When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized European culture on X this week, a team at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs was swift to hit back online.
“Our culture,” they wrote on Thursday, posting a comparison table of key life-standard indicators, showing the EU beat the US in many areas, from life expectancy to student debt.
Their X account in English, called “French Response,” is the latest way France is seeking to defend itself against an ever-growing tide of online disinformation.
Photo: AP
Doing its best to be funny, it has since September last year been battling information it deems to be false from Russian and US accounts — but also US President Donald Trump’s White House.
Information had become “a new battleground,” ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said.
“We’re choosing to occupy the space by turning up the volume and raising our voice,” he said of the X account, which now counts 100,000 followers — although still a drop in the ocean compared with X owner Elon Musk’s more than 230 million.
The account, maintained by a group of diplomats, ex-journalists and fact-checkers, has been active this week as global leaders met at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday squared up to Trump in flashy aviator sunglasses — which his team said were due to a burst eye blood vessel, saying his country did not like “bullies.”
Newspapers the next day were covered with images of the rebel French leader in his shades, with commentators likening Macron to Maverick from Top Gun.
The French Response account celebrated the headlines.
“When the world does your French response for you,” it wrote, just after Trump mocked Macron’s sunglasses.
To a Russian account that falsely claimed Macron left Davos early to avoid Trump, when the French president had in fact never planned to be there the same day, it responded in English: “Another impeccably planned French leave.”
However, Ruslan Trad, an expert in global security at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, said there was a fine line between tackling trolls and being perceived as one yourself.
“When official diplomatic channels adopt trolling tactics, they implicitly validate the information ecosystem’s descent into provocation-based discourse,” he said. “More problematically, matching adversaries’ tone risks creating equivalence in audiences’ minds between democratic institutions and disinformation actors.”
Trump this week backed down from his threats to seize the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland by force and agreed to talks.
However, earlier this month, the French Response account had felt compelled to reply after a US user claimed Trump would easily take over France after “we conquer Greenland and Canada.”
“Breaking: Statue of Liberty reportedly spotted swimming back across the Atlantic. Said she ‘preferred the original terms and conditions,’” it quipped, referring to the statue France gave the US in the 19th century.
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