What a democracy
no longer sees,
it suffers.
and the mechanisms of in France and the European Union. Doctoral thesis in progress at the CEDS, supervised by Pr. Michael Strauss.
“A democracy's capacity to guarantee its citizens an information environment reliable enough to exercise free judgement.”
“Reconstruct what circulated,
name what operated.”
The full manuscript will be made public only after the defence, scheduled for 2026. This site does not pre-empt that publication: it opens the case file.
You will find here what can be shared without compromising scientific assessment: the concepts and their definitions, the forensic cases as institutions have publicly attributed them, the protocol of the experimental study and its ethical framework. You will not find the unpublished results, the calculation formulas, the psychometric items or the technical analyses that the examination committee must review first.
The aim is simple: to let a researcher, a specialised journalist or an institution understand what is being studied, why and how, and decide, on that basis, whether to open a dialogue or engage with the study. The full conclusions themselves will wait for the defence.
Four operations,
one single ecosystem.
Since 2022, coordinated information-interference operations have targeted French democratic debate. The thesis treats them as manifestations of one and the same ecosystem, shared methods, reused infrastructure, converging public attributions.
Viginum · SGDSN
MTAC · DFRLab
EU DisinfoLab
- Op · 01
Doppelganger
Cloning of French press domains.
Documented by Viginum (2023) · sanctioned by the European Union.
- Op · 02
Matriochka
Targeting of media outlets and the fact-checking community.
Documented by Viginum (2024).
- Op · 03
Paris 2024 Games
Information saturation of a major event (the "Seine water" fabrication, fake content).
Documented by Viginum (2024) and Microsoft (MTAC).
- Op · 04
Portal Kombat
Coordinated network of multilingual pro-Russian portals.
Documented by Viginum (2024) and the DFRLab.
A conceptual apparatus,
named and situated.
The thesis's original concepts are named and defined here in a single sentence. Their full operationalisation, coefficients, items, legal drafting, appears in the manuscript.
- 01ESS
Composite index measuring a state's structural vulnerability to FIMI operations.
- 02CRMP
Protocol for the longitudinal measurement of a population's cognitive resilience.
- 03FBSS
Psychometric scale of individual susceptibility to FIMI content.
- 04ASE
A proposed institutional architecture: an Epistemic Security Agency.
- 05R1–R8
Eight societal resonators, the pre-existing vulnerabilities that FIMI exploits.
- 063 amendments
Concrete proposals for the DSA, the AI Act and the governance of the EDS (European Democracy Shield, Joint Communication JOIN(2025)791, 12 November 2025).
A rigorous trial,
a null result.
The experimental study tested the effectiveness of cognitive inoculation against documented FIMI content. Pre-registered and conducted under ethics approval with 502 completers, it returned a null primary result (d ≈ −0.10, p = 0.29): the thesis reads this as support for structural measures rather than reliance on individual inoculation alone.
- Sample
- 502 completers
- Status
- Data collection complete
- Framework
- Anonymous · ethics approval
- Pre-registered
- Analysis plan · Zenodo
- Primary result
- Null (d ≈ −0.10)
- 01May 2026
Version 2 of the open dossier goes live: ten pages, a detailed methodology, work in progress.
- 022026
Data collection for the experimental study on cognitive inoculation is complete: the primary result is null (see Methodology).
- 032019, 2025
The thesis's forensic corpus gathers 21 documented campaigns, totalling 52 analytical units coded using the DISARM framework.