Monitoring Disinformation and Influence Campaigns in the 2022 French Elections: Lessons Learnt

ISD's real-time monitoring of disinformation and influence campaigns across both the 2022 French presidential and legislative elections — covering October 2021 to June 2022 — is one of the most methodologically developed election monitoring reports available. The investigation identifies coordinated inauthentic behaviour, cross-platform health disinformation monetisation, and astroturfing campaigns, while documenting how hybrid anti-establishment narratives fused domestic grievance politics with foreign-amplified disinformation in ways that complicate attribution.

The 'lessons learnt' framing gives the report particular methodological value: Simmons, Gatewood, and Fourel reflect explicitly on what their monitoring approach could and could not capture, where it worked well, and where improvements are needed. This methodological self-assessment is rare in the election monitoring literature and directly applicable to practitioners designing monitoring operations for future elections. The French case is also analytically important because France's information environment — its domestic media landscape, its regulatory context, and its specific vulnerability to certain narrative families — makes it a distinctive and instructive case study.