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Former minister and former presidential candidate (in 2007) Ségolène Royal Glucksmann accused him of committing a "kind of robbery" on the PS by aligning his party with this primary election originally organized by the PS. Royal called those remarks "sexist." #Frankrijk #verkiezingen #linksepolitiek (translated)

With the victory of Raphaël Glucksmann in the center-left primaries for the French presidency, broad leftist cooperation seems further away than ever, as he previously prefers cooperation with the political center over the radical left parties. #Frankrijk #verkiezingen #linksepolitiek (translated)

"With meticulous research, he documents how an activist-radical, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish left has gained a foothold in academia, in the cultural scene, and also in the Left Party." Armin Laschet, former Minister-President and Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag, said in his tribute: "With meticulous research, he documents how an activist-radical, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish left has gained a foothold in academia, in the cultural scene, and also in the Left Party." "They highlight the diversity of opinions and identities," said Laschet in his tribute. #GeorgStefanTrollerPreis #JüdischesLeben #Journalismus (translated)

The author wrote that after years of loud demands for a ban on the AfD, now the Left Party is also coming under scrutiny. CDU Prime Minister Gordon Schnieder wants to have the constitutional loyalty of both parties examined. The author stated that he also does not support a ban on the Left Party. https://t.co/bVZKa6ORBv #Politik #Verfassung #Parteien #DE (translated)

Dr. Bernd Baumann wrote that a political confrontation between two blocks is imminent. The SPD is moving towards collaboration with the Greens and forces he described as Islamist-left through its Berlin regional association. He interpreted this as a strategic withdrawal of the SPD from the Merz coalition and as the beginning of the next federal election campaign, which is oriented towards the successful camp election campaign of Schwesig. On the other hand, according to Baumann, the AfD is uniting citizens who demand an end to left-wing policies. The Union is being squeezed in between: it showcases its themes only to then negotiate again with left-wing parties. In this conflict, such a party is no longer needed, he wrote. #Politik #Bundestagswahl #SPD (translated)

Kai Nielsen wrote that the political left has set a concerning precedent for the future, which could be a taste of what conservative politicians are to face. He feared that inquiries into who voted how could extend into private lives and that electoral secrecy would only be granted to one's own political bubble. Nielsen described this as a terrible development and wrote that he did not expect a return to the Stasi era. #Wahlfreiheit #Politik #Freiheit #Wahlen (translated)

Mick van Wely wrote that organized crime, in his opinion, was dangerously infiltrating radical leftists in Germany. He stated that criminal organizations were given the most space by the far left and that especially Arab crime clans were providing votes in return. He also noted that concerns about this would increase within the police, while the media, according to Van Wely, hardly reported on it and carefully kept the issue out of sight. https://t.co/OHjUnZq0E2 #Duitsland #misdaad #politiek (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 account "Faces of War" wrote that the brothers Johann, Ludwig, Karl, and Josef Schwaiger came from a farm in Neutiefenweg, which today belongs to Aholming in the Isar Valley. All four fell at the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1944. Johann died at the age of 20, Ludwig was 28, and Josef was 22 years old. Karl Schwaiger died on October 11, 1941, at the age of 29. #NieWiederKrieg #WirVergessenNicht #Geschichte #Erinnerung #Frieden (translated)

Lex Hoogduin wrote that he believed change was possible, but not in the way that the cabinet and the left envisioned. He advocated for a peaceful classical-liberal revolution with a smaller government, fewer rules, bureaucracy, and civil servants. According to him, the government should free citizens and protect their property, while reducing the tax burden and maintaining a limited safety net for people who faced real setbacks. He also argued for space for a revival of an independent civil society outside of the state, with communities in various fields. #liberalisme #overheid #belasting (translated)

The alliance of SPD, Greens, and Left Party in Berlin is on the brink, as the Greens are debating whether they should sacrifice their political principles to collaborate with the Left Party, while simultaneously warning against extremist tendencies. #Grüne #RotGrünRot #Berlin (translated)

Richard Schmitt criticized that ORF referred to the AfD as "far-right" in its morning news at 6:30 AM without explaining or providing evidence. He accused the broadcaster of having a leftist orientation and claimed that everything to the right of Marx is classified as far-right there. Schmitt demanded either neutral reporting or the privatization of the broadcaster. Since he believed that neutral reporting was no longer attainable, he advocated for privatization and said that leftist activists would then have to raise 800 million euros themselves to maintain their propaganda offerings. He also urged the AfD to file a lawsuit. #Sonntag #Medienkritik #AfD (translated)