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PARIS (AP) — France says it has been the target of a Russian online destabilization crusade that has used automated social media accounts to stoke controversy and confusion over spray-painted Stars of David that have given the impression that the streets of Paris have stoked fears of emerging anti-Semitism in France and the war between Israel and Hamas.
The roughly 250 blue stars that were temporarily erased are now the subject of French police investigation to determine whether the graffiti was anti-Semitic, as initially suspected by the Paris police prefect and others, and whether they were fixed from abroad.
Drawings of the stars on the walls of Paris and its suburbs last month temporarily sparked debate and fear on social media, as well as fears about protecting France’s Jewish community, Europe’s largest.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, triggering its newest and deadliest war, the French government has tallied more than 1,150 anti-Semitic acts. That’s barely three times more than all the acts opposed to French Jews in 2022, according to the Interior Ministry.
Last Thursday, the French Foreign Ministry accused Russia and said a Russian botnet had stoked controversy around the stars with thousands of posts on X, the former platform known as Twitter. Bots are automated accounts programmed to mimic human users by generating messages or following users on social networks, occasionally for nefarious or malicious purposes.
“This new virtual Russian interference operation against France demonstrates the patience of an opportunistic and irresponsible strategy aimed at exploiting foreign crises to sow confusion and create tensions in public debate in France and Europe,” he said.
He said the bots were affiliated with a Russian network, Reliable News, known as Doppelgänger.
Russian activity was stumbled through Viginum, a French state virtual surveillance framework created in 2021 after hackers attacked Emmanuel Macron’s successful crusade for the French presidency in 2017. Viginum’s number one project is to find and analyze foreign virtual efforts to influence online audiences. . debate in France.
Viginum decided that a network of 1,095 bots affiliated with NRNs published 2,589 posts on X in less than two weeks, “contributing to the controversy around the stamped Stars of David,” the French Foreign Ministry said.
Viginum also found that the NRN network gave the impression of having been informed of the graffiti earlier than the other posters in X, the ministry said. He says the NRN bots first published articles about stars on the night of Oct. 28, 48 hours earlier. Images of stars began to appear in X.
The European Union has known the NRN as a virtual crusade of data manipulation that has also spread propaganda of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In addition to fake social media accounts, NRN has also used fake internet pages that mimic government media and websites, and “is part of a broader hybrid crusade across Russia in opposition to the EU and member states,” the EU Council said. A July announcement imposed sanctions on Russian-Americans and entities deemed guilty of the crusade.
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AP writers John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, and Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
The Associated Press