Info Verification
Ukraine: a fake newspaper cover targets Emmanuel Macron
While traveling in the Czech Republic, Emmanuel Macron returned to his comments on Monday March 4 concerning the possible sending of Western troops to Ukraine.
“
We refuse to enter into a logic of escalation
,” tempered the French president.
At the same time, a caricature of the head of state on the front page of the German satirical newspaper
Titanic
appeared on social networks.
RFI's Info Verif unit carried out an investigation into this new false cover spread by Russian propaganda.
This cover, attributed to the German satirical newspaper Titanic, was manipulated.
© Screenshots/RFI montage
By: Grégory Genevrier Follow
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Was Emmanuel Macron caricatured on the cover of the German satirical magazine
Titanic
for March 2024?
This is what several Internet users have been saying, wrongly, on social networks in recent days.
Their narrative is based on an image.
We see Emmanuel Macron armed with bottles of wine and a baguette, dressed in military attire and dropping frogs into the sky from a plane.
This caricature is called, in German, “
Macron sends French reinforcements to the Ukrainian army
”.
It directly refers to comments made by the French president on February 26, 2024, when he declared that sending Western troops to Ukraine could “not
be excluded
”.
This fake newspaper cover has been circulating online since March 4, 2024. © Telegram screenshot
Verification completed, the German magazine
Titanic
never actually published this front page.
To see this, simply go to
the official website of the German media
and look for the magazine dated March 2024. We then find the authentic cover, dedicated not to Emmanuel Macron, but to Russian President Vladimir Poutine.
The original cover of the magazine does not mention Emmanuel Macron.
© Screenshots/RFI montage
The logo, the graphic charter, the barcode and even the authentication number have been faithfully reproduced to deceive the vigilance of Internet users.
The Shadow of Portal Kombat
According to research by
RFI's Info Verif unit
, this false cover of Emmanuel Macron appeared for the first time online on the evening of March 4, on the Telegram channel and the VKontakte account of @russosphere which evokes "
the coward of the Élysée
”.
This publication is then immediately reprinted, word for word, a minute later by the Pravda.fr website.
The infox first appeared on the Vkontakte account “russophère” before being taken up on the Pravda.fr website.
© Screenshots/RFI montage
This website and this account have been identified by Viginum, the French service for protection against foreign digital interference, as
actors in the Portal Kombat network
.
A structured disinformation network made up of more than a hundred websites used to disseminate and amplify pro-Russian propaganda online.
The distribution scheme takes place in two stages.
False information is first published on a Telegram channel or a social network, before being taken up by a website such as the Pravda ecosystem made up of sites translated into several languages.
A path that helps amplify the virality of fake news.
The false cover is also circulating on X, formerly Twitter.
© Screenshots X/ RFI Montage
Fake headlines, a major tool of Russian propaganda
This false cover presenting a caricature of Emmanuel Macron is not the first to circulate, far from it.
RFI's Info Verif unit has identified
more than ten of them since the start of the war in Ukraine
.
These two newspaper covers shared on social networks are false.
They were manipulated.
© Screenshots/RFI montage
This disinformation technique has already targeted several Western media, often satirical magazines.
The German
Titanic
, the French
Charlie Hebdo
and the Spanish
El Jueves
are notably regularly targeted.
This propaganda is aimed both at the Russians, whom the Kremlin wants to convince of the merits of its invasion and the crumbling of Western support for Ukraine, and at Westerners.
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