An internal European Union report and a classified French intelligence assessment released Monday claim Russian networks exploited the riots to sow chaos and undermine support for Ukraine—joined by American MAGA influencers and Israeli accounts that spread the content to advance their own anti-immigration and anti-Islam agendas.
1+According to the report, the goal of these actions—which unfolded on social media during the wave of protests that erupted across France in October 2026—was to accelerate chaos, portray the French government as having lost control, and undermine the legitimacy of President Emmanuel Macron and Western support for Ukraine. These actors didn’t ignite the protests, which began as an authentic outcry over the cost of living, but allegedly exploited the unrest to weaken the West.
According to the EU report’s findings, a covert Russian network dubbed “Operation Overload” operated with considerable sophistication, mass-distributing videos designed to look like official reports from leading Western media outlets. Using advanced artificial intelligence tools, the network’s operatives cloned expert voices and forged graphics from well-known newspapers to lend credibility to completely false claims—that migrants had raped protesters and that terror attacks were about to happen imminently.
1+A French Foreign Ministry assessment revealed a surprising figure: exposure to Russian content was significantly smaller compared to accounts associated with the American and Israeli right. While the ten most-viewed tweets from the pro-Russian sphere reached only 2.8 million views between October 16 and 18, similar tweets posted by accounts associated with the American MAGA movement recorded more than 49 million views during the same period.
Meanwhile, Israeli accounts, influencers, and actors reached more than 35 million views with similar narratives linking the riots to uncontrolled immigration and radical Islam, as part of a desire to use the events to justify their own domestic political agenda. French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that while no direct foreign interference in organizing the protests on the ground was identified, foreign manipulation of information definitely occurred.