It is a story that, potentially, involves the widespread contamination of online information. The economic intelligence company Avisa Partners, which provides services to foreign dictatorships and major firms listed on France's CAC 40 stock market, already stands accused of manipulating information on participative forums on French and foreign media, including Mediapart, as we reported in June (read in French here). Now the same firm is also suspected of having successfully infiltrated the online collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which is read by four million visitors a day in France alone. The reported aim is to change pages to secretly promote its clients or denigrate competitors.
Documents and witness accounts collected by Mediapart, and corroborated by internal research within Wikipedia (see black box below), reveal these new allegations concerning Avisa. This is a firm which claims to be close to major French public institutions such as the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the national gendarmerie, even though France's intelligence agencies have regarded it with deep mistrust for years.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
According to Mediapart's information, Avisa Partners has sold services involving the modification of online pages to large French companies such as leading luxury goods group LVMH, La Banque Postale and energy giant EDF. In the case of EDF, for example, the task consisted of “restraining anti-nuclear activism” on Wikipedia. Avisa was also tasked by the pharmaceutical and agrichemical giant Bayer, which bought the genetic modification firm Monsanto in 2018, with “restraining anti-GMO activism” on the online encyclopaedia.
The economic intelligence company, which has attracted talented staff from the diplomatic service and French intelligence to its ranks, has worked similarly for other major clients too. For example, via Wikipedia it has sought to improve the image of Russian company Rusal, the leading producer of aluminium in the world, of the president of the Republic of Congo Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the presidency of Idriss Déby in Chad and the former Hungarian president János Áder, who is close to that country's prime minister Viktor Orbán.
When questioned by Mediapart Avisa Partners did not response to our precise questions on the services it provides to its clients. However, in a written statement (see here in full in French) the French company said it worked on Wikipedia in a “transparent” way which “respected the community's principles”. It also said that the work it carried out in this manner “allowed us to obtain for our clients modifications that always seek to improve the encyclopaedic quality of the page and thus of information for internet users: correcting errors, moderating some non-objective content, adding missing information”.
A finely-honed strategy
The Wikipedia encyclopaedia, whose collaborative operation is based on transparency and trust between the contributors who provide material for the articles, bans promotional content. Paid involvement is authorised on the express condition that it is declared as such, with a published warning to the public. But the strategy highlighted in this investigation got round this obstacle by infiltrating the Wikipedia community with contributors claiming to be independent volunteers - but who in reality worked for Avisa's clients.
In recent months the firm has attracted the attention of several volunteers at Wikipedia who have been involved in an “anti-advertising” campaign to keep the site clear of adverts and who have sought to flush out hidden agencies. Their suspicions grew after Le Monde published details on July 12th, as part of its 'Uber Files' revelations, on the activities of a regular Wikipedia contributor. This contributor had enabled the agency Istrat - Avisa's forerunner, with the same management team - to modify pages to defend Uber.
According to Le Monde, Istrat had boasted to Uber that it was able to get access to its Wikipedia page to “add an historical chronology to dilute negative information with positive or neutral data”.
“In reaction to this article the community of volunteers went through all the articles [editor's note, on this issue] to analyse the sources but also to spot the pseudonyms used by all of Istrat's authors,” Capucine-Marin Dubroca-Voisin, president of Wikimédia France, told Mediapart. As a result of this rapid clean-up “some information was removed and compromised accounts were blocked”.
Following that publication some administrators also began a debate about whether it would be possible to ban Avisa Partners from Wikipedia as a legal entity. If it happened, this very rare process would stop the agency from using the encyclopaedia, even for services that were officially declared and openly reported. “That could have a dissuasive effect, as agencies would know that from then on any bad practices could come back to bite them,” said Capucine-Marin Dubroca-Voisin.
To stay undetected among other users, the Wikipedia contributors linked to Avisa also carried out modifications – adding or checking information and joining in discussions between volunteers – on subjects far removed from the activities of their employer. For example, they perhaps worked on the biographical page of a Hollywood actor or a football star.
This activity allowed them to cover their tracks and gain credibility within the community. No one was then likely to imagine that these accounts were in reality working for a digital influencing company. These infiltrators could, when needed, then rework sensitive content – for example biographies of company bosses or heads of state – without being suspected by other members of the community of working for private interested parties who paid well for such contributions.
These profiles sometimes use virtual private networks (VPNs) which allow users to hide their true IP address online; for example, they might appear to come from Moldova or Lithuania when in fact they are working from Paris.
Working for Bernard Arnault
Our investigation came across a major contributor whose activity is now arousing suspicion. Very active since he first registered in February 2021, 'Melv75' has so far made 2,888 contributions to articles, many of which are no great importance. In May 2021, for example, he expanded page entries on Saint-Roch church in Montpellier in the south of France, the singer Marie Modiano, daughter of Patrick Modianao, and the famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, 'Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville'. None of these issues have links with Avisa.
