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The author argued that NATO should support Saudi Arabia in a time of need, citing a strategic partnership dating back to 1915, when Ibn Saud entered a formal relationship with Britain through the Treaty of Darin. They said the relationship deepened with the United States after 1945 and became a central pillar of the West. https://t.co/B1A03RtFRc #NATO #SaudiArabia #Partnership #SA #US #GB

The author revisited an April post, saying the gap in public understanding of large language model capabilities had widened and had become more like a “sharp funnel” than two groups talking past each other. They estimated that roughly 6 billion people, or about 75% of the population, had “barely come” to something; the post ended before completing that thought.

The author, who identified themself as a candidate for Austrian federal president in 2028, said they wanted Austria to become one of Europe’s most attractive places to live, work, build companies and enjoy life. They described Vienna as a global home for digital nomads, expats and entrepreneurs, and began to say it was already among the world’s most prominent destinations, but the post ended before completing the thought. https://t.co/TzbexBHw1k #Wien #DigitalNomads #Entrepreneurship #AT

The author wrote that the gap in shared understanding of LLM capabilities was widening, shifting from people talking past one another to what they described as a “sharp funnel”. They estimated that around 6 billion people, or roughly 75% of the population, had “barely come”—but the post ended before completing the thought.

The author wrote that the history of the Second World War showed how valuable, and how vulnerable, freedom, democracy and human rights could be when intolerance and dictatorship prevailed. They said such horrors must never happen again and that everyone had a responsibility to prevent them. https://t.co/z89dRAMLdz #Liberté #Démocratie #DroitsHumains #LU (translated)

The author warned that Russian ex-combatants could become a tool for the Kremlin in Europe by fuelling organised crime and carrying out terrorist attacks. They said Estonia was calling for an EU-wide entry ban and argued that European countries should act before the threat crossed their borders. The author said they had made the comments to POLITICO Europe. #Russia #Europe #Security #RU #EE #EU

Because these people can't find a key to how to stop Putin. It's more difficult to stop Putin than to pressure others. Because it's much easier to talk about prices and link it to Ukraine when everyone in the world understands that the reason (for high fuel prices) is the war in the Middle East - it drives up prices. They are rising because of the war in the Middle East, because of the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz - everyone understands this. If we want to speak honestly with people, they need to see reality. Don't play with people. #Зеленски #Тръмп #Мъск (translated)

Félix Bolaños stated that Feijóo had asked for sacrifices the day before and that Abascal had announced that he would repeal the measures approved during "sanchismo," including scholarships, pension increases, the minimum wage, equality of maternity and paternity leave, and employment with rights. Bolaños presented November 29 as a choice between continuing to advance and a massive cut in rights. #Derechos #Política #SaludMental (translated)

The author wrote that people in the EU were going broke because of Ursula von der Leyen’s and Kaja Kallas’s policies, and said their response was to ignore the hardship while expressing support for other causes and offering solidarity. They described the EU as an idea they loved with many benefits, but said it was collapsing because of what they characterised as weak and unintelligent leaders. #EU #politics #solidarity #EU

Oscar López Agueda stated that the last time the citizens were asked to make sacrifices, pensions and salaries of public employees were not updated, spending on dependency, health care and scholarships was cut, layoffs were made easier, university fees and VAT were increased, and co-payment was implemented. #Pensiones #Recortes #Empleo (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 wrote that Starlink was not used in Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries because it did not work above Russia. They warned that if Elon Musk switched off the service to signal his dislike of Zelensky, it would lead to many thousands more Ukrainian deaths on the frontline. The post ended as the author began saying the move would also cause severe damage. #Starlink #Ukraine #ElonMusk #UA #RU

The author called on Japan to expand PAC-3 production for Ukraine and other countries, describing the goal as making the country a “Patriot arsenal of democracy”. They set targets of 200 interceptors in 2027, 300 in 2028 and 500 a year by 2029, and called for a second production line and expanded seeker production. https://t.co/eAHTQJmOby #Japan #Ukraine #Defense #JP #UA

Ana defended Alessandra Rojo de la Vega and described the treatment she was receiving as unjust. She claimed that trans sex workers had been sent to vandalize the town hall and attack employees, and that afterwards the mayor had been accused of repressing them. She pointed out that there were videos of the events and questioned whether Alessandra had destroyed her own offices. She also criticized reporters Jorge Becerril and El Halcón for spreading that version, and asserted that they were paid by MORENA. Ana said she feared the situation would continue and expressed her support for the mayor. #JusticiaParaAlessandra #VocesDiversas #RespetoYDerechos (translated)

The Football Planet reported that Corinthians sought Beccacece, who, according to the profile, did not intend to work in Brazil at that moment after leaving the Ecuador national team. Gustavo Quinteros, former coach of Grêmio, was offered to the club, and the management was evaluating his name before deciding whether to proceed. He had been without a club since leaving Independiente in August. The profile added that, in light of the difficulties in hiring a coach for only three months, Corinthians changed strategy and began offering a contract until the end of 2027, already during the management of the next president. The publication attributed the information to ESPN Brazil. #Corinthians #Futebol #Treinadores (translated)