Search

Supporting Putin's war economy is morally wrong, while he uses the money to bomb cities. Nebraska representative Don Bacon, who is also retiring from Congress, criticized the agreement on Friday, stating on platform X that supporting the Russian president's war economy is morally wrong. #Trump #Republicani #Rusia (translated)

The author of the entry wrote that Ukraine has the right to defend itself, and Donald Trump should not be lecturing it about peace, since — as he stated — he trades with the aggressor. He added that Ukrainian victims cannot be treated as a means to obtain cheaper fuel. https://t.co/WeRAdH1kVU #Ukraina #prawaCzłowieka #wojna #UA #US (translated)

Lisa wrote that America once understood itself as the guardian of Western values, but under Trump increasingly appears like a "rogue state" without a moral compass. She accused the country of lacking principles and credibility, referred to Trump as an "idiot," and asked how he could be elected. #Amerika #Politik #Werte (translated)

Adam recalled that on September 4 of this year, KO politician Bartosz Arłukowicz wrote on X that a war is ongoing and there is no time for hesitation. Adam argued that in wartime, truth is the first casualty of events, and journalism becomes an adversary to all sides. He added that propaganda does not need to reach a wide audience at that time, because people seek it out themselves, wanting to gain moral support in a conflict perceived as a struggle between good and evil. According to Adam, journalists then face a difficult question of whether propaganda deemed righteous can be more important than uncomfortable facts. #wojna #dziennikarstwo #propaganda (translated)

A citizen criticized Carla Hinrichs, who, as a spokesperson for the Last Generation, has encouraged others to engage in blockades. She wrote that ten participants should pay 403,000 euros to Lufthansa today; two others would likely live at the subsistence level for 30 years according to a Cologne judge. While others paid the price for the morality represented by Hinrichs and its staging on social media, she herself traveled to the USA, the citizen wrote. According to this, Hinrichs does not consider a change in her own lifestyle necessary and does not even adhere to it herself. https://t.co/kHBOaaic5M #LetzteGeneration #Klimaschutz #SozialeGerechtigkeit (translated)

Jura Háček wrote that the only joy of the Motorists for themselves is, according to him, the celebration of AI by the creation of a single representative in Černouček, who allegedly is not even a member of the association. He described the motorists as an obscure group of five friends and as "moral beggars" and criticized their alleged self-destructive behavior. He added that he is almost reluctant to laugh at them and mentioned that people don’t even laugh at people with disabilities. His final score was 10 councilors minus one Owl in Prague. #motorismus #humor #politika (translated)

Marco Setaccioli accused the recipients of his message of collaborating with Putin and constantly contributing to the weakening of democracies. He argued that, without their actions, Putin would have stopped killing a long time ago, and he wrote that he felt deep shame for what he considered their moral abyss. #democrazia #Putin #vergogna (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

Jesus Bengoechea wrote that Valverde, Tchouaméni, and Jude did not have a great game the day before, but he noted that they reacted when the team was losing by one goal and had one player less. He also attributed the preservation of the result to Mou's tactical adjustments and maintained that the footballing and moral quality of the players deserved a competition worthy of that name. #Fútbol #GranJuego #Táctica (translated)

Bojan Požar wrote that they had to replace Tamara Vonta because, in his words, she no longer physically fit the image of the host of the news program on private television, especially the presentation that the then American owners of Pop TV had of her. He added that they were not allowed to say this publicly. #mediji #televizija #voditeljica (translated)

Regina Laska wrote that CDA chairman Dennis Radtke (CDU) referred to Gerhard Schröder's recent appearance in Moscow in the Tagesspiegel as a "case of moral bankruptcy" and called on the SPD to expel the former chancellor from the party. Laska agreed with him. Schröder was too ill to testify before a parliamentary inquiry but fit enough to celebrate Vladimir Putin's birthday in Moscow and accept a new supervisory board position in Russia. According to Laska, the SPD state chairpersons in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are now also demanding a new expulsion procedure. The SPD district of Upper Palatinate voted unanimously in favor of it on Saturday. Schleswig-Holstein's SPD leader Ulf Kämpfer stated that the paths of the party and Schröder had parted ways many years ago. Laska asked why Schröder was still a member of the SPD. Previous expulsion procedures had failed in 2022 and 2023. It is not only about Schröder's differing stance on Russia policy, Laska wrote, but also about his demonstrative loyalty to Putin, who has been waging a war of annihilation against Ukraine for more than four and a half years. She also pointed out that SPD foreign policy expert Ralf Stegner had praised Schröder's visit to Putin. Pierre Orthen, chairman of the SPD local club in Baden-Württemberg's Leutenbach, publicly questioned whether this was in line with the responsibilities of a member of the Bundestag's Foreign Affairs Committee. Laska wrote that Stegner had held talks with Kremlin-affiliated representatives in Baku in April 2025. It apparently concerned the future of the Petersburg Dialogue, which Schröder co-founded with Putin in 2001. In June 2026, Stegner was said to have praised Schröder's connection to Putin; now he had attended Putin's birthday party. Laska asked what these contacts had achieved for peace in Ukraine and wrote that anyone justifying such talks as efforts for peace must also be able to explain what they had accomplished. #Schröder #Ukraine #SPD (translated)