When top US diplomat Marco Rubio criticised European culture on X this week, a team at the French foreign ministry was swift to hit back online.
“Our culture,” they wrote on Thursday, posting a comparison table of key life-standard indicators, showing the European Union beat the United States in many areas, from life expectancy to student debt.
Their X account in English, called “French Response”, is the latest way France is seeking to defend itself against an ever-growing tide of online disinformation.
Doing its best to be funny, it has since September been battling information it deems to be false from Russian and US accounts — but also the White House under President Donald Trump.
French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said information had become “a new battleground”.
“We’re choosing to occupy the space by turning up the volume and raising our voice,” he said of the X account, which now counts 100,000 followers — though still a drop in the ocean compared to X owner Elon Musk’s more than 230 million.
The account maintained by a group of diplomats, ex-journalists and factcheckers, has been active this week as global leaders met at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
France’s foreign ministry has adopted a new tactic against misinformation – Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday squared up to Trump in flashy aviator sunglasses — which his team said were due to a burst eye blood vessel, saying his country did not like “bullies”.
Newspapers the next day were covered with images of the rebel French leader in his shades, with commentators likening Macron to Maverick from “Top Gun”.
The “French Response” account celebrated the headlines.
“When the world does your French response for you,” it wrote, just after Trump mocked Macron’s sunglasses.
– ‘Trolling tactics’ –
To a Russian account that falsely claimed Macron left Davos early to avoid Trump, when the French leader had in fact never planned to be there the same day, it responded in English: “Another impeccably planned French leave.”
But Ruslan Trad, an expert in global security at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), warned there was a fine line between tackling trolls and being perceived as one yourself.
“When official diplomatic channels adopt trolling tactics, they implicitly validate the information ecosystem’s descent into provocation-based discourse,” he told AFP.
“More problematically, matching adversaries’ tone risks creating equivalence in audiences’ minds between democratic institutions and disinformation actors.”
Trump this week backed down from his threats to seize the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland by force and agreed to talks.
But earlier in January, the “French Response” account had felt compelled to reply after a US user claimed Trump would easily take over France after “we conquer Greenland and Canada”.
“Breaking: Statue of Liberty reportedly spotted swimming back across the Atlantic. Said she ‘preferred the original terms and conditions,'” it quipped, referring to the statue France gave the United States in the 19th century.
