Meddling in the French Election

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/opinion/meddling-in-the-french-election.html

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There may be some question whether Russia was behind the hacking attacks on one candidate’s computers or is covertly meddling in some other way in France’s politics. But Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was most likely on target when he said that the Russians are “actively involved in the French elections.” Whether Russia’s efforts are effective is another question; yet another is how to counter them.

Moscow’s interest in the election is not hard to understand. France has been a pillar of the European Union, an important member of NATO and pivotal on maintaining sanctions on Russia. Of the four leading candidates, three would seek closer ties to Russia: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, who has received millions in loans from Russian banks and traveled to Moscow last month for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin; François Fillon, the scandal-scarred candidate of the mainstream right; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left populist who has lately surged in the polls.

The fourth candidate, Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former economy minister, is strong on maintaining Russian sanctions and favors strengthening the European Union, which Mr. Putin would dearly like to see weakened. Not surprisingly, Mr. Macron’s campaign charges that Russia is spreading fake news about him through its state-funded media, such as RT and Sputnik, including rumors about his sex life.

How effective such efforts are is hard to gauge. RT and Sputnik have small audiences, and are not particularly sophisticated in their effort to push what the director of the Sputnik bureau in Paris called, with no hint of irony, “a pluralism of truth.” Russian disinformation does get recycled on social media, like a false report last month that Mr. Fillon had made a huge recovery in opinion polls.

If Russia is in fact conducting hacking operations to affect the outcome of the French election, French authorities have every right to take strong measures, as Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has vowed to do. And social media companies should take steps to fact-check dubious content. In the end, however, the best defense against Russian meddling is to expose it for what it is. And if the American presidential election is any guide, the greatest effect of Russian interference was to create even more problems for the Kremlin.