Why are fake covers of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo circulating in Russia?

On November 28, the FRANCE 24 Observers team noticed an image of a fake cover of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo circulating on Twitter along with a caption in English that said, “France: Nazism is associated with Ukraine. Charlie Hebdo rolled out a special issue about the adventures of Ukrainian Nazis in Qatar. It’s a satire on the recent incident in Doha, where 3 drunken tourists painted Hitler’s moustache on the symbol of the World Cup.”

The post was retweeted at least 129 times. Moreover, the fake cover also appeared in tweets in Spanish, in French, in Polish and in Italian, generally with a small number of shares.

There are layers of fake news in this story. The fake Charlie Hebdo cover is about a different fake news story that our team debunked back on November 25. And that fake news story was about a video alleged to have been made by Al Jazeera but that hadn’t been, really). 

Are you ready for the next layer to this fake news story? The fake Al Jazeera news report claimed that Ukrainian supporters in Qatar had spray-painted Nazi symbols on posters for the World Cup, including the words “Sieg Heil”. They had also apparently added a Hitler mustache to the World Cup mascot. It turns out, however, that Al Jazeera never published this news report. Moreover, no such graffiti was documented in Qatar. The footage featured in the clip was all doctored. 

This is all relevant because the fake Charlie cover shows the mascot of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar wearing a Hitler mustache, the same “graffiti” that appeared in the fake Al Jazeera video (are you exhausted yet?). The Charlie Hebdo cover also shows two men wearing the keffiyeh scarves common in Qatar who are looking up a word in the dictionary, saying that it must be “something in Ukrainian”. 

But, as we mentioned, this Charlie Hebdo cover never existed. It’s a fake cover designed in the same style as the real magazine. There is no mention of this cover in the recent issues of the magazine. And if you look at the magazine archives, issue n°1584, which is supposed to be the one showing Ukrainian supporters creating Nazi graffiti, actually features a cover making fun of French politics. 

Images of at least six fake Charlie Hebdo covers have been circulating since July 

On September 23, 2022, the magazine Charlie Hebdo published an article about how they had seen at least two fake covers imitating the magazines, adding that the covers were “very ugly.”

These two fake covers featured French President Emmanuel Macron sitting on a water cannon spraying protesters and yelling, “Stay at home, don’t revolt!” while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, depicted as a dog, seems to be eating excrement from a bowl in the colors of the European Union. 

The other cover shows a besuited man with a green head in the shape of the United Kingdom throwing up on former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, still depicted as a dog, clings to the green-headed monster. Spelling mistakes in the French titles, including “La fête est fini” (the party is finished), which is missing the “e” in “finie” and the French word “chaud” (hot) misspelled as “haud”, also underline the amateur nature of these fakes. 

In October, there was another fake Charlie Hebdo cover, this one showing British King Charles III getting mad about some graffiti left on the tomb of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, by Volodymyr Zelensky. Once again, Zelensky is depicted as a dog.

And then, in early November, the FRANCE 24 Observers team identified one more fake Charlie Hebdo cover, this one featuring Pope Francis putting his hand on a child’s rear end. The cover was a reference to a declaration made by the pope about the “cruelty” of Chechen and Buryat fighters [Editor’s note: Buryat are the largest indigenous group in Russia, who live in the Siberia region]. This was controversial especially because these ethnic groups represent some of the largest non-Christian populations in Russia. 

All in all, there were six fake Charlie Hebdo covers that have been circulating online since July, all of them on themes related to the war in Ukraine. 

Most of these covers were shared by pro-Russian groups on Telegram

We used TG Stat, a tool that can analyse data on Telegram, to understand more about these fake covers and how they’ve been circulating online. Apparently, the fake Charlie Hebdo cover showing Nazi graffiti in Qatar has been shared in more than 85 Russian-language Telegram groups since November 25. In several cases, the post was also shared on Telegram groups in Spanish, French and English. 

The original post appeared on a Telegram channel called “Раньше всех. Ну почти. Спецоперация”, a cryptic title that translates (roughly) to “Sooner than others. Almost. Special operation”. That post was later deleted. 

