State responses to foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) have predominantly operated through detection, attribution, and fact-checking. @FrenchResponse, launched by France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 2025, marks a significant departure from that approach: a publicly identified, adversarial counter-disinformation account engaging hostile content directly on X. This study provides an empirical analysis of its first five months of operation, drawing on a hand-coded dataset of 127 timeline posts, social listening data covering 22,093 engaging accounts, and three confrontation case studies. The central finding cuts against the confrontation premise: audience overlap with adversary threads runs below 1.3% across three structurally different confrontations. Yet the account's observable effects cluster around mobilization, ecosystem anchoring, and a new gradation in public diplomatic communication, functions that may prove its more durable contribution. The findings are used to assess what the model implies for state-driven adversarial response and the conditions under which it could be replicated.
Mickaël Bazin (2026) studied this question.