But in reality 'Melv75' was involved in this activity so that at the same time, and without raising any suspicions, he could make around 15 modifications on a much more sensitive Wikipedia page: the biography of Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and boss of the global luxury goods leader LVMH, a major Avisa client.
The links between LVMH and Avisa clearly go back some time. According to police phonetaps carried out in 2013 it was the former head of domestic intelligence under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, Bernard Squarcini, who put the economic intelligence firm in touch with LVMH after he moved to the private sector.
One particular intercepted telephone call, dating from April 13th 2013, suggests that Bernard Squarcini even hoped for a “review of comms” at the luxury group for whom he provided services and that certain aspects of this communications work would then be handed to “Dassier”. This was a reference to Arnaud Dassier, one of the co-founders of Avisa with Matthieu Creux. Squarcini described Arnaud Dassier as a man heading a “system of pre-established blogs [with] 300 guys scattered around the world” to serve the hidden communications needs of its clients.
The French-language Wikipedia page on the LVMH boss, which was viewed nearly 900,000 times in 2021, is seen as a crucial communications issue for the billionaire. “The biography devoted to Bernard Arnault on Wikipedia is the main source of online information about him: it appears in first place in a Google search: it serves as the source of the content posted by Google in the biographical file (which appears by default on the first page): it feeds articles and publications about Bernard Arnault by the press or analysts,” Avisa stated in an internal document seen by Mediapart.
The issue was of even greater strategic significance given that the “information on the French-language page serves as a reference point for the versions in 40 other languages that exist”, including the English-language version, which between them attracted a total of two million visits in 2021.
In the same year 'Melv75' was launching into action to add a gloss to the billionaire's biography by subtly highlighting positive information and shortening more awkward episodes in his background.
The first aim was to deal with a troublesome film and on May 6th 2021 the contributor expanded the biographical page's section on 'Merci Patron!' ('Thanks Boss!'). This documentary by journalist François Ruffin – now a radical left MP – mocked LVMH's methods and had made Ruffin one of Bernard Arnault's bêtes noires, to such an extent that he was spied on by Bernard Squarcini and his team. 'Melv75' added several sentences to highlight Bernard Arnault's line of defence in the current version of the Wikipedia page. He wrote that the boss of the luxury goods group believes the film contains “attacks from 'observers on the far-left' and, highlighting the jobs it has created, insists that the group is a 'counterexample' for political organisations that seek to criticise it”.
There was another modification on the same day, again under the name of 'Melv75'. In the section on the page about the 'Boussac affair' - which tells the story of the dismantling by Bernard Arnault of a textile group that was once owned by France's 'cotton king' Marcel Boussac - the Wikipedia contributor removed one little phrase. This had observed that the LVMH boss did not keep the “commitments” he had made about preserving jobs when he bought Boussac, a group which had filed for bankruptcy but which owned fashion house Christian Dior.
False sources
Some days later, on May 18th, the same account embarked on another modification: this was in the 'Early Life' section of Bernard Arnault's Wikipedia entry, which is at the top of the page and thus widely read by users. Here he deleted a reference to the “bourgeois education” that the billionaire's parents had provided for him. This reference was not inaccurate - Bernard Arnault's childhood growing up in a family of bourgeois manufacturers in the north of France had already been told many times – and was later restored by another contributor. But on January 9th 2022 'Melv75' once again insisted that the word 'bourgeois' be removed.
The contributor 'Melv75' also intervened in the section about Bernard Arnault's assets being tax domiciled in Belgium, another sensitive issue which had tarnished the image of captain of French industry that the LVMH boss has cultivated. The contributor expanded the Wikipedia page to include the businessman's own take on the issue.
On January 15th 2022 'Melv75' stated in the biography that the billionaire had “never faced proceedings from the French legal or tax authorities in this affair”, referring to the issue of Belgian tax domicile status. To prove that this statement was based on a precise source – a fundamental condition if fellow Wikipedia members were to allow a modification – the contributor provided a link to an article that had miraculous appeared two days earlier on a site unknown to the general public, Drapeau Rouge ('Red Flag'). That article is about a new tax convention signed between France and Belgium two months previously but it notes in passing that Bernard Arnault had “never faced proceedings by the French legal or tax authorities”. This allowed 'Melv75' to justify his change to other contributors, who were unaware that Drapeau Rouge was also working for Avisa, publishing its content.
When approached by Mediapart, the management at Drapeau Rouge did not respond to our questions.
