UPDATE: Macron campaign says it has been the victim of a massive, coordinated hacking operation. https://t.co/dZ210WM8aZ pic.twitter.com/z4ahmtDsCV
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) May 5, 2017
Reuters reports:
A large trove of emails from the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was posted online late on Friday, 1-1/2 days before voters go to the polls to choose the country’s next president in a run-off against far-right rival Marine Le Pen.
Some nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for posting the data or if any of them were genuine.
In a statement, Macron’s political movement En Marche! (Onwards!) confirmed that it had been hacked.
“The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information,” the statement said.
An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing French rules which forbid any commentary liable to influence an election, and which took effect at midnight French time on Friday (2200 GMT).
Comments about the email dump began to appear on Friday evening just hours before the official ban on campaigning began. The ban is due to stay in place until the last polling stations close on Sunday at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).
Is Wikileaks involved? Of course Wikileaks is involved!
Surprise, surprise! | #France #MacronGate #Macron #LePen #LePenNon #France2017 #cyberespionage pic.twitter.com/hUZPia8PkC
— Florian Flade (@FlorianFlade) May 5, 2017
And so are the trolls for lulz crowd at 4Chan:
8 hours ago, a 4chan anon promised "swiftnet logs going back months" proving Macron has a secret Caymans bank account #Presidentielles2017 pic.twitter.com/5bXMECYdJb
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 5, 2017
Redditors are google bombing the phrase "Emmanuel Macron has a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands" by putting it in every comment pic.twitter.com/Bzt1XBFyi5
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 5, 2017
And the Le Pen campaign is exploiting the work of the 4chan folks:
.@BuzzFeedFrance And what does Le Pen do with the Caymans story? Comes out and says she has no proof. Doesn't matter. She got a headline out of it. pic.twitter.com/somT2w6GBi
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 5, 2017
Broaderick covered a different attempted social media driven scandal attack on Macron last week.
The thread was started by a Swedish user who asked members of the community if they could help him create memes and misinformation about Emmanuel Macron that could then be translated and spread across the web.
The original poster suggested they focus on a narrative that Emmanuel Macron was secretly sleeping with his wife’s 30-year-old daughter, Tiphaine Auzière.
An American user then appeared in the thread and put in a photo of Auzière superimposed over Macron, writing “something to start memeing about.”
The memes were intended to create a false sense of support for Le Pen among liberal social justice communities.
Lovely…
Reuters is also reporting that Macron is leading Le Pen going into the last 36 hours or so before the polls open.
An Ifop-Fiducial survey on Friday afternoon, hours before official campaigning closed at midnight, showed Macron on course to win 63 percent of votes in the second round and Le Pen 37 percent, the best score for Macron recorded by a major polling organization since mid-April.
Four other polls earlier in the day put the centrist on 62 percent and Le Pen on 38 percent, and a fifth showed Macron on 61.5 percent, as his second-round campaign gained ground following a stuttering start last week.
Pollsters said Macron had been boosted by his performance in a rancorous final televised debate between the two contenders on Wednesday, which the centrist was judged by French viewers to have won, according to two surveys.
It is likely that these late revelations are intended to dirty up Macron and make weaken him should he win, rather than swing the election to Le Pen. The latter, given the gap in the polling seems unlikely to happen. Regardless, we’ll have updates on Sunday once the returns are in.
Stay frosty!
And So it Begins: Ratfucking the Second Round of the French ElectionPost + Comments (290)