“Digital sovereignty is built in stages, and if the institutions do not take action, the public will not either”

Originally published in French in Le Monde on 20 May 2026 .

Emmanuel Macron, who was the target of a complex state-sponsored disinformation campaign even before his first election in 2017 [following the hacking of email accounts belonging to figures close to En Marche!, nearly 150,000 emails and documents were posted online two days before the presidential election], has shown himself determined, throughout his terms in office, to combat the manipulation of information. Several ministries and government departments have been tasked with tackling this issue. They have been provided with adequate resources, enabling France to boast some notable successes, such as Viginum, a service dealing with foreign digital interference that serves as an inspiration to counterparts abroad, or the more discreet but equally crucial Cyber Crisis Coordination Centre (C4).

More recently, the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs created an X account that has caused quite a stir: French Response. The aim is to broaden the diplomatic lexicon, introducing a satirical tone into the usually subdued realm of diplomatic discourse. Thanks to a few well-crafted quips, this account has received extensive and laudatory press coverage, a sign that it has met expectations and found its audience. French Response may even be overwhelmed by its own success; one suspects its hand is behind certain tweets from other diplomatic missions.

However, the French Response model is beginning to mark time. One might criticise it for not doing enough. If it’s going to ‘troll’ its opponents—mass disseminators of disinformation—on their own turf, why not embrace the approach and take it to its logical conclusion? We’d like to see a similar account on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook, taking on the Kremlin’s propagandists on their own turf, or a Truth Social account standing up to Donald Trump’s lies…

Above all, this account is merely a tactical response, not a strategic one. It addresses only issues of content, not channels. As long as government communication continues to favour – and legitimise – platform X, which openly admits to interfering in political processes in France and Europe, it condemns itself to having to keep responding there to lies that it helps to amplify.

Alternative platforms

What, indeed, is the point of all efforts to correct misinformation as long as government communications remain dependent on platforms – whether American or Chinese – with heavy algorithmic curation, i.e. where it is no longer the user who decides what appears on their screen? It is the platform that will choose at times to boost the visibility of one piece of content, and at others to drastically reduce that of another. Does the French Response account congratulate itself on its good scores? All Elon Musk needs to do is snap his fingers to make it invisible to users, rendering all efforts futile.

Added to this is an acknowledged dependence on non-European economic operators who harvest our data en masse, build closed ecosystems on which they make users dependent and unable to leave, and occasionally engage in interference operations ( Facebook with Cambridge Analytica , Twitter with its promotion of European allies of MAGA, TikTok, whose manipulation led to the first round of the 2024 Romanian presidential election being cancelled ).

Recently, the Ministry of the Economy announced, in a commendable effort to educate and properly inform the public, the creation of a service, ‘Bercy décode’, which commentators have sought to link to French Response. Alas. The Ministry, whose minister [Roland Lescure] is nevertheless the only member of the current government to have left X with a bang and who champions “digital sovereignty” right down to the service’s name, makes use, apart from its website, only of non-European social media platforms with heavy algorithmic curation to convey its messages.

Yet other channels are available. Free and decentralised networks are not just for geeks. Whilst the Mastodon environment may be a little daunting for the uninitiated user, Bluesky is designed to feel perfectly natural to users accustomed to X. Better still: new service providers are emerging, such as Eurosky, which offer data hosting and, soon, moderation within Europe, whilst interacting with the rest of the network worldwide.

When we speak to public authorities about these alternative platforms, they sometimes reply that opening new channels would represent an unreasonable investment given the still-small audience found there. But is that a reason to give up? Can we accept being trapped in the chicken-and-egg dilemma? Digital sovereignty is built in stages, and if institutions do not act, the public will not act either. It is more the responsibility of the state to invest in sound, well-governed digital platforms in order to attract the public than for the public to go there in the hope that institutional communicators will eventually evolve.

Incidentally, there is an added bonus to decentralised networks: their portability, much like that implemented in mobile telephony. Unlike the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), which lock their users into a proprietary environment, portability allows users to switch platforms seamlessly, without losing any of their content or connections. Data moves from one network to another. When joining one of these networks, there will never again be a ‘cold start’ – that unpleasant moment when you start with an empty timeline and zero followers. It will be the last time you have to rebuild your network.

Digital communication has taken on a central role in our democracies, both in informing citizens and in public debate. Let us protect it from malicious actors by moving it to well-governed spaces. We do not so much need tit-for-tat retaliation as we do to stop being treated like sheep by poorly managed and predatory platforms.

Robin Berjon , an expert in technology governance, is vice-president of the Modal Foundation; Nicolas Hénin , a consultant and researcher, is a member of the Mis-Translating Deceit project (University of Manchester)