Website impersonates Euronews to spread disinformation about the Sudanese Army
Fake X/Twitter accounts share content from impostor website spreading disinformation about links between Boko Haram and SAF
1) Some ‘Tweeps’ (yes, I am still using that term) raised concerns about a piece of sketchy news being shared by pro-RSF accounts in #Sudan. The news claims to be from a site called @EuroPostAgency The site is clearly part of a #disinformation network. I will highlight some things here >
2) Firstly, the news being shared indicates that the Sudanese army had some meeting with Boko Haram, considered by many states to be a terrorist organisation. A fairly obvious attempt to smear by association. Fits with pro-RSF propaganda
3) Anyway. the website looks professionally produced with some decent design. It even has the option to subscribe for the excellent price of only $1 per month. Oh Europost, you do spoil us. I subscribed with a burner email but no result! Dig deeper and things get even stranger...
4) Firstly the website was registered on 20th June 2023, so it's new. That in itself is not that weird, but if you follow the link from the website, to the the Europost Twitter account, the date is different. Indeed the Twitter account goes back to 2010
5) The Twitter account also says there are 898 tweets, which is a) low for a news account that is 13 years old, b) there are no visible tweets. From what I know about a related network this is an account that was sold/hacked some time ago and has been scrubbed and repurposed
6) On the site none of the socials work except Twitter. You can see these tabs for YT, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. They even give an indicator of the number of subscribers/likes. But if you click them they go nowhere (except Twitter)- designed to give illusion of credibility
7) The content on the website is mostly stolen from sites like Euronews. If you copy and paste an article from Europost for example, you will see that it copies the text from Euronews. It also copyies the branding. There is no attribution as you'd see from legit syndication
8) What makes it more interesting is that not ALL the content is copied. Some of the strategic disinformation is original. The article about Boko Haram and the SAF, for example, appears to be original. It even claims to be from one of EuroPost's own correspondents in Washington!
9) if you copy and paste the text it takes you to a medium blog written by someone called Carol. Carol has written two posts, both about Sudan. The other article is trying to implicate Egyptian military support through drone use with SAF - that article is also on Europostagency
10) on Europost there are a few original articles about Sudan, almost all seemingly hostile to the Sudanese Armed Forces or Egypt.
11) If you search Twitter for the domain europostagency.com the only posts are about four to five tweets sent in the past few hours. This indicates that no else is really sharing articles from europostagency, except for accounts sharing disinfo -(and one asking if it’s disinfo)
12) And i'll wager even the verified account(s) sharing the article are not who they claim to be....
So TLDR: @europostagency is impersonated content, seeking to spread anti SAF propaganda through likely related social media channels. #Sudan