Far-right activists in U.S. press hacking attack in France

Efforts against Macron seek to boost Le Pen.

In the French presidential election, American far-right activists on Saturday threw their weight behind a hacking attack against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, hoping to cast doubt on an election that is pivotal to France and the wider world.

The efforts were the culmination of a monthslong campaign against Macron after his candidacy began to gain steam this year, with digital activists in the United States and elsewhere regularly sharing tactics, tips and tricks across the English- and French-speaking parts of the internet.

It is unclear whether the leaked documents, which some experts say may be connected to hackers linked to Russia, will affect the outcome of the election today between Le Pen, the far-right candidate from the National Front, and Macron, an independent centrist. But the role of American far-right groups in promoting the breach online highlights their growing resolve to spread extremist messages beyond the United States.

“It’s the anti-globalists trying to go global,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow of the digital forensics research lab at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, who has studied the far right’s recent efforts against Macron and others in France. “There’s a feeling of trying to export the revolution.”

The digital attack, which involved posting campaign documents like emails and accounting records to message boards, occurred late Friday, hours before a legal prohibition on campaign communications went into effect across France. In response, Macron’s team said the hackers had included fake information alongside authentic material “to sow doubt.”

“Intervening in the final hour of the official campaign, this operation is clearly a matter of democratic destabilization, as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” Macron’s campaign said in a statement late Friday, minutes before the communications prohibition went into effect.

Yet within hours after the hacked documents were made public, the hashtag #MacronLeaks began trending worldwide, aided by farright activists in the United States who have been trying to sway the French vote in favor of Le Pen.

Jack Posobiec, a journalist with the far-right news outlet The Rebel, was the first to use the hashtag with a link to the hacked documents online, which was then shared more widely by WikiLeaks. Posobiec remains the second-most mentioned individual on Twitter in connection with the hashtag behind WikiLeaks, according to a review of the past 100,000 Twitter posts published since late Friday.

While there is no evidence that the breach against Macron’s campaign was organized by this loosely connected group of far-right campaigners, the U.S. activists have been gathering on sites like 4chan and Discord, which were previously used to coordinate support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

One popular tactic, experts say, has been “Twitter raids,” or efforts to hijack trending hashtags and topics on the social media site and inject far-right and anti-Macron propaganda.