From Reuters (November 9):

A covert Russian network sought to exploit last month’s riots in France by using social media to blame the unrest on ​uncontrolled immigration and portray the government as having lost control, according to an internal EU assessment seen by Reuters.
A separate internal assessment, compiled by France’s foreign ‌ministry and also seen by Reuters, found that social media accounts linked to Israel and to the US MAGA movement also pushed “hostile narratives” around the riots, linking them to radical Islamism and migration.

The effort to inject talk of into the discussion of the turmoil in France has been underway for a while now (I wrote about it for the first time three weeks ago), and it is as dishonest now as it was then.

Russia has undoubtedly been trying to inflame the situation in France. But it is unlikely that these or any other such efforts have made any significant difference. To start with, surveys (here’s one) repeatedly show that most French people — and they are hardly unique in this respect — do not trust what they see on social media.

If anything, talk of the danger posed by disinformation (which, on occasion, is real enough) is often so exaggerated that it can tip over into disinformation itself. (For example, those who refer to millions of “views” rarely point out that, on some social media platforms, views as short as two seconds are included in the total.) And when it does, its purpose is all too frequently to either change the subject, press for (more) censorship, or both.

That appears to be the case here.