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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 described the proposal as “simple and historic”: Saudi Arabia would recognise Israel and establish full diplomatic relations, while the United States, Europe and all NATO allies would open a formal pathway for Saudi Arabia into the West. https://t.co/lc6YWPhQc8 #SaudiArabia #Israel #Diplomacy #SA #IL #US #EU #NATO

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 accused Donald Trump of maintaining a politically treacherous relationship with Putin’s Russia, saying he had repeatedly deferred to Putin, attacked Ukraine, weakened confidence in NATO and advanced positions that served Moscow’s strategic interests. The author also referred to the “Krasnov” story. https://t.co/rwwfFV4YYK #Trump #Putin #NATO #US #RU #UA #NATO

Gordon explained that before his arrival, he did not expect to form such a special bond with the FC Barcelona supporters so quickly. He stated that the club was the best in the world and that its supporters, who had seen the best players play in Barcelona, were the best. He added that he and his family were very happy about it. #FCBarcelona #Supporters #Football (translated)

Ida Gabrielsson argued that the government formation should be based on the fact that S, V, MP, and C had campaigned for a change of power and had Magdalena Andersson as a common candidate for prime minister. She wrote that C could not count in parties that did not support Andersson and at the same time demand influence based on their mandates. According to Gabrielsson, voters had given C 7 percent and V 8.4 percent, and V would not accept C pursuing right-wing policies with the support of V's mandate. Gabrielsson stated that C could seek support from Ulf Kristersson or try to get KD and L to switch sides. If that did not happen, C needed to negotiate with S, V, and MP to get a majority behind Andersson, according to her. She wrote that V was willing to compromise, but that the parties supporting a prime minister candidate must also be able to accept each other as a government basis. She criticized C’s growth proposals, including continued privatization of the Employment Service and permanent tax subsidies to cleaning companies and large restaurant chains. Gabrielsson claimed that the Economic Institute, the Fiscal Policy Council, and others had assessed the proposals as ineffective, expensive, and ineffective in creating jobs. She also wrote that the proposals would be financed through cuts to unemployment benefits and sick pay as well as cuts in welfare. Gabrielsson asserted that the most voters preferred a red-green government, followed by the Tidö alternative, while C's centrist alternative lagged far behind. She wrote that more people had voted for S, V, and MP than for the previous Alliance if SD was excluded. Finally, she urged C to first clarify its political direction and implied that the party needed to choose a side if it could not find a centrist solution. #Regering #Sverige #Politik (translated)

Joachim B. Olsen rejected that BT had held discussions about employees' political beliefs and wrote that no one could explain who allegedly was responsible for them. He accused Jakob Ruggaard of conducting an ideological crusade because BT had uncovered Ruggaard's party's relations to terrorist movements and urged him to clean up in the Unity List. #politik #demokrati #terrorisme (translated)

The Folle Histoire regretted that Mao did not settle the issue of the Kuomintang in 1949, believing that it would have simplified the current situation. According to the author, the party was no more commendable at that time than the Chinese communists, but it no longer ruled Taiwan, and Chiang Kai-shek died at the same time as Mao. The author added that Taiwan has since become a democracy to which its population seems attached and said he finds it hard to understand why some wish for its forced attachment to the People's Republic of China. He felt that this amounts to applying the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination in a variable manner. He also wrote that Taiwan has been a thorn in China's side since the 1950s and that the United States fully plays on this situation, while specifying that the relationships between Washington and Taipei are more complex. #Taïwan #Mao #Kuomintang (translated)

Jaf used an insulting term towards the Spanish and presented Morocco as their “father,” claiming that Spain had suffered humiliations at the hands of Morocco over the last millennium and would always remain in a subordinate position. To support this claim, he cited the humiliation of Sagrajas in 1086, then the Ifni War in 1957, during which, according to him, Spain had sought the help of France. He also listed the battle of Consuegra — 1097, the battle of Uclés — 1108, the battle of Alarcos — 1195, the battles of Écija and Martos — 1275, the naval battle of Algeciras — 1278, the siege of Algeciras — 1278–1279, and the battle of Gibraltar — 1333. Jaf also mentioned the battle of the Three Kings (Oued al-Makhazin) — 1578, claiming that the Spaniards were then allied with the Portuguese in a crusade against Morocco sanctioned by the Pope. He continued with the battle of Barranco del Lobo — 1909, then several events from 1921: the fight of Abarrán, the siege of Igueriben, the battle of Anoual, the fight of Sidi Dris, the fall of Nador, the fall of Selouane, the fall of Zeluán, the surrender of Dar Quebdani, and the fall of Monte Arruit. Finally, he cited the fights of Tizi Azza — 1923, the Spanish retreat from Chefchaouen — 1924, and the Ifni War — 1957–1958. #Histoire #Maroc #Espagne (translated)

Of course, it is not an optimal situation. As a defender, you know that it often takes a little time before you find relationships between each other. But you do what you can and try to make the best of the situation. No, I have not been involved. It is mainly the leadership team that has had time to sit down and reflect. #Sverige #TonyGustavsson #VMPlayoff (translated)

One does not shoot at close range at children. High school anger: "One does not shoot at close range at children," criticizes Olivier Faure. Algeria, Sahel band, Lebanon... Olivier Faure draws up "the assessment of Emmanuel Macron" on international relations. #PrimaireSocialiste #Cyberattaque #ANSSI (translated)