RSF’s investigations – a key response to attacks against our organisation
The investigations conducted by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in 2024 not only shed light on violence against journalists and attacks on trustworthy journalism, but also played a key role in responding to a wave of attacks by various actors against RSF itself. The work of RSF’s investigators even found itself at the heart of its litigation response strategy.
“After a year marked by multiple attacks on our organisation and the loss of our secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, who helped to create our investigation desk, RSF will continue to defend a demanding vision of journalism and the public’s right to freely reported, reliable, independent and diverse news and information. We will continue to investigate crimes against journalists and their perpetrators, as well as disinformation’s entrepreneurs, regardless of whether they’re from the Kremlin or in upmarket Parisian neighbourhoods, and without fear of being challenged about the quality of our work. On the contrary, as in 2024, our investigations will be a major tool for addressing attacks.”
It was in the course of trying to access the RSF website by means of an ordinary Google search in April 2024 that we discovered a fake site dedicated to RSF. Everything was false on this site although it all seemed real. The site’s creators had plagiarised RSF’s logo and visual identity and even used some of our editing codes. In the course of investigating, RSF discovered that, although this practice is widely used by Kremlin disinformation agencies, in this case it was the work of a French company based in Paris that calls itself Progressif Media.
Supported by internal Progressif Media documents and statements by internal company sources, RSF revealed in July that this company had in fact registered not one, but five domain names imitating RSF’s name. And that the resources deployed did not stop there. They included visuals portraying RSF as a sect, pre-written tweets sent to 16,000 people for onpassing, a video calling for a campaign against RSF, and supposedly “shocking” information about our “biases” and our “funding.”
RSF’s investigation also uncovered the close ties between this company and Vivendi, the media conglomerate owned by French billionaire businessman Vincent Bolloré’s family. Vivendi provides Progressif Media with office space and is one of its shareholders. In response to RSF’s revelations, Vivendi finally acknowledged that its Canal+ TV channel had hired the company for online promotion and “community animation” services – terminology that hugely minimises the reality of the actions undertaken.
In fact, RSF's investigation established that this disinformation and smear campaign, about which RSF managed to see an internal report produced by Progressif Media, was a response to the success a few months earlier of a request that RSF had filed with the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court.
In response to RSF’s request, the Council of State had ordered the Broadcasting and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (ARCOM) on 13 February to ensure that broadcast media outlets respect the requirements of media pluralism and the editorial independence of their journalists. The decision annoyed the management of Vivendi's media outlets including the TV news channel CNews, whose one-sided treatment of certain subjects had occasionally been criticized but until then had mostly been tolerated by ARCOM, which had been very lax about enforcing the cardinal principles without which journalism could not exist.
Progressif Media’s counter-attack to defend CNews, involving the use of “hacking” and “trolling”, was carried out in a sneaky, manipulative and sometimes covert manner. Neither Canal+ nor Progressif Media were direct relays. The operation was implemented by means of so-called “citizen” groups on social media but our investigations showed that it was managed by Progressif Media. Such practices are the antithesis of journalism and news reporting. And yet Progressif Media now shares the premises of JDD, the French Sunday newspaper that became Bolloré property in 2023 – a close proximity that is very unusual for a leading French media outlet.
The findings of this investigation were the basis of the complaint that RSF filed with the Paris public prosecutor on 23 July 2024 denouncing identity theft and deceptive commercial practices.
Since then, the fake site has been taken down, as has a web page entirely dedicated to this “battle” against RSF. But these practices, designed to manipulate public opinion by means of groups managed by Progressif Media, have not stopped. Several journalists and media outlets have been the subject of vitriolic attacks, including France Culture journalist Nora Hamadi and Sylvain Bourmeau, a journalist with the AOC news site. And many media outlets and broadcasts have even been reported to ARCOM, in what is a curious form of “community animation.”
Kremlin-laundered disinformation against RSF, X indifference
By using the same means as the worst enemies of trustworthy journalism and, by extension, of democracies, Progressif Media has invented nothing. These techniques are part of the arsenal deployed by Russia, which has adopted disinformation as a weapon in the service of its geopolitical ambitions. Like many Western media outlets, RSF was also a target in 2024. Several videos usurping its identity and logo and sometimes using the likenesses of its representatives have circulated with total impunity since July.
This content – which has included passing off RSF as the author of a study on the alleged Nazi sympathies of Ukrainian soldiers and the alleged dishonesty of Ukraine’s media – has been designed to use RSF’s brand and credibility to legitimize the Kremlin narrative about the war in Ukraine. Shared hundreds of times, one example has had nearly half a million views. In September, RSF showed how the Kremlin had laundered this fake content by means of a statement by a foreign ministry spokeswoman and by using the social media accounts of two Russian embassies abroad.
At the same time, ten posts on X (the former Twitter) that had helped to amplify this content were the subject of a series of reports by RSF to Elon Musk's social media company. But none of the posts was taken down. In response to this deliberate inaction, and on the basis of RSF’s investigation into this disinformation operation, RSF brought a suit against X in the French courts in November 2024, accusing it of disseminating false news and of complicity in misrepresentation and identity theft.
RSF accuses this social media platform of making its exceptional resources and visibility available to those who spread falsehoods and seek to deceive and manipulate public opinion, while at the same time guaranteeing them perfect impunity. As more and more media outlets desert X for this reason, it is time for the platform to be held accountable. In response to X’s indifference, the courts are the last resort for defending reliable information and punishing those who spread disinformation.
Investigations that annoy
As well as serving as the basis of two important judicial complaints by RSF in 2024, RSF’s investigative work was also the subject of a trial. The head of RSF’s investigation desk appeared before a court in Paris on 17 December in response to a defamation suit by Karim Keïta, the son of a former Malian president, who was named in an RSF investigation into Malian reporter Birama Touré’s disappearance in Bamako in 2016.
In this well documented investigation carried out over several years and based on statements by multiple sources, RSF successively revealed in 2021 and 2022 how this journalist had been detained, held captive, mistreated and then probably killed by a Malian intelligence agency after he investigated several sensitive subjects concerning Karim Keïta.
At the hearing in December, the prosecutor’s office asked the court to reject the lawsuit after RSF’s lawyers pointed out that it lacked any specific accusations. The court adjourned until 20 February, when its decision is expected.
The head of RSF’s investigation desk is the third journalist to be sued by Keïta in connection with this case, following Adama Dramé, the director of the Malian weekly Le Sphinx, and French reporter Vincent Hugeux. Far from being intimidated, RSF intends to pursue its investigations because it believes they help to shed light on the truth and to defend the cause of reliable reporting and those who embody this ideal.
