They would have published hundreds of virulent messages in a few hours. Two men and six women were arrested on Tuesday in Moselle, Rhône, Seine-et-Marne, Hauts-de-Seine and Finistère and will be tried at a later date, learned Agence France- Press (AFP) to the Paris prosecutor’s office, Wednesday 19 January. These eight members of the anti-vaccine group V_V will appear before the Paris Criminal Court for “online moral harassment”, after concerted and targeted actions on two parliamentarians and a doctor in 2021.
The operation, coordinated by the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity, Genocide and War Crimes (OCLCH), targeted members of the group of Italian origin ViVi or V_V. The two men (45 and 54 years old), including a Moselle leader of the V_V in France, and the six women (aged 40 to 52) have been placed in police custody as part of investigations carried out since the spring by the national center for the fight against online hate.
“We had to act”
Justice accuses them of having harassed three people in a concerted way between the spring and the end of the summer of 2021. Among the victims of harassment are the Moselle deputy Isabelle Rauch (La République en Marche), the senator of Charente, Nicole Bonnefoy (Socialist Party), and a department head of the university hospital center of Amiens, reported sources familiar with the matter.
“At the moment, elected officials are the object of threats by anti-vaccines and since hate speech announces acts of hate, we had to act”, General Jean-Philippe Reiland, commander of the OCLCH, told AFP. The Moselle research section and other local services participated in the arrests, while the Metz cyber antenna facilitated the identification of suspects, “all well integrated”, but unrelated to a health profession, according to General Reiland. The V_V bring together around 300 supporters in France, “including a hundred really active”, according to the senior officer.
“Guerriers V_V”
The name of the movement would come from the Italian verb to live (“live”) and its logo, a double red V in the center of a circle, diverts that of the graphic novel V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The members, who describe themselves as “warriors”, highlight in their digital profiles the stylized mask of Guy Fawkes, popularized by the hackers of Anonymous and become an emblem of the defense of freedoms.
In December, Facebook’s director of emerging threat investigations, Mike Dvilyanski, explained that the members of this group coordinate in particular by Telegram messaging. Volunteers had access to lists of people to target and to « formations » to escape the automatic detection of the American giant. On the networks, their tactics consisted in particular of leaving comments under the messages of the people targeted rather than posting content. To get through Facebook’s auto-detection, they used slightly modified spellings, like vaxcinati instead of vaccine (“vaccinated persons”, in Italian).
Under the publications of institutions, elected officials or press articles, we can thus see dozens of messages appearing, sometimes perfectly identical, published in a short period of time. They denounce a “vaccination blackmail”, “the real virus [sont] the government and the system that kills people and destroys society” and say “stop the removal of rights”.
After devoting an article to them in June 2021, the newspaper The Parisian had been the victim of a digital raid on his Facebook page with “over 1,400 hateful comments” posted in just three hours. Harassment, when committed online or on a digital medium, is punishable by two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros.
La mouvance V_V would gather some 20,000 supporters worldwide according to a report published in December by Graphika, a company specializing in social media analysis. Some members have also taken part in acts of vandalism against hospitals and operations to interfere with vaccinations, by taking medical appointments without honoring them, for example, still according to Graphika.