In late 2020, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election and the deluge of false claims it generated around alleged massive voter fraud, disinformation experts started to worry: Could this phenomenon be replicated in other democracies? Or was election misinformation a purely American phenomenon?
In December 2020, we at NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of news sites, had found more than 40 French, Italian and German-language websites republishing false claims about the 2020 U.S. election. Misinformation about voting was undoubtedly reaching Europe—threatening, in France, to feed distrust in the democratic process.
However, until the second round of the French presidential election, on April 24, 2022, election-related misinformation remained relegated to the fringes of social media. And even since Emmanuel Macron's reelection, despite efforts of hoaxsters to actively promote such narratives, this type of misinformation has not really gone viral.
Several factors explain why false narratives did not emerge as widely as initially feared. For a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic concentrated most of the attention of misinformation providers; then, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was the subject of most new content on French-language misinformation websites.
Narratives questioning the integrity of the French election did emerge online. Some even read like copy-pasted versions of U.S-born myths: Marine Le Pen had allegedly mysteriously lost votes on election...
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