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Gustavo Petro advised blocking the accounts identified as bots on social media and stated that those responsible might get upset. He also claimed that the world's wealthy were spending resources to prevent what he termed inevitable: the emancipation of humanity. https://t.co/Hemf8upD1s #Bots #RedesSociales #Emancipación (translated)

Le Chiffre estimated that French law deemed 16-year-olds sufficiently capable of discernment to emancipate, marry, enter into a contract or a will, be imprisoned, work, and drive a car, but not to vote. He asserted that, in his opinion, there was no argument for this exclusion other than contempt for young people. #Démocratie #Jeunesse #Voter (translated)

Pedro Emanuel stated that the team would have to change their attitude to face Boca Juniors in Argentina, in a different competition and in the first of two matches. He mentioned that the opponent had also made changes to their team the day before and had not won, having been close to losing, but he highlighted Boca's quality and their ambition to be Argentine champions. The coach acknowledged that his team had not played well and would need to do more to be competitive and fight for the result. However, he added that the team could have a less successful performance and that he expected to reach a high level on Tuesday, thanks to physical, technical, tactical, and mental preparation. #Futebol #Competições #BocaJuniors (translated)

The author of the message advocated for lowering the voting age to 16. He argued that at that age, a person could be emancipated, take on parental responsibilities, vote in labor court elections, and be incarcerated. According to him, 16-year-olds should therefore be able to express their opinions like other citizens. #FR (translated)

Rosario Aitala, deputy president of the International Criminal Court, told Corriere della Sera that the sanctions announced by the United States were preventing judges from carrying out both public and private activities, and that for many of them, the effects were already in place. He reported that they were subjected to measures similar to those reserved for terrorists: revoked credit cards, closed bank accounts, and canceled insurance contracts, with some companies refusing to reimburse medical expenses. According to Aitala, many apps on their phones had stopped working and it was forbidden to book hotels or flights through platforms. As an example, he recounted that Alexa no longer responded to a colleague after he asked her to play blues music. Another European colleague, he added, had booked a room in his own country through a European platform and, after half an hour, received an email ordering him not to try again. #Giustizia #Sanzioni #DirittiUmani (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

Bally Bagayoko presented the launch of the Hip-Hop and Urban Cultures Festival of the New Town of Saint-Denis–Pierrefitte-sur-Seine as an evening focused on creation, commitment, and hope. He said that the city aimed to maintain a strong cultural ambition despite a difficult political and social context, which weakened local communities and tested cultural policies. He described culture as a right and a means of emancipation, and hip-hop and urban cultures as spaces for expression, encounter, and solidarity. According to him, the evening also allowed for affirming support for the mobilization of high school students on October 17. Bagayoko advocated for a convergence of struggles and generations around social justice, equality, dignity, and access to culture. #HipHop #CulturesUrbaines #SaintDenis #PierrefitteSurSeine #CulturePourToutesEtTous #Jeunesse #ConvergenceDesLuttes #FaireRenaîtreLEspoir #HipHop #CulturesUrbaines #Culture (translated)

The emancipation crisis in Spain is reflected in the fact that almost half of young people between the ages of 26 and 34 live with their parents due to the inability to access housing, which is illustrated through five real cases that highlight the difficulties and limited options available to them. #CrisisDeEmancipación #ViviendaJuvenil #AlquilerEnEspaña (translated)

Completely unaware of what had just happened, of what the head of the Government had just said about the body from which its legitimacy emanates, Lucena referred to the three flaws that, in his opinion, have weighed down Spain's view of itself: "failure-ology," "victimhood," and "pornomiseria." #Sánchez #Democracia #Parlamento (translated)

The housing crisis in Spain affects a large part of the population, especially young people and those with limited incomes, and requires the collaboration of all political forces and the private sector to find effective and fair solutions. #CrisisDeLaVivienda #EmancipaciónJuvenil #ColaboraciónPolítica (translated)

The newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that emails obtained by the Federal Police indicated that senator and presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) shared a bank account at Santander with lawyer and businessman Willer Tomaz, who is suspected of being involved in a money laundering scheme linked to frauds in the INSS. According to the newspaper, both denied the allegations. The information was initially revealed by UOL and was confirmed by Folha. #Política #Corrupção #Brasil (translated)

Florencia Andersen described Lando Norris as arrogant and pointed out that, when asked by a journalist whether the accident had been an unnecessary risk, Norris responded by asking what the name of the race was and what came after the sprint. Andersen said that he ended up stating that it was a race and characterized his tone as conceited. #Fórmula1 #LandoNorris #Deportes (translated)

The news column wrote that Pedro Emanuel considered the game against Remo fundamental to alleviate the pressure of the relegation battle. According to the publication, Bruno Duarte was still a doubt to start among the starters, while the Portuguese coach was expected to field his best available formation. The probable lineup for Vasco was Léo Jardim; Paulo Henrique, Saldivia, Robert Renan, and Cuiabano (Lucas Piton); Sosa, Thiago Mendes, and Lescano; Andrés Gómez, David (Bruno Duarte), and Colidio. The publication cited ge.globo and credited the photo to Matheus Lima. #Vasco #Futebol #Rebaixamento (translated)