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Conservative Raiz Banido said that, from the next day until the 25th, the profile would publish content frequently and offer daily materials for sending via WhatsApp, as well as ready-to-use photos for stories. He also asked followers to inform in the comments about car rallies or sticker campaigns in their cities, so he could share the calls. #Engajamento #Comunidade #Carreata (translated)

Renato Souza wrote that, behind the scenes, ministers of the TSE evaluated that a decision by Kássio Nunes represented undue interference in the electoral campaign in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro. According to him, the channel used by Janones did not contain relevant campaign materials or disinformation. #Eleições2022 #JustiçaEleitoral #Desinformação (translated)

The commentator wrote that Dominika Wielowieyska was responding to the voices of PiS politicians and Krzysztof Stanowski regarding Michał Kołodziejczak. According to him, the journalist emphasized that she does not want to hastily judge the matter or succumb to pressure to immediately publish material and make a judgment. The author asked whether Wielowieyska is a journalist or a politician of the Civic Coalition. #polityka #dziennikarstwo #KoalicjaObywatelska (translated)

The former vice president of the BND, Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, described the material as the "crown jewels of the BND" and told Der Spiegel that these were "the most critical evaluation reports provided by the presidency of the BND." #espionaje #serviciossecretos #Alemania (translated)

CohenTheBarbarian stated that despite their hard-earned experiences, many soldiers still wore synthetic clothing as their first layer. He claimed that in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there were likely numerous components of uniforms made from flammable materials due to cost. He added that in the front line, he saw soldiers whose three layers were all flammable, and their injuries were terrible. He urged readers to keep this risk in mind if they ever faced a "trial by fire." #vojáci #uniformy #bezpečnost (translated)

Tea Jedlovcnik advised Esih not to bother with further writing, as in his opinion nothing written would change the situation. He noted that the biggest problems were within Esih's own ranks, while also criticizing the supporters of non-governmental organizations. He believed that the political side to which he directed his accusations was not doing well and was acting pathetically. He added that the right wing had much more material for criticism in his opinion. Among other things, he mentioned leftists whom he described with a derogatory term, the brides in handcuffs who were supposed to be suffering abuses in Romanian prisons, and the upcoming parties of GEN-I. The opposing side was said to have only Stevanović, who according to Jedlovcnik was doing well compared to UKZ. In the end, he suggested to Esih to rather write about botany and cuisine. #politika #javnoopinion #kritika (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

Two people were arrested for stealing 134 kg of copper from the tracks and selling it minutes later at a recycling point in Sant Andreu, as part of a surveillance plan by the Mossos d'Esquadra to prevent thefts of this material from the railway network. #RoboDeCobre #MossosDEsquadra #VigilanciaUrbana (translated)

Luigi Marattin responded to Corrado Formigli, who in the Corriere had described as "an embarrassing confusion" what the deputy said on Piazzapulita. Marattin mentioned that he has been reading investigative journalism and historical studies on conflicts for decades and cited Il Legionario, a book about Giustino De Vuono, arguing that its author documented the presented theses. Marattin accused the documentary Naza of making unfounded accusations. He cited the bombing which, according to the mentioned reconstruction, would have killed 500 civilians, stating that no evidence of either the attack or the death toll had been presented. He argued that the only source was Hamas's word, treated as truth, while Israeli accounts were dismissed as propaganda. He added that he had said on air that, in wartime, he did not consider the reports of the involved parties reliable and preferred those from independent observers. For this reason, he described Israel's decision not to allow foreign journalists into Gaza, even at their own risk, as a mistake. Marattin accused Formigli of not listening to this point and of silencing dissenters, imposing his own opinion. Finally, he wrote that he would have liked to read a "mea culpa" from the host for his statements about Israeli children on October 7. #giornalismodinchiesta #storia #media (translated)

Donald Tusk accuses Karol Nawrocki of being responsible for the lack of response to pathological content on the internet following a series of attacks in schools, emphasizing that Nawrocki's veto prevents the swift blocking of dangerous materials. #BezpieczeństwoInternetowe #PrzemocWyszkołach #TuskVSNawrocki (translated)

In Ostwald, Alsace, fuel prices are approaching three euros per liter, exacerbating motorists' frustrations as the long-awaited drop in prices is still slow to materialize despite the release of 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil. #PrixCarburant #Alsace #Automobilistes (translated)

Lucas Pavanato wrote that it had been almost three weeks since Tabata last commented on Banco Master or Vorcaro, since a report, according to him, revealed that Luciano Huck, her friend, was a partner at Vorcaro. Pavanato asked if Tabata was doing well. https://t.co/giLjaEYJzV #Tabata #LucianoHuck #Política (translated)