Manufactured
Several websites campaigning against Emmanuel Macron, such as Fdesouche.com, resistancerepublicaine.eu and lagauchematuer.fr claimed that the candidate’s wife quickly erased her Twitter account after launching a survey on April 29th regarding second round votes, due to the result being favorable to Marine Le Pen. However, Brigitte Macron’s supposed Twitter account turned out to be a fake account.
“We are launching a little poll 1 week before the election! Who are you supporting in the second round?”, can be read in the screenshot of a Tweet from the account @BMacronOff which uses a picture of Brigitte Macron. The tweet was used widely by the aforementioned websites. The survey results vary depending on the time at which the screenshot was taken, but all of them name Marine Le Pen as the winner with a large majority (63 to 73% of voters).
“Brigitte Macron launches a poll about the second round, and the result is not what she expected”, states website lagauchematuer.fr. “Brigitte Macron received a slap in the face with her online poll“, adds resistancerepublicaine.eu. The far-right website Fdesouche.com wondered if Mrs Macron did not suppress these polls “because of the results”, before deleting its own article which CrossCheck found thanks to an internet archival tool.
The reason for this turnaround is quite simple: many elements reveal that Brigitte Macron has no connection with the Twitter account @BMacronOff. This account is not certified by Twitter, yet almost every public personality (and certainly political ones) are certified by Twitter. Furthermore, the account @BMacronOff was not active before the poll, and has since been suspended.
When contacted by Le Monde, a CrossCheck project partner, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team confirmed that Brigitte Macron did not own any Twitter account.
