help of a plagiarised Le Soir site: Macron and Saudi Arabia supposedly in cahoots. Since then, European experts are said to be pointing the finger at Russia for this operation. The rumour therefore had to be investigated, which I did using Brandwatch and Visibrain.
I. Lessons learned
As the article is devilishly long, I am putting the main lessons at the start. For journalists, researchers, patients and others, I deliver the full analysis and investigation after this chapter.
1. Probably not an initiative coming from Russia. The hypothesis? Iran
The only origin we can point to on Twitter is that of the 3 accounts that spread the story at the start
What can we say about these 3 accounts?
- Gabriel Blanc (generic first and last name with a small number) is an account set up specifically for the operation. Outside the operation, its only tweet without a mention is one that clearly identifies Wahhabism, a notion very little known here and of little importance to Russia.
- Lina Vincent (generic first and last name with a small number) is an account that also lashes out at Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia and Macron.
Looking at its posts and above all the account it is affiliated with, we find the same obsessions, and we see that the man presented as Russia's ally, Le cio, is singled out:
The account also sends its bombs towards Russia Today and Sputnik. I still find it hard to believe that the Russian state would send its own Scuds at its own media.
Moreover, the account is offered in Russian. And it is largely aimed against Wahhabism.
- John Smith (generic English name): a little smarter, since his tweets have since been deleted. He also has the strength to speak in Arabic.
The last account comes directly from Iran. All the clues therefore point more towards Iranian propaganda than Russian.
Iran, incidentally, is a country that already thinks hard about European propaganda, since I have already come across them in hashtag propaganda tactics:
We can thus see this kind of image circulating:
Thus, during an analysis for Libéracisme, I had been able to isolate a community of bots that alone wrote almost 17,000 tweets at 5pm.
The messages were as follows:
When we look at the accounts followed, it is also close to the Iranian issue:
2. A devilishly clever mechanism
Thanks to this case we can now attempt a hypothesis on the methodology of this kind of manoeuvre:
a) Identify the adversary's weaknesses
In my view, Macron has mainly two weaknesses:
- It is a young party. As a result, many opportunists will come knocking at its door. It will not know how to partition its information networks and will suffer enormous leaks, on top of internal tensions between the “old guard” and the “newcomers”. Between the “left” and the “right”.
- As it is a young party, the only complete grey area it feeds is its funding.
Here, funding was the chosen angle, and it can feed every conceivable conspiracy.
b) Seek to feed those who are the first to react emotionally to the false information
We can clearly see that the people contacted are mainly his opponents: those who, emotionally, may confuse Le Soir.be and Le Soir.info
In doing so, they play perfectly on the reactive paradox:
All it takes is to introduce the perfect message inside communities of interest in order to “troll” them; the opposing communities will react mechanically to reach the real target. We can see it in my final analysis: those who spread the Soir.Info story are Macron's detractors. Playing on hateholders is therefore a prime bet that I had already identified many times as a marketing lever. However, this would be the first time we see this in the field of propaganda.
c) The luck factor?
It took more than two weeks for the mayonnaise to take. Either it is the luck factor, or it is the fact of having sent the right message to the right place in a space outside Twitter. Pierre Bourgeois would need to deign to say where he saw the message to get an answer. My hypothesis is that the article finally succeeded thanks to Facebook, through a fairly well-known technique heavily exploited by the satirical paper Nordpresse. (Screenshot taken by Le Monde here)
Still, everything looks as if the initiative had appeared by the miracle of the Holy Spirit.
d) The FN, from small networks to large networks
Incidentally, this case delights me because it confirms a hypothesis established a year ago: FN politicians speak through their activists and keep up the virility within their networks:
The FN is therefore a particularly exploitable network. It is easy to send fakes matching their template (Islamism, Macron, etc.) and watch them tweet it all at the speed of light, and then denounce their fake-news propaganda, even though they believed it themselves!
3. A mistake by Le Soir, a sign of a lack of digital culture
If Le Soir had listened to the tweets it received via the “Via” mentions, it could have picked up the mirror site 2 weeks before the events. You will tell me it is very hard to monitor every tweet that uses “via”. However, any media outlet can set up a very easy system.
Add a search column on TweetDeck:
- In the search criterion, enter “Via @LeSoir”.
- Go to content, and under excluding add “www.lesoir.be”
- Add an alert to stay informed
II. The story
It all begins in February, almost two weeks earlier. The fact is remarkable. If Le Soir had listened to the tweets it received via the “Via” mentions, it could have picked up the mirror site 2 weeks before the events.
The user has since deleted his tweet, which may tend to prove that this is perhaps not his first attempt, even though there are no other tweets from this person across the whole (28M+ tweets) of the presidential election. This account posts nothing more than that. Then another account becomes very active to send all this to a few people:
The targeted accounts? Mainly pro-Fillon users and media that will not fall into the trap
The move comes from a certain Gabriel Blanc. Journalist.
It is interesting because this generic name, created in February 2017 and claiming to be a journalist, uses the same technique as the next account spreading the rumour:
I then asked what they tweeted most, using the Brandwatch software. For Lina Vincent, it looks like this:
Its mechanism, incidentally, is used for other operations:
For Gabriel Blanc, there was absolutely no tweet outside this affair. Both seem to follow accounts linked to Saudi Arabia and Iran. The following day, anti-Israel accounts publish the information: 
In the article, which I will not name, the Le Soir.info story is picked up, pointing to the site as its source.
Iranian accounts then spread the information:
Curiously, at the same moment, the Islamisation site publishes an article claiming that Jacques Attali is preparing the ground in Saudi Arabia. 
I say curiously, because stories mixing Macron and Saudi Arabia are not plentiful. And here, as if by chance, they occur at the same moment:
The information will above all be shared with the help of Louis Aliot: 
In short, more sharing for over two weeks around our Soir.info article. Until the moment when, all of a sudden, the article resurfaces:
I put the question to Pierre Bourgeois, as did another journalist who had reached the same conclusion as me:
And it seems we both drew a blank. This will eventually alert networks close to François Fillon:
With the same source for the article, on a patriot communities site:
Alerted by these small communities, Marion Le Pen then publishes the information with the link:
Mentions of Le Soir then shoot up, helped along by two large accounts:
The similarity with Le Soir will have confused many people:
Very quickly, Libé will tear the hoax apart:
And then by the fact-checkers:
In the end, the hoax will be spread by the far right, but the debunking only by the press. All of it is shown in this infographic:
III. Analysis of the ecosystem
Aware that the events are quite hard to read, I made two methodological choices:
- I isolated the first part of the rumour to see the initial spreaders. This is therefore the spread up to 4 pm.
- I also isolated only those who posted the LeSoir.info link
This gives the following:
Once the universe was delimited, I fed all the profiles into the presidential election Visibrain panel. What I find in the most-used expressions (leaving out external retweets) is quite interesting:
Over the last month, the most tweeted word and hashtag is... MACRON. Not for his campaign slogan, but for other things: let us look at the first one: # Fillon2017 followed by #stopMacron #Fillonprésident #Marine2017 and finally lepionmacron. So these are first and foremost Fillon supporters who dived in. As for the most tweeted sources, it is alarming, since they are essentially alternative media. We can see that these are also fans of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The most shared articles are all anti-Macron:
All the conversations in this ecosystem revolve around Marine Le Pen and François Fillon, with Emmanuel Macron as the punching bag. (Note that the points shown may not have spoken in the panel, but may be retweeted/quoted by those who did):