In the end, 'Melv75's' work resulted in 15 discreet changes to Bernard Arnault's biography, and another to the Louis-Vuitton Foundation's Wikipedia page, using a subtle approach to avoid being spotted.
“We have followed to the utmost the planned wording while respecting the criteria of the encyclopaedia and the benefit/risk balance,” Avisa Partners said at the end of its task to LVMH, in a document seen by Mediapart. “Thanks to this approach the measures that were employed permitted interventions that were accepted by the community and thus 'solid',” it congratulated itself. However, the firm told its prestigious client, two of the requests for modifications on the page “represented too great a risk” and could have led to other contributors spotting manipulation. The agency would seek to make further attempts “when the context allows”.
The LVMH group did not reply to Mediapart's questions on this.
Friends well-treated, enemies discredited
The strategy to infiltrate Wikipedia did not just rely on 'Melv75'. Other accounts were also used, using varied profiles to make them hard to spot. The evidence needed to expose such accounts is often hard to compile, especially as the volunteers who are tracking the agencies do not have the same level of resources as the agencies, as one contributor involved in the anti-advertising campaign told Mediapart. She suggested it takes “between 30 minutes and three quarters of an hour” to verify one article. “This is about volunteer time faced with agency accounts who are being paid,” she said.
That was how another suspect contributor, 'Rapatoast', was able to escape internal checks up to now. Registered in November 2021, this account carried out numerous changes to the Wikipedia page on Philippe Heim, chair of the executive board of La Banque Postale and executive vice-president of La Poste Group. These changes mostly involved the removal of information about the circumstances in which Philippe Heim had left his previous roles at Société Générale bank. Other contributions were often innocuous but 'Rapatoast' never stated at any time that they worked for an agency, in this case Avisa Partners.
When approached, La Poste Group confirmed to Mediapart that Avisa Partners had carried out the “inclusion of new and factual information” on Philippe Heim's page as part of a “contract to monitor social networks between November 2021 and the end of June 2022” agreed by La Banque Postale.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Doubt remains, however, over the activities of other accounts. An example is the mysterious account 'Ithaque Odysseus'. Because of dubious behaviour reported by other members of Wikipedia, this contributor was threatened with suspension in March 2022. But he strenuously defended himself inside the community. Yes, he “contributed mostly via a shared connection” but this was only because he “lives in a region with an internet network of poor quality” he explained over the issue of his internet connection addresses. He protested: “As Wikipedia is not a pale imitation of Soviet trials, I really hope that an unfair and unilateral decision will not be applied to my account.” In the end, because of the lack of conclusive evidence, 'Ithaque Odysseus' was not sanctioned.
Yet an analysis of this contributor's activity on Wikipedia reinforces the initial suspicions about him. In 2020 and 2021 he added to the biography of Philippe Wahl, the CEO of La Poste and also chair of the supervisory board at La Banque Postale, which had just taken on Avisa's services.
But on this occasion the changes were not part of the group's commercial relationship with Avisa. “We have never asked for any contribution or services from Avisa Partners concerning Philippe Wahl in any way whatsoever,” La Poste Group told Mediapart.
Among the contributions from 'Ithaque Odysseus' was one made on March 26th 2021 when he argued that a section on a controversy that had broken out in 2013 about Philippe Wahl's pay – he had received 736,490 euros, well over the legal limit of 450,000 euros established for public companies – was not sufficiently sourced. This was despite the fact that there was a link on the Wikipedia page to an investigation by Mediapart which had revealed the affair. Two weeks later a vigilant contributor put the matter right by pointing out to her associate that the source was indeed there “in the footnote in the following sentence” and that his intervention was therefore unwarranted.
Asked about this particular case Avisa Partners did not reply. La Poste insisted that it was “not a request” it had made. “We don't know anything about this account,” it said.
At the start of 2022 'Ithaque Odysseus' had another favoured subject: the president of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, who had launched her campaign for the presidential election. The links between one of Avisa Partners' co-founders, Matthieu Creux, and Valérie Pécresse are known; the former started his political career in the latter's private office when she was minister for higher education from 2007 to 2011.
'Ithaque Odysseus' intervened several times on Valérie Pécresse's Wikipedia page to tone down controversies involving the presidential candidate for the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) party. On February 18th this year, in the middle of the presidential campaign, he tried – unsuccessfully, as another member opposed his contribution – to delete part of the candidate's biography relating to revelations from investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaîné and Marianne magazine. These revelations concerned her position - and that of her husband - in the sale of French company Alstom to American conglomerate General Electric.
Even after the first round of the presidential election in April – in which the LR candidate came fifth with less than 5% of the vote – 'Ithaque Odysseus' criticised the handling of Valérie Pécresse's Wikipedia page which “resembles a campaign smear tactic” and sought to soften it. “A little nuance in a section that's entirely critical,” he urged on April 18th 2022. This time he changed the heading on a section about the “recruitment of fake activists” by Valérie Pécresse during a meeting at Brive in central France in 2019, an affair revealed by Mediapart a year earlier. The new heading read: “Suspicion of having recourse to fake activists”.
