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David Ágape wrote that the Attorney General of the Union, Jorge Messias, used an official profile with a seal and link to the AGU to campaign for Lula. He stated that Messias followed a direction from André Janones and criticized the conduct as subservient to the president. Ágape said that, about six months earlier, the AGU, then led by Messias, had published a guideline stating that public agents could not use the prestige of their position or institutional visibility to promote candidacies nor confuse personal manifestations with official positions. According to him, the official channels of the AGU were also restricted during the election period. The author recalled that Messias had been nominated by Lula to the Supreme Court but was rejected by the Senate. Ágape stated that this was the first rejection of a presidential nominee to the Court since 1894. He also questioned whether a revelation attributed to the outlet A Investigação would have influenced the rejection: according to the cited report, Messias signed an AGU opinion favorable to aspects of late abortion and later reportedly cried and said he signed without reading. In the end, Ágape stated that Messias would be close to leaving the position and suggested he would return to acting as a messenger for his political group. https://t.co/KMq0Oyg2R9 #Política #Brasil #AGU (translated)

Cláudia Teixeira stated that five commentators distinguished themselves by thinking for themselves, unlike others who, according to her, repeated an ideological line. She wrote that the five voices questioned and dismantled arguments and had the courage to expose what many tried to hide, adding that this made them uncomfortable and made a difference. #Opinião #LiberdadeDeExpressão #VozesAutênticas (translated)

Dawisson Belém Lopes stated that, in the assessment of those with extensive knowledge of international relations, Grupo Globo followed the guidelines of Tel Aviv. He said that the exchanges between the organization's CEO, who remained at the company for 29 years, and Vorcaro made this connection evident. #RelaçõesInternacionais #GrupoGlobo #TelAviv (translated)

Rogério Marinho stated that the leadership of the Attorney General's Office of the Union (AGU) violated a guideline of electoral neutrality during the campaign. According to him, Messias attributed a victory of the state to Lula, while Flávio Roman, whom he called the number two in the agency, declared that the public attorneys "are with Lula." Marinho said that the state attorney's office should not act as a campaign committee and stated that the 140th edition of the Opposition Observatory showed the participation of AGU's leadership in the electoral dispute and what he classified as the appropriation of the public machine by the PT. He shared links to this edition and previous ones. #NeutralidadeEleitoral #AdvocaciaPública #Eleições2023 (translated)

Richemont, owner of Cartier, is considering joining Signet Jewelers in its bid to acquire De Beers, with the aim of strengthening its control over the supply of natural diamonds in a market challenged by the popularity of synthetic diamonds. #Richemont #DeBeers #Diamantes (translated)

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha mocked Donald Trump's comments about Ukraine, highlighting the country's progress in its defense and comparing the situation to a game of poker, stating that Ukraine has evolved from having "no cards to play" to having strategic options. #DonaldTrump #Ucraina #Putin (translated)

Pri wrote that Paulo Figueiredo had warned that Moraes' retreat, with the revocation of the arrests of Alan dos Santos and Eustáquio, would be a survival strategy, not a surrender. According to Pri, a letter crafted by Temer in 2021, with Tarcísio present, promised to end the fake news inquiry, but did not fulfill that promise. Pri also stated that if the STF took a softer stance, Flávio would lose the agenda that nearly elected him, and said that even O Estadão had already made this alert. https://t.co/MKmXfMvvwU #Política #STF #FakeNews (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

In Marble Hill, a resident of New York was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Agents had surrounded his car in a residential area, and there was a 5-year-old child in the back seat, city mayor Zohran Mamdani stated Thursday evening on platform X. #ProtesteNewYork #ICE #Bronx (translated)

This tent is just a piece of cloth. Imagine that a military vehicle came here and fired a burst of bullets. There were also gunfire coming from the sky, from the quadcopter drones, and they were directed against unarmed civilians. We left our neighborhood, Zeitoun, to survive, but death is following us. #Gaza #conflict #drepturileomului (translated)

Sabrina F. described people over fifty as the last generation raised without the internet, social networks, and digital devices, arguing that they developed independence from a young age. She recalled that at seven they had house keys, at nine they cooked for their younger siblings, and by ten they could take care of themselves. According to Sabrina F., they spent their days outdoors, often with scraped knees, and learned to handle practical matters. She also mentioned memories of the radio, black-and-white television, record players, and cassettes, as well as car trips made with a map and a packed lunch. She claimed that this generation held more vivid memories and greater trust in their instincts. #GenerazioneSopravvissuta #Memorie #CrescitaFelice (translated)

Romanians will be able to keep and present official documents, such as their ID card and driver's license, through the RO Wallet application, which will be gradually launched starting in January 2027, with the first phase targeting users of the electronic identity card. #ROWallet #identitateDigitală #România (translated)