The unintentional contribution of the press to foreign disinformation operations

INFLUENCE

The unintentional contribution of the press to foreign disinformation operations

By Athenae Erulin

Hardly a month goes by without Viginum or its European counterparts denouncing a new information operation aimed at destabilizing democracies and shaping opinions (Döpleganger, RRN, Portal Kombat, Matryoshka, Olympic Games…).

The various reports highlight large-scale operations to disseminate inauthentic content, relayed on social networks and totaling millions of views and shares.
But there’s another, low-key danger whose less spectacular but more insidious effects will be visible over the long term.
Their effect will be exacerbated by the development of generative AI, which relies on the web to build up its corpora, and their integration into search engines.

And the press, both French and foreign, unknowingly contributes to the success of these operations.

Before finding out who contributes to foreign disinformation operations, which you can discover by reading this article in full, it’s important to understand how the Internet and search engines work.

Search engines all work in much the same way:

  • Firstly, robots (crawlers) move from one site to another thanks to the clickable hypertext links they contain, indexing content and identifying their semantic environment.
  • Then, acting as a kind of reverse directory, the search engine will identify the different content related to each search intention.
  • Finally, the search engine will look for ‘signals’ to estimate the relevance of each of these contents and rank them. Either in first position, or exiled from the second page.

Among the signals used to estimate relevance are behavioral ones: did the surfer click on the first result proposed? Did they stay on the content for a long time, or did they return quickly to the results page? etc.

Another signal of a content’s authority is its inbound links, or backlinks, i.e. links from other sites pointing to the site in question. The performance of these links is modelled in an indicator called PageRank, named after its inventor, Google founder Larry Page.

We’ll spare you the PageRank mathematical formula:

 

But here are a few key points:

  • The more links a site receives, from a wide variety of sites that are themselves highly reputable, the better.
  • But even better: if these links can point to ‘deep’ pages rather than to the home page, and if the text of the clickable link can include words related to the semantic environment of the destination page.

“A website works just like an author or expert. The more it is mentioned by other experts in its discipline, the more its expertise will be recognized”

One of the sub-disciplines of SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is backlinking.
This involves writing content aimed at being ‘mentioned’ by other sites (if possible those with a high authority in the field) to reveal its relevance and better position itself in the results pages.

In some ultra-competitive fields, this can go as far as buying back old domain names that have become available again, to give your site the benefit of inbound links, or even to buy links (although Google forbids this).
The press makes extensive use of this technique to boost its revenues.
Through netlinking platforms, newspapers such as Ouest-France, Le Figaro, BFMtv, Les Echos, Le Point, Challenges and many others offer links through sponsored articles to artificially boost the positioning of their clients’ sites.

In short, a site will perform well if :

  • Its content addresses a clear semantic environment, responding to search intentions.
  • It is technically impeccable from an SEO point of view, to facilitate the experience of both web users and bots.
  • It benefits from a multitude of optimized inbound links, transmitting notoriety (also known as link-juice or SEO juice).

Thus, in the summer of 2021, in the midst of the Covid crisis, the Chinese state press was able to position itself on poorly processed strategic search intents (known as Data Void) in order to position itself well on search engine results pages and serve up a counter-narrative insinuating that the American military camp at Fort Detrick could be the source of the pandemic, in any case by instilling doubt.
All they had to do was build content on a semantically unprocessed environment, with technically robust sites and encourage the development of inbound links.

Indeed, even now, American citizens searching for “Fort Detrick” are offered (admittedly less well positioned) articles from news[.]cn or globaltimes[.]cn.
The positioning of these articles is reinforced by the use of backlinks, such as the one to the Chinese Embassy in Croatia.

It’s this persistence of web content, as opposed to the lightning speed of social networks, that makes it so dangerous in the long term when it comes to manipulating information.

Of course, online press sites are often cited. They benefit from a substantial level of authority, which they pass on to all the sites they mention.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

By mentioning disinformation sites and including clickable links, online press sites :

  • Enable the circulation of Internet users, generating traffic (even if the Internet user is informed of the misleading nature of the destination content) which gives search engines the information that this content is worthy of interest.
  • Allow bots to circulate, making it easier for them to discover and index misleading content.
  • And in some cases, you can pass on part of your PageRank and bring web awareness to the destination site, which will help it move up the search engine results pages.

As an example, let’s take just one site among the 193 listed in Viginum’s Portal Kombat report: pravda-fr[.]com.

This site benefits from over 1,200 inbound links from nearly 300 domain names (data extracted on 11/15/2024). We have selected only the 107 most important domains. We’ve grouped them by country of hosting. Their size is proportional to their authority.

For example, in an article debunking false information about the Olympic torch’s passage through Marseille, the newspaper Libération inserted a link to the Pravda website under the anchor “Aux larmes! Poutine dirige ici” (To tears! Putin rules here), giving it both traffic and authority with this simple link.

Similarly, L’Express, in an article about foreign interference during the parliamentary elections, inserts a link in the subscriber section to the home page of the pravda-fr[.]com website, giving it traffic and authority.

In an article about Talant’s deputy mayor, Cyril Gaucher, Le Bien Public inserts a link to an article on a Russian website under the anchor “sur une chaîne nationale russe” (on a Russian national channel), which in turn reproduces the content of the Telegram account “Russia Today en français”, whose broadcasting is forbidden in the European Union.

Last but not least, GEO inserts in one of its articles, under the clickable text “his visit to Uralvagonzavod”, a link that initially points to pravda-fr[.]com and now redirects to the site francais.news-paravda[.]com, which does not appear in the 193 sites listed in Viginum’s report, published at the end of April, because the domain name was not registered until May 23, 2024.

And on this site francais.news-pravda[.]com we find, not surprisingly, links from the newspapers Le Monde, Libération and Médiapart.

These links are free gifts to foreign manipulation organizations, while these same newspapers charge companies wishing to gain a little visibility.

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the Russian company Tigerweb mentioned in Viginum’s report. This company, owned by Yevgeny Shevchenko, administers the “Portal Kombat” network.

Each backlink obtained from French media outlets represents a trophy, and is added to the trophy cabinet. They are undoubtedly displayed by the company in front of its client to testify to the effectiveness of the operation and to obtain the continuation of this modus operandi.

Backlinks are also a way for them to identify sites that knowingly share their articles and act as driving belts for their operations, whether paid or unpaid (by “useful idiots“).

So what can we do?

There are several ways to avoid this phenomenon:

  • either insert only screenshots of the quoted articles, without making the URL readable, as we have done in this article.
  • or make the URL non-clickable, by adding square brackets for example: pravda-fr[.]com, which leaves the possibility for the surfer to copy/paste the URL into the browser’s address bar and access the content (which brings traffic but no brand awareness).
  • or insert the URL as displayed in Wayback machine (which brings neither traffic nor brand awareness) :
    https://web.archive.org/web/20240324205247/https://pravda-fr.com/world/2024/03/16/92794.html

At a time when democracies are falling prey to relentless informational attacks, it may seem necessary for the press to ensure that it does not contribute, however unwittingly, to these pernicious processes, with the aim of increasing collective resilience and better arming citizens intellectually in the face of such operations.

« A city’s strength lies not in its ramparts or its ships, but in the character of its citizens. »
Thucydide
History of the Peloponnesian War

– Athenae Erulin