Hats off to @EUvsDisinfo for their exposé on the @EPToday website, which was featured in @PoliticoEUROPE’s Brussels Playbook this morning @florianeder
euvsdisinfo.eu/how-to-get-the…
euvsdisinfo.eu/how-to-get-the…
We've named this thread: "How to hide your Indian interests behind American and Russian content"
1/14 We’ve noticed that people have been quick to attribute EPToday as Russian disinformation, but we want to recast attention to a couple of aspects of EUvsDisinfo’s article…
2/14 Here, you can see that content from BOTH Russia Today and Voice of America was syndicated to increase the web visibility of EP Today and their Facebook page #contentsyndication 
3/14 As this screenshot from the article shows, before using Russia Today, EP Today syndicated much of their content from Voice of America. More importantly, EUvsDisinfo did draw attention to the fact that...
4/14 ...This illustrates how easy it is for organisations to syndicate content from news sites, regardless of the narratives pushed. After digging deeper into EP Today’s website, we observed content related to Indian interests.
5/14 EP Today content has, for instance, been shared by Dr Pramila Srivastava, Head of the Srivastava Group and publisher of the New Delhi Times newspaper. (source: twitter.com/PramilaBK)
6/14 But, why? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that EP Today’s Facebook page is managed from India, as @EUvsDisinfo highlighted…
7/14 Just to go a little bit deeper into what EUvsDisinfo flagged, we also looked at the amplification of EP Today's content on Twitter (over the last 30 days), and noticed that this content was very popular in both India and Belgium.
8/14 In looking at the web archive of EPToday.com, we found a previous version of the page from 2014 that mentioned the same email address as EP Today’s current one, but had a different phone number listed. web.archive.org/web/2014021819…
9/14 A Google reverse search on this Belgian landline phone number returned two websites: Srivastava Group and International Trading Corporation.
10/14 It is interesting to note that Srivastava Group's office is located at Square de Meus in Brussels, which is close to the European Parliament. And it seems as though they share the same office address as EP Today.
11/14 Meanwhile, we searched to find out which servers these domains are hosted on, and found that both srivastavagroup.com and itcmsch.com were hosted on the same server viewdns.info/reverseip/?hos….
Another significant one here is uiwnet.com.
Another significant one here is uiwnet.com.
11/14 Looking back at EPToday.com’s website, we searched for its IP history using the viewdns.com service, and we found that eptoday.com was previously hosted on the same server as the SrivastavaGroup.com.
12/14 We also found the original registration of eptoday.com before it was “whois shadowed” (meaning hidden - thanks to @noneprivacy for this). We found a direct link between the EPTODAY and UIWNET.COM domains, which were both hosted on the same server.
13/14 To summarise, EP Today’s online presence seems to have both physical (phone number, office address) and online (same servers, official registration email) links with Indian stakeholders in Brussels.
14/14 This investigation is ongoing, so stay tuned for more updates! Aside from this though, it reveals just how complicated this field of research is; it shows how attribution is always difficult, and how caution should be taken when reporting on disinformation investigations.
