10/16/2025
NewsGuard Rates Network of 139 Fake French News Websites with Ties to the Kremlin
New York, NY — NewsGuard publishes today its rating of a network of 139 websites with Russian ties masquerading as French news outlets using AI to write articles and publish false or egregiously misleading claims about France and international politics.
The network, first exposed in a September 2025 report by the U.S.-based cybersecurity company Recorded Future, gets a NewsGuard score of 7.5/100. (See Full Nutrition Label for details.)
According to Recorded Future, these websites are “very likely operated by John Mark Dougan with support from the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE) and the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).”
As NewsGuard has reported in 2024, John Mark Dougan is a former U.S. Marine and Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016 after his home was raided by the FBI for allegedly leaking confidential information about local officials. Asked about his apparent involvement with the 139 French-language websites, Dougan told NewsGuard in an October 2025 message on Signal: “I’ve never heard of those sites. Still, I have no doubt [about] the accuracy and quality of the news they report. And God bless Macron and his child predator wife (if indeed she is a she).”
Since gaining asylum in Moscow, Dougan has become a key player in Russian propaganda campaigns, including by producing elaborate, detailed false narratives using artificial intelligence, according to federal U.S. officials. Viginum, a French government agency tracking foreign digital interference, reported that Dougan’s network of sites is part of a larger Russian influence operation known as Storm-1516, which has repeatedly targeted France, the U.S., and Germany.
In January 2025, NewsGuard named Dougan Disinformer of the Year.
“In April 2025, we revealed that Storm-1516 was increasingly targeting France, with five false narratives that had been published between December 2024 and March 2025, generating 55.8 million views,” said Chine Labbé, Managing Editor for Europe at NewsGuard. “At that point,” she added, “France seemed spared one key element of the Storm-1516 disinformation playbook: a coordinated network of websites posing as local news outlets to distribute the hoaxes. With these 139 fake news sites, the playbook is now complete. Of course, we will keep a close eye on these websites, and the false claims they continue spreading.”
A review of IP addresses and domain registration records by NewsGuard found that the 139 sites comprising the French-language network were created between February 2025 and August 2025. They either disclose no owners or give fabricated company names in violation of French law. They also feature names that seem chosen to mislead readers into believing they are reliable French media, with URLs including TVFrance2.fr (an echo of France 2, the flagship TV channel of France’s public broadcaster), and CourrierFrance24.fr (which seems to mix references to Courrier International, a weekly magazine publishing French translations of international news stories curated from foreign media outlets, and France 24.)
Below are some examples of false claims promoted by this network to date:
- France sold 51 percent of its electric utility company EDF in June 2025 to a Ukrainian politician charged with corruption
- A surgeon who had evidence about the French first lady’s gender-transition surgery was found dead in June 2025
- French nuclear company Orano began dumping nuclear waste in an Armenian national park in June 2025
- Leaked WhatsApp messages show France’s Macron issued arrest warrants for Le Pen and other far-right leaders in April 2025
- French President Emmanuel Macron set up a ‘political assassination squad’ to silence those who challenge him
The sprawling network previously targeted the U.S. and Germany, with tactics similar to those at play here. Yet, some tactics observed here are brand new, proving that the campaign is constantly adapting its methods, including the impersonation of real journalists to advance false claims, attaching their names and photos to fabricated articles.
To learn more about NewsGuard’s reporting on this French network of websites, contact [email protected].
About NewsGuard
NewsGuard helps consumers and enterprises find reliable information online with transparent and apolitical data and tools. Founded in 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s global staff of information reliability analysts has collected, updated, and deployed more than seven million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all the top false narratives spreading online.
NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.
Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95 percent of online engagement with news across nine countries.