Banner: A street vendor walks past a bar called “Facebook” in Yaounde, Cameroon, October 2, 2018. (Source: Reuters/Zohra Bensemra)

A fake Cameroonian news outlet and TV channel known as Ebene Media TV has been spreading pro-Russia content since 2023. The DFRLab investigated Ebene Media TV’s online presence, sourcing practices, and social media amplification strategies. Our investigation found that the outlet often copied and reposted content published by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik. We also identified evidence of amplification via inauthentic means to promote the outlet’s YouTube videos, including the use of a news aggregator and social media posts in multiple languages.

Our investigation shows that Ebene Media TV is part of a wider operation launched by CSS Engineering, a Cameroonian business previously flagged for plagiarism and spreading pro-Russian content online. The DFRLab was able to attribute the campaign to CSS Engineering and found evidence of the company creating more fake news initiatives that spread pro-Russian content online.

The DFRLab collected all posts on Ebene Media TV’s website using WordPress’s REST API, totaling 37,918 articles from 2019 to April 2024. At the time of writing, the homepage for ebene-media.com was not functioning, though a link to the website’s news section was still accessible.

Although the website was set up in 2019, it began actively posting in May 2022. Using keyword analysis, we found that Ebene Media TV’s website posted most often about France (9,190 articles), Russia (7,256), Ukraine (6,196), and the West (3,153). In contrast, Ebene Media TV covered West African countries much less frequently, including Mali (1,167), Niger (255), Cameroon (171), and Burkina-Faso (60).

Few, if any, articles on Ebene Media TV’s website are original. Of the total published articles, 24.2 percent  – nearly 10,000 articles – appear to be articles copied from various news sources in French, including Russian state media, other news outlets, and sports media. These include RT en Francais. Sputnik Afrique, Slate, and Footmercato. There were 3,998 articles featuring “francais.rt.com” or “spoutniknews.africa” in the body of the articles, while the articles taken from Footmercato and Slate typically dealt with general news and sports.

Some articles appear to be copied from other French news sources without proper citation. For instance, an article about the Russian cruiser Moskva, which sank after a successful Ukrainian strike in May 2022, appears to have been stolen from the French online news outlet Le Tribunal du Net.

Additionally, Ebene Media TV’s website posted 2,898 articles featuring videos, representing around 7.6 percent of all content posted. These video posts appear to have ceased after April 4, 2023, though posting to YouTube has continued.

From August 2020 to the time of writing, Ebene Media TV’s main YouTube channel uploaded more than 21,70 videos and garnered at least 403,000 subscribers. Ebene Media TV+, a secondary channel created in 2022 though now deplatformed, posted 6,240 videos and garnered 38,200 subscribers. According to VidIQ, both channels posted nearly one hundred videos per week.

Initially, only the secondary channel’s videos mentioned the use of AI-generated voiceovers in their video descriptions. It adopted the practice on April 29, 2024, including the disclaimer “NB: The voiceover was generated by artificial intelligence.” On May 7, the main channel also started including disclaimers mentioning the use of artificial intelligence for its videos.

Using the Meta-owned social media analysis tool CrowdTangle, the DFRLab found spikes in posts and engagement during geopolitical crises. For instance, posting activity hit an all-high in August 2023 during the Niger crisis, when an armed junta removed President Mohamed Bazum from power. Facebook activity seems, however, to have stalled since late 2023.

As noted by The Intercept and Reset, the main Facebook page that reposts Ebene Media TV videos is Infos Global, a fringe page that reposts pro-Russia content, news segments, and videos from French far-right politicians. In certain cases, the DFRLab found that the top ten amplifiers of Ebene Media TV reposted content from the fringe Facebook page Magasin de l’Info, which utilized similar appropriation tactics. CrowdTangle data also shows that new pages have emerged, posting Ebene Media TV content with similar tactics.

We found five additional Facebook pages directly related to Ebene Media TV and its associated channels, totaling 39,824 followers at the time of research. The oldest page appears to have been created in April 2022, while others were created throughout 2023.

The Ebene Média Business page regularly posts videos with AI-generated voiceovers about immigration to Canada and other countries. On YouTube, Ebene Media TV+ posted a community post pointing at another channel, “Voyager et Réussir,” which uses the same AI-generated voiceover technology and posts about a similar topic.

On X, suspicious accounts spread copy-pasta posts with links to Ebene Media TV’s TikTok and YouTube channels. While two of Ebene Media TV’s X accounts have been suspended, @ebenemedia_tv remained active at the time of writing.

Using a keyword search for the phrase “Découvre la vidéo de Ebene Media TV” (“Discover Ebene Media TV’s video”), the DFRLab found 142 tweets linked to a dozen accounts that exhibit similar traits of inauthentic behavior. All the accounts using that phrase spread multiple links to Ebene Media TV’s TikTok account. The most prominent account seems to be @agpillois, which shared a total of ninety posts. The accounts mostly spread links to other social media platforms, including TikTok and VK.

