- I predict a riot - 23rd October 2026
- Big is beautiful - 22nd October 2026
- More Artificial Information (AI) part three - 22nd October 2026
Little remarked on in the coverage of the riots in France, is how they have been seized on to peddle false news by groups linked to hostile powers (particularly Russia), and it highlights once again how The Eye (although small), is also seen as a way to gain influence so has been targeted.
NewsGuard, a United States of America (USA) disinformation monitor, found that 14 fake reports, often pointing the finger at migrants, were linked to a Russian influence operation.
An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated image of the Palestinian flag atop the Eiffel Tower was viewed 3.7 million times. and the President, Emanuel Macron said there was indeed “foreign manipulation”, not of the events themselves, but about the narrative of what had happened. He declared that the riots were being used abroad for political purposes, accusing foreign leaders of disliking France.
The chaos there was the result of a combustible mix on the streets – and an inadequate police presence.
Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, conceded that the police had “lost control”, and a parliamentary inquiry has been opened.
Those on the streets fell into three groups: The first were the half-million students, teachers and unionists who protested peacefully against underinvestment in education and the cost of living.
Pauline, a 20-year-old university student, said she was demonstrating against “everything”, from overcrowded lecture halls and high petrol prices to police repression.
The unpopular president was also on her list. “Macron, t’es mort” (“Macron, you’re dead”) read graffiti near a smashed-up bus shelter, next to “ACAB”, or “All Cops Are Bastards”.
A second group, the casseurs, have a history of infiltrating demos.
Dressed in black and full-hooded, often wearing ski goggles and face masks, they look to pick a fight.
In France there are 600-800 members of such ultra-left groups, often anti-capitalist anarchists, said a parliamentary report in 2023.
They are agile, covert and deft at evading the police. Of 48 ‘black blocs’ (a group of casseurs) arrested after protests in 2023, 85 per cent were men and 75 per cent aged under 33. Most are well educated and not poor, noted the report.
They seek “to create trouble in order to overturn the system”, said Mr Nuñez, then head of the Paris police.
The third group were opportunistic looters. Messages shared on TikTok guided youngsters to smashed-up shopfronts.
In Bordeaux one young man casually swung stolen goods inside a shopping basket; others ripped looted Nike trainers from their boxes and ran.
Within hours stolen goods were put on sale online – “jumper stolen during the demos” read one description before the websites took them down. Some 3,000 shops and businesses were looted or vandalised.
The distortion of the causes of all of this with fake news, only serves to underline what has happened to The Eye in the past.
Our site always used to get a couple of ‘allow requests’ from e-mail addresses with the .ru (Russia) ending, but recently this has increased massively, and at one point there were four or five A DAY!
These details are set against a worrying backdrop, as Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries.
Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
Viginum said it had come across a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames ‘Portal Kombat’.
Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. But over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022.
French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.
Viginum stated that it closely watched the sites over several months, and managers there have concluded they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media.
The underlying objective it would seem, is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe, and according to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organisation.
Apart from seizing on supposed causes of the French riots, THE UK has suffered generally as well.
It is declared on the UK Government’s website: “Russia is one of the world’s most prolific cyber actors and dedicate significant resource into conducting cyber operations around the globe. The UK government has publicly attributed malign cyber activity to parts of three Russian Intelligence services: the FSB, SVR and GRU, with each having their own remits“.
Alarming information like this comes after a dire warning from Sir Ken McCallum, who has been the Director General of MI5 since 2020, and warned that the UK needed to “defend itself robustly” against security threats. He said that Russia had carried out operations which were “routinely” being uncovered.
Perhaps they are not all being ‘uncovered’, if the French riots (as well as us) are being targeted by Russia as a way of influencing matters?
Truths like these by our Editor, Welshman Phi Parry, who was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Soon on The Eye, how the influence of Russia extends even to Africa.
