France is to create a state agency to detect fake news over fears that next year’s presidential election could be hit by a “pandemic” of disinformation.
The National Agency for the Fight Against Manipulations of Information will be launched in September in an effort to prevent foreign powers such as Russia and China from using covert means to influence French voters.
President Macron’s supporters accused Moscow of trying to help Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, in the 2017 election, and believe it will attempt a repeat next year. Le Pen has regularly defended President Putin and was invited to hold talks with him in the Kremlin four years ago.
French officials insisted that the agency would be an impartial observer of cyberspace whose job would be to unearth bots and trolls seeking to shape the political debate in France.
“It’s not a question of correcting or re-establishing the truth but of managing to detect attacks when they come from abroad,” Stéphane Bouillon, the government’s general secretary for defence and national security, said.
He said the agency, which will have a 60-strong team, would be a French state version of Graphika, a US analytics company. Its work would help “politicians, diplomats, judges and the media to understand that of 400,000 tweets about such and such a piece of news, 200,000 come from bots in a region outside our country”.
Bouillon said the agency would be under the authority of the defence and national security general secretariat, which monitors security threats.
“It’s not about intelligence gathering. What interests us is anything becoming pandemic in terms of information,” he said. “Our objective is to detect as quickly as possible when something is happening and to be able to point out who is the arsonist.”
The first test for the agency will be a referendum in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia in December to determine whether voters want independence from Paris. “We will look to see if there are not states with an interest in seeing the vote go in a way which would not necessarily be that of the Caledonians themselves,” Bouillon added.
The comment appeared to be a reference to China, which is said by French media outlets to be keen for New Caledonia to obtain independence, to extend its own influence in the Pacific.
• Macron said yesterday that he was ditching controversial plans to reform the French pension system. However, he left open the possibility of a new reform to the state pension scheme, saying “difficult decisions” lay ahead.
