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An AI-generated video falsely depicting a military coup in France proved convincing enough to prompt an African head of state to contact President Emmanuel Macron seeking clarification about the fabricated crisis.
The deepfake footage, which accumulated 13 million views on Facebook during the second week of December, presented itself as breaking news from a fictitious French television channel called "Live 24." A computer-generated reporter announced that Macron and his government had been overthrown by an unnamed colonel, with backdrop visuals showing the illuminated Eiffel Tower, flashing police lights, a hovering helicopter, and an armed soldier monitoring crowds behind police cordons.
"One of my African counterparts sent me a message: 'Dear president, what is happening in your country?'" Macron revealed during a Tuesday visit to Marseille, speaking to the regional newspaper La Provence.
The French president acknowledged his initial amusement at the obviously fabricated content quickly gave way to frustration when his team encountered resistance from Meta in removing the video.
Despite Macron's team reporting the video to Facebook's parent company Meta on Dec. 14, the platform initially declined to remove the content, stating it did not violate usage rules. The video remained accessible for several days, bearing only a minor warning label that read "this content may have been digitally created or altered to seem real."
"These people are mocking us. They don't care about keeping public debates healthy, they mock the sovereignty of democracies and are putting us in danger," Macron said in Marseille, directing his criticism at major technology companies.
The French leader suggested even his position provided insufficient leverage against tech giants. "I tend to think that I have more leverage than most... Well, it doesn't work. As you can see, we're not well-enough equipped," he said.
The video, uploaded by a user operating under the alias "ISLAM," finally disappeared from the platform Wednesday morning, three days after Macron first became aware of its existence.
The December incident comes as at least the second AI-generated coup video targeting France within the same month. Earlier in December, another fabricated video falsely claiming to originate from RFI, a French international radio broadcaster and sister station to FRANCE 24, made similar coup allegations. That video, also posted by the username "ISLAM," garnered 3 million views before being removed.
The incidents come amid broader shifts in social media content moderation policies. In Jan. 2025, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, would eliminate most fact-checking mechanisms.
"We're going to get rid of fact-checkers (that) have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US," Zuckerberg said in announcing the policy change, a move widely interpreted as yielding to pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump.
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