From September 2022, a few months after the start of the War in Ukraine, several media were victims of a digital campaign to manipulate information. 20 minutes was part of it. On several occasions, our website and our videos have been reused for Russian propaganda purposes. However, the network was not only acting against our editorial staff.
It would even be a “complex and persistent” network, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during a press conference on Tuesday. Identified by the Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference Service (Viginum), the digital information manipulation campaign targets several European countries, including France. His code name? “RRN” highlighting the network’s close connection to the “media” Reliable Recent News. Its goal ? “To discredit Western support for Ukraine”, underlines the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“A hybrid war led by Russia”
“The investigations conducted by Viginum have brought to light numerous elements revealing the involvement of Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and several Russian companies in the creation and conduct of the campaign. Viginum has also observed that several Russian state or state-affiliated entities have participated in the dissemination of certain content produced as part of the campaign,” Minister Catherine Colonna assured in a statement read by her spokesperson, adding that Paris was in “close ties” with its allies “to defeat the hybrid war led by Russia”.
“From the end of May 2023, the RRN campaign experienced unprecedented development, since it was the identity of the website of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs that was usurped”, assures his alongside the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security (SGDSN).
Impersonate and imitate media
To act, the network revolves around four components: “The dissemination of pro-Russian content linked to the war in Ukraine, notably denigrating its leaders”, “the usurpation of the identity of media sites, but also governmental, European , via the typosquatting technique aimed at reproducing their domain name”, “the creation of French-speaking news websites sharing controversial content, instrumentalizing French national news” and “the implementation of inauthentic combined means, such as fake sites or fake accounts on social networks, allowing content to be relayed”.
Each time, the same logic returns through the lexical field used to manipulate opinion. The whole thing is to show the supposed ineffectiveness of the sanctions aimed at Russia, to prove the alleged Russophobia of the Western States or the barbarity which the Ukrainian armed forces would show, as well as the neo-Nazi ideology which would predominate among the Ukrainian leaders.
Four French media mainly targeted
For example, in our case, a video allegedly produced by 20 minutes had circulated on Telegram and discredited a Russian journalist in exile, Ilya Ber, accusing him of being the initiator of the false covers of “Charlie Hebdo”. Even using the name of one of our journalists, the video was in no way produced by our editorial staff.
In all, 355 domain names were detected by Viginum. But in France, four media were particularly victims. Among them we find The World, The Parisian And Le Figaro… And 20 minutes. “At least 58 articles have been published via these channels”, specifies the Quai d’Orsay, which specifies that it was also able to identify “the involvement of Russian or Russian-speaking individuals as well as several Russian companies”.