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Carlos Bolsonaro stated that Lula was not included in the investigations on fake news and that there were no preventive measures against Lulinha or against people he referred to in a derogatory manner. He added that if the traditional press accused someone of falsifying a vaccination card and simply traveling by plane, two lives would have already been destroyed in the name of defending democracy. #Fakenews #Imprensa #Democracia (translated)

The post reported that Benjamin Netanyahu's former military secretary accused him of falsifying the records of October 7 and of endangering the hostages by refusing the ceasefire requested by Hamas to save his own government. It added that the opposition accused him of treason and called for the immediate initiation of criminal proceedings. #Netanyahu #Israele #politica #IL #IL #PS (translated)

An OpenAI report reveals how Russian and Iranian agents used fake journalists and articles to fuel tensions between Ukraine and Poland, interfere in South American politics, and generate tangible effects in various countries, exploiting the platform for their disinformation efforts. #Disinformazione #Ucraina #OpenAI (translated)

David Ágape identified Judge João Marcos Buch of the Santa Catarina Court of Justice (TJSC) as the author of a publication that, according to him, revived the 2018 rumor that Jair Bolsonaro would persecute gay people. Ágape stated that Bolsonaro did not persecute this group. The author also mentioned that Buch sentenced Professor Jonas Bressan to two years in prison and ordered him to pay R$ 10,000 for collective moral damages for a message forwarded in a WhatsApp group on the eve of the second round of elections in 2022. According to Ágape, the Civil Police had archived the investigation. Ágape further reported that in a Christmas letter sent to prisoners in 2021, Buch criticized inequalities and racism in Brazil and the Brazilian government. At the inauguration ceremony on March 7, 2025, the judge reportedly said that the country was flirting with fascism and publicly declared his love for his husband, Lucas Buch. According to Ágape, a year later, the Civil Police of Espírito Santo executed search and seizure warrants at Lucas's address in Florianópolis. He stated that the operation was authorized by the courts at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office of Espírito Santo and was part of an investigation into fraud and embezzlement, with an estimated loss of R$ 3.5 million. According to the author, the records described the victim as elderly, vulnerable, and residing abroad. https://t.co/hbxC7B2HDF #Justiça #DireitosHumanos #Fascismo (translated)

The elected federal deputy Ana Elisa (PT-MG) stated in an interview with Estúdio i on GloboNews this Thursday (8) that there was a significant difference between the right and Bolsonarism in Brazil. She said she considered it democratic for the right to exist in society, but not Bolsonarism. Ana Elisa also assessed that since Jair Bolsonaro's election, the country had a distorted image of the right. According to her, there was an abyss between right-wing individuals and Bolsonarists. #eleição #anaelisa #votação #política #g1política #eleição #política #votação (translated)

The author stated that Chinese citizens were falsifying genealogical data to pretend to be descendants of Jews and obtain German nationality. He said he did not know how the deception could work, but speculated it might be related to an episode he recounted in his book, which he mentioned was titled "The…". #DatosGenealógicos #NacionalidadAlemana #Fraude #DE #CN (translated)

Actu Foot indicated that Granit Xhaka had received a suspended fine of 150,000 euros for falsifying a Covid certificate. The account clarified that the midfielder would not have to pay it if he committed no further offense for two years. https://t.co/bMsd8TTY8v #GranitXhaka #Covid19 #Football (translated)

An investigation by the Financial Police led to the reporting of 101 people involved in an organization that exploited foreign caregivers by recruiting them with false documents and depriving them of their rights, with operations primarily carried out in South Tyrol and other regions of Italy. #Caporalato #Immigrazione #Bolzano (translated)

Ultimora.net reported that two Georgian citizens were stopped by border police at Bologna's Marconi Airport while trying to board a flight to Tel Aviv with fake Israeli passports. According to the site, they had arrived in Italy on a flight from Turkey, had been reported at liberty and expelled from the country, before heading to Albania. Investigations were underway regarding the reason for the trip. Ultimora.net added that, according to some accounts, a third Georgian person, not authorized to enter Israel, was also removed from the flight. #Bologna #Polizia #Immigrazione (translated)

