Thread by @DisinfoEU

BREAKING: We uncovered 2 Facebook pages managed from Ukraine that support Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – leaders of 2 major French political parties (far-right and far-left).
They contain a substantial amount of disinformation.

Thread ⬇️ (1/16)

Our investigation began when we stumbled across linfonational.net – a website with some content that had already been fact-checked by AFP and Libération CheckNews. (2/16)

We noticed that the Facebook page “Marine Le Pen 2022” (30k followers) had very actively shared content from this obscure media outlet registered in Ukraine, and that the page itself is managed from Ukraine. (3/16)

The page “Marine Le Pen 2022” also ran a small ad campaign during the 2019 European elections, which was then taken down by Facebook. (4/16)

The page – active since 2016 – was previously called “Marine le Pen 2017”. The name of the page was changed to Marine Le Pen 2022 on 7 May 2017 – the day of the French presidential elections. (5/16)

This page previously shared content from another website named francenational.com during the 2017 elections. We linked this website to linfonational.net, since they share the same advertising code. (6/16)

web.archive.org/web/2017092004…

We then looked at other websites that share the same advertising code and discovered linfopopular.net and republique5.fr. (7/16)

Surprisingly, linfopopular.net, registered in Ukraine, is also massively shared by the Facebook page “Jean-Luc Mélenchon 2022” (5k followers) (8/16)

This page is also managed from Ukraine and was created more recently in November 2018. (9/16)

The registration information of republique5.fr gave us the contact information of Ilya M. – a nickname for Ilya S. (10/16)

Ilya S. and Ilya M.’s Facebook accounts used several “Yellow Vests” Facebook groups to disseminate content from these websites. (11/16)

They also shared the content on far-right Facebook groups. (12/16)

What was most surprising to us was that Ilya S. does not even seem to speak French and had only shared the hyperlinks without any comments. (13/16)

Here are some figures associated with these websites and Facebook pages only from the past few months. (14/16)

To be clear:
1⃣Polarisation seems to be the objective;
2⃣Such tactics could easily be deployed by anyone;
3⃣And without politicians even knowing about it;
4⃣We do not know whether Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon are aware of these pages. (15/16)

We cooperated with @lemondefr on this investigation.

Read more here (article in French):
lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/…
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