This site aims to highlight long-running, concerted efforts to push russia’s narrative and talking points into the comment sections of Le Monde, one of the most revered French newspaper. A limited number of contributors are posting 20-30 times a day (some of which, since 2014), parroting the last talking points of the russian propaganda apparatus, trying to stir dissent, inverse the responsibilities of the invasion of a sovereign country and diminish western support to Ukraine.
Why le Monde:
To the online propaganda the researcher, le Monde offer several noteworthy advantages: only subscribers can post, the number of contributions is limited to 1 per article (and 3 replies to other contributions). While it is easy to change “nicknames”, it is also easy to track such changes as they are applied retroactively.
Unlike platforms with a wider, more public audience, Le Monde thus offers a finite and well-delimited universe to study the activities of russian propagandists trying to sway public opinion in western democracies.
Their rhetorical tricks, sophisms, contradictions and idiosyncrasies are in full display every day, and looking back a couple years at them depicting Biden’s warning about the upcoming russian invasion as “nothing else than a fantasy” and a “yet another manifestation of russophobia” proves enlightening.
Outside of academic interest, it is our opinion that this deliberate and concerted effort to push the narrative of a hostile power, while often praising war crimes or dehumanizing Ukrainians could fall under a number of criminal qualifications and thus be prosecuted accordingly.
It is abundantly clear that le Monde, with its educated readership and somewhat functioning amount of peer control does not present a large risk compared to other platforms with a larger audience. We hope that by highlighting those actions, putting numbers and words into a diffuse feeling, we can trigger a sense of emergency for political, judicial and intelligence leadership and make them realize that democracies may be facing one of their gravest dangers yet.
russia (among others) leverages what makes the strength of our societies – freedom of opinion and expression – (and is, by the way, nowhere to be found there) to undermine institutions, divide, justify war crimes and ultimately weaken what offered Europe one of its longest peace eras.
Collaborate
We are happy to collaborate with fellow researchers, data journalists, as well as CERTs or public authorities, share data or work on modelling together.
If you are a newspaper trying to investigate your own comment sections, we are also happy to be in touch.
We can be contacted at lemonde2poutine[at]proton.me or via social media.
We do not open attachments or click links so state your request in the body of the email.
Public PGP key if you want E2E encryption
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