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SHADES recalled, relying on data from INA, the gap between the media coverage of candidates in the 2022 presidential election and the results at the polls. It was noted that Éric Zemmour was the second most cited candidate in the media, but he received 7% of the votes in the first round. https://t.co/43cFta5toO #Élections2022 #Politique #Médias (translated)

ΗΠΑ: Τι δείχνουν οι δημοσκοπήσεις για τις ενδιάμεσες εκλογές του Νοεμβρίου 2026 Στις 3 Νοεμβρίου 2026 οι Αμερικανοί προσέρχονται στις κάλπες για τις ενδιάμεσες εκλογές. Θα εκλεγούν όλα τα 435 μέλη της Βουλής των Αντιπροσώπων, θα κριθούν 35 έδρες της Γερουσίας, συμπεριλαμβανομένων δύο ειδικών εκλογών, και θα πραγματοποιηθούν εκλογές κυβερνητών σε 36 πολιτείες. Δεν πρόκειται για προεδρικές εκλογές: το επίδικο σε ομοσπονδιακό επίπεδο είναι ποιος θα ελέγχει τα δύο σώματα του Κογκρέσου από τον Ιανουάριο του 2027 https://dimoskopiseis.gr/usa-midterms-polls/

The author of the publication claimed that Argentina had lost 32,300 companies and 437,000 jobs since Javier Milei came to power. He also stated that Milei, whom he described as far-right, would travel to Spain in the coming days to campaign in favor of the PP and Vox. https://t.co/9S1AJ6ClyJ #Argentina #Economía #Política #AR #ES (translated)

Dragão News reported that the game against PSV was sold out, while there were still 433 tickets for the match with Napoli, 85 for the one against Ac. Viseu, and 810 for the one against Estoril. The profile stated that the Estádio do Dragão was the only way. https://t.co/j1MNQWOiqX #Bilhetes #Futebol #EstádioDoDragão (translated)

