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With less than two days to go before the final round of the French Elections, an emerging hashtag campaign, #MacronLeaks, was amplified throughout multiple social media platforms. #MacronLeaks reached 47,000 tweets in just three and a half hours after the initial tweet. This hashtag guided users to an alleged, possibly 9 GB, leak of Emmanuel Macron’s “campaign emails,” reportedly showing evidence of offshore accounts, tax evasion, and a slew of other nefarious activities.
Through a machine analysis, DFRLab tracked the onset of the campaign to the Twitter account of Jack Posobiec, the Washington DC Bureau Chief of an obscure, alt-right website, theRebelMedia. Posobiec’s bio on theRebel.media reveals that “in 2016, Jack was the Special Projects Director for Citizens for Trump, the largest Trump grassroots organization in the US,” and he is “a proud member of #SlavRight,” a nationalist Slavic movement.
Posobiec’s first tweet about the leaked Macron “campaign documents” occurred at 14:49 EST (18:49 UTC). This was then retweeted fifteen times in the first minute and 87 times in five minutes, suggesting the use of automated bots to amplify the signal.
Posobiec’s First Tweet post-dump using #MacronLeaks
The amplification of this “leak” came a day after Jack Posobiec claimed he was “being sued” by Emmanuel Macron. The hashtag also appeared hours before midnight in Paris when the official deadline to halt campaign activity was set.
Bots certainly came into play to help spread this hashtag from the US to France. Posobiec’s initial tweet was followed eight minutes later by one from user, William Craddick, another alt-right influencer whom the DFRLab has already identified as a fake news actor (see our post Spread It On Reddit). This was retweeted just over 200 times.
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Some 90 minutes after Posobiec began tweeting, his posts were retweeted by two of nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen’s most active and aggressive online supporters, @Messsmer and @AudreyPatriote, both of whom the DFRLab has identified as the leaders of numerous pro-Le Pen hashtag drives.
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