Other accounts focused on sharing links to Ebene Media TV’s YouTube videos. On X, the account @MaxDoll1746989 engages in similar posting patterns; at the time of writing, we found that this account had posted fifty-nine posts about Ebene Media TV. Every post featured an incremented counter preceded by the letter “P.” Each post also featured the title of the Ebene Media TV video. In addition, this account engages in seemingly identical inauthentic behavior on Facebook.

Another prominent account, @Qode17Kat, reposts links to Ebene Media TV’s YouTube channel on X. The conspiracy-related account shared fifty posts between 2021 and May 2024. In addition to the X posts, the account also posted sixty messages on Telegram with links to Ebene Media TV’s YouTube channel.

Two additional accounts did not include links in their posts but exhibited signs of coordinated posting. On February 22, 2024, the accounts @EricArchambau18 and @azulojo2023 posted an excerpt of an Ebene Media TV video showing Russian advances in Avdiivka. Both posts were made at the same time and featured the same description as Ebene Media TV’s YouTube video. As observed with the other accounts, these accounts also regularly engage in posting conspiracy-related content.

In addition, the two accounts posted other identical content glorifying Vladimir Putin and defaming French President Emmanuel Macron throughout April 2024.

Accounts on X and results on Google News indicate that content posted by Ebene Media TV on YouTube is aggregated on the third-party website AlloTrends. The DFRLab found that the X account @godfroykone shared fifty-two posts with links to AlloTrends between July 2023 and March 2024. All the posts linked to stories with Ebene Media TV videos, together with seemingly machine-translated titles of the video in various languages.

On Google News, 159 entries from AlloTrends.com dating back to 2021 feature Ebene Media TV YouTube videos. AlloTrends’ legal information page claims that the website is operated by the Hong Kong-based company Panda Network Limited (熊貓網有限公司).

The DFRLab was able to attribute the Ebene Media TV infrastructure and other fake news outlets to CSS Engineering, a Cameroonian business that has created a dozen news websites and frequently employs content appropriation, inauthentic behavior, and AI deepfakes to monetize disinformation.

Both on Facebook and YouTube, Ebene Media TV reports links to Cameroon Magazine, another false news outlet that uses AI-generated voiceovers to produce misleading news content. Moreover, in 2021, Cameroonian news outlet CamerounWeb called out Cameroon Magazine for plagiarism, claiming that it “reproduces all its contents without prior authorization. The authors of these reprehensible actions deliberately fail to specify the source of the articles taken on Camerounweb.com and sometimes simply attribute the authorship of the content to other sites.”

Identical graphics and content appropriation indicate that Cameroon Magazine also posted pro-Kremlin narratives using AI-generated voiceovers.

In addition, Ebene Media TV’s earliest videos featured a shortened link inviting viewers to donate money via PayPal. The page mentions that the money will be donated to “CSS ENG – GROUP EBENE MEDIA,” indicating a connection between the two entities.

CSS Engineering’s website previously highlighted a project known as “Ebene Magazine,” according to a 2017 archived record of the website. A historical Google analytics code reverse search shows that between 2018 and 2020, CSS Engineering owned at least twenty-three domain names purporting to report on the news. And between 2016 and 2024, CSS Engineering appears to have created several news projects that are now part of both Cameroon Magazine and Ebene Media.

Most notably, Ebene Sport engages on YouTube in identical tactics as Ebene Media TV, posting AI-generated voiceovers about sports news and using a WordPress website that reposts other outlets’ articles.

The DFRLab also found a 2016 instance in which the Ebene Magazine project reposted an article by Africa24Info.com, an inauthentic news outlet that the EU DisinfoLab researched in 2020 for spreading articles copied from Sputnik and RT. An X query shows that in 2016 dozens of suspicious accounts on X amplified a story accusing France of murdering the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Two bots used link shorteners that directed to Ebene Magazine’s copy-pasta story taken from Africa24Info.com.

Using the WordPress REST API, we found users registered on Cameroon Magazine’s website whose names matched two CSS Engineering employees’ pages on LinkedIn and one on Facebook, though the employees never named Cameroon Magazine or Ebene Media TV.

In another instance, an employee whose name appears on Cameroon Magazine also posted ads for the creation of websites by CSS Engineering while reportedly working for a CSS Engineering client, Acopredi, a company which appears to help Cameroonian students relocate to Tunisia.

In addition, the Facebook profile of CSS Engineering CEO Georges Momo indicates that he also owns Ebene Media TV, thus showing a direct ownership link between CSS Engineering, Cameroon Magazine, and Ebene Media TV. Momo also appears in the user list of the Cameroon Magazine website. Along with another user, Momo left comments on Acopredi. According to Momo’s Facebook page, he is also the CEO of Acopredi. Both Momo and the other user appear on Cameroon Magazine’s list of authors.

Additional research by Tessa Knight.

Valentin Châtelet, “Fake Cameroonian news sites spread pro-Russia, anti-France content,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), July 16, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/07/16/fake-cameroonian-news-sites-spread-pro-russia-anti-france-content/.