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The 2016 US election campaign, the scene of numerous attempts at interference and multiple false news, fake news or infox, had greatly worried Europeans with a view to the elections to Parliament. Social networks give reason to those who had said they were worried because the Internet is teeming with messages of misinformation. This is reflected in several recent reports, including one published this Wednesday by Avaaz, an NGO that describes itself as a network of citizen cybermilitants. Their report points to misinformation attempts that have reached hundreds of millions of Internet users.
From our correspondent in Brussels,
Avaaz's cybermilitants have been closely watching Facebook for three months. They conducted an in-depth survey of the six most populous countries in the EU, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Poland which make up 70% of the EU population. Their survey revealed that pages and disinformation messages were viewed more than five hundred million times by Facebook users.
The NGO has installed an operating room in a discreet building in the heart of Brussels' European district. Thirty people are working in front of a multitude of screens. It is sort of a response to the Facebook operations room in Dublin mounted on the occasion of the European elections. In their operating room, all day Avaaz members monitor Facebook activity in the six countries under investigation. One of them is also permanently connected to WhatsApp, where Avaaz members across Europe report messages with suspicious content.
There are several types of content. At first we have suspicious pages and Avaaz has counted 500 pages mounted with fake accounts and either create entirely false news or relay messages specifically anti-European. For Avaaz, it is mainly Europhobic or far-right content that is to be counted on with calls for nationalism, racism or hostility towards migrants.
Russian hackers in the line of fire
For example, there is a message in Italy relayed thousands of times where we see in a video of migrants attacking a police car, total misinformation since it is a scene from a film. Of the 500 pages of misinformation recorded since the beginning of the investigation, 44 concern France and there are also personal attacks as false information that accused Brigitte Macron, the wife of the President of the Republic, to cost 200,000 euros per year. month to the French taxpayer or messages accusing the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo to encourage the arrival of migrants.
The procedure also allows to detect infox with for example this message on the mayor of Paris which was republished multiple times in a few minutes and on each page was presented as the original message.
Facebook has already removed 77 of the 500 pages that have been identified by Avaaz but the NGO also asks that there is the possibility to put a fix. For the moment, only users who republish or share a suspicious message receive an alert on the suspicious nature of the message, and Avaaz asks Facebook to display a similar warning each time a user consults the message in question.
As for the source, the NGO does not press ahead with the authors of the messages, but another report published two weeks ago points to hackers, Russian hackers who have specialized in the amplification of misinformation messages. This is a study conducted by an American company, SafeGuard Cyber, which is active as its name suggests in the security of cyberspace. His report points out similar messages in huge volumes or the multiplication of accounts of identical origin on Facebook, but also YouTube, Twitter or Instagram.