Operation Dark Clark – Russia built a real organisation around a false identity Most influence operations create fake people, fake websites or fake news stories. Operation Dark Clark appears to have gone considerably further: Russian operators built what looked like a functioning research organisation in Latin America, employed real people to produce genuine research and concealed from those employees who was ultimately directing their work. OpenAI disclosed the operation on 8 October after banning a cluster of accounts originating in Russia. The actors used ChatGPT while targeting countries across Latin America, principally to damage Ukraine’s reputation, manipulate domestic political debates and manage a self-described research organisation called the Social Research Center, or SRC. OpenAI assessed Dark Clark as Category Five on the six-level Breakout Scale, the first operation it has disrupted since beginning its influence-operation reporting to reach that level. A front organisation with real employees The SRC presented itself as a research platform studying subjects including Latin America’s relationship with India and the Indian diaspora. OpenAI found more than 60 articles on its website, most of them apparently original rather than plagiarised. Internal reports produced by the Russian operators discussed hiring, dismissals, salary scales, staffing and unfinished research projects, strongly suggesting that the operators controlled the organisation rather than merely collaborating with it. At the centre of the structure was “Mia Clark”, a fictitious identity reportedly used to manage social-media activity and communicate with staff. According to OpenAI, the available evidence indicates that employees working for SRC in Latin America were probably unaware that the organisation was being directed by Russian actors. They interviewed experts, conducted research and wrote papers in what appears to have been good faith. The deception therefore existed primarily at the organisational level: much of the work was real, but the identity and strategic purpose of the institution commissioning it were not. OpenAI This is one reason Dark Clark differs from the familiar model of a troll farm. A reader encountering an SRC paper might be looking at research genuinely written by a Latin American employee based on genuine interviews. The manipulation lies further upstream, in who built the institution, selected its direction and controlled its infrastructure. From forged emails to real events The operation also appears to have attempted something more ambitious than online persuasion: inducing real people to produce events that could later be turned into propaganda. In May 2026, according to the operators’ internal reports, they created an email address impersonating Lima’s regional education authorities and instructed schools to organise activities about Ukraine for a cultural-diversity event. The instructions included references to Stepan Bandera, whose historical legacy remains particularly contentious in Poland and parts of Eastern Europe. The operators claimed that some schools complied, replied to the false address and sent photographs of the events. OpenAI could not independently verify every claim contained in the operators’ reports. It did, however, find Peruvian reporting matching the story, followed by publications in Poland and an English-language outlet in Hungary. Some coverage included comments from a Polish MEP calling for people displaying what he described as anti-Polish attitudes to be declared persona non grata. OpenAI therefore concluded that the fabricated starting point appears to have entered genuine political debate across national borders. The mechanism is unusually effective because the final photographs need not themselves be fabricated. If people can be tricked into staging a real event on the basis of a forged instruction, the operation creates authentic visual evidence of something that was artificially initiated. The same method in Ecuador and Bolivia Dark Clark’s internal reports describe similar efforts elsewhere. In Ecuador, the operators claimed they used a fake education email to encourage schools to stage ceremonies involving President Daniel Noboa and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Ecuadorian media subsequently covered a matching controversy, and the country’s education minister issued a detailed denial. Other Ecuador-focused material included fabricated audio attributed to Ukraine’s consul and a false television report alleging that Noboa’s government was recruiting Ecuadorians to fight in Ukraine. Local fact-checker Lupa found that the supposed Teleamazonas report had never been broadcast, that images had been taken from Instagram, that the audio was AI-generated and that a company named in a supposed recruitment contract did not exist in Ecuador’s corporate registry. In Bolivia, an internal report described a fake audio recording supposedly made by an employee of state water company EPSAS during anti-government protests. It claimed that water supplies to La Paz would be cut and a state of emergency declared. The allegation produced a fact-check and an official denial. OpenAI says the operators explicitly described their objective as worsening the political crisis surrounding the demonstrations. Possible links to the post-Wagner influence machine Dark Clark did not emerge in a vacuum. The operators repeatedly asked ChatGPT about Politology and La Compania, names associated in previous investigations with the Russian influence apparatus that developed from structures once connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Forbidden Stories and its partners obtained 1,431 pages of internal documents describing a network known as “The Company”, which they reported had grown to almost 100 operatives and was conducting influence projects across roughly 30 Global South countries. Their investigation found that the organisation moved under the supervision of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, after Prigozhin’s death. Its documented budget for ten months of activity in 2024 was approximately €7.3 million. Two older Argentina campaigns claimed in Dark Clark’s internal reports — a false story about Javier Milei buying Cartier collars for his dogs and the staging of anti-Milei graffiti — had already been independently attributed by investigative journalists to Politology/La Compania. That is significant corroboration, but it is not enough to prove that every Dark Clark activity was run by the same organisational structure. AI was the back office, not the mastermind Perhaps the most important finding concerns artificial intelligence itself. In most documented cases, the Russians were not using ChatGPT to generate the propaganda seen by the public. Their principal use was administrative: drafting reports for an unknown superior, summarising operations, translating material and recording the supposed success of campaigns. Those reports also expose a weakness in the operators’ own measurement. OpenAI found instances in which they tried to claim credit for developments they had probably not caused, suggesting that they were not only attempting to manipulate Latin American audiences but also presenting an inflated picture of their effectiveness to whoever was supervising them. Dark Clark nevertheless broke further into the real world than any influence operation OpenAI had previously disrupted. Under the Brookings framework, Category Five means that an operation has escaped its original network and been amplified by high-profile individuals such as politicians. Dark Clark crossed that threshold because fabricated narratives appear to have provoked governmental denials, mainstream reporting and political comment in several countries. Its most important innovation was therefore not a particularly convincing deepfake. It was the construction of a partly genuine institution around a concealed foreign controller. The research could be real. The employees could be real. The interviews could be real. What was false was who they were ultimately working for. Sources OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/ Forbidden Stories — Propaganda Machine: Russia’s foreign influence strategy across three continents https://forbiddenstories.org/propaganda-machine-secret-documents-reveal-russias-foreign-influence-strategy-across-three-continents/ Forbidden Stories — Ghost Journalists, Cash and Kremlin Scripts: Argentina https://forbiddenstories.org/ghost-journalists-cash-and-kremlin-scripts-how-russian-operatives-tried-to-influence-argentinian-media/ openDemocracy — Russian influence operation in Bolivia https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-bolivia-south-america-putin-evo-morales-wagner-prigozhin-covert-operations-propaganda-disinformation-foreign-interference/ Lupa Media — Fake Teleamazonas report about recruiting Ecuadorians for Ukraine https://lupa.com.ec/verificaciones/noboa-mercenarios-ucrania-ecuador/ Brookings Institution — The Breakout Scale https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/ Keywords: #DISINFORMED #Episode17 #OperationDarkClark #DarkClark #Russia #LatinAmerica #RussianInfluence #RussianDisinformation #Disinformation #InformationWarfare #InfluenceOperations #ForeignInterference #FIMI #FalseFront #FrontOrganisation #FakeInstitution #SocialResearchCenter #SRC #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #NarrativeManipulation #SourceLaundering #InstitutionalManipulation #ForgedDocuments #FakeAudio #PoliticalInfluence #CovertInfluence #Peru #Ecuador #Bolivia #Argentina #Ukraine #Politology #LaCompania #TheCompany #SVR #WagnerLegacy #PropagandaMachine #GlobalSouth #BreakoutScale #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD

