Bed bug panic gripping Paris was stoked by Russian trolls, French intelligence suspects
- Experts said Russian trolls were using fake ‘doppelgänger’ articles to spread fake news
The bedbug panic gripping Paris has been fueled by Russian trolls, French intelligence suspects.
Experts told France’s RMC radio that Russian trolls were using fake ‘doppelgänger’ articles that looked like they had been written by a renowned French newspaper to tackle bedbug panic on social media.
The French news agency AFP identified two such fake articles, the Telegraph reports.
One, which resembled articles from the regional newspaper La Montagne, claimed that effective insecticides used to kill bed bugs would break the embargo on Russian chemicals.
But La Montage told AFP it had never published this article and called the doppelgänger a “forgery”, with AFP adding that bedbugs have been present in France for longer than sanctions on Russia have been in place.
Intelligence experts have told France’s RMC radio that Russian trolls used fake ‘doppelgänger’ articles that looked as if they had been written by a renowned French newspaper to quell bedbug panic on social media.
The second fake article was allegedly written by the left-wing French newspaper Libération and shared by a Telegram account with links to Russia Today, which is owned by the Russian government.
It claimed that the rise in bedbug numbers was due to Ukrainian refugees. The fake news was also published by a page posing as the conservative daily Le Figaro.
However, intelligence experts told RMC that they don’t think Russia initiated the bedbug panic in Paris — rather, it “rode” the wave of the upcoming bedbug terror being shared by people on social media.
Doppelganger articles are nothing new and a popular method among Russian trolls to spread fake news.
Catherine Colonna, the French Foreign Minister, said earlier this year that these doppelgänger articles, written by Russian troll farms, were “unworthy of a country with a seat on the UN Security Council.”
About 355 media outlets and the French Foreign Ministry website were targeted by these trolls.
Mathilde Panot, a French MP, said she had alerted authorities to 200,000 infestations in 2017. By 2022, this had risen to 1.2 million sites infested with bedbugs.
Nevertheless, bed bug sniffer dog handlers told the Telegraph that they had not seen an exponential increase in cases in Paris.
Aldo Massaglia of pest control company Doggybug said his company had been called upon to tackle infestations in hotels, schools and cinemas for more than a decade, but he has seen sales for Doggybug increase by 50 percent since the bedbug panic gripped France.