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Mats Uotila claimed that the justifications presented to the Italian press were noble, but in his opinion, Sanna Marin had left politics immediately after the lost parliamentary elections. According to Uotila, Marin betrayed her voters because Finns did not want her to continue as prime minister, and the role of a regular member of parliament was not acceptable to her. https://t.co/Z2Nxz4yHBE #poliikka #Suomi #vaalit (translated)

Henri Vanhanen wrote that Finland should take seriously Russia's alleged plans to assassinate leaders of the European defense industry. According to him, European intelligence services had warned that Russia had intensified its assassination plots targeting business executives. Possible targets included not only large arms manufacturers but also smaller defense technology companies, especially manufacturers of drones and their components. Vanhanen referred to a plan revealed in 2024 to assassinate Armin Papperger, CEO of the German company Rheinmetall. He wrote that more recent intelligence data indicated broader and more systematic actions beyond individual cases. According to Vanhanen, Russia's intention was to undermine the European defense industry, intimidate its business leaders, complicate support for Ukraine, and disrupt the strengthening of Europe's defense capabilities. Vanhanen urged an urgent assessment of whether the protection of key personnel in Finland's defense industry is adequate. He suggested that the security police, police, and defense administration work together with companies to identify individuals at special risk and ensure preemptive action against threats. He proposed, if necessary, strengthening personal protection, enhancing counterintelligence efforts against companies, and improving information sharing among authorities. According to Vanhanen, Finland should not wait for the first attack on its territory before preparing. https://t.co/xVZMYe1R7e #Puolustusteollisuus #Venäjä #Suomi (translated)

Jari Sarasvuo asked what was going on and wrote that respecting different worldviews as well as commitment to common rules and culture helped build a better future without discrimination or forced relocations. According to him, Western culture was based on mutual respect, tolerance, and trust. Sarasvuo urged to hold on to these ideals and encouraged Sukkolaa and Juha Itkonen. #kulttuuri #suvaitsevaisuus #yhteisö (translated)

Thank you for your prayer for the pastoral visit I will make to Peru. Greeting the Peruvians at St. Peter's Square, in procession for the 'Senor de los milagros', Leone said: "Thank you for your prayer for the pastoral visit I will make to Peru." #PapaFrancesco #salute #Perù (translated)

Yaron Nadbornik criticized Heikki Hiilamo's column published in Yleisradio, stating that it presented a one-sided image connecting the actions of Israel's leadership, Finnish Christian groups, and Minister Antti Häkkänen's visit to the structures of oppression. Nadbornik argued that the column's treatment of Israel and Zionism made Jews collectively responsible and expanded the criticism to also include Israel's supporters and Jews in general. According to Nadbornik, Hiilamo's text divided the parties into white and Christian oppressors and non-white and Muslim victims. He said this framing overlooked the Jewish roots, history, and vulnerability in the Middle East, as well as the fact that millions of people from various backgrounds lived in Israel. He also believed that the framework wrongly fit the conflict into a narrative of Western colonialism and racism and presented Israel as a refuge for a people without another homeland. Nadbornik wrote that the prejudices against Jews were based on their otherness. He noted that studies had shown that Jews living in the diaspora were unjustly held accountable for the actions of the state of Israel. He argued that Hiilamo's rhetoric, which connected Christian groups and ministerial visits with the suffering in Gaza, reinforced this framework. Nadbornik recalled the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, describing it as a massacre involving rapes, mutilations, and the abduction of civilians, including babies, festival-goers, and the elderly, into Israel. He called it the largest single act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. According to Nadbornik, Hiilamo overlooked the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah openly sought the destruction of Israel in connection with Israel's military actions. He believed that framing the terror attack merely as a security threat or comparing it to Russia's invasion of Ukraine ignored the rights of Israeli citizens to exist and be protected. https://t.co/PFvBFdaoiQ #Israel #Juutalaiset #Rasismi (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

FAN BASE JIMIN PERU 13 said that they were still processing the end of the three days of concerts and described the experience as the first time they welcomed Jimin to Peru. The fanbase mentioned activities organized such as a train, banners, screens, trucks with the artist's image, a paragliding event, and poles decorated with his image. The team stated that the projects required coordination, planning, and dedication, and thanked those who supported them and the international community that, as they wrote, helped make them a reality. They also noted that they were closing the chapter of Jimtober in Peru with gratitude and memories, and wished good luck to Chile, where they said it was now time to celebrate. #JimtoberEnPeru #Jimin_Peru_13 #ATrainOfLoveForJimin #JIMIN #ParkJimin #JimtoberEnPeru #JIMIN #FansDeJimin (translated)

The cat account saw BTS share Jimin's reaction during the ARMY Peru project. As he recounted, the singer greeted Lima and said that day was the last performance day for the group in Peru. After hearing them sing "Happy Birthday," he thanked them for the gesture and expressed his affection. Jimin also mentioned that feeling moved by the welcome, support, and affection from the Peruvian audience had made them happy. He added that the group would travel to another country, but that they would not forget the love received from the other side of the world, and expressed his hope to see his fans again. #Jimin #ARMY #BTS (translated)

Jimin wrote that the stadium in Lima had turned yellow, described the scene as very beautiful, and thanked everyone who raised the banner. He said that day would be remembered forever and posted the phrase "JIMTOBER IN PERU." https://t.co/MA9CU6nR8m #Lima #Gratidão #JIMTOBER (translated)

Abi said that she was crying because of the surprise songs and because BTS had worn outfits from Peruvian culture, praised the country's cuisine, and said that they loved their fans very much and that they would return. She also emphasized that Jimin had smiled upon seeing the fan project and stated that the Peruvian fans had succeeded in winning them over. #Perú #Kpop #Música (translated)