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Jonas Zuschke accused TV2 Echo of manipulation and propaganda. He wrote that the media continued to portray the demonstrators as school students protesting against poor conditions at schools, and claimed that the coverage did not reflect reality. He also criticized the journalist's final question about what could make the viewer go out onto the streets, calling it extremely inappropriate. Zuschke urged people to share the post. #TV2Echo #Manipulation #Propaganda (translated)

Dr. Laetitia Muadi called for not influencing labor inspectors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She introduced Finance Minister LikundeR as a loyal executor of President Félix Tshisekedi's directives. Muadi stated that no category of civil servants was currently receiving their full salary scale, specifically citing university professors, teachers, doctors, and nurses. According to her, the government was gradually adjusting salaries based on the state budget and treasury. She denied that the president ordered, during the 94th Cabinet meeting, the payment of 100% of their salary scale to labor inspectors and controllers. She indicated that presidential instructions were instead focused on accelerating the reform of the General Labor Inspection (IGT), the monthly payment of salaries, and the administrative and financial autonomy of the agency. Muadi stated that these measures had been implemented: a new IGT had been established, salaries had been integrated into the liquidation state for the fourth quarter, and operating and installation credits were included in the 2027 finance bill. She specified that inspectors and controllers were receiving 30% of their salary scale and were demanding 100%. According to her, the government had opted to increase remuneration in phases, as it had done for other categories of civil servants, depending on budgetary means. #RDC #Travail #Syndicats (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

An Indian court has released the leader of the "Cockroach" protest movement, Abhijeet Dipke, and two other activists one day after their arrest, but under the condition that they must "not disturb the peace" for one year, as further protests are expected against the alleged manipulation of voter lists by the election commission. #JugendProteste #Indien #KakerlakenBewegung (translated)

Ukrainian soldiers are using an electronic warfare system to deceive Russian ballistic missiles by manipulating the navigation signal in such a way that they believe they are in Peru, causing the missiles to correct their course and land in the Dnieper. #ElektronischeKriegsführung #UkrainischeArmee #RussischeRaketen (translated)

Ansgar Schledde explained that in the local elections in the Hannover region, more than 3,000 outer ballot envelopes were opened prematurely in 14 out of 20 surrounding municipalities. He regarded this as a systematic violation of §59 of the Lower Saxony Municipal Election Code. The envelopes should have remained unopened and sealed; instead, ballots with the names and addresses of the voters became visible and were repackaged. The votes were then counted without verification, Schledde wrote. The procedure was ordered by the regional election office via email and was only stopped by the state election director four days before the election. Interior Minister Daniela Behrens (SPD) commented cautiously on the incident; supposedly, no impact on the election result was to be expected, criticized Schledde. He supported the objection of Bundestag member Dirk Brandes and announced a complete clarification as well as a legal examination. For the state elections in 2027, postal voting documents must be designed to prevent manipulation, and the rules must be adhered to. Those who violate the election regulations must face consequences, Schledde wrote. https://t.co/uzZye3DAPi #Wahlen #Demokratie #Niedersachsen (translated)

The author said an X translation of a text accurately summed up what they described as the left’s manipulation of Maricarmen’s death in Spain. The excerpt began by saying that Maricarmen had died and that people should first wish her peace, then cut off as it introduced a further point. #España #Maricarmen #Política #ES

Mona Juul wrote that she rarely gave space to political opponents and colleagues on her side, but this time she thought it was important to highlight their warnings about misinformation. She mentioned, among other things, that Stinus Lindgreen from the Radical Left had written about daily Russian misinformation on social media and his concern that parts of the population had lost trust in the authorities. According to Juul, Karsten Hønge from SF had described lies and manipulations from the Kremlin, while Troels Lund Poulsen from the Liberal party had talked about anonymous profiles, conspiracy theories, and accusations directed at him. Alex Vanopslagh from the Liberal Alliance had written that Russia spread propaganda, and Ida Auken had warned that actors from St. Petersburg influenced who won Danish elections. Juul wrote that she herself saw conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation, AI-generated lies, and Russian bot accounts on social media. She called the development a challenge for Danish democracy and believed that politicians must stand together because the truth was under pressure. She highlighted Danish news media and journalists as important for democratic information because the media had accountable editors-in-chief and were responsible to the Danish people and the Press Council. At the same time, she warned against videos on X, whose authenticity could not be established. Juul thanked her political colleagues for addressing coordinated misinformation and said that Russia wanted to create distrust among people. In response, she called for solidarity. #Misinformation #Demokrati #Sammenhold (translated)

The author of the message wrote that after watching television for 15 minutes, he was shocked by what he considered to be blatant lies about the protests. He added that people who only inform themselves through television risk, in his opinion, being manipulated. #Télé #Manipulation #Médias (translated)

LeMeltingPote estimated that the body language, facial expressions, and face of this young man indicated, in his opinion, a clinically psychopathic profile, who was not yet able to fully mask his emotions or to feign certain ones. He described him as terrifying, manipulative, narcissistic, perverse, and deceitful, comparing him to a snake. He added that he felt as if no one noticed him. #Psychopathie #Manipulation #Narcissisme (translated)

Press briefs reported that Acrimed denounced the media treatment of the high school student movement. According to this organization, editorialists, by relaying the government’s thesis of manipulation by LFI, were obscuring the demands of the youth and contributing to justifying repression. https://t.co/TJycoa0UNx #média #répression #lycéen (translated)

Lambdactu wrote to AlertesInfos that the surveys conducted among a few hundred people by institutes owned by close associates of those in power aimed, according to him, at manipulating and fabricating opinion rather than reflecting it. He added that those who relayed them indiscriminately were participating in this manipulation. #Sondages #Manipulation #Opinion (translated)

The author claimed that the plague had escaped from a Russian laboratory. He denounced what he described as a media-political agitation mixing geopolitics, fear manipulation, and financial interests of laboratories, and then questioned the so-called "Russian plague" affair and conspiracy articles. #Peste #Geopolitique #Manipulation #RU (translated)

Pope Leo XIV declared that the Church's primary mission was to help people reflect on their origins, their destiny, and the meaning of love and suffering. He warned that the pursuit of profit at any cost and the manipulation of information could lead individuals toward a consumption-based lifestyle, whereas the human heart was, in his view, turned toward heaven. #AudienceGénérale #Église #Spiritualité #Réflexion (translated)

Instant Foot wrote that Lionel Messi dismissed conspiracy theories regarding the 2026 World Cup final, lost against Spain. According to the account, Messi stated that nothing unusual had happened and that the team gave it their all. He also described the match against England as grueling both physically and emotionally. #Messi #Mondial2026 #Football (translated)