FIP: Le Point logo used in false Armenia report

PanARMENIAN.Net - False information targeting Armenia’s political sphere is being circulated on the social platform X under the name of the French magazine Le Point, FIP.am reports.

At first glance, a bot-like account posted a video bearing the logo of the well-known French publication Le Point. The subtitles claim that 70% of members of Armenia’s Civil Contract party have applied for French citizenship.

“This is France’s direct interference in Armenia’s political life. The same situation occurred in Moldova ahead of parliamentary elections,” the video’s subtitles state.

The video has gained wide circulation on X.

FIP writes that there is no information confirming that 70% of Civil Contract members applied for French citizenship. There has not even been discussion of such a claim in Armenia’s political sphere, and no source has reported it.

Obtaining French citizenship is a complex and lengthy process requiring years of residence in France and specific conditions. Granting citizenship to hundreds of officials at once would be technically and politically impossible. Moreover, there is no such article or report on the Le Point website.

The logo used in the video belongs to Le Point, a political and social weekly considered one of France’s three largest news magazines.

At the end of the video circulated on X, two individuals are listed as authors: Boris Hansel and Pierre Le Mouellic. Both are real people but have no connection to political journalism. Boris Hansel is a well-known French professor who has written exclusively on health and scientific topics for Le Point. One of his recent YouTube videos addressed weight gain after quitting smoking.

Pierre Le Mouellic is a video editor. His name appears at the end of Hansel’s actual videos as the person responsible for editing.

According to FIP, the creators of the fake video took the closing segment of one of Le Point’s health-related videos and attached it to politically themed content in order to lend credibility to the fabricated material circulating on X.

FIP notes that Le Point has previously been used in disinformation campaigns. Some time ago, information was spread using the outlet’s logo claiming that caricatures of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had appeared on buildings, but that assertion was later debunked by French fact-checkers.

The video was shared by an apparently bot-operated anonymous X account showing suspicious activity; its previous post before the latest one dated back to 2012 and was written in Spanish.

FIP states that this mechanism of spreading false information is characteristic of the Storm-1516 disinformation campaign. Active since 2023, the network specializes in creating “false sensations” presented as journalistic investigations or exposés. Storm-1516 mainly focuses on short, fabricated and emotionally charged videos distributed on social platforms such as X and Telegram.

France’s VIGINUM center (Service de vigilance et de protection contre les ingérences numériques étrangères), which combats foreign digital interference, has published a report on the Storm 1516 disinformation campaign, describing it as an “information manipulation set” — a network focused on carrying out informational and propaganda influence operations.