Doppelganger is the name given to a massive disinformation campaign against France, allegedly directed by Russia.

The targets were many major French daily newspapers such as Le Parisien, 20 Minutes, Le Monde, and Le Figaro. The campaign started last year and also targeted German media such as FAZ, Der Spiegel, Bild, and Die Welt.

This campaign works by creating a website that looks exactly like Le Parisien’s website. Yet on closer inspection, it’s actually fake, because the real site is leparisien.fr, while this is leparisien.ltd.

This is why it is called a doppelganger campaign. Hackers mimic articles and the layout of real news websites to confuse social media users, while sometimes they add links to some actual articles from these media sites. This technique is called typosquatting.

According to French authorities, these ‘copycat’ sites are spreading pro-Russian content. For example, a fake article attributed to Le Monde, whose title in French translates as follows: “French minister supports the killing of Russian soldiers in Ukraine”, giving a very biased and pro-Russian title.

Usually, the same propaganda narratives are repeated over and over again on these fake websites, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They include the ineffectiveness of sanctions against Russia, the alleged Russophobia in the West, or the negative consequences of the reception of Ukrainian refugees in Europe.

And it’s not just the media, as the French Foreign Ministry’s website has also been targeted, with a false announcement that a tax was imposed on every monetary transaction to finance military support in Ukraine.

This means that despite the shutdown of Kremlin-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik, Russian disinformation continues to spread through other hybrid channels.

These articles are then shared on social media in an attempt to go viral. However, according to the French government, so far this massive disinformation campaign has been mostly unsuccessful in garnering clicks and attention.

Source: Euronews

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