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Jim Ferguson wrote that Cristela Georgescu had told reporters her husband, Călin Georgescu, had not cheated but had been wronged. Ferguson said she was distressed that photographs of their children had appeared as part of the investigation and believed the case against her husband had been planned long in advance. According to Ferguson, Cristela Georgescu believed the truth would emerge if the investigation were handled by a fair and independent justice system, and maintained that her husband was innocent. Ferguson also argued that the detention and investigation of a former presidential candidate, and measures that his family considered politically motivated, warranted international scrutiny. https://t.co/s1RQfa1Uhh #Justiție #Inocent #Transparență (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)

36 years after the fall of the Berlin wall and regime change in Hungary, we now prepare for the return of staged trials and politically motivated verdicts. As former culture minister in Viktor Orbán's cabinet, Balázs Hankó told reporters ahead of the vote about waving his https://t.co/ML4huT4EYS #BerlinWall #Hungary #PoliticalTrials #DE #HU

MY PRESIDENTIAL PLEDGE 🇦🇹🇹🇷 Ekrem İmamoğlu remains imprisoned in Türkiye amid multiple criminal proceedings that he denies; opposition parties and international critics describe the cases as politically motivated, while the Turkish government says the judiciary is independent. https://t.co/UF3I57ylJP #Ekremİmamoğlu #Türkiye #PoliticalPrisoner #AT #TR

Bavaria‘s state criminal investigator (Landeskriminalamt) tells me the complex houses several defense companies. They believe it was a politically motivated attack but do not believe Rohe & Schwarz was the target. They believe another company may have been the target but did not #Bavaria #DefenseIndustry #PoliticallyMotivatedAttack #DE

Empathy, Compassion, and the Limits of Emotional Moral Judgment Empathy is widely regarded as a foundation of morality, but psychological research suggests that it is not an unqualified virtue. Paul Bloom (2017) argues that affective empathy—the experience of sharing another person’s feelings—has important limitations when used as a guide for moral judgment. First, empathy is biased. We respond more strongly to suffering that is vivid, identifiable, and psychologically close. Research on the “identifiable victim effect” shows that people can be more willing to help a specific individual than anonymous victims, even when the latter represent a much larger number (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Lee & Feeley, 2016). Emotional salience therefore does not necessarily correspond to moral significance. Second, empathy is innumerate. Human emotional responses do not naturally scale with the number of people suffering. A single identifiable victim can evoke a powerful response, while thousands or millions of anonymous victims may produce comparatively little emotional engagement. This creates a problem when moral decisions concern suffering on a large scale (Bloom, 2017). Third, empathy can be exhausting. Repeatedly sharing the distress of others may produce empathic distress and emotional fatigue. Research suggests an important distinction between empathic resonance and compassion: while empathic engagement can increase negative affect, compassion can promote positive affect, motivation, and prosocial behaviour (Klimecki et al., 2014; Weng et al., 2013). The implication is not that we should care less. Rather, caring and feeling are not the same thing. Compassion allows us to recognize suffering and remain motivated to alleviate it without necessarily absorbing the suffering ourselves. Empathy may therefore be valuable for human connection, but it is a poor stand-alone system for making large-scale moral decisions. When millions of lives, limited resources, and competing needs are involved, compassion must be combined with reason, evidence, and deliberate judgment. The goal should not be to feel everything others feel. It should be to care deeply enough to help, while remaining clear-headed enough to help effectively. References: Bloom (2017); Kogut & Ritov (2005); Klimecki et al. (2014); Lee & Feeley (2016); Weng et al. (2013). Empathy and Its Discontents https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27916513/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Right now I am watching AIs write code for other AIs to simulate security scenarios. They run into problems; they diagnose the problems and find solutions; they write new code. I am a dilettante: a motivated or skilled person could do so much more. #AI #MachineLearning #Coding #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

Estonia strongly condemns the harsh sentences against the Yabloko party and its member, Lev Shlosberg. These politically motivated proceedings once again demonstrate the Kremlin’s fear of genuine political competition and its determination to deny the Russian people a real #Estonia #Yabloko #Russia #EE #RU

FREE EKREM İMAMOĞLU! 🇹🇷🇪🇺 Ekrem İmamoğlu remains imprisoned while facing a vast criminal case that he denies and that Turkey’s opposition and international critics describe as politically motivated. He has been detained since March 2025, and his trial began in March 2026. � #FreeEkrem #EkremImamoğlu #TurkeyPolitics #TR #EU

Ann Widdecombe was beaten to death with a hammer at lunch in her own house. The police came straight out and said it wasn't politically motivated before releasing a suspect. No clue so. So a) they have no idea and b) yet again why are police trying to influence narratives? #TrueCrime #PoliceTransparency #JusticeMatters #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

California Governor Gavin Newsom alleged that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating his wife and former staff members as part of a politically motivated effort by former President Donald Trump to target him, coinciding with speculation about his potential 2028 presidential run. #GavinNewsom #Trump #PoliticalInvestigation

Many people imagine a cover-up as a conspiracy hatched in a smoke-filled room: “We cannot release this—it would damage our political cause. Bury it.” Real motivated reasoning is far more subtle. It typically operates through a series of small and relatively innocuous decisions, #MotivatedReasoning #ConspiracyTheories #PoliticalCoverUp #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

The UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Norway have imposed sanctions on networks facilitating settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, following a surge in attacks since the escalation of the Gaza conflict, while Israel has denounced these measures as politically motivated. #SettlerViolence #WestBankSanctions #PalestinianRights

Heureux de retrouver la salle de sport MODUVATED ! Un espace accueillant, une excellente ambiance et des équipements de qualité qui n’ont rien à envier aux plus grandes salles. 🥊 Sparrings du jour avec les frères le champion invaincu François Gomis et Formose Mendy, sous l’œil attentif du coach Diego Toujours un plaisir de partager ces moments de travail et de passion. 🔥👊 #Boxe #Sparring #Motivated #TeamWork #Discipline #PassionSportive #Boxe #Motivation #TeamWork