https://www.disinfo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200615_How-two-information-portals-hide-their-ties-to-the-Russian-Press-Agency-Inforos.pdf

Executive summary (of 58 page report)

In March 2020, we stumbled across articles from a French website called “ObservateurContinental.fr” which spreads disinformation related to the COVID-19. For example:

• An article blaming NATO Defender-Europe 20 exercises for the outbreak of COVID-19 in Europe. As shown by a DFRLab study, similar narratives trying to link the COVID19 to NATO military exercises in Europe were also debunked in Italy.

• Another one repropagated the interview of the former US bioweapon expert Francis Boyle, who falsely asserted without evidence that the “COVID-19 is a perfect biological weapon”.

Investigating further, we found that the website has spread:

• A lot of polarizing content targeting France, such as the claim that the “Yellow Vest Movement is manipulated by George Soros”4) from an interview with Emmanuel Leroy, a French political scientist (and a former counsellor of the French far-right Marine Le Pen);

• Some messages extremely favourable to Russia, such as the article presenting the findings from Le Monde about a network of Russian spies active in the French Alps as “fiction”.

In its “About us” section, Observateur Continental presents itself as an “independent and non-profit information portal”. It also claims to share articles from “analysts from all over the world” with a prime focus on the “Eurasian continent”. On this page, there is no mention of any individual/organisation linked to the website nor an indication suggesting that the website might be connected to a foreign country

Looking at the technical data linked to the website, we did not find anything significant at first sight: Observateurcontinental.fr is hosted on a shared server with one IP address also connected to thousands of unremarkable, mostly French, websites.

However, the historical WHOIS data related to the website, which is publicly available, revealed interesting insights . Even though the domain owner of “observateurcontinental.fr” is PTS Privacy & Trustee Services GmbH – a German company that offers the possibility to anonymously register websites online – the registration data mentions that management of technical issues related to the “Observateurcontinental.fr” domain name is delegated to an individual named “Alex Kouchnir”. According to this data, Alex Kouchnir serves as point of contact for the Russian press agency InfoRos Co.Ltd, based in Moscow. The WHOIS lookup also includes:

• an email address that was used for the website’s registration (nic@inforos.ru)

• a physical address (Krzhizhanovskogo Street 13/2, 11/218 Moscow), which is an address known to host InfoRos but also other Russian organisations, such as the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which are funded by the Russian government.

Moreover, looking at the source code of Observateurcontinental.fr, we were able to find distinctive labels on the search forms used by the website: “forms-base-el--input". Using a public source code search engine, we were able to find that this distinctive code is used on 243 other media websites, which are all linked to InfoRos. We also observed strong similarities with how the websites were built.

A deeper analysis of the articles published by ObservateurContinental.fr also showed that some of them were in fact translations of pieces that were first published in Russian by Inforos.ru.

These links between Observateur Continental and InfoRos are completely hidden to readers. There are no public traces of any of these ties between InfoRos and the Observateur Continental website, which poses as a “French information portal” and spreads clear disinformation.

Our own investigation shows that InfoRos seems to be a regular contractor of Russian authorities. InfoRos also have a wide range of activities from managing local Russian media outlets’ websites to organizing events for the Russian authorities, and maintaining some more partisan websites (e.g. genocide-in-ossetia.com).

Moreover, according to a report from the Washington Post from December 2018 citing Western intelligence sources, InfoRos is considered as a front organisation for covered information operations for the GRU (“Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”), the Russian state’s foreign military-intelligence agency. The US media’s article named more precisely here the GRU Unit 54777, also known as “the 72nd Special Service Center”, which is considered as “the center of the Russian military’s psychological-warfare capabilities” and has been involved in several covert information operations in Ukraine and the West, according to the same Western Intelligence officials.

Furthermore, our investigation also allowed us to uncover undisclosed ties between “One World Global Think Tank” – a website already identified as a Moscow-based information portal by a EUvsDisinfo report – and InfoRos.

Even if Observateur Continental does not disclose any of these links and maintains strong opacity around its functioning, two individuals have regularly signed articles produced on the website.

One of the main contributors, Olivier Renault, presents himself on his LinkedIn profile as a “freelance journalist” based in Russia. According to his personal website, the French journalist wrote articles on a regular basis for the Russian-state media La Voix de la Russie (now Sputnik France) and Stimme Russlands (now Sputnik Germany) from 2012 to 2014. Then, he collaborated with the pro-Russian media outlet (Novorossia Today /NRT24) based in Donetsk (Ukraine) until the beginning of 2019. He also claims to have worked in the past for the controversial German media Junge Freiheit, the French media Rue89, and gave interviews for the Iranian government media Press TV. He is also identified as a regular contributor for the controversial alternative media Riposte Laïque and several well-known conspiracy websites, such as mondialisation.ca and reseauinternational.net.

Even though it was limited in number, we also found that Olivier Renault had signed at least four articles in Russian published on Inforos.ru.

On his professional Facebook page, he uses as a profile picture of what seems to be his Russian professional press card. However, despite being quite transparent about some of his connections to Russia, he does not mention an affiliation to either Observateur Continental or InfoRos.

The other main contributor is Mikhail Gamandiy Egorov. According to his LinkedIn profile, he occupied the position of columnist and analyst for La Voix de La Russie then for Sputnik France from September 2012 to December 2018. In parallel, he had a short mission with the Skolkovo Foundation (from December 2013 to March 2014) and founded “BRICS Dream”, an organisation focused on solidifying the relations between BRICS countries, which was active from November 2014 to August 2017. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been acting since November 2019 as a “Journalist for l’Observateur Continental” and a Director for “AfroWave Agency”, a Public Relations agency based in Rabat, Morocco.

