Paris (AFP)
The anti-health pass protests reflect in the street what has been observed for months on social networks where anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-containment accounts proliferate, with millions of subscribers, a protean galaxy endowed with relays and powerful influencers.
"My name is Claire, I am a nurse": published on July 14, this 7-minute video that aligns the infox - the pandemic does not exist, vaccines are not vaccines - has accumulated at least a million views and tens of thousands of shares in a few days, just on Facebook.
We also find her on Twitter, TikTok ...
If the anti-masks had managed to organize rallies in recent months, the announcement on July 12 of the compulsory vaccination of caregivers and the extension of the health pass seems to have given a new boost to this disparate movement, protest and very hostile to Emmanuel Macron.
- "Basement" -
After several demonstrations last week - which culminated on Saturday with more than 110,000 people (according to the police) marching in France - others are planned this Saturday.
Calls relayed via the hashtags # manif24juillet, #antipass or #passdelahonte.
# photo2
With a unifying slogan: the defense of "freedoms".
"This protest movement has been present for several months via the various digital channels," notes Coralie Richaud, lecturer in public law at the University of Limoges, interviewed by AFP.
She also notes the "extremely heterogeneous" character of the profiles, from the far left to the far right, some tending to conspiracy, others not, with a lot of anti-vaccines but also those who have been vaccinated.
"Their only common denominator is to be + anti +", continues this specialist in protest movements on the internet.
It was then necessary "to structure the protest", a "demand" which serves as a "base" and which passes "from the individual to the collective" via a questioning of power.
# photo3
Famous "yellow vest", Jérôme Rodrigues calls on Facebook "all dissatisfied citizens" to take to the streets in a "union around anger".
- "Influencers" -
The movement can count on other heads of gondola, hyper active "influencers" on the internet and relayed by certain popular media, from the program "Touche pas à mon poste" to the France Soir site, via Sud Radio and CNews.
Among them, the former number two of the FN, president of the Patriots, Florian Philippot, or the sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who each have about 250,000 Twitter subscribers to whom they regularly distill infox and approximations on vaccines and Covid.
# photo4
Others are less known to the general public but very followed, such as MP Martine Wonner, a psychiatrist by training, with tens of thousands of subscribers on Twitter and Facebook.
For more than a year, she has been relentlessly broadcasting infox on masks, vaccines ... even in the hemicycle, to the chagrin of her colleagues.
At the end of June, filmed in a taxi, she affirms that airlines prohibit their flights to the vaccinated, an assertion several times denied.
The video is shared some 10,000 times in three days.
Other relays of mobilization, the singer Francis Lalanne, who was one of the supporters of the "yellow vests" and who described the vaccination as a "crime against Humanity", or the comedian Jean-Marie Bigard, 1.3 million fans on Facebook where he shares his opposition to the health pass and vaccines.
The movement also has its "scientific guarantees", such as the doctor Louis Fouché or the geneticist Alexandra Henrion-Caude.
The latter has gathered in recent months 100,000 subscribers on Twitter and YouTube where it multiplies anti-vaccine infox.
# photo5
Absent from gatherings but a tutelary figure brandished like a totem pole: Prof. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner in medicine in 2008 but disowned in recent years by his peers because of his unscientific theories.
He repeats in very divided interviews that vaccines created the Sars-Cov-2 variants, a claim without scientific basis.
In a completely different genre, the former reality TV candidate "Kim Glow" regularly broadcasts conspiracy theories to her 3 million subscribers on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok: the Covid is a genocide against the elderly, vaccines inject 5G chips ...
However, researcher Coralie Richaud invites us to remain cautious about the future of this transposition of the virtual into a massive protest movement in real life.
She recalls that the "yellow vests" were victims of their refusal of any representative.
© 2021 AFP