In the age of social media and disinformation, journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and media watchdogs in democracies are figuring out how to band together to create a line of defense against those who seek to sow division and doubt in advance of elections. 

This week, a French coalition calling itself the Online Election Integrity Watch Group published a summary report on its activities ahead of this spring’s national election there. The group includes entities such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Check First, GEODE, the Institute of Complex Systems, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Tracking Exposed, and Reset Tech, an initiative run by the Luminate foundation. To learn more about what the Watch Group learned in this election cycle, Tech Policy Press spoke to the report’s lead authors, Théophile Lenoir and Iris Boyer.