From what I understand, the group is mostly made up of Americans. Their main challenge will be how to post on French FB pages without looking obviously "foreign". They may also not be much attuned to the issues du jour in French politics: little coverage of France on Fox News (other than the ridiculously comic) and I don't expect they read Le Figaro or listen to RMC. Not sure how effective they will, unless they hire genuine French provocateurs.

The so-called "fachosphere" does exist on the French web with places like Francais de Souche and other stinkholes; their success at putting people on the street have been very limited. The FN apparatus itself has been much more successful at drawing crowds, using, yes, FB and Twitter.

Reports: Fake news targets Germany's Merkel ahead of elections

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been Europe's main target of fake news articles, the majority of them directed at her open-door policy toward refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, said a source close to the matter, citing information from an internal EU working group.

The disinformation campaign against the chancellor in the run-up to the 2017 parliamentary elections resembles those made by Russian entities, the unnamed source added, although the information could not be independently verified.

France and the Netherlands, two other EU nations preparing for key elections this year, have also been targeted by disinformation campaigns, the source said, according to news agencies.

Or, conversely, if their true impact amongst "the youths" is simply not understood by old fuddy-duddies like me.

"Creating chaos and disruption, so that (the far-Right) is seen as the only one able to bring order" is a rather familiar strategy, historically speaking, but one has to wonder if this particular strategy can work when the majority of the politically active demographics will never see any of the "chaos" wreaked by this sort of online activism.

Then again, Trump.

Plongée chez les trolls pro-Trump qui veulent faire élire Marine Le Pen

Comment des trolls américains créent de faux comptes Facebook et Twitter pour inonder les réseaux de mèmes pro-FN.

posté le 24 janvier, 2017 à 1:14 p.m.

Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire

"Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt" -- Der Psychologe Michal Kosinski hat eine Methode entwickelt, um Menschen anhand ihres Verhaltens auf Facebook minutiös zu analysieren. Und verhalf so Donald Trump mit zum Sieg. -- by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus in Das Magazin, translated as "Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself" by aNtiDoTe Zine:

... The world has been turned upside down. The Brits are leaving the EU; Trump rules America. It all began with one man, who indeed tried to warn of the danger, and who still gets accusatory emails. "No," says Kosinski quietly, shaking his head, "this is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I just showed that it was there." ...

What is Cambridge Analytica Doing in Europe?

... The circumstance of Trump having spent so little money on advertising could also speak for the effectiveness of personality-specific targeting, as could the fact that three quarters of his marketing budget was spent in the digital realm. Facebook became his ultimate weapon and his best canvasser, as a Trump staffer tweeted. In Germany, the rightwing upstart party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) may like the sound of this, as they have more Facebook friends than Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) combined. ...

... Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, ambitious Front National activist and niece of the presidential candidate, has tweeted that she has accepted the firm's invitation to collaborate. In an internal company video, there is a live recording of a discussion entitled "Italy." Alexander Nix confirms that he is in the process of client acquisition, worldwide. They have received inquiries out of Switzerland and Germany. ...

... Psychometrics, sometimes also known as psychography, is a scientific attempt to "measure" the personality of a person. The so-called Ocean Method has become the standard approach. Two psychologists were able to demonstrate in the 1980s that the character profile of a person can be measured and expressed in five dimensions, the Big Five: Openness (how open are you to new experiences?), Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), Extroversion (how sociable are you?), Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?), and Neuroticism (how sensitive/vulnerable are you?). With these five dimensions (O.C.E.A.N.), you can determine fairly precisely what kind of person you are dealing with--her needs and fears as well as how she will generally behave. For a long time, however, the problem was data collection, because to produce such a character profile meant asking subjects to fill out a complicated survey asking quite personal questions. Then came the internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski. ...

... The company divided the US population into 32 personality types, and concentrated on only seventeen states. And just as Kosinski had determined that men who like MAC cosmetics on Facebook are probably gay, Cambridge Analytica found that a predeliction for American-produced cars is the best predictor of a possible Trump voter. Among other things, this kind of knowledge can inform Trump himself which messages to use, and where. The decision to focus candidate visits in Michigan and Wisconsin over the final weeks of the campaign was based on this manner of data analysis. The candidate himself became an implementation instrument of the model. ...

... Kosinski has been observing all of this from his office at Stanford. After the election, the university was in an uproar. Kosinski responded to the developments with the most powerful weapon available to researchers: a scientific analysis. Along with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he conducted a series of tests that will soon be published. The first results seen by Das Magazin are unsettling: psychological targeting, as Cambridge Analytica deployed it, increases the clickthru rate on Facebook ads by more than sixty percent. And the so-called conversion rate (the term for how likely a person is to act upon a personally-tailored ad, i.e. whether they buy a product or, yes, go vote) increases by a staggering 1400 percent.* ...

* The study mentioned made a series of comparisons: a product was advertised online in two ways--one tailored to fit the character profile of a consumer and the other designed to clash with their character--and the respective conversion rates measured.

Read the whole thing.

Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire

French candidate Fillon's lawyer says he confident, but supporters worry - Reuters

A lawyer for Francois Fillon went to the financial prosecutor's office on Thursday to defend the French presidential candidate against press allegations that his wife had received a salary for a fake job, a charge that could harm his bid for the Elysee.
[..]

The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine reported this week that Penelope Fillon had been paid some 600,000 euros (£511,828) for many years of employment as a parliamentary assistant to Fillon, then to his replacement as a National Assembly lawmaker and also for work at a cultural journal.

It said its research had showed there was no evidence she had ever really worked.[..]

The image conveyed by the Welsh-born Penelope Fillon's own rare public comments and glossy magazines is of a woman leading a country life and keeping home for her family in their 12th century chateau near Le Mans, west of Paris.

Last October she told a newspaper, Le Bien Public: "Up to now, I have never been involved in the political life of my husband."

Among political figures,
Marine Le Pen has the most followers on Facebook, where the far right is strongest (three in the top ten)
On Twitter, it's pretty balanced among the political tendencies.
The fastest movers are Hamon, followed by Mélenchon and Macron.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}