Forty-eight hours after the second round of the legislative elections in France, a wave of xenophobic false information is sweeping social networks. Hijacked videos, fabricated quotes, manipulated results, some fake news has already accumulated several million views. At the origin of this disinformation are openly Islamophobic French- and English-speaking accounts, whose mission is to influence public opinion and fuel racism with false information.
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While the polls gave the National Rally (RN) a clear lead in terms of the number of seats in the National Assembly, it is ultimately the New Popular Front (NFP) which came out on top early legislative elections, according to the results of Sunday, July 7. In this context, many false pieces of information are circulating on social networks. One of them wrongly claims that the leader of the Insoumis Jean-Luc Mélenchon promised that ” Arabic to become official language in France after election results “. ” May God save France, because its people will not do it. “, comments the author of this tweet seen more than 1.5 million times.
In reality, Jean-Luc Mélenchon never uttered these words attributed to him. The speech he gave following the publication of the results is freely accessible online: at no point does he mention the Arabic language. The aim of this fake news is to present the victory of the New Popular Front as the victory of ” the Islamization of the country “.
To support this racist narrative, Internet users also share a video in which thousands of Muslims are seen praying in the middle of the street. The comment claims that this great prayer takes place in France: ” It’s not Pakistan, it’s France. Who supports Marine Le Pen? “.
Please note, this video has been taken out of context.
After checking, these images were taken out of context. Thanks to the immense mosque and the architecture of the buildings visible in the video, we were able to precisely geolocate the scene. It was filmed, not in France, but in Russia, in front of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, during the Eid al-Adha celebrations, more than two years ago. This ceremony brings together thousands of worshipers every year.
This video, already verified many times by teams of verifiersis very regularly hijacked in several European countries by very popular xenophobic accounts. Their activity consists of publishing photo montages, images generated by artificial intelligence or videos of violence with xenophobic comments.