FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
PARIS – Doppelganger is the evil double of a person in Germanic folklore and also a Russian disinformation operation documented back in 2022, notably by European organization EU DisinfoLab and American giant Meta. This operation reached a second, more sophisticated level, which was denounced by the French Foreign Ministry.
Targeted newspapers and ministries
Paris accuses Moscow of having published false articles with anti-Ukrainian content on the copy sites of Parisien, Le Monde, Le Figaro and 20 Minutes. France condemned these actions as part of Russia’s “hybrid warfare” and as “unworthy of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council”. “The French authorities have revealed the existence of a digital information manipulation campaign against France involving Russian actors and in which state bodies or entities linked to the Russian state have participated by disseminating false information,” Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said. The campaign targeted French media, as well as the Foreign Ministry and other government sites, and created mirror sites, spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said. At the end of September, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that it had repelled a covert manipulation of its platform originating in Russia to increase the visibility of these articles coming from pirate sites for which its promoters, two marketing and IT -consulting firm, had spent $105,000. Meta had hoped his report would put an end to the operations, but that wasn’t the case.
Attacks also in Germany
In addition to the four French media, other major media organizations, particularly in Germany, were also targeted (FAZ, Der Spiegel, Bild, Die Welt). The hackers produced fake articles on a site identical in all respects to the official sites, but with a different domain name, for example .ltd instead of .fr. Clicking on the links will take you to more articles from the real newspaper. Misinformation includes claims that sanctions against Russia are ruining the German economy or that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy is leading his country to disaster. According to the Parisien, about twenty fake articles on the leParisien.ltd website criticize the West, the United States, Europe and Ukraine. The articles are then reposted on social media to reach as many people as possible and to fool readers of real newspapers.
Deny the massacres
The original structure of the operation is called RRN, after the name of the pro-Russian website RRN.world, which stands for Reliable Recent News (formerly Reliable Russian News) and which launched the disinformation campaign to deny the massacres it committed against the Russians in Bucha . The fake Facebook pages also served to amplify tweets by Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen’s former right-hand man, on the war in Ukraine, as well as a video by French outlet Omerta defending pro-Russian positions. Former senator and Russia supporter Yves Pozzo di Borgo republished a fake article in Le Parisien claiming that Ukrainians were deserting en masse. In France, the Facebook ads published by the Operation since February 2023 have reached almost 3 million views in total.