“I wish to categorical my warmest and most honest greetings to Prime Minister Modi on this Indian Independence Day. It’s a pleasure to see India excel below your dynamic management at a time when the world is struggling towards Covid-19.” This pleasant message is from French Nationwide Rally MEP Thierry Mariani in a video posted on Twitter on 14 August by the web newspaper EU Chronicle, whose Twitter account was suspended after these revelations. By no means heard of EU Chronicle (1)? Unsurprising: it was a pretend information outlet set as much as serve India’s pursuits. This was revealed within the “Indian Chronicles”, the revelations by the NGO EU DisinfoLab, to which Les Jours had entry, which make clear a formidable machine of disinformation and affect.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s former transport minister was not the one one to specific sympathy for the Indian prime minister on that day. Former Polish European Parliament vice-president Ryszard Czarnecki (PIS, conservative and eurosceptic) and Italian MEP Fulvio Martusciello (Forza Italia) additionally featured in movies broadcast the identical day on the identical Twitter account.
EU Chronicle isn’t just on Twitter. Behind it, there’s a younger newspaper, obtainable solely on-line, which first appeared in Might 2020. Regardless of a web site with a fundamental design and really modest presence on social networks (solely 400 subscribers on Twitter, no Fb web page), the newspaper strikes an formidable pose. It guarantees its readers “a world of data, knowledge and reality” the place present occasions are handled in a brand new approach. Trying extra intently, the positioning seems merely to be an aggregation of dispatches and press releases. And but it claims to work with actual “freelance journalists” in Brussels. However right here too, there’s purpose for doubt.
In its report revealed on 9 December the NGO EU DisinfoLab had enjoyable retracing the day of an EU Chronicle “journalist”, based mostly on her exercise on 29 October. Rita Storen, one of many outlet’s major contributors, appears to have began work at midnight and left her workplace at 18:40. On this lengthy stretch she made plenty of errors whereas copying press releases and writing one-sentence tales. Rita Storen, whose existence seems restricted to this web site, appears extra like a bot than a “freelance journalist” frequenting the Place de Bruxelles.
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Additional evaluation of the positioning reveals a preliminary clue linking the EU Chronicle to the Srivastava group, which is behind the key affect operation detailed right here. The IP handle is similar because the one registered by a number of the group’s NGOs. Furthermore, the “newspaper” seems to work in the identical approach as one other web site singled out by EU DisinfoLab in its earlier report, “EP Right this moment” (EP referring to European Parliament). That outlet, additionally linked to the …