On September 9, Sweden's new Health Minister, Elisabet Lann, collapsed during a press conference she was attending with other members of the government. The footage was widely shared on social media, including TikTok, where some users claimed the incident occurred just after the minister revealed to the press that she was allegedly having a secret romantic relationship with Emmanuel Macron. However, the minister made no such claims, explaining that she was simply suffering from hypoglycemia.

" News flash: all the French are in shock [sic] at the moment after Elisabeth's revelation [sic]": this is how a video with approximate syntax begins, shared thousands of times on TikTok, and which concerns an alleged " secret of Emmanuel Macron " that the Swedish minister allegedly revealed " during an interview ".

According to the voiceover, presumably generated by artificial intelligence, Ms. Lann thus " said that she had a romantic relationship with Emmanuel Macron ."   with whom she would have " had a child before their respective careers separated them [sic]" before " losing consciousness crying "   under the influence of emotion.

Fictional "revelations"

But viewing the images filmed during the press conference and transmitted to AFP by the Swedish authorities shows that Elisabet Lann never made these comments.

On TikTok ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ) and Facebook ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), we find several versions of the same false information, totaling tens of thousands of views and shares. The most shared, dated September 10, has thus garnered more than 35,000 likes and nearly 8,000 shares. Despite some differences in editing, the videos broadcast a few days apart share the same audio of a voiceover designed in the style of a television news program.

Contrary to what the publications claim, this is not an interview but a presentation conference of the new Minister of Health , which took place on Tuesday, September 9 in Stockholm in the company of the Minister of Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed and the president of the Christian Democrats party, Ebba Busch (link archived here ).

From the original presentation video obtained   by AFP, lasting 11 minutes and 32 seconds, the minister never mentioned the name of Emmanuel Macron, let alone a past " romantic relationship" . Elisabet Lann takes the floor at 08:19, and sticks to general considerations related to her taking up of office, evoking the challenges facing Swedish social security and the problem of " long waiting times " for medical care before briefly outlining her background.

As Social Affairs Minister Jakob Forssmed resumes speaking, Elisabet Lann appears to feel unwell and loses consciousness a few moments later (at 11:05). The video's audio is muted, the camera angle is moved away from the scene, and then the broadcast is cut.

According to the Swedish press, the minister was escorted to another room to collect her thoughts before returning to the conference room a few minutes later: a reporter from the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet who was present at the scene reported that the minister explained to those present that she had fallen due to a " hypoglycemic " attack (archived link here ). This testimony was corroborated by other media present at the scene, such as the television channel SVT (archived link here ).

A nebula of pro-Russian accounts

Behind these posts, which spread quickly by capitalizing on an already viral video, we find a swarm of accounts regularly sharing pro-Russian content glorifying Russian President Vladimir Putin and attacking actors, people, or countries supporting Ukraine.

Most of these TikTok channels, created in the previous months, adopt pseudonyms and a semblance of appearance reminiscent of continuous news channels or online media: " Actumondial24 ", " MrActu ", " Actugeopolitique "... and apply a voiceover, presumably generated by artificial intelligence, to excerpts from television news in order to give credibility to their stories.

These accounts share the same audio over various image montages, some of which reveal inconsistencies: in one of them, images of former French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne are used to refer to Swedish Minister Elisabet Lann.

In another clip , a video sequence illustrating Emmanuel Macron's supposed " relationship " with the minister actually shows the French president with the First Lady, Brigitte Macron.

A recurring modus operandi

The modus operandi of this nebula of small TikTok accounts is reminiscent of another fake news story, already verified by AFP and disseminated in the wake of a meeting of several countries, including France and the United Kingdom, which had pledged to send troops to Ukraine to guarantee peace as soon as an agreement was signed between Ukraine and Russia. The false claim falsely claimed that the French General Staff had disobeyed Emmanuel Macron's order " to send French soldiers to fight Russia in Ukraine " (archived link here ).

Countries supporting Ukraine are regularly targeted by pro-Russian online disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion in Western countries. Among the most prominent examples are the Doppelgänger , Matryoshka , and CopyCop campaigns , which have made extensive use of inauthentic profiles, known as bots, to publish AI-generated content aimed, among other things, at undermining Western support for Ukraine.

The disinformation campaign targeting Elisabet Lann, like the one targeting the French army and Emmanuel Macron, shares certain characteristics of this modus operandi: both campaigns use the same phrases, the same format designed to give the illusion of information coming from a reliable media outlet shared by a large number of different actors, and the same alleged source, " numerous witnesses " whose traceability is impossible.

Furthermore, many of the " news " accounts used to share the fake news have only been active for a short time, and some of the content shared only remains online for a few days, while the comments on the videos seem to be amplified by bots, empty accounts that are only a few weeks or months old. Several of these accounts also spread the two fake news stories within a few days of each other.