Anna

This is how the Iranian regime's accounts work their way into a French audience. Each account begins with a French face: a French name, a French city and a short life story. One is a journalist from Marseille, another a doctoral student in Lyon, another a mother. Several borrow the names of French celebrities. The account then collects followers. It follows thousands of French users in communities where following back is a courtesy, and they follow it in return. That is how an account that X locates in Iran comes to have more than 4,000 followers, most of them French. It grows through emotion. Images of suffering in Gaza are the largest part of what these accounts publish and bring their largest audiences. The followers and the credibility gained there are then spent on French politics. To reach people who do not follow them, the accounts place replies under the posts of news media, elected politicians and the President, where hundreds of thousands of French readers will see them. Half of everything they publish is a reply of this kind. At every French crisis since 2023 they have carried one message: the President is a dictator, the police are the enemy, and the answer is the street. When X began showing where accounts are based, in November 2025, most of them fell silent within days. The ones that returned this autumn connect through an app build that shows a region and not a country. The loudest voice now belongs to the accounts of an outlet that French authorities attribute to the Iranian regime's interference, and those accounts display France as their location. One month ago we documented the same method ahead of Israel's election.