how were copies of news sites created?

An article by 20 minutes which claims that Ukraine is blocking wheat exports, an article in the Guardian who assures that Boutcha was staged… These articles are false: 17 media have been cloned. Their domain name is copied, but ends with a different extension. The site 20minutes.fr thus became 20minutes.com and the German tabloid Bild was falsified eight times.

This misinformation campaign, dubbed Dopplegänger, which means double in German, is ingenious in form. On the merits, two remarks came up systematically. A first narrative focused on the fact that winter was coming and that economic sanctions against Russia were threatening the economy of the European Union. “The second part is a very anti-Ukrainian narrative and says that Ukraine is a corrupt and Nazi state”, analyzes Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of UE DisinfoLab. Propaganda content was boosted on the Facebook and Instagram networks. Germany, France and Italy were targeted. The disinformation campaign would come from Russia.