It was a brief comment that provoked a surge of anger. In mid-August, a tweet from EELV MP Sandrine Rousseau received a “Note” from Twitter, a feature recently rolled out in France that allows users to anonymously add elements of context to any message. A collaborative tool, managed by Twitter users (renamed X), inspired by Wikipedia and supposed to be self-regulating.
This August 13, Sandrine Rousseau publishes a message that evokes “male violence”, including incest, with the aggressors being mostly men. She then mentions the number of “3 boys” victims of incest per class. A difficult statistic to establish, but quickly embellished with a Twitter “Note” casting doubt on this figure.
“‘Three incestuous children per class’ arises from an online survey carried out by Ipsos among 1,000 people. The notion of ‘incestuous experience’ used is very broad and includes in particular the fact of having suffered the nudity of their parents as sexual confidences”, He then secured the note.
The note was later removed, though keep it accessible in the dedicated menu, for Internet users who have registered as a collaborator.
“No right of reply”
A point of view that the chosen ecologist is far from the only one he shares. On August 21, deputy RN Thomas Ménagé, questioned on France Inter, assured that he did not want to imagine a policy based solely on “data from the IPCC”, an international group of UN climate experts. In the following hours, a “Note” specifies that Giec “does not produce data” and “does not exaggerate”.
“Those who wrote the note are technically right,” Thomas Ménagé admits to Tech&Co. But he also remembers the difficulty a politician has in “summarizing his thoughts, without summarizing it too much.”
Like Sandrine Rousseau, Thomas Ménagé claims to appreciate the concept of a collaborative tool intended to put a false claim into context. But he regrets the lack of right of reply on the part of the interested party. A point of view shared again by several elected officials, who saw one of his tweets adorned with a “Note”, including the LFI elect Hadrien Clouet.
On August 19, he had thus mentioned the impossibility of finding a medicine (Movicol), in four pharmacies in the same region. A “Note” was then posted on Twitter to clarify that the drug was not in a “shortage situation”, according to the ANSM, the Medicines Agency.
“Remembering that there is a shortage of a drug at the local level does not necessarily imply a shortage at the national level. These are comments that go hand in hand with the initial declaration of discredit”, judge Hadrien Clouet.
risk management
Because despite its theoretical operation inspired by Wikipedia, the Twitter tool still seems malleable to manipulation, sometimes called “astroturfing”, observes the deputy Julien Bayou, also the subject of a “Note” on August 2. on nuclear power – with Tech&Co. Often used for political purposes, astroturf is a method of coordinated communication on a social network to generate opinion.
Since the beginning of August, Twitter “Notes” have mainly targeted left-wing personalities, among the affected elected officials. Thus, some thirty “contextualizations” have been set in messages such as those mentioned above, or even in publications of marine tondelier (ELV), Mathilde Panot (BIA), or Clementine Autain (LFI).
Based on tweet history from the official account “Twitter Notes”, only two elected officials from the right and extreme right (the LR eric ciotti and RN Thomas Ménagé) for their part have expressed concern about the publication of “Notes”. Messages that nevertheless point to the government, a dozen times since the beginning of August.
“We correct people, not knowledge”
For the moment, X (ex Twitter), which does not respond to the media, does not communicate the number of French contributors to its tool. This figure could, however, give an idea of the porosity -or not- of the system to manipulation attempts by well-organized groups of political activists: a coordination that could, for example, be used to vote en masse for a “Nota “, so that this ci is displayed to all users.
Yes Twitter gladly compare With its Wikipedia tool, the elected officials are more divided, highlighting an important difference with the online encyclopedia: the total opacity on the identity of the taxpayers, also responsible for validating or not the “Notes”. “They are anonymous. It seems to me like a company to discredit any word that does not like,” laments Sandrine Rousseau.
“Wikipedia are pages that remain, that are read and that can be corrected. It is enough to make a false ‘Note’, which is then drowned in the Twitter feed, but which discredits the author of the tweet,” Sandrine Rousseau abounds. The environmentalist finally sees in this function “an additional cultural tool in the battle of Elon Musk.”
Source: BFM TV
