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"It will definitely be necessary to evaluate the implementation schedules, which, not so much in the first year, but afterwards leave an ever-increasing impact. (..) It is likely that this can be covered, but it immediately closes those opportunities for coming to the budget and voting for the millions that are currently being requested in demands from all sectors additionally." The current Minister of Finance, Māris Kučinskis (AS), pointed out: "It will definitely be necessary to evaluate the implementation schedules, which, not so much in the first year, but afterwards leave an ever-increasing impact. (..) It is likely that this can be covered, but it immediately closes those opportunities for coming to the budget and voting for the millions that are currently being requested in demands from all sectors additionally." #Budžets2027 #Ekonomika #Valdība (translated)

Maddalena Loy had recalled a phrase attributed to Goebbels about the repetition of lies and had defined the accusation from the opposition that the Meloni government had cut funding for public health as false. Loy had contested the data from the Gimbe Foundation, led by Nino Cartabellotta, on the 18.8 billion euros of “invisible cuts.” According to her reconstruction, the figure did not indicate resources taken away from hospitals but the difference compared to what would have been allocated had the ratio between the national health fund and GDP of 2022 remained unchanged. She argued that Gimbe’s headline had led publications like Repubblica to present the figure as an actual loss and called that interpretation a political attack on the government. In comparing allocations, Loy pointed out an increase of 8.2 billion euros between 2011 and 2019, under the Monti, Letta, Renzi, Gentiloni, and Conte governments; of 11.6 billion euros between 2019 and 2022, during the Conte government; and of 17.5 billion euros between 2022 and 2026, with the Meloni government, which would raise the fund from 125.4 to 142.9 billion euros. She described the latter as the largest accounting increase in peacetime. Loy also mentioned monthly increases of around 400 euros for doctors, peaking at 600 euros, a plan to hire 1,000 doctors and 6,300 nurses, coverage of over 2,000 new services, and a flat tax of 15% on overtime for doctors and nurses. She finally contested the statements of Senator Castellone on L’Aria che tira regarding cuts to healthcare. #SanitàPubblica #GovernoMeloni #FakeNews (translated)

Jarek Olechowski wrote that those supporting Donald Tusk had created a fake graphic bar resembling materials from Republic TV and were using it to attack the station and demand that the National Broadcasting Council revoke its license. He claimed that the graphic was marked as generated by artificial intelligence, yet it was still disseminated by politicians from the Civic Coalition and journalists supporting the government. He described Republic as the largest news television in Poland and the only major station completely independent of the authorities, and compared the actions described to the Russian machine aimed at freedom of speech and Polish democracy. #WolnośćSłowa #Demokracja #Media (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

ALK4PON3 praised AleIVCR and his team, saying that their work had evolved in events, graphics, story, and mechanics. He added that he had always trusted them and that, although he complained when they beat him, he remained on the Eufonia ship and eagerly anticipated their next projects. #Eufonia #DesarrolloDeJuegos #Comunicación (translated)

Martien Visser wrote about the progress regarding grid congestion that the website of Netbeheer Nederland did not show historical data and that readers therefore had to make do with his information. He added that PBL no longer saw hybrids as a structural solution and that The Hague wanted to make heat pumps mandatory. #grafiekvandedag https://t.co/XWQ2pdO3qt #energietransitie #warmtepompen #netcongestie (translated)

Łukasz Warzecha criticized an author whom he described as an idol of the elites, and assessed her novels as verbose and grafomanic. He claimed that almost no one reads them, although few admit it. He accused her of only answering questions posed in a submissive manner, and in other cases refusing interviews. https://t.co/HsIJg1RHe4 #literatura #opinia #kultura (translated)

The author wrote that people watching the war in Ukraine have certainly come across the Russian channel RYBAR, which he described as the most influential and well-crafted propaganda channel of the Kremlin. He stated that the channel provided current news from the battlefield through graphically sophisticated maps, but also propaganda. He also mentioned the creator of the channel, Mikhail Zvinchuk, and his wife. https://t.co/JqyVFFp8Wz #Ukrajina #propaganda #válka #UA #RU (translated)

how we interact with each other when antisemitic incidents occur. The leader of the Berlin Greens, Werner Graf, expressed in an interview with rbb very great trust in the leadership of the Left, that they stand by this agreement. #RotGrünRot #BerlinerKoalition #Antisemitismus (translated)

Martien Visser wrote that he was sometimes labeled as a grump with an image and hoped that people would still say that in April 2027. He referred to the EU winter outlook from ENTSOG, which he claimed had been published the day before, and quoted the statement that every extra molecule strengthened Europe’s position. Visser wrote that this showed how vulnerable we were. #grafiekvandedag https://t.co/L9jIPDRli4 #EU #energie #winteroutlook (translated)

The article explores the social and cultural complexity of the suburbs of Paris, highlighting how graffiti and demonstrations reflect the tensions and dynamics of urban life, from the history of migration to current protests, emphasizing the richness of experiences that coexist beyond the discomfort. #Banlieue #Graffiti #Cultura (translated)

He stated that the Government had not issued the SAE alert for Las Condes and criticized that the Ministry of Health had published a flood prevention graphic only 33 minutes earlier. He described the delay as "a shame" and said that those affected had saved themselves by their own means, like Morocho. https://t.co/kX8PZwJfmG #Chile #LasCondes #Aluviones (translated)

The author contrasted the demand for a ban on the AfD with the question of whether it is now the largest German party. He referred to TE graphics that, according to his representation, showed the rise of the AfD and the decline of the CDU to the level of "Others" like the Greens, SPD, and Left Party. Furthermore, he stated that one could understand the anger and desperation with which the CDU, SPD, and Greens were acting, but then referred to surveys and a linked post. https://t.co/PlVOmOdYMC #AfD #Politik #Deutschland #DE (translated)

Sabrina F. described people over fifty as the last generation raised without the internet, social networks, and digital devices, arguing that they developed independence from a young age. She recalled that at seven they had house keys, at nine they cooked for their younger siblings, and by ten they could take care of themselves. According to Sabrina F., they spent their days outdoors, often with scraped knees, and learned to handle practical matters. She also mentioned memories of the radio, black-and-white television, record players, and cassettes, as well as car trips made with a map and a packed lunch. She claimed that this generation held more vivid memories and greater trust in their instincts. #GenerazioneSopravvissuta #Memorie #CrescitaFelice (translated)