Avisa Partners did not respond to questions about its relationship with Valérie Pécresse's team.
Meanwhile, the Paris region president's office told Mediapart that “neither Valérie Pécresse nor her entourage asked Avisa Partners for any service whatsoever during the presidential election campaign”. It continued: “Nor have we in other campaigns, we have never been their clients.” Her office said that Valérie Pécresse's Wikipedia page “like all political pages has for years and in each and every campaign been a playground for activists of all persuasions, in favour or against.” It added: “None of the changes, including those you talk about, were made at our initiative.”
Profiles mobilised against creating an Avisa page
Avisa's main competitor in economic intelligence in France is ADIT, a company co-owned by private investors and the public agency that looks after state investment in firms, the Agence des Participations de l’État (APE), plus the publicly-owned Banque Publique d’Investissement (BPI). ADIT has recently experienced some curious issues with its Wikipedia page. Indeed, in early May ADIT formally reported these issues to prosecutors, claiming it was a victim of the “supplying of false information,” “forgery and use of false instruments” and “criminal conspiracy”. The prosecution authorities in Paris say this complaint is still being assessed.
According to Mediapart's investigations, a contributor who had registered just a month before but who was already very active in the Wikipedia community had modified the ADIT Wikipedia page on April 19th 2022. The contributor, who uses the name 'Tocrahc', added a section called 'Controversies' which sought to highlight all the controversies in which the company had supposedly been embroiled. In particular 'Tocrahc' stated that this company had supposedly taken part in spreading fake press articles on behalf of tobacco firm Philip Morris International. Yet this information came from a blog on Mediapart Club - which has now been removed - written by an account linked to Avisa Partners.
“ADIT harbours deep suspicions, even if its complaint was made against person or persons unknown while it awaits police and judicial investigations, as to the people who manipulated its Wikipedia page in a malicious way and those who introduced erroneous information on that Wikipedia page. It is a serious case of information manipulation,” said ADIT's lawyer Olivier Baratelli.
“I have absolute confidence that the French justice system will determine with certainty who are the authors of these demonstrations of hostility towards ADIT, it being clear that this manipulation is clearly aimed at damaging the leading French economic intelligence company and to try to dent its reputation. The facts seem even more serious and appalling to me given that they target a business in which the French state has kept a controlling stake since its privatisation, and that the company has clearance in terms of French state secrets,” the lawyer said.
Avisa Partners did not respond to questions about the activities of this contributor. Interestingly, 'Tocrahc', who was so active on ADIT's Wikipedia page, also made many changes to the encyclopaedia's page on Chad, whose government is a major client of Avisa, even though the French firm disputed this to Mediapart. These changes appear balanced, with 'Tocrahc' tackling issues linked to poverty and human rights, though some wording could come across as flattering to Chad's government. For example, the contributor writes of the corruption that “remains high in Chad” and that this is the case “despite many schemes to clamp down on unlawful markets, money laundering and the monopolization of public value by third parties”. It is the same with a reference to the “independence of the media” which is “not guaranteed” in the country. The Wikipedia contributor notes that “the authorities justify this failure on the grounds of security issues”.
On March 20th 2022, a week after he joined the Wikipedia community, 'Tocrahc' also intervened in preliminary discussions over the creation of a Wiki page on Avisa Partners. In particular the contributor wanted to delete information on the links – even though they have been proven – between co-founder Arnaud Dassier and the presidential campaign of far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour.
By contrast, in May, following Emmanuel Macron's re-election, 'Tocrahc' expanded the Wikipedia entries for two people close to the government, minister Olivia Grégoire and former Élysée advisor Sylvain Fort, to highlight their past experience at Avisa Partners.
Back on March 26th, when Wikipedia contributors were discussing publishing a page on Avisa Partners – including the information about Arnaud Dassier and Zemmour's campaign - 'Tocrahc' had made his unhappiness clear. “Why hurry? Let's keep a copy of the page and look at it in a few months,” he said, trying to delay it. His argument was not accepted and the page was published. But in June there was another debate about whether to delete the page.
This time it was 'Melv75', the contributor who had changed Bernard Arnault's Wikipedia page, who entered the fray, intervening on June 23rd with the aim of getting the Avisa page removed. But four days later Mediapart published the initial investigation on Avisa's practices and this persuaded many contributors to argue for the page to be kept. Sensing that the mood had changed, 'Melv75' then completely changed his mind, doubtless in the hope that he would not be spotted.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter