DISINFO: Macron distributes fake news on Russian meddling in referendums
SUMMARY
President Macron spreads fake news. He said that during the last referendums, on Brexit and Catalonia, the vote was manipulated by foreign powers. But there are no proofs.
RESPONSE
On July 29, 2018 The UK Parliament issued a special report presenting evidence of Russian meddling in the referendums in the UK and in Catalonia. The Parliament report refers to the research done by the "89up" agency, which found that Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik published 261 media articles on the EU Referendum, with an anti-EU bias [between 1 January 2016 and 23 June 2016]. The "89up" report also showed that RT and Sputnik had more reach on Twitter than either Vote Leave or Leave.EU, during the Referendum campaign. The Parliament report also refers to a joint research project by the Universities of Swansea and of Berkeley, at the University of California, which also identified 156,252 Russian accounts tweeting about #Brexit. These accounts posted over 45,000 Brexit messages in the last 48 hours of the campaign. The Parliament report also found that during the referendum campaign in Catalonia, Russia provoked conflict, through a mixture of misleading information and disinformation, between people within Spain, and between Spain and other member states in the EU, and in NATO (p. 51).