In recent weeks, you may have seen articles on social networks, apparently published on the site of the French online daily 20 Minutes, which relayed pro-Russian propaganda. But beware ! It was actually an identity theft: a website that looked like him like two drops of water except that he was called “www.20minuts.com”, without e to minutes.
You could read articles denouncing violence committed by Ukrainian soldiers, alleged lies about cereals stored by kyiv, or even alleged corruption of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. These articles are in fact part of a vast disinformation operation which has affected 16 other European media.
Many are in Germany. The sites of major daily newspapers Der Spielgel, Bild, Suddeutsche Zeitung were cloned in the same way. In Great Britain The Guardian was also concerned, as was the Ansa agency in Italy. But it does not stop there. The articles were then relayed on social networks by more than 2,300 fake accounts and fake pages in various languages. As well as paid advertisements.
It was Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, who discovered the deception. It was she who dismantled this network of disinformation which would have spent no less than 100 thousand euros in this campaign. According to the multinational, it would therefore be the Russian disinformation operation “the most important” and the most “sophisticated” since the start of the war in Ukraine.
To thwart this campaign, Meta relied on the work of a research laboratory specializing in digital technology: DFRLab. This lab studied what is called the domain name of fake sites generated by the network. To create a website, you must first buy a domain name, for example: www.radiofrance.fr. However, DFRLab discovered a link between these domain names and Russia since several of them were actually hosted in the country.