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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)

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)

Eu avisei. Segundo mensagens, Roberta Luchsinger presenteou Swedenberger Barbosa, então secretário-executivo e nº 2 do Ministério da Saúde, com um Cartier de ouro de R$ 66 mil reais, uma obra de arte de mais de 80 mil reais e bancou seu aniversário regado a Whsky, vinho gin e champagne.. No mesmo período, Roberta negociava no mesmo Ministério uma proposta envolvendo medicamentos à base de canabidiol estimada em R$ 626 milhões. Um relógio de R$ 66 mil e diversos presentes caros para o nº 2 da pasta enquanto se buscava abrir um negócio de centenas de milhões no mesmo ministério é, no mínimo, um fato que merece explicações. E é por isso que dissemos desde o início: o dossiê do Lulinha não terminou. As perguntas só estão aumentando e vamos pedir investigação de cada novo fato que vier a tona. #Política #Corrupção #Investigação

🇮🇪💰💚 SMILE | Un couple ayant remporté 134 MILLIONS D’EUROS à la loterie a décidé d’en donner la moitié à des œuvres caritatives. Frances et Patrick Connolly, gagnants du jackpot en 2019, ont notamment financé des actions contre l’isolement, des aides alimentaires d’urgence et des projets destinés aux jeunes aidants. Le couple a également créé sa propre fondation. Ils ont tout de même conservé de quoi profiter de leur nouvelle vie : grande maison, voyages, montre Cartier et Aston Martin… achetée d’occasion. (BBC) #Loterie #Générosité #Bienfaisance

El presidente Abelardo de la Espriella es pequeño de estatura, pero le cabe el país entero en la cabeza. Qué digo el país: la galaxia completa. Qué digo la galaxia: el universo, sus alrededores y hasta más allá de Suba. Pero hay algo que no le cabe: la crítica. La caricatura no le incomoda porque se burle de él. Le incomoda porque lo revela. Porque lo desnuda. Lo despoja de esos falsos ropajes que huelen a Dior y Cartier; de esa voz impostada de tenor de Patillal; de esa pose de hombre de mundo y, finalmente, hasta de esa pose de hombre. Y cuando se le quita todo el decorado, queda lo que la caricatura sabe mostrar mejor: el señor de las moscas. Y RCN, al sacar a un caricaturista del talento de Vladdo, termina haciendo su propia caricatura: la de un canal que presume independencia mientras le teme a un dibujo. Y como diría el gran filósofo de cabecera, Diomedes Díaz: “La risa, remedio infalible, ¡ay ombe!” #crítica #caricatura #política

@josefinarodzam @luisestrada_ En tu declaración patrimonial no declaras ni tus inmuebles, ni ninguna de las joyas como tu reloj Cartier (cosa que debes por ley). La crítica fue desde el principio por ocultar y por seguir ocultando. Saludos secretaria https://t.co/cmMFMFSGHT #corrupción #transparencia #justicia

Josefina Rodríguez, secretaria de turismo federal borró su reloj Cartier, el reloj Rolex de su esposo y el traje de baño Moncler. Los primeros en desobedecer a @Claudiashein y el discurso de austeridad son sus funcionarios. Y borran lujos para no salir en esta cuenta. https://t.co/TBtni0FvTS #Austeridad #Corrupción #FuncionariosPúblicos

Am strâns fotografii și filmări de la Marșul Bucharest Pride 2026. În ele apar copii. Unii sub 5 ani. Duși de mână printr-un marș de 30.000 de oameni pe care organizatorii înșiși îl definesc drept un eveniment centrat pe sexualitate și identitate sexuală. Am verificat pagina oficială a evenimentului, pe site-ul Asociatia Accept — organizatorii. Am căutat orice: o singură mențiune despre protecția copiilor, o restricție de vârstă, o cerință de acord parental, o zonă sigură. Orice semn că cineva s-a gândit măcar o secundă la minorii prezenți. Nu există NIMIC. Legea e clară. Art. 27 alin. (4) din Legea 272/2004: copiii nu pot fi folosiți în acțiuni de susținere a unor cauze fără măsuri adecvate de protecție. ACCEPT a ignorat legea, sponsorii au tăcut si profitat iar ambasadele au sustinut, ca de obicei. Da, ambasadele. 25 de misiuni diplomatice străine au semnat o declarație publică de sprijin pentru acest marș: Austria, Belgia, Regatul Unit, Canada, Chile, Croația, Cehia, Danemarca, Estonia, Finlanda, Franța, Germania, Grecia, Italia, Lituania, Mexic, Norvegia, Portugalia, Slovenia, Spania, Suedia, Olanda, Elveția, Albania și Australia. Până acum, nimeni nu le-a cerut socoteală. Nimeni nu le-a întrebat nimic. Noi am făcut-o, pentru ca toate au o limita. Le-am scris fiecăreia dintre cele 25 trei întrebări pe care ar fi trebuit să și le pună singure: Știați că la evenimentul pe care l-ați susținut nu exista nicio măsură de protecție a copiilor? Verificați vreodată dacă la evenimentele cărora le dați girul diplomatic sunt protejați minorii? Considerați că prezența copiilor de doi-trei ani la un marș centrat pe sexualitate e compatibilă cu standardele din țara dumneavoastră? Am scris și sponsorilor care și-au pus brandul pe acest eveniment: NIVEA (Beiersdorf), Accenture, Got2be (Henkel Consumer Brands), LIVE (Henkel). Și-au asociat numele cu un marș la care copii mici au participat fără niciun fel de protecție. Vrem să știm dacă asta e în regulă pentru ei, poate nu au o problema? Am scris și direct Asociației ACCEPT. Nu e prima dată când ambasadele sprijină public, pe teritoriul României, evenimente care contrazic valorile, cultura și tradițiile majorității românilor. Și de fiecare dată s-a trecut mai departe. Practica asta de presiune culturală trebuie să se oprească. Ambasadele sunt aici pentru cooperare diplomatică, nu pentru a impune agende societății românești. Dacă nu primim răspunsuri, fiecare solicitare va fi escaladată la ministerul de externe al țării respective si la cartierul general al sponsorilor. Vremea cand asemenea actiuni se faceau fara raspundere s-a incheiat. Pe masura ce investigatia inainteaza vom depune si reclamatiile la autoritati. Fiecare share e o întrebare în plus la care vor trebui să răspundă. Românii trebuie să știe. Va tinem la curent cu raspunsurile, le vom publica integral la noi pe site. Multumim celor care ne sprijina! 🇷🇴 #BucharestPride #DrepturileCopiilor #ProtecțiaMinorilor