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If President Trump negotiated this with Putin – please tell us when the ceasefire begins – we are ready and will accept it. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he was not informed in advance about the "energy ceasefire" with Russia announced by US President Donald Trump. #Trump #Ukraine #Russland (translated)

I consider it impossible that this victory goes to our heads. The second half was a quite effective grounding for that. Today was about the routine of the Bundesliga, about duels, resistance, and patience. And that’s exactly what we accepted from the very beginning. Sports director Fabian Wohlgemuth (47) said: "I consider it impossible that this victory goes to our heads. The second half was a quite effective grounding for that. Today was about the routine of the Bundesliga, about duels, resistance, and patience. And that’s exactly what we accepted from the very beginning." #VfBStuttgart #Bundesliga #ChampionsLeague (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)

After intensive exploratory talks, the SPD, the Left, and the Greens in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern have decided to enter into coalition negotiations for the first red-red-green three-party alliance, which will begin tomorrow. #MecklenburgVorpommern #Koalitionsverhandlungen #Rechtsextremismus (translated)

Fleur Agema wrote that Minister Mirjam Sterk started talking about reforms herself in Café Kockelmann, but according to Agema, she did not receive any questions about the extent of the cuts to elderly care. She referred to these as not being reforms and stated that the plans included, among other things, an increase in the personal deductible to 400 euros, a personal contribution for home care, and the elimination of household help with a safety net. She also mentioned the cessation of funding for 6,000 nursing home places and the cancellation of the return of care homes, while according to her it had been shown that these were the most suitable for 20,000 vulnerable elderly people. Agema criticized the broadcast and addressed Mats Akkerman at the end. #ouderenzorg #bezuinigingen #hervormingen (translated)

Madelon Vos wrote that entrepreneurs, according to the CEO of DSM, needed a reliable government, but did not get one. She stated that Dutch politics trivialized the effects of the income tax in box 2 and the high rates in box 3, and that this policy severely affected entire sectors, including the Dutch crypto and precious metals sector with more than two million investors. Vos wrote that investors had to keep track of their real returns themselves, while some banks and brokers could not provide that data and the Tax Authority had not yet verified the calculations. According to her, investors would want to deduct inflation, transaction costs, currency costs, and subscription costs from that calculation. She also reported that the man who had been at the basis of the law had since advocated for the withdrawal of the amendment and the law and for a new piece of legislation. Furthermore, Vos pointed to the rising interest rates in France and the possible consequences of that for the Netherlands. She wondered if war was looming and wrote that the Netherlands was increasing pressure on Russia. https://t.co/X4T4ze43tV #ondernemen #beleggen #politiek (translated)

"First, start a war against Iran without a recognizable plan that drives energy prices up worldwide – and then make a deal with the warmonger Putin to cushion the consequences before the midterms – it couldn't be more unscrupulous," said Green Party leader Franziska Brantner to the news agency dpa. #Russlandsanktionen #TransatlantischeBeziehungen #UkraineUnterstützung (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

Max von Kreyfelt proposed a compulsory integration course for D66 in his column. According to him, the party spoke excellent Dutch, but still needed to learn how to deal with people who have different beliefs. He referred to Jan Paternotte, who mentioned the Renaissanceschool associated with Forum for Democracy in the Chamber and asked for stricter rules for new schools. According to Von Kreyfelt, Rob Jetten had advocated for a swift evaluation and possible legislative changes. The proposed course would, according to Von Kreyfelt, include lessons on civil rights, freedom of education, diversity, democracy, and equal rights. He wrote that citizens should be allowed to think independently and vote for other parties, and that a political background in itself was not an offense. Regarding Jetten's statements on October 9 about taking stronger action against certain schools and online channels where, in his view, young people were learning incorrect ideas about equal rights, Von Kreyfelt noted that Jetten had not mentioned the Renaissanceschool. As an exam task, Von Kreyfelt described a parent who wanted to pass on different beliefs to their child than D66. According to him, a student would succeed with an answer that did not involve inspection, improvement processes, or legislative changes. He concluded that D66 needed to learn that a free society also existed without its permission. #Inburgering #Diversiteit #Democratie (translated)

Denis Trubetskoy wrote that Moscow's attacks on Ukrainian data centers were not a strategically wise decision. Although Russia can cause more damage in many areas than Ukraine, the latter's network is much more decentralized and can rely on Western backups. In conclusion, he sarcastically commented on Yandex and similar providers. #Ukraine #Russland #Cyberangriffe (translated)

After the massive influx of migrants to Ceuta, where the police begin to clear makeshift camps, the anger of the residents grows as thousands of migrants want to stay despite the devastating conditions, leading to a cat-and-mouse game between them and the security forces. #Ceuta #Migration #Asyl (translated)

LilitThyra wrote that Zelensky provoked Trump with attacks on Russian refineries and his statements. Trump is now his opponent, which marks the beginning of a new chapter. She expressed hope that this could possibly bring movement toward peace. https://t.co/N7WFcs6cuR #Selensky #Trump #Frieden (translated)