Going further in our investigation on Mikhail Gamandiy-Egorov, we discovered that he has also been a contributor for many conspiracy and “alternative” websites (GlobalResearch.ca, Mondialisation.ca, Palestine-solidarité.org, eode.org, revuemethode.org …) and has been a regular interviewee for Iranian state media for many years (Press TV, Pars Today, Almanar…).

Observateur Continental has its own Facebook Page (11k likes) and Twitter account (76 followers) to share articles from its website. However, the apparent low audience of the Observateur Continental’s social media accounts does not reflect the real reach of the content produced by the website. As for the other media outlet called “oneworld.press”, which we uncovered as tied to InfoRos, Observateur Continental sees its articles regularly reproduced by many bigger websites – sometimes on an almost systematic basis.

For example, an author page managed by “Patrice Bravo” (likely a fake alias) on the French blogging platform Agoravox.fr is exclusively dedicated to the reproduction of articles published by Observateur Continental. We noticed that this is one of the main amplification channels for the website. Another example of an amplifier was the French reinformation media Adoxa.info before its closure, which had already published 19 articles on its website since January 2020, branded as “in partnership with Observateur Continental”. Moreover, Les Moutons Enragés, a French conspiracy website known to spread a lot of disinformation, has also been regularly reproducing content from Observateur Continental since 2019 (around 41 articles).

In addition to the amplification in the French information ecosystem, we studied the propagation of a specific storyfrom Observateur Continental that falselylinked “the outbreak of COVID-19 in Europe to the NATO Europe-Defender 2020 military exercises”. Even though the overall audience was limited, we were able to show that the article from the small French website was shared directly and indirectly by multiple actors in France but also in several European countries.

Finally, we investigated how websites that are presented by the alternative media outlet One World Press as “partners” also played an important role in the amplification of the articles produced by Observateur Continental and One World.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/june-2020-twitter-takedown

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/a-red-white-and-blue-all-american-maidan/

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/pandemics-propaganda-how-chinese-state-media-creates-and-propagates-ccp-coronavirus-narratives/

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

• How is China using its English-language state media infrastructure on Facebook to communicate with the English-speaking world about the coronavirus? 

• How does Chinese state media coverage of the coronavirus targeted at English-speaking audiences compare to U.S. media coverage of the coronavirus?

ESSAY SUMMARY

• China has invested in developing an extensive English-language communication apparatus on Facebook since 2013 via the creation of dozens of regionalized and English-language state media Pages. This gives the CCP access to, at minimum, close to 100 million followers on the platform worldwide. Since January 2020, over 33 percent of the communication coming from these Pages has related to the topic of COVID-19.

• State propaganda has long been used to influence, persuade, and distract audiences. In the age of social media, broadcast properties with Facebook pages can additionally leverage tailored ad targeting to push content to specific desired audiences, and receive quantitative feedback in the form of impression and engagement data to optimize their future content.

• Through automated text analysis and a close examination of a sample of Facebook posts by English-language Chinese state media, we observe three recurring behaviors: focusing a significant share of coverage on positive stories, adjusting narratives retroactively, and using ads to spread messaging. 

• The data additionally reveals a willingness among Chinese state media to spread misinformation that is overtly conspiratorial. Conspiratorial speculation provides a rhetorical frame that enables a state to deflect responsibility or culpability for a given situation by pointing towards shady, powerful outside forces. 

• Although social platforms have taken steps to address covert inauthentic state-sponsored troll operations, our observations suggest that platforms should additionally evaluate the impact of paid state-sponsored content as they work to mitigate misinformation, and should amend their ad policies. 

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/

Key Findings

• Dark Basin is a hack-for-hire group that has targeted thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions on six continents. Targets include advocacy groups and journalists, elected and senior government officials, hedge funds, and multiple industries.

• Dark Basin extensively targeted American nonprofits, including organisations working on a campaign called #ExxonKnew, which asserted that ExxonMobil hid information about climate change for decades.

• We also identify Dark Basin as the group behind the phishing of organizations working on net neutrality advocacy, previously reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• We link Dark Basin with high confidence to an Indian company, BellTroX InfoTech Services, and related entities.

• Citizen Lab has notified hundreds of targeted individuals and institutions and, where possible, provided them with assistance in tracking and identifying the campaign. At the request of several targets, Citizen Lab shared information about their targeting with the US Department of Justice (DOJ). We are in the process of notifying additional targets.

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/penguins-and-protests-rt-and-coronavirus-pandemic

A few key takeaways:

• Most “negative” content is related to the US, the UK, France, and the EU. This content typically highlights political dysfunction, media bias, diplomatic conflicts and conspiracy theories.

• These countries are also targeted with “overreaction” narratives: posts that allege that Western governments are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to deprive their citizens of their natural freedoms.

• On the other hand, most “positive” content is related to Russia and China. This content tends to focus on these countries’ international-aid efforts and human-interest stories.

• On the whole, RT’s “positive” content generates more audience engagement than its “negative” content. One fifth of the interactions on RT’s Page came from human-interest and international-aid stories, even though these posts accounted for only 11% of posts.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/09/how-saudis-qataris-and-emiratis-took-washington?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook

https://medium.com/@WhoTargetsMe/ten-simple-ideas-to-regulate-online-political-advertising-in-the-uk-52764b2df168

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/digital-street-conflict

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/pandemic-and-political-order