Brazil’s synthetic voters – when AI manufactures public opinion They look like ordinary street interviews. A reporter approaches a passer-by in a Brazilian square and asks a simple question: who will you vote for? A young voter explains why Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva deserves another term. An elderly woman says Brazil needs Flávio Bolsonaro because he represents political renewal and greater security. The locations look plausible, the microphones are visible and the answers sound much like the brief political opinions heard in television vox pops around the world. None of the people are real. Ahead of Brazil’s presidential election on 4 October, fact-checking organisation Aos Fatos identified at least 50 TikTok videos in which artificial intelligence was used to manufacture voters, reporters and apparently spontaneous political interviews. Together, the videos had accumulated around 7.4 million views by mid-August. Some promoted Lula, others Flávio Bolsonaro, while another group used synthetic characters to ridicule or stereotype supporters of one side. Aos Fatos found no apparent evidence linking the accounts producing the videos to either presidential campaign. The opinion poll that never took place The format is important. These were not conventional deepfakes in which a recognisable politician is made to say something he never said. Instead, the creators reproduced the visual language of the vox pop – the short street interview used by broadcasters and social-media creators to illustrate what ordinary people supposedly think. In pro-Lula videos, synthetic voters described themselves as beneficiaries of social programmes or credited the president with improving their lives. In videos supporting Flávio Bolsonaro, artificial interviewees associated him with political renewal, public security and fighting corruption. Other clips were openly hostile: AI-generated characters presented as poor or living in parts of Brazil’s north-east were shown in dirty clothes or run-down surroundings, declaring support for Lula because they supposedly preferred welfare payments to work. The deception is therefore subtler than fabricating a candidate’s statement. It manufactures something that political communication normally treats as evidence of public sentiment. A real vox pop may be unscientific, but the people interviewed at least exist. These videos created the appearance that identifiable social groups – young people, pensioners, welfare recipients or residents of particular regions – were spontaneously expressing political preferences when no such encounters had taken place. An electoral-law specialist interviewed by Aos Fatos described the technique as the fabrication of a “social fact that never occurred”. That captures the central innovation: AI is being used not merely to falsify political speech, but to manufacture the impression of grassroots opinion. Fifty videos, but not one proven network The available evidence does not support describing the 50 posts as a centrally controlled influence operation. Aos Fatos located them through TikTok searches and recommendations produced by the platform itself, then examined the accounts responsible for publication. Most had relatively small individual audiences, although their combined reach was substantial. The first examples identified by the investigation appeared as early as March 2026. Activity increased in June and was concentrated particularly in July and the first half of August as Brazil’s election calendar intensified. Some accounts specialised in AI-generated videos generally, including fabricated podcast-style material. Others were explicitly political or supportive of a candidate, but Aos Fatos found no apparent links between those profiles and the official Lula or Bolsonaro campaigns. That distinction is essential. The evidence demonstrates a common technique and a shared political environment, not a single command structure. Some creators may have been motivated by ideology, others by engagement or monetisation. Publicly available evidence does not establish who commissioned the individual videos or whether any coordination existed between the accounts. This decentralised model also creates a different enforcement problem from a traditional bot network. There may be no headquarters to expose and no infrastructure whose removal disables the entire operation. The format itself can be copied by anyone with access to inexpensive generative-video tools. When the algorithm mixes real and synthetic citizens Aos Fatos documented another important feature of the phenomenon: TikTok’s recommendation system placed AI-generated interviews alongside genuine street interviews. For a user scrolling quickly through the platform, the transition between an authentic citizen and an entirely fabricated one could therefore be almost invisible. In 18 per cent of the 50 videos analysed, there was no indication that the people shown had been generated using AI. After Aos Fatos provided TikTok with the videos, the company said it had removed all of them for violating its rules on edited and AI-generated media. TikTok said its policies require creators to identify synthetic content and prohibit manipulated media capable of misleading users about matters of public importance or impersonating genuine journalistic material. The issue extends beyond one platform. Factchequeado’s review of Brazil’s 2026 election campaign found that synthetic endorsements and other deepfakes had become one of the most visible forms of AI-assisted electoral misinformation, alongside fabricated candidate statements and invented scenes. Brazil already had rules for synthetic politics Brazil entered the campaign with unusually detailed electoral rules governing artificial intelligence. The Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, requires electoral propaganda using synthetic multimedia to disclose clearly that AI was used. More importantly for the fake-voter videos, its rules prohibit synthetic audio or video used to favour or harm a candidacy when it creates or alters the image or voice of a living, deceased or fictitious person. The difficulty is attribution and enforcement. When a synthetic video is published by an official campaign, responsibility can be relatively straightforward to investigate. When it comes from an apparently independent account with no demonstrated relationship to a candidate, lawyers interviewed by Aos Fatos said responsibility is more likely to fall on the individual creator, while imposing electoral sanctions on a campaign would require evidence of a connection. For the final 72 hours before the election and the 24 hours following it, the TSE has imposed additional restrictions on newly published or republished synthetic material involving candidates or public figures, reflecting the particular difficulty of correcting fabricated content immediately before voting. From deepfake politicians to synthetic electorates The Brazilian case illustrates a broader change in political manipulation. The first generation of electoral deepfakes concentrated on famous people: make a politician appear to say something damaging, or fabricate an endorsement from a celebrity. Synthetic vox pops reverse the perspective. The politician can remain completely authentic; it is the electorate around the politician that is fabricated. That changes the psychological proposition of the message. Instead of saying the candidate believes this, the video suggests people like you believe this. Age, clothing, accent, neighbourhood and social class can all be generated to construct an artificial constituency around almost any political claim. There is no evidence that the 50 Brazilian videos identified by Aos Fatos constitute a single centrally directed campaign, nor evidence that they changed voting intentions. What they demonstrate is a technique whose barrier to entry has become extremely low. AI no longer needs to forge the politician. #DISINFORMED #Episode14 #Brazil #BrazilElection2026 #Elections #ElectionDisinformation #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #SyntheticVoters #SyntheticMedia #AIAvatars #AIGeneratedVideo #VoxPop #FakeInterviews #Astroturfing #AIPropaganda #PoliticalDisinformation #InfluenceOperations #InformationWarfare #SocialMediaManipulation #TikTok #PublicOpinion #ManufacturedConsent #SyntheticPublicOpinion #DigitalInfluence #Deepfakes #ElectionIntegrity #TSE #AosFatos #FactChecking #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD (translated)

