The 20 Minutes website spoofed to relay Russian propaganda

• The

  20 Minutes

  website has been cloned by hackers in order to spread pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda by passing it off as information.

• According to Meta, Facebook's parent company, which spotted this campaign, it would be the biggest investment in disinformation since the start of the conflict in Ukraine.

  Other European media are also concerned.

• In order to ensure that you are on the

  20 Minutes

  website , and that you benefit from quality information, you must check that the correct URL has been entered in your browser's search bar and that the secure connection is activated.

Macronists, Mélenchonists, propaganda tool of the American empire or in the pay of the New World Order… At

, like most general information media, we are used to being attributed support or influence from all kinds.

But in recent months, we could have been accused of relaying Russian propaganda in the conflict between Vladimir Putin's country and Ukraine.

Our site copied for Russian propaganda

Indeed, victims of our success, we have been copied, or rather… usurped.

A website imitating ours has been spotted by Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

Same colors, same presentation, and a very, very similar URL: 20minuts.com.

“People registered this domain name, a similar graphic charter and then they used a tool that sucks up our content, making their site almost similar to ours, explains Winoc Coppens, director of the information system of

With one difference, they inserted their own content, pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda articles.

»

The largest disinformation campaign since the start of the conflict

Also, in the middle of the

articles , one could find others who denounced supposed Ukrainian lies, violence committed by Kiev troops or corruption by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Questionable information?

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According to Meta, who relied on the work of Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a digital research laboratory, it is the work of a Russian disinformation network which would have invested nearly 100,000 euros for the largest and most sophisticated operation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Several European media concerned

20 Minutes

is not the only site to have been affected by this campaign since other major European dailies have also had their clones, such as the British

, the Germans

, the Ukrainians of

or the agency Italian press Ansa.

According to our colleagues from France Info, these misinformation articles were even shared on social networks "by more than 2,300 fake accounts and fake pages in various languages, as well as by paid advertisements".

We can never be too careful

Other sites could soon be targeted by these methods.

Indeed, in July 2026, an Internet user, spotted by the moderator's blog, had spotted the registration of nearly 1,000 suspicious domain namesB by the same anonymous person, all suggestive of known institutions, such as Insee, the Strasbourg Academy or Pôle Emploi.

Sites and email addresses that could be used for fraudulent purposes.

ENSi, the experts in the fight against computer piracy, continue to scrap with the same intensity as we fight against disinformation, in particular through our Fake Off section, we can only advise our readers to ensure that they are on the

website and not on a clone by checking that the URL entered in the browser is indeed www.20minutes.fr, with the added bonus of the secure connection provided by our site with the small padlock icon and the "S" after the http.

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