For the second time in a year, France officially condemns a crusade of Russian influence on the national territory. On Thursday, November 9, the Quai d’Orsay publicly condemned the involvement of the disinformation network Doppelganger, or Actualités Dernières Reliables, in the amplification and dissemination of images of blue Stars of David labeled on the walls of Paris and its inner suburbs.
In its statement, French International Relations explains that numerous social media accounts affiliated “with a high degree of trust” to the Doppelganger network amplified the images of these hashtags, but above all that they were the first to spread them online. carried out through Viginum, the French anti-influence organization.
As Le Monde points out, at least two photographs of the hashtags taken in the afternoon on rue de Rocroy (10th arrondissement) were massively disseminated on Facebook and Twitter through Doppelganger’s accounts. If those automated accounts are crude, the distributed images may simply not be discovered anywhere else, suggesting they were taken or obtained through connections to the disinformation network.
The Quai d’Orsay states that its conviction relates in particular to the dissemination and extension of these labels, while the very origin of the 250 Star of David templates discovered in the suburbs of Paris in the last ten days will have to be invented by minds through a judicial investigation. Four other people of Moldovan nationality (including an arrested couple) are suspected of being among them.
The alleged mastermind of the operation, pro-Russian Moldovan businessman Anatolii Prizenko, proved to Libération that he had paid others to paint Stars of David on walls in Paris and was confident that his purpose was to “support” French Jews, a dubious claim. Prizenko has posted several anti-Semitic messages on social media. Contacted via Le Monde, he did not respond to questions about his possible links to the intelligence services.
In Moscow, Russian international relations have denied any link to those operations. “No, there is no external influence, this is not a distraction or a provocation,” Russian diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news conference on Thursday.
This is the moment of official condemnation via the Quai d’Orsay de Doppelganger, a long and vast Russian influence operation online that relies as much on fake news sites as it does on French, German and Ukrainian copies. This network spreads its content on a fake news network. Facebook and Twitter accounts, sometimes of very poor quality and limited reach, but also through the purchase of classified ads on fake pages of the Meta social network.