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Advocate Carri Ginter and Social Minister Karmen Joller have publicly argued because officials have tried to prevent inquiries into the health data of more than 60 individuals, directing them to the Data Tracker, where the necessary data is absent. #Tervis #Andmed #Poliitika (translated)

Žiga Turk noted that half of the voters did not want a political police, while the other half wanted an investigation into political corruption. He labeled both as good, but called it bad that, according to him, they lied to the first half of the voters. #politika #volitve #korupcija (translated)

Henri Vanhanen criticized Donald Trump's actions in the Ukraine war, noting that he declared agreements about which there was uncertainty, while pressuring Ukraine in a way that benefited Vladimir Putin. As a recent example, Vanhanen pointed to Trump’s announced energy ceasefire. According to him, Volodymyr Zelensky heard about it practically for the first time from the media, Russia had not confirmed the agreement, and continued, according to Zelensky, attacks on Ukraine's power plants. Vanhanen asked what kind of ceasefire it was if the other party did not know what had been agreed upon. He suggested that Zelensky had to be cautious of Trump’s criticism to avoid being blamed for obstructing peace. Vanhanen referred to the Financial Times reporting that the United States threatened to cut off arms and intelligence supplies to Ukraine unless the country stopped attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. He also wrote that Trump agreed to buy Russian diesel, demanded Ukraine to cease attacks on Russian oil refineries, and encouraged a change of leadership in Ukraine. Vanhanen estimated that the war in Iran and the resulting fuel prices, the upcoming midterm elections, and the need to show results might explain Trump’s urgency to secure an agreement. According to him, Trump aimed for cheaper diesel and a visible peace political achievement, while Putin would benefit from a decrease in attacks on Russia’s energy sector. Vanhanen noted that the alignment of these goals seemed to occur at Ukraine’s expense. Vanhanen stated that he did not oppose a ceasefire if it protected Ukrainians and also bound Russia. However, he observed that for Trump, merely declaring an agreement seemed to suffice, even without information about its terms or Russia's commitment. Vanhanen assessed that Russia would benefit from a situation in which the United States sought a quick agreement and Ukraine was cautious not to offend Trump. In such conditions, he believed Putin could gain concessions from Trump without Russia needing to win against Ukraine at the negotiating table. #Ukraina #Trump #Venäjä (translated)

The author wrote that the voting, in his words, will decide on the future shape of Slovenia, equality before the law, and whether a Slovenian will be the master in his homeland and municipality. He urged voters who have not yet cast their vote to do so by 7 PM, mentioning their relatives as well. https://t.co/Dix0lcy6wM #Slovenija #Volitve #Demokracija #SI #DK (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

Klemen Jaklič wrote that the fight for equal respect in the Slovenian media landscape has lasted as long as he can remember. He stated that the referendum on this had already been won, but its basic message has been trampled on multiple times in the struggle between will and reason. He marked today as a new opportunity for reason and wished Slovenia good luck. #enakopravnost #mediji #Slovenija (translated)

Niko A. Kauko pondered what would happen to the EU-Finland's support for Ukraine and the cooperation agreements between the countries if Ukraine were to hold elections, choose a new president, and the war were to end. He estimated that with a change in presidency, relations between Ukraine and Russia could also improve. Kauko asked whether Finland's support for Ukraine had ultimately been directed more towards Zelensky and the war than towards Ukraine itself. He referred to Stubbs' statement that the war was "his war," and wondered if Finland's "unwavering Ukraine first" line would fade as the war receded. Kauko described the war fundamentally as a great power conflict and believed that neither side had clean hands. According to him, Finland should not have participated in the conflict other than through diplomacy and mediation. He considered such an approach wise, which, in his assessment, was no longer visible in Finland's stance. #Ukraina #EU #sota (translated)

Abi said that she was crying because of the surprise songs and because BTS had worn outfits from Peruvian culture, praised the country's cuisine, and said that they loved their fans very much and that they would return. She also emphasized that Jimin had smiled upon seeing the fan project and stated that the Peruvian fans had succeeded in winning them over. #Perú #Kpop #Música (translated)

Rodra wrote that the second half had reconciled him with the team. He stated that Madrid was chaos and that he navigated it better than anyone, claiming that this was how he had won his Champions. He also mentioned Fede playing as a right-back and everyone being ecstatic about a victory. #RealMadrid #ChampionsLeague #Fútbol (translated)

Mikael Lith wrote that, in his opinion, the center of Helsinki has become more unpleasant in recent years, especially on weekend evenings. He described loud and swearing groups of people, individuals under the influence of substances, and rundown places. According to Lith, there was an increasing need for police and security guards, and he estimated that it wouldn't be long before Helsinki would become Finland's Birmingham. #Helsinki #yhteiskunta #kulttuuri (translated)

Roni Arvonen wrote to a user named Sukkola that he did not think the analogy they used was effective. According to Arvonen, in the new covenant, most of the old covenant's rules were no longer valid, so the situation was comparable to criticizing Finland's current alcohol policy by lamenting prohibition. He finally directed his words to Sanna and assessed that she could do better. #Suomi #politiikka #alkoholipolitiikka (translated)

Tuomo Saarni wrote that party discipline was important for the National Coalition Party as well, but in the vote regarding the terrorist organization, the female representative of the party was allowed to vote in favor of mandatory hijab, according to him. He asked what misogyny was still needed for. #politiikka #naisasiat #demokratia (translated)

A town in Málaga organizes a controversial bullfighting show with people with dwarfism, arguing that there is no mockery and that the event is legally permitted, while critics question the ethics and respect for human dignity in such activities. #EspectáculoTaurino #Discapacidad #DerechosHumanos (translated)

Henri Vanhanen wrote that Finland had paid billions of euros because, in his opinion, the geopolitical risks posed by Russia were not taken seriously in time. He referred to Fortum's Uniper transactions, in which he claimed nearly six billion euros were lost, as well as Rosatom's assertion that it had won the arbitration concerning the Hanhikivi nuclear power project against Fennovoima. Vanhanen noted that the final resolution and possible compensation were still unclear. Vanhanen said the losses were in the billions and had also been a detriment to taxpayers. According to him, lessons should have been learned from these cases that geopolitics and security policy could not be separated from economic decision-making. He wrote that warnings about Russia's aggression had been issued for years, but economic interests often outweighed them, and he felt that Finland could no longer afford to ignore the realities of global politics until the billion-euro bill arrived. https://t.co/Omv0fRGsLq #geopolitiikka #turvallisuuspolitiikka #Suomi (translated)