European media caught in a bind – Technologist

There were six video clips of around 10 minutes each, professionally produced, with the Netflix logo and a fake Tom Cruise voice over: On Sunday, June 2, a Microsoft report called attention to the broadcast, already spotted by specialist site Provereno (“Verified”). It was yet another fake pro-Russian documentary, this time attacking the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

It was the “umpteenth” such instance, because not a week has gone by without French-language fake news sites relaying new content attacking the Élysée Palace, French support for Ukraine, or fanning the flames of the country’s political and social tensions. Through videos, memes and interviews with celebrities, the various technical installations suspected of being operated from east of our borders have, since 2022, been in overdrive in Europe and France. First and foremost is Doppelgänger, a vast network of fake sites, Twitter, Facebook and even TikTok accounts, active for over a year and a half and attributed to Russian marketing associations presumably acting on behalf of the Kremlin.

Nonetheless, there’s been one constant among all this online content: It’s been relatively ineffective. A close look at some of the numbers involved has suggested that these campaigns don’t reach large numbers of people, with their messages tending to garner few views and even fewer shares and comments.

The film mimicking Cruise’s voice had found virtually no audience before being removed from YouTube. Doppelgänger’s Twitter accounts, widely identified as spam by the social network’s algorithms, have now been buried in the news feed. On Facebook, the pace of advertising by the network of fake sites has been declining. To get around the filters set up by Meta, the authors of pro-Russian messages have even had to “degrade the quality” of their posts, for example by adding syntax errors that make them unreadable, said David Agranovich, Meta’s Director for Threats Disruption, at a recent press conference.

No such thing as bad publicity

In reality, Russian agents of disinformation have been increasingly relying on the mainstream media. They have adopted a deliberate strategy where occasionally they themselves report false content produced by the country’s propaganda machine to the major media outlets.

The NGO Reset and cybersecurity firm Check First have unraveled these workings in an extensive report, published Tuesday, which expands on an earlier investigation by Agence France-Presse and the Russian opposition collective Antibot4Navalny: At least 800 editorial boards, elected officials and researchers were solicited by pro-Russian accounts with the intent of moving them toward favorable treatment of Kremlin-friendly inventions. The dual aim has been to overwhelm the resources of universities and the media, while at the same time seeking to draw the public’s attention to these fake news pieces.

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