Macron accuses foreign leaders of exploiting French riots

**Macron accuses foreign leaders of exploiting French riots**

Violence erupted in Marseille and other French cities as well.

French President Emmanuel Macron has accused foreign leaders of using the riots that broke out across the country on Saturday for electoral gain.

Without naming anyone, he said they were campaigning for upcoming elections “at France’s expense” through their remarks on the violence, which broke out on the margins of cost-of-living protests.

Speaking during a trip to the Middle East, he described them as “leaders who are in campaign mode, whether here in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic”.

The comment appeared to target Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces parliamentary elections next week, and US President Donald Trump, whose mid-term polls are due next month.

Macron said the unnamed leaders had been misled by fake AI-generated videos about the riots.

Nearly 150 people have been jailed and more than 800 have been brought before the courts since the unrest that swept Paris and other cities including Lyon, Marseille and Nice.

Videos of running clashes between masked rioters and police, along with scenes of property damage and looting, spread widely on social media.

The government admitted that police had “lost control” during the violence, which followed weeks of student protests over conditions in high schools.

Macron later promised that the authorities would be “uncompromising” toward “agitators from ultra-left fringe groups”, whom he blamed for much of the disorder.

Speaking in Doha, the Qatari capital, the French president said: “For me, there is no visible foreign interference in the events that took place. On the other hand, there was foreign manipulation of information afterwards, yes, and that gave rise to unacceptable and stupid comments from many people, including foreign leaders...

“We had people claiming that we had been invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said in an interview for Israel’s i24 channel, external, that France, which has Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, had been hit by an “invasion of extremist Islam”.

He said he had told Macron after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023: “If we do not eliminate them here, you will have them in Paris.” “That is exactly what is happening,” he added.

Also on Tuesday, Trump blamed the riots on mass immigration to France.

“When I look at France, when you look at Italy, when you look at all the turmoil and the hatred, that’s not about school,” he said. “That’s about people coming into the countries that hate the country.”

“Close your borders and take control before it is too late!” he said in comments aimed at Macron.

According to a report in the UK’s Financial Times newspaper, external, EU regulators are looking into possible foreign online interference and disinformation campaigns linked to the French riots and similar recent outbreaks of unrest in EU countries.

It quotes unnamed security officials as saying that pro-Russian and far-right social media accounts tied to earlier disinformation campaigns have circulated violent videos in an effort to create more chaos.

The paper adds that Iran and Algeria are also suspected of being behind some of the messaging.

David Colon, a researcher at France’s Sciences Po university who specialises in disinformation, was quoted as saying that “pro-Kremlin influencers” linked to the Russian campaign Storm-1516 had “amplified the events and spread a number of false narratives”.

France is one of Ukraine’s strongest military backers in its ongoing war with Russia, while Algeria is a former French colony with bitter memories of the war that won its independence in 1962, and French relations with Iran have been strained by its war with the US and Israel this year.

BBC Verify has examined more than 15 examples of fake news videos on social media that researchers at the US-based dTeam say were produced by a Russian disinformation operation called Matryoshka.

The videos use branding that closely resembles real French news outlets, including Le Monde, Euronews and France 24.

The direct impact and reach of Matryoshka videos appear limited, but experts say the emphasis on amplifying unrest matches known Russian disinformation methods.

Separately, BBC Verify traced one of the most widely shared AI-generated images on social media, which supposedly showed an elderly couple being robbed and left in their underwear in Paris, to an obscure website.

Sabrina Hania, director of Infos-Israel.News, told the BBC that her team created the image — published on 17 October — using ChatGPT and without a reference image.

It was posted soon after a television journalist reported the alleged incident, citing “police information”. The claim remains unverified, with French media reporting that prosecutors have no information backing up that it happened.

Although the original image was marked “Made with AI” on X and “AI content” on Instagram, it was later reposted on X without any disclaimer in a post that drew more than six million views.

Hania said she regretted that the image had been taken out of context and misled so many people, blaming those who reshared it without identifying it as AI-generated.