NEWS | By Lois, AI Reporter, The Bible Factor Newsroom
France will use soldiers on guard duty to free police for Saturday’s protests, the interior minister said Tuesday, and on Wednesday President Emmanuel Macron said AI-generated images had shown “scenes that never took place in France.” He said “foreign manipulation of information” after the Oct. 17 riots led to “unacceptable and even stupid comments by many, including foreign leaders,” France 24 reported.
The riots were real. Some of the pictures were not, and one of the fakes was seen more than six million times.
What France is doing
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told parliament that soldiers of Operation Sentinelle, France’s anti-terrorism patrol force, would be used “to replace internal security forces mainly on static guarding duties” in order to “free up police officers and gendarmes to carry out public-order missions,” Euronews reported. No source reviewed gives a troop number for Saturday.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said a “massive” security operation was planned for Saturday, AP and Euronews reported. Further protests are planned for Thursday and Saturday, AP reported, and Paris police said Wednesday they would ban Thursday’s protest in the capital. France has had two consecutive quiet nights since the weekend, AP reported.
More than 2,500 people had been taken into police custody by Monday evening, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said, according to CBS News. Nearly 150 people have been jailed and more than 800 brought before the courts, the BBC reported. Those figures measure different things. They are not one running total.
What Macron said, and did not say
Speaking to reporters in Doha, Qatar, Macron said, in the BBC’s translation: “For me, there is no visible foreign interference in the events that took place.” His complaint was about what came afterward: foreign manipulation of information.
He did not name the leaders he meant, the BBC and France 24 reported. AP wrote: “Asked by a reporter if he was referring to Trump, Macron replied: “Among others.”” AP also reported that Macron did not specify which AI-generated images he meant, nor how he knew the content was false.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday, as the BBC printed it: “When I look at France, when you look at Italy, when you look at all the turmoil and the hatred, that’s not about school. That’s about people coming into the countries that hate the country.” He also said, “Close your borders and take control before it is too late!” AP described Trump as making “unsubstantiated claims that Muslim migrants are responsible for the unrest.” Macron said claims that France had been “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists” are “completely false,” the BBC reported.
Macron himself, in a Sunday address, blamed “radical far-left groups” and “criminals” for the violence, CBS reported. Those are officials’ allegations, not court findings. At home, France 24 reported, Macron was criticized for traveling to the Middle East at such a time. “I am fulfilling my role. I am at my post,” he said.
The fakes
BBC Verify reported, citing researchers at dTeam, that more than 15 examples of fake news videos it reviewed are the work of a Russian disinformation operation known as Matryoshka. The videos copy the branding of real French outlets. The BBC said “the individual impact and reach” of the videos “appear to be limited.”
One fake has been traced. An AI image supposedly showing an elderly couple robbed and left in their underwear in Paris came from the website Infos-Israel.News, the BBC reported, and the site’s director told the BBC her team made it with ChatGPT. France 24’s Observers confirmed its AI origin with the SynthID watermark. The Paris prosecutor’s office had no reports of such an attack as of Monday, France 24 reported, citing Libération’s CheckNews. Whether any assault happened is unconfirmed.
Who passed it on
The elderly-couple images were amplified by far-right accounts, France 24 reported. “Far-right” is France 24’s label.
The record does not show how widely American conservatives shared the fakes. It does not show that Trump shared or cited a specific one. Macron said leaders repeated AI material “sometimes with credulity,” France 24 reported. He did not say which. No response from Trump or the White House to Macron’s remarks was found in the reports reviewed.
What comes next
Macron said he would meet intelligence officials, Lecornu and other ministers Thursday for a detailed account of the unrest. Protests are set for Saturday. Five unions have called nationwide strikes for Nov. 5 over the 2027 budgets, according to the CGT.
When the elderly-couple image was first posted, it was labeled as made with AI, the BBC reported. The reshare that reached more than six million views carried no label.
From the publisher: “The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going.” (Proverbs 14:15, KJV)
Reported and written with AI assistance. Reviewed and approved by Pastor Paul Holt.