At first glance, the website stamped with the red logo of the newspaper Image it looked like the site of Germany’s leading tabloid. In particular, it was read, in August, that a child died in a bicycle accident in Berlin after the street lights were switched off at night, in a Germany forced to save energy due to the drastic reduction in deliveries of Russian gas.
But the investigative work, carried out in particular by the AFP verification unit, was able to show that this information was false and part of a large pro-Russian disinformation campaign carried out by imitating European media sites.
In late September, Facebook’s parent company Meta called it “the largest and most complex Russian-origin operation since the start of the war in Ukraine,” acting with “a truly unusual combination of sophistication and brute force.” Meta investigated the network, tipped off by investigative journalists about the authenticity of the sites.
Among some 60 affected media sites, German newspapers, such as spiegel Y Image, were particularly targeted, along with others such as the English daily The Guardianthe italian agency ANSA or the French newspaper 20 minutes.
“Definitely a fake”
The Belgian NGO EU DisinfoLab, specialized in the analysis of disinformation, has also published an investigation into the operation of this network, which it has called “Doppelganger” (similar in German). Its goals, according to EU DisinfoLab: “represent Ukraine as a failed, corrupt, Nazi state” and “promote Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine.” The network, active since May, also aimed to sow fear among Europeans “about how sanctions against Russia will ruin their lives,” according to EU DisinfoLab.
This was the meaning of the fake article that claimed to be Image. AFP’s fact-checking team was able to prove that the account of the bicycle accident, which allegedly occurred on a dark street, was false. “No young person has died in a traffic accident since the beginning of the year,” a Berlin police spokeswoman told AFP.
In the German capital, public lighting is the responsibility of the Agency for the Environment, Urban Mobility, Consumer Protection and Climate Action. An agency spokesman said the article was “definitely false.” Maintaining public lighting to ensure traffic safety is a legal obligation in Berlin and “is strictly observed,” the source added.
Russian host
A number of other false stories were published in Germany, including about a school in Bremen (north) that was allegedly hit by an explosion while trying to save gas (in a copycat site of the spiegel) or about truck drivers blocking roads to protest against European Union policies (on a site imitated from the media online tee).
The device is identical every time: once the story is published on the fake site, with an almost similar domain name, they are broadcast by paid ads or fake social media accounts, particularly on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and Twitter. .
The EU DisinfoLab investigation did not lead to a “formal attribution” of the fakes, but there is evidence pointing to the involvement of Russian-based actors. Therefore, some of the domain names were purchased through the Russian host. Nic.Ruand some videos were produced on computers whose settings were in the Russian language.
A computer time zone, GMT+8, suggests that the fake content may have been produced in Russia’s Irkutsk region and some of the articles resemble those that appeared on the Russian news site. NRN worldaccording to EU DisinfoLab.
Source: BFM TV
