A full version of this report is available through NewsGuard’s Reality Check.

By Natalie Huet, McKenzie Sadeghi, and Chine Labbe | Published April 17, 2025

A Russian propaganda operation that previously took aim at elections in the U.S. and Germany has a new target: France.

NewsGuard found that Storm-1516 — a Russian influence operation that includes the efforts of John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff granted asylum in Moscow turned Kremlin propagandist that uses AI to create and spread false claims — targeted France with five false narratives from December 2024 to March 2025. The disinformation spread in 38,877 social media posts, generating 55.8 million views. That compares to just one narrative targeting France in the previous four months that spread in only 938 social media posts that accumulated 845,000 views. 

Moreover, NewsGuard’s analysts found that leading generative AI chatbots readily repeated these false narratives about France, representing a new disinformation threat, in which false claims are not just reaching humans via social media, but through the underlying tools people use to consume news and information.