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In March, Joe Kent, the director of the national counter-terrorism center, resigned because of the war with Iran, writing in the letter that his wife had died in a war manufactured by Israel, and the next day, he was on Carlson's show explaining it. #DebatePolítico #Conservadorismo #HistóriaBritânica (translated)

Why fight the Second World War in the first place? The soundbite that circulated the world was "why fight the Second World War in the first place?", and being directed at the man that Carlson had announced as the greatest warmonger in England was not an accident. #DebatePolítico #Conservadorismo #HistóriaBritânica (translated)

In the debate between Tucker Carlson and Jacob Rees-Mogg about how to avoid a war between Britain and Russia, the deep divergences between Carlson's non-interventionism and Rees-Mogg's Atlanticism became evident, highlighting the tension within British conservatism. #DebatePolítico #Conservadorismo #HistóriaBritânica (translated)

Pedro Passos Coelho says that he acknowledges he has the duty and responsibility to intervene in the public debate and admits that he would consider returning to active politics if he thought he could add something positive to the country. #PedroPassosCoelho #PSDNasEleições #SaúdePortugal (translated)

The Political Axis stated that Lula (PT), trailing in the polls, focused on the youth during an event in Paulista and tried to mobilize the grassroots for the second round. According to the profile, the Political Debate Monitor at USP could not estimate the audience because the Presidency prohibited the use of drones. https://t.co/6wD2AM6hbb #Lula #Eleições2022 #Juventude (translated)

Fabri stated that Rayan Cherki had far surpassed a player he had been compared to, who had cost 110 million more. He added that Cherki had scored a great goal while his rival watched from the bench and insisted that this settled any debate. https://t.co/4OOGWbfCkA #Fútbol #RayanCherki #Golazo (translated)

Fede Sturzenegger stated that a tweet from Flor Carignano about DNU 70/23 showed, in his opinion, that Kirchnerism was against the benefits that the norm had granted to Argentines. He described it as a force protecting the "elite" and claimed that its proposals would lead to stagnation and poverty. In defending the decree, Sturzenegger said that after the repeal of the Rental Law, four times more apartments were being published and that prices had dropped by more than 30% in real terms. He also stated that, since the DNU, the prices of medications had fallen by 20% in real terms; domestic tickets by 51%; and tourist packages by 40%. He added that in 2025 there were 33 million passengers and that international connections from cities in the interior increased by 70%. Regarding foreign trade, he attributed part of the 63% drop in appliance prices and the 43% drop in textiles to the changes in the decree. He also said that more than 750,000 satellite internet connections allowed access for almost 3 million people in the interior, and that tourism reforms had increased the number of agencies by almost 40% and employment in the sector by more than 10%. Sturzenegger pointed out that some labor and land provisions had been taken to Congress, while others had been challenged in court. He stated that the DNU had removed trade restrictions, reduced paperwork, and allowed contracts in the chosen currency, among other changes. He concluded that the debate about the decree should be kept in mind in the elections of the following year. #DNU70 #Kirchnerismo #Argentina (translated)

In the post-election debate, the future of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, the exhaustion of the Pirate Party, and the perception of Motorists as new political upstarts were discussed, with moderator Pavel Štrunc emphasizing that the post-election struggle for power is just beginning. #volby2026 #AndrejBabiš #Českápolitika (translated)

In the post-election debate, journalists from Aktuálně.cz criticized Andrej Babiš and his ANO movement, pointed out the exhaustion of the Pirate Party, and simultaneously assigned the role of political "rubes" to the Motorists, while discussing the future and coalition potential of individual parties. #Politika #Volby #AndrejBabiš (translated)

Of course, I do not disguise that the result for us is bad in Prague; it is important for us to reflect on that. On the other hand, I am glad about the result in Ostrava. The failure in the capital was admitted by the head of Motorists and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Petr Macinka. "Of course, I do not disguise that the result for us is bad in Prague; it is important for us to reflect on that. On the other hand, I am glad about the result in Ostrava," the Deputy Prime Minister noted in a television debate. #KomunálníVolby2026 #Praha #HnutíANO (translated)

Prague is difficult for us, Just like he was disappointed with the election results in the capital city, Patrik Nacher, the deputy speaker of the House for the ANO movement, said. "Prague is difficult for us," Nacher stated in Sunday's Debate on Czech Television, noting that the ANO leader in Prague, Jan Hušbauer, got involved at the last minute. #KomunálníVolby2026 #Praha #HnutíANO (translated)

Xico Graziano criticized Lilia Schwacz for a video in which, according to him, the professor said she would use Pix as much as possible because Flávio Bolsonaro could end the system by order of Donald Trump. Graziano classified the statement as false and questioned whether Schwacz knew this or truly believed that a victory for Bolsonaro would leave Brazil subservient to the United States. The author highlighted that Schwacz was a professor of Anthropology at USP, a Global Scholar from Princeton, an award-winning writer, and the owner of the publishing house Cia das Letras. He also stated that she was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in March 2024 for chair 9. Graziano compared the video to her inauguration speech two years earlier, in which, according to him, Schwacz had advocated for the strengthening of institutions and citizenship. Graziano questioned whether the professor had used her prestige to deceive the public and speculated about the reasons for the publication, mentioning the possibility that she had consumed alcohol or was out of touch with reality due to living in an academic bubble. He also associated the episode with what he described as an old ideology of the Brazilian intellectual left, formed in the 1950s and 1960s and still linked to the class struggle. #FakeNews #Cidadania #Antropologia (translated)

Raul Sena stated that the left's strategy would hardly regain votes. According to him, the left presented the dispute as a fight between good and evil, in which voting against Lula would mean being on the wrong side of history, but people knew voters of Flávio who they considered good, honest, and hardworking. Sena said that this comparison weakened the narrative and made people feel manipulated. He also claimed that the speeches were becoming increasingly aggressive and tried to convince through fear and hostility. In Sena's assessment, treating someone as a horrible person usually did not make them change their vote. #Política #Eleições2024 #DebatePolítico (translated)

The author of the post called for the initiation of a debate on the responsibility of Big Tech companies. He wrote that they profit from mechanisms that sell users' attention to advertisers while also exposing children to harmful content. He compared this issue to the case of Rafał Brzoska and his struggle. #PL (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

According to economist Peter Heather and classicist John Rapley in their book Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West (2023), U.S. debt is part of a broader debate about imperial decline, as debt is a symptom of a change in the global distribution of wealth and power. #DeudaNacional #EconomíaGlobal #Hegemonía (translated)