Russian independent media outlet Provereno media did a detailed analysis of posts featuring these fake Charlie Hebdo covers. In each occasion, the posts first appeared on Russian-language Telegram channels that openly support the Kremlin. 

For example, the fake cover showing Boris Johnson being vomited on first appeared online on July 12, when it was shared on the Nebozhena Telegram channel, which has 480,000 followers. 

The Emmanuel Macron cover first appeared on September 1 on the Pool N3 channel, which has 274,000 followers.

The cover featuring Charles III was posted on September 20 on Christina Potupchik’s Telegram channel. Potupchik is the former commissioner of the pro-government Russian youth group Nashi. Her channel has 177,000 followers.

And the cover showing a Ukrainian missile falling into a hole was first posted on November 16 on a channel called Putin TG, which has 313,000 followers.

These posts circulated almost exclusively on Russian Telegram channels and were amplified by well-known Russian propagandists, including Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian TV presenter who French daily newspaper Libération has called the Kremlin’s “chief propagandist” and whose Telegram channel has more than 1.4 million followers. 

Fake covers from different media outlets

Since September, the FRANCE 24 Observers team has identified at least five other fake covers of international publications, including the German publications Stern and Titanic, the Spanish publication El Jueves and the American magazine Vogue. Most of these fake covers didn’t circulate widely. Others had some success, like the Vogue cover, which was retweeted 1,600 times, even though it was clearly a parody.

For its part, Russian media outlet Provereno says it has identified fake covers from at least 10 international media outlets, including Turkish, Indian and German publications. They analysed these fake covers in this article.

‘These fake covers are part of a strategy to turn the Russian population into zombies’ 

Ilya Ber, editor-in-chief of independent Russian fact-checking outlet Provereno, says that there is a strategy behind these fake covers:

According to our observations, these fake covers are a new phenomenon. During the height of the last misinformation war in 2014 and 2015, we didn’t see anything like it. It’s really a strategy born during the summer of 2022 that became a more developed strategy in the autumn of 2022. 

These fake covers were created by Russian propagandists mostly for internal needs. They are part of a strategy to turn the Russian people into zombies. And they are doing a good job of it, judging from the number of shares. They were first published in private groups [Editor’s note: then shared by larger and larger groups run by well-known Kremlin supporters].

What is interesting is that we find references to fake news in these fake covers. That’s the case for the Charlie Hebdo cover that refers to the fake news story about Ukrainian football fans creating pro-Nazi graffiti at the World Cup in Qatar. 

Similarly, another fake cover, this one of the German magazine Stern, that depicts Ukrainian President Zelensky as “a black hole” sucking up international funds donated to Ukraine. [Editor’s note: The FRANCE 24 Observers team analysed some doctored images of graffiti depicting Volodymyr Zelensky as a black hole sucking up money. Turns out, the graffiti was likely digitally added to photos of Saint-Mandé, a Parisian suburb, and Warsaw, in Poland].

The objective is twofold. First of all, there are internal aims, namely to make Russians believe that some Western media outlets support Russia. There are also external aims, including trying to artificially amplify any messages sympathetic to Russia in foreign languages. In both cases, the aim is to nourish the public with “alternative” facts. 

Moreover, we’ve seen the pro-Russian movement use similar strategies in the recent past. 

According to an investigation by Proekt Media, an independent Russian-language media outlet, authorities in Moscow have already tested a similar strategy on Telegram. Starting in 2016, the pro-Kremlin movement attempted to cast a negative light on opposition leader Alexei Navalny by circulating posts often featuring explicit photos along with funny captions. The youth movement Nashi was a major source of these posts. 

In early November 2022, analytics company Graphika Inc. reported that pro-Russian accounts were using political caricatures in an attempt to influence the result of the American midterm elections. Accounts publishing these images were linked to a “troll factory” with ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary agency, as well as the Internet Research Agency, a Russian propaganda agency.

If you see an image online of a magazine cover that seems a little fishy— especially if it is about the war in Ukraine— then always check to see if the cover was actually published by the outlet in question. And if you are still in doubt, reach out to the FRANCE 24 Observers team via the Twitter account  @InfoIntoxF24 and we’ll take a look.