France Accuses Russia of Attempting to Destabilize the Country
The French government has stated that Russia has launched a disinformation campaign within the country, spreading photos of graffiti representing Stars of David that recently appeared in Paris on social media.
This information is reported on the official page of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
According to the statement, the Russian network Recent Reliable News (RRN/Doppelgänger) is directly involved in the artificial dissemination and initial spread of photos with the Stars of David in one of the districts of Paris on social media.
"On 6 November 2023 VIGINUM, the State’s technical and operational service tasked with vigilance and protection against foreign digital interference, detected the involvement of a network of 1,095 bots on the X platform, which had published 2,589 posts contributing to the controversy over Stars of David stencilled in the 10th arrondissement of Paris," the statement said.
France's state technical and operational service is confident that these bots are directly related to the Russian RRN network, particularly because one of their main activities is redirecting people to the network's websites.
Additionally, despite the fact that controversial photos were first reliably published on X at 19:37 on October 30, VIGINUM experts managed to identify the same photos published by the RNN bot network on October 28, 48 hours earlier.
"This new Russia-led digital interference operation against France testifies to the continuation of an opportunistic and irresponsible strategy aimed at using international crises to sow confusion and create tension in public debates in France and Europe," the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized in the statement.
Recently, The Gaze reported that graffiti representing Stars of David that appeared on the streets of Paris may be related to Russia's destabilization campaign.
In particular, after the discovery of the drawings on October 31, several individuals were arrested, who, after interrogation by the police, confessed to creating the images at the request of a Russian citizen for a small fee.