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Tomáš Zdechovský wrote that after the intervention of the Russian data center, there was talk of a sharp decline in bot activity. If the decrease in fake accounts supporting people labeled as "flastenci" were also confirmed, he would consider it significant. He questioned whether it is compatible to declare allegiance to Czech sovereignty while simultaneously drawing technical support from Moscow. He added that the Czech debate should be led by real people and that, in his opinion, Kremlin troll farms would not be missed by anyone. #českápolitika #dezinformace #sociálnímédia (translated)

David Rangl, in an ironically toned post, claimed that the intervention of Russian data centers caused chaos in the Czech pro-Russian scene. According to him, disinformation websites and trolls stopped receiving instructions, so some people had to form their own opinions. Rangl described that the SPD convened a crisis staff, which, according to him, after several hours came up with several contradictory explanations: either the attack did not occur, Russia repelled it, or it could have been Brussels, NATO, migrants, and Petr Fiala to blame. He also mentioned a demand for the government's resignation without a clearly stated reason. According to him, on the alternative scene, one influencer condemned Russian aggression, another published photos of burning servers as evidence of Russian victory, and another began promoting Russia's accession to NATO. Jindřich Rajchl, according to Rangl, demanded a parliamentary investigative committee due to the decline in followers. The post further described the extinguished premises of the Stačilo! movement, non-functional stamp machines at the Václav Klaus Institute, and the vaccination of the Svatopluk association against rabies at a veterinary station. The situation was eventually calmed by a chain email that blamed events on Soros, Ukrainian pensioners, and a secret NATO lab in Uzhhorod. Rangl concluded that Russian servers were gradually returning to operation, while the damages to the Czech "patriotic scene" could be irreversible, as some people realized during the outage that they could think independently. #ČeskáRepublika #dezinformace #vlastenectví (translated)

Roman Kolář wrote that in his opinion, fake accounts are "on fire" in a Russian data center that Ukrainians set ablaze. He added that this explained why only trolls, whom he labeled with vulgar and derogatory terms, contacted him. https://t.co/4KKJv6OQYw #fakeúčty #trollové #Ukrajina (translated)

The author described the information about the plans to assassinate the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of the Polish government as frightening. He accused individuals whom he identified as being connected to PiS of having harassed, mocked, and trivialized these reports. He added that the Russian narrative had deprived them of empathy. #Polska #hejt #bezpieczeństwo #PL #RU (translated)

The Georg-Stefan-Troller Prize was awarded for the first time in Frankfurt to honor outstanding works that provide deeper insights into Jewish life, while the winners emphasized that Jewish life goes far beyond the history of persecution and exclusion. #GeorgStefanTrollerPreis #JüdischesLeben #Journalismus (translated)

Jarek Olechowski wrote that those supporting Donald Tusk had created a fake graphic bar resembling materials from Republic TV and were using it to attack the station and demand that the National Broadcasting Council revoke its license. He claimed that the graphic was marked as generated by artificial intelligence, yet it was still disseminated by politicians from the Civic Coalition and journalists supporting the government. He described Republic as the largest news television in Poland and the only major station completely independent of the authorities, and compared the actions described to the Russian machine aimed at freedom of speech and Polish democracy. #WolnośćSłowa #Demokracja #Media (translated)

Krzysztof Sałek from KO Stalowa Wola wrote that three data centers were destroyed in the last three days. In his opinion, Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries and troll farms will significantly weaken Vladimir Putin's influence in the world. He also predicted a difficult period for extreme right-wing populists and their reach, and assessed this tactic as successful. https://t.co/lEbdIGcfZ6 #Ukraina #Putin #konflikt (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

Wolfgang Ischinger wrote that hundreds of Russian trolls and others were trying fiercely to blame the responsibility for the current situation on events from 1990 or 1997, thereby shifting it to the West. He interpreted this as a sign of Russian weakness and desperation. #Russland #Desinformation #Politik (translated)

Joanna Bartnik wrote that after the wave of comments on her previous post, she concluded that those who voted for Nawrocki did not understand the role of the president. According to her, they believed that his passion for boxing promotes Poland. #Polska #prezydent #polityka (translated)

Max Hübner called the placement of a plaque by President Nawrocki's Office under Belweder for Donald Tusk a "brilliant trolling." He wrote that Tusk didn't want to go to the Presidential Palace and that under Belweder, opposite the KPRM, he was creating an "industry of contempt and hate" against Nawrocki. https://t.co/1sH95OIn0K #trolling #polityka #Belweder (translated)

Mr. Devil Stockton claimed that Paweł Szefernaker was the first in Polish politics to rely on a troll farm, which initially counted around 2,000 accounts and operated from 2009 to 2015. According to the author, Szefernaker and Beata Szydło's team came up with the slogan "Poland in ruins," and the controlled accounts disseminated spam. Stockton wrote that Szefernaker distanced himself from these methods but had already made enemies. He also published a second list, including 109 accounts he described as trolls and bots under the politician's control. He claimed they were influencing discussions on X, supporting the message and covering up scandals involving the president's office, as well as weakening critical posts about Karol Nawrocki. He encouraged blocking these accounts, arguing that it would limit the spread of false propaganda. #Polska #polityka #dezinformacja (translated)

Pan Diabeł Stockton wrote that lies and manipulation were the last, yet still dangerous weapon of PiS and its media allies. He announced the publication of another list, covering over 100 trolls and bots, which he attributed to the Szefernaker farm. It was supposed to be released that day around 6 PM. He also thanked for every coffee offered to him and emphasized that this support meant a lot to him. https://t.co/dwmGJYuZdH https://t.co/p4nV8Gaoe6 #kłamstwo #manipulacja #media (translated)

The Severan wrote that a person who he believed faced a significant prevalence of reactions now wanted to ban anonymity on social networks. He referred to anonymity as a guarantee of freedom that allowed people to express their opinions without fear of future repercussions. He claimed that pedophiles, predators, and trolls from Russia were used as a cover and stated that he had not read how the ban would impact these groups or what specific threat it would remove. According to him, the first wave of the ban would most significantly affect freedom. #anonymita #svoboda #sociálnísítě (translated)