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Thomaz wrote that Lula was talking about the cuts that Flávio Bolsonaro could make and stated that he might follow the example of Javier Milei in Argentina, cutting rights for poor people and retirees and leading the population to misery. #lulanapaulista https://t.co/j3ZEjndFuM #Política #DireitosHumanos #Brasil (translated)

The PT Brazil stated that Lula arrived at Paulista and criticized Flávio Bolsonaro's plan for cuts. According to the publication, Lula said that the proposal could follow the model of Javier Milei in Argentina, reducing rights for poor and retired people and leading the population back to misery. https://t.co/m70fQ7MlvK #Lula #Política #Brasil (translated)

The author believed that neoliberalism was coming to an end and that this shift had begun when Donald Trump decided to impose tariffs. He stated that people had been pushed into misery and that, where a true left was lacking, the worst had emerged. He notably cited Trump's election in the United States and mentioned Javier Milei, without finishing his sentence about him. https://t.co/DNawqKlRRv #Néolibéralisme #DroitsDeDouane #Gauche #US #AR (translated)

The author of the publication claimed that Argentina had lost 32,300 companies and 437,000 jobs since Javier Milei came to power. He also stated that Milei, whom he described as far-right, would travel to Spain in the coming days to campaign in favor of the PP and Vox. https://t.co/9S1AJ6ClyJ #Argentina #Economía #Política #AR #ES (translated)

Pedro Ronchi stated that the international press has been highlighting what he called the disaster of Javier Milei's government in Argentina, while the national press has stopped talking about Milei to protect Flávio. https://t.co/bvxukk9aKb #Argentina #Milei #Imprensa (translated)

Lula stated that Flávio Bolsonaro wanted to bring to Brazil the model of Javier Milei. According to him, the experience had resulted in fewer rights, workdays of up to 12 hours, unemployment, and poverty at the highest levels, as well as harm to retirees. Lula questioned whether this was the future that Flávio desired for Brazilian workers. https://t.co/LSWf8hXr5G #Brasil #Trabalho #DireitosHumanos (translated)

ElEconomista.es stated that employment in Argentina had increased by 510,000 during the government of Javier Milei, driven by the private sector and self-employment, while political employment in the public sector was reduced. It also noted that in 2024, 29,553 new companies were established, one of the highest figures for gross registration. #Empleo #Argentina #Economía #AR (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

Santi C. stated that, under the leadership of President Milei, Argentina had moved from relying on the agricultural sector as the only source of dollars to sustain a protected and inefficient industry to having, for now, three competitive sectors: agriculture, energy, and mining. According to what he wrote, these sectors generated jobs and foreign currency income, provided natural coverage against external shocks, and promoted massive migration to the interior of the country. He asserted that the change had already occurred, that its effects were just beginning to be seen, and that nothing could alter its course. #EconomíaArgentina #CambioEconómico #DesarrolloSostenible (translated)

The author stated that Argentina had lost 32,300 companies and 437,000 jobs since Javier Milei came to power. He also noted that Milei would travel to Spain in a few days to campaign in favor of the PP and Vox. https://t.co/zcBMC34J3f #Argentina #Empleo #Política #AR #ES (translated)

French Milei supporters published a translation of a tweet from Javier Milei, in which the Argentine president accused socialism of claiming causes such as disability, retirees, or public universities to justify, in his opinion, uncontrolled and untransparent spending and bureaucratic structures. Milei claimed that audit requests were often presented as an attack against the concerned individuals, and that opening accounts revealed intermediaries, advocacy organizations, and taxpayer-funded privileges. He argued that this mechanism had been observed in Argentina and other countries, to the detriment of people who truly needed help and Argentine taxpayers. He demanded the publication of all accounts and contracts as well as accountability from each responsible party. #Liberté #Transparence #Responsabilité (translated)

Milei's repentants stated that the second most populated city in Entre Ríos was flooded and that there were hundreds of evacuees. They criticized Rogelio Frigerio for not speaking out on X and accused him of traveling to France with public money to support Milei. He also used a sexually vulgar expression to reproach him for his attitude towards the president and called him pathetic. https://t.co/WkqVgDbzzP #EntreRíos #Inundaciones #Emergencia (translated)

Milei's repentants stated that the Justice had issued a tenth ruling that required the Government to comply with the University Financing Law and that it had rejected the ninth appeal from Milei and Pettovello. It also raised the question of what would happen if a Peronist disobeyed ten judicial rulings and called for people to take to the streets on October 15. https://t.co/moQPjZ6QDf #Justicia #FinanciamientoUniversitario #Argentina (translated)

The author stated that Milei had privatized water in Argentina and questioned who was in charge. He also accused those who proclaimed themselves patriots and pointed to others for selling the country of being the ones who sold it the most. #Argentina #Privatización #Agua #AR (translated)