Russian AI Network Impersonates French Parties to Influence Snap Elections
A Russian-linked influence operation uses AI to generate deceptive articles and fake party websites targeting France's snap legislative elections. The campaign rewrites real news with a conservative bias to manipulate voters ahead of the final round of voting.
A Russian influence operation uses artificial intelligence to target France’s snap legislative elections through fake news websites and impersonated political party domains. Researchers link this campaign to a network known as CopyCop, which relies on large language models to mass-produce deceptive articles and distribute them across the internet.
The operation registers typo-squatted domains to impersonate legitimate French political parties, including President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party. One fake website spreads false claims by promising 100 euros to citizens who vote for Renaissance, aiming to discredit the party through fabricated voter bribery scandals.
Hundreds of generated articles reveal a specific prompt instructing the AI to rewrite authentic news stories to adopt a conservative stance against the Macron administration. Pro-Russian Telegram channels then amplify these machine-translated articles in multiple languages to maximize their reach ahead of the final election round.