Adopted by parliament last November, France’s law “against the manipulation of information”, more generally known as the “anti-fake news law”, has been put to the test this month for the first time, and not exactly in circumstances that President Emmanuel Macron envisaged when he announced his plans for the legislation in January 2018.
The legislation is notably aimed at countering organised interference, through the dissemination online of false information, in elections. In the runup to European Parliament elections to be held in France next weekend, Communist MEP Marie-Pierre Vieu and her party colleague, Senator Pierre Ouzoulias, filed a complaint, under the articles of the new law, against French interior minister Christophe Castaner’s posts on social media claiming that May Day demonstrators had attacked a major Paris hospital and members of its staff.
The claim proved to be false. In fact, a group of around 30 people who were taking part in a May 1st ‘Labour Day’ march in Paris ran for shelter inside the sprawling grounds of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital to escape a police charge and tear gas clouds. When motorbike-mounted riot police chased them, some had tried to enter the building, unwittingly at a spot that leads into an intensive care ‘reanimation’ unit. But faced with the firm refusal of entry from the staff inside, the demonstrators quickly turned away without aggressive behaviour, as was subsequently testified by the medical staff present during the incident and their hierarchy.
The minister’s post on Twitter was a prime example of fake news. “Here, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, a hospital was attacked,” Castaner tweeted shortly after the incident. “Its medical personnel were assaulted. And a police officer mobilised to protect it was injured. Unwavering support for our law and order forces: they are the pride of the [French] Republic.”
Ici, à la Pitié-Salpêtrière, on a attaqué un hôpital.
— Christophe Castaner (@CCastaner) 1 mai 2019
On a agressé son personnel soignant. Et on a blessé un policier mobilisé pour le protéger.
Indéfectible soutien à nos forces de l’ordre : elles sont la fierté de la République. pic.twitter.com/BjXYFw2XzR
The ‘anti-fake news’ law (the full text of the legislation, in French, can be found here) stipulates that during the three months that precede an election, a magistrate may take action to halt the publication of “inexact or misleading allegations or imputations about an event” when these are “of a nature that might affect the sincerity of the elections to come” and which have been “published in a deliberate, artificial or automated and massive manner”.
So it was that on May 10th, Marie-Pierre Vieu and Pierre Ouzoulias filed their complaint demanding that Twitter remove the false claims posted by interior minister Christophe Castaner. The case was heard by a Paris court on May 16th and their complaint was thrown out in a ruling the following day. “Our aim was to demonstrate, with the absurd, that the law serves no purpose,” Ouzoulias told Mediapart. In that sense, he and Vieu won their case.
“It is ascertained that the reanimation unit was not the object of an attack by the demonstrators who remained outside the building, and that the medical staff were not injured,” read the May 17th ruling by three Paris court presiding magistrates.
The facts of the case are hardly trivial; a total of 32 people were arrested over the alleged attack on the hospital, when they were held for questioning, some for almost 24 hours. They were subsequently released without any further action taken against them.
The events took place in the context of repeated clashes with police in Paris during rolling weekend demonstrations by the so-called 'yellow vest' movement, protesting falling living standards for low-and middle-income earners, some of whose supporters joined the May Day marches. Castaner has adopted a hardline policy of policing the recurrent protests, some of which have been marred by violence from marginal groups of extremists, during which hundreds of demonstrators, but also some bystanders, have been left with serious injuries from police weapons, including pistol-launched rubber pellets and stun grenades (see more here, here and here).
The build up to the false claims of the hospital "attack" began late in the afternoon of May 1st when public radio station France Info aired an interview with an intern from the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital who described an attempt to enter the intensive care unit where he was situated at the time. As of 6.29pm, Martin Hirsch, the head of the Paris hospitals administration services, tweeted his “full support for the teams at the Pitié-Salpêtrière who faced a gang of demonstrators/vandals in a violent intrusion attempt.”
That version of the events was picked up, and blown up, by Castaner, and also health minister Agnès Buzyn, and even ecology minister François de Rugy. It rapidly became headline news across French media, before being totally discredited by numerous eye-witness accounts and video footage showing the demonstrators remaining outside, and never entering, the hospital building (see Mediapart’s report on the events).
“If the message written by Mr Christophe Castaner appears exaggerated in his use of the terms ‘attack’ and ‘injuries’, this exaggeration concerns events that were real, namely the intrusion by demonstrators into the grounds of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital,” continued the magistrates in their May 17th ruling. It concluded with a subtle interpretation: “The information not being totally void of a link to real events, the condition according to which the allegation must be manifestly inexact or misleading is not met.”
Nor, said the magistrates, did the tweet meet the condition that it involved massive, artificial or automated publication, and there was no payment made to increase the reach of the tweet which, the magistrates underlined, was not drawn up by a “bot”, casting aside the power, and opacity, of Twitter algorithms. No-one except Castaner, who has almost 200,000 “followers” on his Twitter account, knows how many times the tweet was consulted.
The court also had to consider whether the false claims were, as the law sets out, “of a nature that might affect the sincerity of the elections” to be held in France on May 26th. In their submission, Marie-Pierre Vieu and Pierre Ouzoulias argued that “the words of the Minister of the Interior aim to make believe [that there is] a climate of violence, to use the effect of fear and chaos, which can only perturb the European elections campaign”. But the magistrates dismissed that view, concluding that “if the tweet had employed exaggerated terms […] it had not obscured the debate, because it was immediately contested, that numerous articles in the written press and on internet indicated that the events did not unfold in the manner in which Mr Christophe Castaner presented them, and that different versions arose, allowing each voter to come to an enlightened opinion, without any manifest risk of manipulation”. The plaintiffs’ demand for the tweet to be removed was thus dismissed (the full text of the ruling can be found by clicking on the 'MORE' tab at the top of this page).
When the government drew up the “anti-fake news” legislation it was primarily concerned by the potential threat of Russian interference in elections, and did not listen to warnings of senators about the weaknesses of the draft bill when it was debated in the Upper House. “Every time that [a case of fake news] will be a little blurred, the judge will not find against it, and the information will as a result become true, even if it’s false,” warned socialist senator David Assouline during the parliamentary debates.
Pierre Ouzoulias, who also took part in the debating in the Senate, says he regrets the time lost with the study of legislation he believes is of no use. “We can clearly see it doesn’t work,” he said.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse