"Boycott of the Olympics": Bayou and Caron fall into the trap of a fake American media

“This is now the image of France in the world.” On Wednesday August 2, EELV deputy Julien Bayou relayed on "X", formerly Twitter, a video from New York Insider, an alleged American media calling for a boycott of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (JO), paralleling images of sports competitions with those of police interventions in demonstrations and the video showing a policeman shooting Nahel in Nanterre at the end of June. “Despite the attempts to hide misery with the showcase of

Both MPs were actually framed and have since deleted their tweets. It is that New York Insider has nothing of a real media. As a BFMTV reporter noted, the Twitter account that shared the video - which had four million views a week after it was posted - is actually called @NewYorkLnsider, using a lowercase "l" to mimic an "I capital letter, because this pseudo is already taken by a resident of New York.

He was able to obtain the blue tick, once guaranteeing the identity of a media or a personality, by paying for the Twitter Blue subscription, deployed by Elon Musk since his takeover of the social network. The account was created in 2011 but could have acquired this name only very recently, since there is no trace of it in the web archives. As for @NewYork_Insider, he is already taken by an application of the same name.

As for the site of the alleged media, if it looks like a news site, it is mainly filled with content plagiarized on real American media or agency dispatches. The seven articles on the home page on the morning of August 3 are all copy-pasted articles from the New York Times and the Fox News channel site. The newyorkinsider.net domain name, on which it is hosted, was only registered on June 27, anonymously.

There is indeed an original article, which relays the reactions to the video broadcast on “X”. The site welcomes the success of the assembly in France and writes that "the frustration and anger of the French are aimed at the supposed bad political strategy of President Emmanuel Macron, which raises growing concerns about the tarnished image of France in abroad”.

Could this be a foreign propaganda site? The few other articles that aren't dispatches or cut-and-paste from mainstream US media are about...Azerbaijan. And the first accounts to have commented on the video on Twitter accumulate tweets of support for the Azerbaijani power and anti-Armenians, as noted by a journalist from BFMTV.

Several Azerbaijani sites also welcome the recovery of positive information about their president by foreign “media”, including newyorkinsider.net. These are the only sites on the web that cite this media, with "PR to SKY", which offers to publish, for 79 dollars (72 euros), a press release on newyorkinsider.net. A very young site in English, whose domain name was registered on May 30 by Mediamark, a "marketing agency" based in... Baku, Azerbaijan.