France joins the fight against propaganda. Emmanuel Macron said that it had never been so easy to pretend to be a journalist using money, technology, and indifference to words and opinions.
He promised the adoption of a special antifake law. This initiative coincided with the opening of the ‘Russia Today’ office in France.
France will fight fake news. President Emmanuel Macron is ready to revise media legislation to protect liberal democracy from fakes. Changes will include, among other things, publications in social networks during the election period.
“Social networks will be required to act with increased transparency regarding all sponsorship content to make public the information about advertisers and those who control them, and to limit the amount of funding invested in these publications,” Emmanuel Macron said.
Statements about the Kremlin’s possible intervention in Western countries’ elections have been heard more than once. Moscow calls them a mythical problem and hysteria. But in the US only, Facebook posts on American policy made by the St. Petersburg “troll factory” have been seen by 126 million users. All this happened on the eve of the elections.
“A well-prepared fake is thrown in, and then it will not matter that it is debunked in a month or two. This changes the political process in the country. And therefore, legislative mechanisms are needed, to quickly react to fakes during the election campaign, especially those disguised, that go on social networks,” says Andrei Yeliseyeu from the analytical center ‘EAST’.
The TV channel “Russia Today” began broadcasting in France a little over two weeks ago. It shows news, interviews, talk shows, and documentaries. In the polls, the French say they do not trust local media and will be happy with alternative sources of information.
“It’s really dangerous, because nonprofessionals, who are a broad audience, do not understand who finances it. Few realize that RT is Russia Today. “RT” has recruited more than 100 employees. At first, everyone was surprised where they would find them and who would cooperate with them, but, apparently, they were offered good salaries,” says journalist from Paris Anastasia Kirilenko.
The percentage of fake news in the French-language broadcast is not so big, experts say, although the channel is playing games on the verge of outright lies. The main danger is a specific way of presenting information. And this will not be impacted by Macron’s initiative, experts say.
“You can find a refugee camp in Calais in France, with poor sanitation, where everything looks bad, to make a report. And it will not even be a fake. Another thing is that the work of a journalist is in the choice of news. And they will be engaged in this kind of selection — against liberal democracy, against the US, against the unity of the Western world,” Anastasia Kirilenko continues.
“Give me an example of a lie on “Russia Today”, one concrete example,” the channel’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said, after Emmanuel Macron called her employees false propagandists.
And here are the examples: three years ago the channel reported that the Malaysian Boeing over the Donbass was shot down by Ukrainians. It referred to the twitter of the Spanish dispatcher Carlos – a non-existent character. And after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Ukraine the “Russia Today” staff ended the broadcasts with these words:
“As a journalist of this company, I am faced with numerous moral and ethical challenges. I can not be part of a television company financed by the Russian government, which whitens Putin’s actions”.
In France, leading experts on Russia and journalists have published a petition in “Le Monde” demanding to deprive “Russia Today” of the broadcasting license. And after Macron’s anti-fake initiative comes into effect, the French journalists working in Russia should be prepared for the loss of accreditations and minor dirty tricks as a mirror response, experts believe.
Masha Makarova, belsat.eu