In Belgium, the network manager Fluvius discovered more than 170 million euros in fraud related to green electricity certificates for solar panels, mainly through the falsification of invoices and inspection reports, between 2018 and 2025. #Fraude #PanneauxSolaires #Belgique (translated)

Luigi Marattin argued that, in the last three years, Western societies had been exposed to a vast campaign of disinformation and psychological conditioning regarding the conflict in Gaza. In his view, this had overshadowed the massacre of October 7, presented by some as an episode of resistance, and spread false claims about genocide, civilian casualties, and attacks on Palestinians seeking food. Marattin said that the reasons for what he termed a campaign of lies would be clarified by historians and hypothesized that factors such as identification with the weaker side, funding of Islamic extremism, and anti-Jewish prejudice had contributed to it. He stated that in the "information war," responses were beginning to appear in the form of documentaries: he mentioned *Naza: the Real Story*, which, according to him, offered more evidence and did not rely on anonymous testimonies, and *We will dance again*, shown the previous night by Nicola Porro and containing images from October 7. Marattin wrote that those images had marked those who had seen them and urged for countering falsehoods without fear of going against dominant thinking. He also accused some protesters with Hamas flags and others of having embraced propaganda and ideology. Finally, he said he would be in Milan the following day to commemorate October 7, which he defined as a dark day for Western civilization, and thanked the Milanese Jewish community for the invitation. #Disinformazione #Guerra #Milano (translated)

The author wrote that patients needed to be able to trust that medicines bought in pharmacies or online were safe and genuine. They said falsified medicines sold online put lives at risk and called for health, digital, customs and law enforcement services to work together to tackle the problem.

Carlotta Barbi wrote that Chiara Poggi continued to live in the memory of those who sought the truth about her death. According to the author, the courage of some magistrates was helping to shed light on questions, contradictions, and aspects that had remained unresolved for almost twenty years. Barbi argued that, in the meantime, versions and certainties presented as definitive had sidelined Poggi's life, and stated that seeking the truth meant clarifying why she had died and who had taken away the years she could have lived. #ChiaraPoggi #Garlasco #CasoGarlasco #VeritàPerChiaraPoggi #GiustiziaPerChiara #Verità #Giustizia #TrueCrimeItalia #CronacaNera #Indagini #GiustiziaItaliana #Memoria #Verità #Giustizia #Memoria (translated)