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David Rangl, in an ironically toned post, claimed that the intervention of Russian data centers caused chaos in the Czech pro-Russian scene. According to him, disinformation websites and trolls stopped receiving instructions, so some people had to form their own opinions. Rangl described that the SPD convened a crisis staff, which, according to him, after several hours came up with several contradictory explanations: either the attack did not occur, Russia repelled it, or it could have been Brussels, NATO, migrants, and Petr Fiala to blame. He also mentioned a demand for the government's resignation without a clearly stated reason. According to him, on the alternative scene, one influencer condemned Russian aggression, another published photos of burning servers as evidence of Russian victory, and another began promoting Russia's accession to NATO. Jindřich Rajchl, according to Rangl, demanded a parliamentary investigative committee due to the decline in followers. The post further described the extinguished premises of the Stačilo! movement, non-functional stamp machines at the Václav Klaus Institute, and the vaccination of the Svatopluk association against rabies at a veterinary station. The situation was eventually calmed by a chain email that blamed events on Soros, Ukrainian pensioners, and a secret NATO lab in Uzhhorod. Rangl concluded that Russian servers were gradually returning to operation, while the damages to the Czech "patriotic scene" could be irreversible, as some people realized during the outage that they could think independently. #ČeskáRepublika #dezinformace #vlastenectví (translated)

Ous wondered whether the situation would repeat every weekend in all the stadiums in England. He expressed hope that the players would keep their cool, believing that being booed for an event they had no influence over — especially since they weren't even at the club yet — could quickly make them crack. #Football #Angleterre #Supporters (translated)

Anne-Laure Bonnel explained that after nearly two years, she had accepted that her abilities had changed since her cancer. She stated that she had undergone chemotherapy, had two surgeries and radiotherapy, and had contracted a staphylococcus aureus. She specified that targeted therapy and hormone therapy were still ongoing. She also mentioned having difficulties with reading and concentration, which she associated with "chemo brain." In remission, she did not know what abilities she would regain and had to adapt her work to her current situation, she wrote. She said she could still conduct short interviews and take photos in less tense areas, but could no longer work as she did before. Bonnel called on her followers to fund her projects via Tipeee or PayPal. She explained that she had created her own production structure to work independently, without political affiliation or external editorial influence. On the occasion of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she also spoke about the challenges of returning to work after cancer and urged society to better support people in remission, whose aftereffects may be invisible. #cancer #cancerdusein #remission #cancer #cancerdusein #remission (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)

Clément Molin stated that Donald Trump's announcement regarding the purchase of diesel from Russia revealed the failure of his administration's foreign policy. He wrote that, despite his promises, Trump had not ended any wars, except for those that were already over, and that the war against Iran had failed, particularly politically, damaging the image of the United States and the global economy. Molin also claimed that Trump had repeatedly failed in Ukraine and that the United States had lost a significant part of its influence there. According to him, Trump’s actions towards Canada and Greenland had brought Europeans closer together, while his pivot to Asia had not materialized: it had discontented most of America’s allies in the region and he had been humiliated by China. He also presented the abandonment of Middle Eastern allies as a sign that the United States was no longer seen as a reliable partner by many of their allies. Domestically, Molin considered Trump weakened, believing that he had not improved the daily lives of the Americans who voted for him, particularly due to the war against Iran. He finally wrote that the purchase of diesel from Russia served Vladimir Putin's interests, while adding that Trump might not receive the promised stocks due to Ukrainian strikes and that the operation would have little effect on the global economy. #PolitiqueÉtrangère #Trump #Russie (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

Michał Fiszer wrote that Vladimir Putin announced the capture of Sviatohirsk by the Russians, a small town northwest of Lyman. He added that Irish influencer and journalist Caolan Robertson recorded a report from there, walking around the town looking for Russian soldiers, whom — according to Fiszer — he did not find. Robertson also peeked into a bathroom and joked that since the toilet had not been stolen, there were no Russian troops there. #Ukraina #Rosja #wojna (translated)

Despite the influence of El Niño, which works against the formation of cyclones in the Atlantic, "there are still certain pockets where hurricanes can form," explains Marc Alessi, a climatologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, to AFP. #OuraganIsaias #Climat #ÉtatDurgence (translated)

Fat Dog are an English band, currently consisting of Joe Love, Chris Hughes, Morgan Wallace, and Ellis D. The band formed in 2020 in South East London. Fat Dog's music has been described as containing elements of dance, punk and klezmer; frontman Joe Love has cited the music from Serious Sam as having influenced the band's sound. Fat Dog was formed during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Prior to releasing any singles, the band became known for their boisterous live performances, with Gary Ryan of NME describing them as "2023's wildest live band". https://hvdommelen.nl/f/FatDog.html

Influencer Anette Visser, who has lived with arthritis since her youth, will make her debut this weekend at the Ironman World Championship in Kona, after she unexpectedly completed her first Ironman following a period of severe muscle problems. #Ironman #triathlon #jeugdreuma (translated)

FRENCHRAPUS reported that Victor Wembanyama had shown his support for Bally Bagayoko, whom he called the "mayor of the century." Bagayoko had thanked the basketball player and called on artists, athletes, and influencers to use their visibility to serve the youth. Wembanyama replied that there was no need for thanks and referred to him as a good guy. #NBA #VictorWembanyama #Soutien (translated)