Morlock No. 2 asked what costs the current policy was causing, mentioning energy, security, and the future of children. He estimated the national debt at 2,809,433,554,826 euros, with an increase of 6,326 euros per second. For 2026, he cited 20,057 business bankruptcies, one every 20 minutes, as well as 5,592,294 unemployment registrations, one every four seconds. #Politik #Wirtschaft #Zukunft (translated)

The author stated that Argentina had lost 32,300 companies and 437,000 jobs since Javier Milei came to power. He also noted that Milei would travel to Spain in a few days to campaign in favor of the PP and Vox. https://t.co/zcBMC34J3f #Argentina #Empleo #Política #AR #ES (translated)

Alex Günsberg wrote that, according to him, an equivalent amount to Finland's average pension could be accumulated by investing 1,500 euros in the S&P 500 index for a child at birth if the retirement age were 70 years, or 2,100 euros if it were 65 years. He claimed that through the Ponzi scheme he described, 2.4 billion euros in investment costs and 438 million euros in implementation costs were transferred to interest groups of the state. Günsberg stated the TER for costs was about 1.15% and the TER for the S&P 500 index fund was 0.03%. According to him, savings would accumulate about 3 billion euros per year without changes to current pensions if the state's manipulation were stopped. #eläke #sijoittaminen #talous (translated)

Under his ecological predecessor Robert Habeck (2021-2025), the renewable sector, now strong with about 430,000 employees, experienced rapid expansion, but at the cost of heavy public subsidies, denounces Katherina Reiche. #EnergiesRenouvelables #ManifestationBerlin #RéformesÉnergétiques (translated)

Anitta Press praised Anitta and said that it fully agreed with the points she made. It stated that positioning was not limited to publications or interactions on social media, but was a daily struggle, built collectively with examples and arguments. It also asked people to remain mobilized and said it believed they could reverse the situation. https://t.co/43ClGQ4KNw #Anitta #LutaColetiva #Mobilização (translated)

Croatia, through cooperation with South Korea, has signed contracts for the acquisition of 18 self-propelled rocket launchers Chunmoo K239 worth 435.2 million euros, thereby further strengthening bilateral relations between the two countries. #Hrvatska #obranbeneTehnologije #suradnja (translated)

Miss Eve criticized BMW over reports that the car manufacturer withdrew its leasing offer for the new President of the Saxony-Anhalt Parliament on the day of his election. If this is true, the question arises as to whether BMW makes business decisions dependent on the party affiliation of an officeholder, she wrote. She argued that for a company car funded by public means, efficiency and the requirements of the office should count. At the same time, she accused BMW of possibly applying political criteria in selecting customers and warned that these could choose other manufacturers. Miss Eve wrote that she drives a BMW 430i M Sport Coupe, but her leasing contract will soon expire. She could then choose another brand. In the event that BMW excludes customers because of their political views, she noted there are 60.5 million eligible voters in Germany, 30.5 percent potential AfD voters, and 18.5 million disgruntled customers. #BMW #Automobilindustrie #Kundenservice (translated)

Remiza.pl reported that there was an operation by the services on Braci Czeskich Street in Szamotuły. According to unofficial information cited by the portal, there was a shooting there in which at least one person was injured. A rescue helicopter was sent to the scene, and the area of the incident has been blocked off. https://t.co/43mx7NZamv #Szamotuły #strzelanina #służby (translated)