Russian state actors were involved in a wide-ranging and coordinated disinformation campaign that used bogus French government and news websites to spread false information and undermine support for Ukraine, the French government said this week.
The French government did not directly accuse Moscow of creating the fake webpages, but said several agencies affiliated with the Russian government, including Russian cultural centers and embassies, “participated actively” in spreading disinformation in 2022 and 2023. The fake websites were created by Russian individuals and companies associated with Russian government institutions, the French government added.
“This campaign includes the creation of fake web pages that impersonate national media outlets and government websites, and the creation of fake social media accounts,” France’s Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said in a statement. rack on Tuesday, it called a “hybrid strategy that Russia is implementing” to undermine democratic institutions and countries.
France’s foreign ministry thwarted an attempt to impersonate its own website, she said.
Anne-Claire Legendre, a spokeswoman for the French foreign ministry, said on Tuesday that the campaign had had no measurable impact on French public opinion, but she noted that French authorities had taken the unusual step of publicly and explicitly reporting the campaign. to denounce.
“It’s clearly a message that will be heard by those involved,” she said.
The disinformation campaign was dubbed the “Doppelganger” operation a 2022 report from the EU Disinfo Lab, which revealed that Russian propaganda was spread through sophisticated replications of major news outlets in several European countries. Meta, the social media company, publicly attributed the campaign to two Russian companies.
VIGINUM, an official French government agency set up in 2021 to counter online disinformation from foreign agencies, said in a statement summary report of her research that the campaign contained “obviously inaccurate or misleading narratives” about the war that were produced by Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and various Russian companies, and then disseminated by the Russian state or state-sponsored entities.
Shady news websites, created shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, discredited Ukrainian authorities and spread false information — for example, that depleted uranium munitions given to Ukraine had created a radioactive cloud that was moving towards France.
The campaign also spoofed more than 300 news outlet or government agency websites in Europe, often through “typosquatting” – registering a deliberately misspelled domain name close to the address of a legitimate site. A convincing clone of the French foreign ministry website claimed that a tax would be levied to raise money for Ukraine.
That misinformation was then amplified by “inauthentic” social media accounts and bots, as well as Russia’s own diplomatic network, the report said.