Grandstand. The ideological polarization of the presidential campaign has been, for many months, the breeding ground for large-scale foreign interference operations organized on social networks. The report on “The Enlightenment in the Digital Age”, submitted on January 11 to the President of the Republic by the sociologist Gérald Bronner, and the latest statements by Emmanuel Macron on the subject attempt to alert public opinion to the risk , real, political destabilization.
Weakened from the inside, attacked from the outside by these new wars of the invisible, France is undermined in its unity and its national security. The digitization of information has brought about a radical change in terms ofinformation warfare (information warfare). This prompted the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, in a speech on April 4, 2018, that this ” change of scale constitutes a change of nature “.
Whether for considerations of ideological leadership (in the case of the United States or China) or for the purpose of weakening Western democracies (in that of Russia), the objective in terms of cyber influence is the same: keep control of information, which has become a strategic resource. Information manipulation actions are part of this logic by organizing the massive dissemination of content, true or false, intended to orient the psychological perceptions of the target populations.
Intoxication of the informational fabric
In short, the public space, to be understood here in the manner of Jürgen Habermas, the German theoretician in philosophy and social sciences, as an idealized unit of place based on reason, has been violently disrupted by social media that have become the new global fields of information conflict. Target in 2017, during the presidential election, of cyber-raids having interfered in its electoral process, France reacted well.
Its resilience then rested on its journalistic robustness. This editorial bond of trust has allowed the major media to remain the main source of information. Their low porosity to disinformation campaigns was reinforced by the critical thinking of “Refractory Gauls” and the attraction for contradictory debate, pillars of the French educational approach. Two not insignificant ramparts that are fragile today. Quietly, the offensive States orchestrate the intoxication of the informational fabric.
Different complementary actions are implemented: hyperexploitation of partial information, taken out of context and presented in such a way as to stir up negative emotions; deepfakes (techniques for modifying the images of personalities in order to make them say or do what you want); campaigns ofastroturfing (artificially giving the appearance of popularity to a candidate or a movement); intervention by “troll farms” bringing together individuals paid to disseminate partial or fabricated information on social networks (“fake news”) or to interfere in the most divisive conversations in order to hysterize them further, etc. The goal is always to sow confusion, to brutalize the debate, to hysterize the population.
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