The first deputy mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, considered that this type of messages are ‘sometimes very harmful to the reputation of the city and its agents’, and considered unacceptable ‘that the city is subject to misinformation and abusive manipulation’.

The mayor recalled that while sometimes ‘are jokes that are taken very seriously,’ in many others ‘are acts of obvious malice with serious consequences for the abundance of retweets, thousands of likes and dozens of press articles that are generated,’ he said.

For all these reasons, the municipal council of the capital decided to organize a ‘systematic response’ against these disinformation campaigns and contemplates ‘if necessary, to take legal action in the dimensions of defamation and public insults because it has come to this,’ said Grégoire.

Moreover, with the presidential election campaign approaching, and in which Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo is a candidate, Grégoire considered that hoax and fake news messages are ‘particularly instrumentalized,’ he said.

‘Instrumentalizing, lying, smearing all the time, it is not part of the game and has taken such a place in the democratic debate that it is important that we organize ourselves to contradict,’ he added, and to deal with it will offer ‘an official response.

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