“Please verify this information”: Since September, Russian online disinformation has consisted not only of broadcasting anti-Ukrainian videos, but also of direct contacts with Western media to verify them, writes AFP.

This is a large-scale “sabotage campaign” against journalists, experts warn.

The Antibot4Navalny collective, which monitors Russia-related influence operations on the X platform, called this modus operandi “Operation Matryoshka.”

How the “bot” from Operation Matryoshka works

For example, on December 4, a netizen named “Käthe” commented on the X post of the French TV channel BFM, asking the channel to check a video that resembled a report by the German TV channel Deutsche Welle, in which it was claimed that “a Ukrainian artist sawed the Eiffel.” Tower”.

“I see such information every day. The official media don’t report on them, so why should I believe?” wrote the mentioned X account.

Within hours, the same profile sent similar messages to dozens of French media outlets, including Le Progrès, Paris Match, Mediapart, Le Point, Franceinfo, Le Figaro, RFI and Le Parisien.

The account then remained inactive until December 20, when it posted graffiti of Zelenskyi as a caricature of a street man in Los Angeles, an image that another account in turn asked the media to verify, and more.

Data provided by “Antibot4Navalny” and analyzed by AFP confirms the existence of dozens, if not hundreds, of profiles that actively use this strategy of reaching out to the media.

Most of these are accounts that have been abandoned by their owners and then hacked. Posts sometimes follow each other at a rate of one per minute to better fill networks, a sign that these accounts are taken over by “robots”.

Disinformation comes from Russian accounts

The AFP analysis also found that those accounts that ask the media to verify misinformation or fakes will publish them themselves after some time.

Looting by a Ukrainian in the Paris catacombs, the waste of military aid to Ukraine, truncated or fabricated graffiti with Zelensky and fake advertising in Times Square: these posts always refer to Ukrainians and seek to promote the idea that Europeans and Americans are tired of helping Kyiv. .

According to an AFP investigation, most of these images were first shared by Russian netizens, including on Telegram and news blogs.

This campaign appears to follow another campaign called “Doppelgänger” that in recent months involved the distribution of anti-Ukrainian infographics released by Western media, a campaign that French intelligence services clearly attributed to Russia. , according to experts interviewed by AFP.

“Russians learn new things”

David Chavalarias, a mathematician in the social sciences and head of CNRS research, believes the campaign is a “fact-checking distraction tactic” to “preoccupy you with unimportant and hard-to-verify topics.”

For the researcher, this operation can also be aimed at giving visibility to this misinformation and untruth.

“The goal seems to be to attract the attention of fact-checkers to intercept their work and have a tactical and long-term impact on certain aspects of the current conflict,” by verifying the virality of certain content, Julien Nosetti adds, adding that “the Russians are learning new things. And there is a certain dexterity in testing different methods.”

A source in the French security services told AFP that she was “not surprised” by this new operation because “the Russians are looking for visibility, they want to be talked about both positively and negatively.”

Operation “Double” is also ongoing.

Anti-Ukrainian images used in “Matryoshka” were also popularized in various social networks by the same bots that were part of the Doppelgänger campaign.

In December 2023, a report by the Insikt Group, a division of the intelligence company Recorded Future, indicated that the Doppelgänger campaign was still very active on social media, with at least 800 bots promoting fake articles posing as Ukrainian publications.

In addition, Germany has uncovered a large-scale “pro-Russian disinformation campaign” using thousands of fake X (formerly Twitter) accounts posting messages harmful to Ukraine using images from German media, according to German media reports on Friday.

“Ukraine remains the country that most often becomes the target of information manipulation – and not by chance,” EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said at a press conference on disinformation and foreign interference on Tuesday, referring to the “battle of narratives.”

“Security is not only weapons, but also information,” he concluded.

Photo of the article: © Nazar Zherebtsov | Dreamstime.com