Search

"They destabilize essential infrastructure for global transport and energy supply, causing shockwaves around the world." The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, denounced a "dangerous escalation," expressing concern over the "attacks carried out by Iranian proxy groups" that "are dragging the region into a spiral of violence." #AttaqueRyad #CondamnationInternationale #Yémen (translated)

Fabrizio Biasin wrote that Marcus Thuram, 29 years old, had made 146 appearances, scored 54 goals, and provided 34 assists, at a cost of zero euros plus 8 million in fees. He called his signing one of the greatest deals in the history of Inter. https://t.co/o34OWAKOGs #Inter #Calcio #Mercato (translated)

These attacks carried out by Iran's proxy groups are dragging the region into a spiral of violence. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called the deadly Houthi attack on Riyadh airport a "dangerous escalation" and stated that the Iran-backed group must stop its strikes against civilian targets. #Terrorisme #ArabieSaoudite #Houthis (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

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the raid as “the deadliest Houthi attack so far,” warning that the offensives by Iran-backed groups are pushing the region into a spiral of violence and destabilizing strategic nodes for transport and energy on a global scale. #Terrorismo #ArabiaSaudita #Houthi (translated)

Bally Bagayoko explained that his group abstained during the vote on a wish presented by the opposition elected officials from the Socialist, Environmentalists, and Citizens group at the municipal council. The text focused on the protection of girls and women against excision and female genital mutilation, as well as the adoption of a comprehensive law against sexist and sexual violence (SSV). He said that his group supported the fight against mutilations and reminded that nearly 500 patients received follow-up each year in the municipality. He also praised the work of the Women's House, Delafontaine Hospital, and various associations, and asked the State to strengthen the resources allocated for prevention and medical follow-up. According to Bally Bagayoko, the abstention concerned the request to quickly adopt the law on SSV. He indicated that the bill had been significantly amended in committee at the National Assembly the week of the municipal council, and its content remained uncertain. His group had asked to remove references to this law from the wish in order to be able to vote in favor of the text on the fight against excision, but the opposition had refused, he wrote. He believed that this refusal had hindered the pursuit of an agreement and denounced a political instrumentalization of the issue. The group ultimately abstained in order not to block the wish, which was adopted, while not supporting all of its content, he noted. #Excision #DroitsDesFemmes #LutteContreLesViolences (translated)

The Omnibus X legislative package proposed by the European Commission threatens public health by removing the re-evaluations of pesticides, thus allowing their lifetime authorization, which is generating growing resistance within civil society and health professionals. #Pesticides #SantéPublique #CommissionEuropéenne (translated)

As the chairman of the committee, the rebellious Eric Coquerel denounced the common votes of the central bloc and the RN-UDR alliance, particularly "on the issue of inheritances, legacies (...) one of the great scandals of inequalities." #Budget2027 #PolitiqueFrançaise #AssembléeNationale (translated)

The Proper Greek Analyst criticized publications from Kontra, Eleftheros Typos, Political, and Dimokratia, arguing that they presented as a Greek success an exception that would pave the way for a reduction of fuel taxes or investments amounting to 1 billion euros. He described the coverage as misleading and said it confused two different requests. According to him, the government's request for temporary reductions in the Special Consumption Tax or VAT on fuels not to be counted toward the deficit was rejected. He argued that such measures would directly support citizens and businesses and that they had been implemented without requests to the Commission from 11 EU countries. He also cited a Reuters publication regarding the rejection of requests from Greece and Italy for greater fiscal flexibility. On the contrary, he mentioned that a request for exemption from fiscal rules on spending for energy projects had been accepted. In his post, this possibility did not concern only Greece: a Commission announcement dated 18/8/26, with code C/2026/4514, stipulated an exemption of up to 0.6% of GDP cumulatively over two years for countries that would apply. He estimated that this corresponded for Greece to 1.56 billion euros, with an GDP of 260 billion euros at current prices in 2026, and not the 1 billion euros that, as he wrote, the government planned to allocate. The Proper Greek Analyst added that Italy's request, which, according to ANSA, concerned 0.6% of GDP or 14 billion euros, was expected to be approved by Monday. He contrasted this amount with the 0.38% of GDP or 1 billion euros attributed to the Greek plan. For Greek projects, he mentioned grants of 200 million euros for energy storage batteries from renewable sources, 320 million euros for railroad safety and expansion projects, 200 million euros for heat pumps and solar water heaters for 100,000 beneficiaries, 117 million euros for energy upgrades of 109 public buildings and universities, 50 million euros for photovoltaics, batteries, and heating systems for 10,000 beneficiaries, 50 million euros for carbon capture and storage in industry, and 45 million euros for 246 school units. He stated that, beyond the subsidies for households, the remaining projects would not directly benefit citizens. #Ελλάδα #ενέργεια #δημοσιονομικά (translated)