The Russian war in Ukraine has many fields of operation. On land, at sea and in the air, but also on the Internet. Kremlin propaganda is spilling onto social media, and, ingeniously, by mimicking the site of 20 minutesour free and independent French news media.
A domain name similar to that of 20minutes.fr
A website imitating that of 20 minutes was recently spotted by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Same colors, same presentation, and a very, very similar URL: 20minuts.com. As explained by Aurélien Capdecomme, Chief Technology Officer at 20 minutes, to our podcast Wait a minute ! “, people have registered this domain name close to 20minutes.fr. They created a graphic charter similar to our media, making their fake site almost similar to ours. Several pages were created, on which pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda articles were published.
How the teams of 20 minutes did they allow the deactivation of this fake site? Why is it easy to create French news site clones? What the law says? And how to check that you are indeed on the pages of our media, and not on a fake site imitating it?
All the answers from Aurélien Capdecomme in this episode. Our “CTO” advises you in particular to check that the URL entered in the browser is indeed www.20minutes.fr, to search for our site with a search engine like Google, or to put our “favorite” website. Good listening !
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