Cognitive warfare goes beyond false information: it saturates minds and paralyzes democratic debate. As 2027 approaches, a collective response is required to preserve free will.
Conflict is now targeting our cognition. This “cognitive war”, studied by the ANR GECKO project, aims to destabilize institutions by exploiting our psychological flaws. Beyond propaganda, it is about saturate the public space with fear, anger or powerlessness to fragment the social body and paralyze political action.
To carry out this invisible offensive, destabilizers practice simulating spontaneous popular movements (astroturfing). AI and large language models (LLM) continuously generate billions of hyper-realistic messages, making their detection difficult. It is urgent to decode these mechanisms.
The asymmetry of threats: a weapon shared by all powers
No area escapes this militarization of information: the great powers use these technologies to influence key elections, making the presidential election a systemic issue.
Russia is among the key players. In 2024, Viginum uncovered the “Portal Kombat” network and its 190 hostile sites. Other countries are the subject of serious allegations: the BlackCore entity, linked to private interests in Israel, is suspected of interference against candidates from La France Insoumise (LFI), triggering an investigation by the National Cyber Unit. Likewise, influence campaigns linked to American interests target perceptions in Europe, proving the global nature of this threat.
French counter-influence is organized in the face of networks
Faced with these attacks, the State moves from observation to rapid response. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses the account French Response on X to counter foreign maneuvers with irony. Faced with a fake AI-generated video simulating a military mobilization, he published the evidence of the rigging: “When you try to manipulate French opinion, avoid leaving metadata in Cyrillic in your video file. Bad scenario, bad actors, 100% fake.”. By investing in the attention economy, the State disarms the adversary on its territory.
At the same time, the DGESCO collaborates with the army to deploy image decryption workshops in high schools in order to build early citizen immunity.
OSINT and citizen engagement as shields
This resistance is based on the capacity of civil society to analyze public information: open source intelligence, or OSINT. This method provides concrete tools to identify fake profiles using simple reflexes. Reverse image search to uncover stolen photos, activity analysis (an account posting 200 automated tweets per day is suspicious), and checking how recently the profile was created.
This alliance takes the form of the mobilization of experts within the Intelligence Battalion of Specialist Reservists (B2RS). These reservists put their skills at the service of staffs to map the spread of a rumor, allowing the authorities to anticipate a crisis or defuse a collective panic before it paralyzes the debate.
A horizon of vigilance for the presidential election
As the election approaches, the territory is preparing to become the scene of increased cognitive confrontation. As highlighted by the European External Action Service (EEAS)electoral periods see each geopolitical bloc accentuate its maneuvers to serve its strategic interests.
France’s response cannot be based on censorship, which is ineffective in an open democracy, but on its chain of collective resilience. It is the union between the responsiveness of the State, the technical agility of its reservists and the vigilance of trained citizens that will allow the integrity of the vote to be preserved. In 2027, victory will not be military, it will be played out in our collective capacity to defend the sovereignty of our free will.
