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BTS Daily Chile⁷ called on ARMY from around the world to report an account and its posts. It noted that the Instagram profile was deactivated, but could be reactivated soon. It also specifically asked ARMY Chile to privately send verifiable information about the person or people responsible, to forward it to BIGHIT MUSIC. It recommended not to post personal data or accusations on social media and to send only information backed by evidence. Additionally, it indicated that a form had been made available to receive relevant information about leaks. #ARMY #BIGHIT #Denuncia (translated)

E wrote that a video from Lyon in France, according to him, showed a situation resembling a war zone, even though some referred to it as a school protest. He stated that projectiles were thrown at colleagues who had recently been subjected to great stress and expressed his support for them. According to E, the video came from the Instagram account mvalet_officiel. https://t.co/PvhksUdvTo #Lyon #Skolprotest #Frankrike (translated)

Jamesons stated that, after more than three months of censorship from Meta, which had banned his Instagram, he returned to the platform and was welcomed by President Lula. The author said that the occasion was priceless and asked people to follow him on Instagram. https://t.co/u52te5kAHM #Lula #Instagram #Censura (translated)

Lucero announced that she and Don Francisco would appear together on Univisión on Sunday, October 11, in a meeting that, she wrote, would remember her first appearance on *Sábado Gigante*, when she was 15 years old. She described them as two figures of Hispanic culture who had led Spanish-language ratings in the United States for decades and reached all five continents. She also invited her followers to share photos, videos, songs, and memories of both, and announced a minute-by-minute conversation starting at 6:55 PM Eastern Time on X and Instagram. The broadcast was scheduled for 7 PM (6 PM Central Time). #Latinoamérica #Entretenimiento #Cultura (translated)

Apollo News wrote that the ZDF comedian Kurt Krömer does not want any AfD voters to be present at his reading tour. On Instagram, he insulted them with a derogatory term and stated that his shows are and will remain "halal." https://t.co/8a94PLbfJR https://t.co/G1BCUwFz2i #KurtKrömer #AfD #Comedy (translated)

The boycott of Babiš's products claimed that Andrej Babiš placed Agrofert in a trust fund, but retained SynBiol in personal ownership. According to the author, he held through SynBiol 87.75 percent of the investment group Hartenberg Holding, whose clinics last year received a total of 1.1 billion crowns from health insurance companies. The author stated that the amount of payments to healthcare facilities was determined by the Ministry of Health through a reimbursement decree and that the ministry in the new government was led by ANO's nominee Adam Vojtěch. He also claimed that Babiš owned 40 percent of the Czech IVF market and connected him with the director of Hartenberg before Vojtěch's first ministerial term. The post also recalled Babiš's promise to relinquish Agrofert, which according to the author he made on Instagram before being appointed prime minister by President Petr Pavel. The author further stated that the European Commission refused to reimburse subsidies to companies linked to Babiš until the conflict of interest was credibly resolved, and that the government was to provide measures concerning SynBiol's reproductive clinics within 30 days. He also quoted Kupka, who stated that the person determining the rules was at the beginning and end of the financial flow. https://t.co/b8hbYIP4Dq #AndrejBabiš #Agrofert #SynBiol (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

The author indicated that Kylian Mbappé was the only player highlighted by Yan Diomande in his Instagram post after his goal. He felt that Mbappé had helped him settle in at Real Madrid and had presented him as a brother. https://t.co/Eyks0FLYCx #Mbappé #RealMadrid #football (translated)

Janoninho stated that Flávio Bolsonaro was appealing to the TSE to try to censor the channel Exército do Lula and accused Meta, the owner of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, of inflating right-wing engagement. According to him, an expert in electoral law admitted that, if an imbalance were proven, Flávio could have his degree revoked in a lawsuit against Meta. Janoninho classified the case as foreign interference in Brazilian elections and said they would not be silenced and would resist. He also stated that Brazil did not fit in anyone's backyard. #CensuraNão #Eleições2024 #LiberdadeDeExpressão (translated)

StagePop stated that, according to data from Social Blade, Ana Elisa, Janones, and Lula were among the five influencers who gained the most followers on Instagram worldwide in the past three days. According to the publication, they surpassed Cristiano Ronaldo during this period. https://t.co/ELoOgdrYf2 #AnaElisa #Janones #Lula (translated)

Jamesons stated that Meta reactivated its Instagram page after removing it in July, when it had more than 30,000 followers. According to the author, the company informed via email that the account did not violate Community Standards and could be used normally again. He said the page was deactivated for more than three months, including the entire first round of elections, and that the absence caused losses in reach, engagement, events, and content opportunities. Jamesons stated that he turned to the courts and that the process would continue, as the reactivation would not compensate for the damages. The author also alleged that Meta had been arbitrarily banning left-wing accounts while reducing their reach. He thanked those who followed the project during the period and asked for support to rebuild the page's presence on Instagram, with likes, comments, shares, and other interactions. #CulturaPop #LiberdadeDeExpressão #Justiça (translated)

Raphinha, star of Barcelona and the Brazilian national team, expressed through Instagram his implicit support for labor and social rights in Brazil, in an electoral context that could be interpreted as backing Lula da Silva, although not doing so explicitly. #DerechosLaborales #Raphinha #Lula2026 (translated)

Verônica Domingues stated that she never advocated for nudity as empowering or revolutionary and said that, as a Marxist, she did not consider any individual action capable of promoting a revolution. For her, showing breasts was an expression of sexuality or part of her work with adult content, and no work would be empowering under capitalism. The author said that blaming women for their objectification for wearing short clothes or posting nude photos was misogynistic, and emphasized the importance of consent. Regarding publishing images with a Lula sticker during the campaign, she assessed that this would probably not change votes, but argued that art did not need to have only a utilitarian purpose. Domingues also stated that she used other social networks, including Instagram and TikTok, to raise awareness and bring the left closer to Marxism. She criticized radical feminists who, according to her, treated sex as immoral and scrutinized the bodies of women who consented to appear nude. She also said that the revolution depended on the collective organization of the working class, not on showing or covering breasts. #Feminismo #Marxismo #DireitosDasMulheres (translated)