cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11627143
The Russian disinformation operations that emerged at the start of the war in Ukraine have ramped up in the past year, with fake news articles and reports hijacking trusted media brands, to undermine public trust and deceive AI systems, a NewsGuard report released on Monday found.
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Among the 15 most imitated media brands were eight French outlets, including FRANCE 24, which saw its brand coopted by fake news stories 34 times over 12 months.
“It’s no surprise that France, which is one of the biggest contributors of aid to Ukraine, is being specifically targeted,” said Chine Labbé, Europe editor at NewsGuard.
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Three presidential candidates who have pledged unwavering support for Ukraine – Raphaël Glucksmann, Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe – have all recently been the subject of fake news stories linked to pro-Russian groups.
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There are multiple objectives for Moscow’s information war according to NewsGuard, which compiled the report with the Ukrainian agency, Center for Countering Disinformation, French government agency Viginum, and anonymous research group, Antibot4Navalny.
These include discrediting support for Ukraine, undermining the reputation of Western leaders, stoking tensions within European democracies and disrupting electoral processes.
Year-on-year, the report found there had been an 850 percent increase in fake news stories mimicking known media brands – rising from 44 in the first half of 2025 to 421 in the first half of 2026.
“The explosion of this phenomenon may mean that the Russians see it as an effective tactic for eroding Western citizens’ trust in the media – or at the very least, that there is significant potential to be tapped at little cost,” said Labbé.
“These days, it costs nothing to create a fake news site using AI and generate a lot of content.”
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No point, not in terms of trying to avoid disinformation campaigns. Russian intelligence is going to be able to get Internet access through a bazillion other sources elsewhere. You just send some people to, say, Kazakhstan or somewhere else that you feel comfortable operating, and go set up your campaign there, probably operate through VPNs to elsewhere to whatever, and then just smoothly transition to your next fallback if things get shut down there. The Internet as a whole is global and is going to be wildly impractical to wall off from anyone who might potentially be working for a disinformation campaign coming out of Russia.
I think that a much more practical route is going to be information sources like France 24 adopting procedures to make themselves harder to spoof and getting software changes and viewer behavior changes onboard with doing whatever’s necessary on their end to not fall for a spoofed source. That’s also a more-general solution to the problem of spoofing than just “this material might be Russia might be trying to do a disinformation campaign about X”. Tomorrow, maybe it’ll be a scammer or a scummy political campaign or some other country. Would be better to have a general solution.