France accuses Israeli tech firm of meddling in elections. The prediction markets reined in their own paid influencers. Iceland fears a ‘Brexit moment’.
The big story this week comes out of France, where investigators finally named the firm they suspect was behind a run of fake scandals aimed at left-wing candidates – an Israeli tech company called BlackCore – and France looks far from the only place it has been active. The same infrastructure, investigators say, was also tied to a fake charity for Gaza. Two US prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, spent last week asking their own paid influencers to take posts down. And Iceland is heading into an EU referendum its foreign minister fears could become a ‘Brexit moment’ – fuelled, she warns, by misinformation, foreign interference and AI. Welcome to issue four of Narrative Ops.
France’s disinfo watchdog ties one private firm to votes in New York and Scotland
France’s foreign-interference agency, Viginum, said on June 11 that the private Israeli firm BlackCore is suspected of reaching well beyond the French municipal elections that first exposed it. Speaking at a press conference alongside Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Viginum chief Marc-Antoine Brillant named New York and Scotland as further suspected targets, with operations also linked to Angola and Togo, Reuters reports.
“This modus operandi was not limited to municipal elections in France.”
– Marc-Antoine Brillant, head of ViginumThe trail began in Marseille and Toulouse. Back in March, deceptive websites and fake accounts smeared three mayoral candidates from the left-wing France Unbowed party with fabricated criminal allegations, including sexual assault. A joint Haaretz and Libération investigation later mapped the operation’s servers and domains to BlackCore and two companies registered in Tel Aviv. The firm advertises itself, in Hebrew and English, around a product it calls political campaign management.
Viginum first identified the operation in March. France has asked Israel for an explanation.
Prediction markets paid the influencers who cried fraud in the LA mayor’s race
Kalshi and Polymarket spent last week asking paid promoters to take posts down. The two prediction-market apps had affiliates who, while pushing the companies’ betting odds, also spread baseless claims of “cheating” and “stealing” in the Los Angeles mayoral race. AFP reported that Kalshi asked at least two influencers to delete posts; Polymarket said it stripped “paid partnership” tags from several others.
The math drove the conspiracy. MAGA-backed candidate Spencer Pratt sat favored for second place on both platforms in the days before the vote, even as the largest polls put him third. When the count went the other way and incumbent Karen Bass and progressive Nithya Raman advanced, influencers held up the shifting odds as evidence of a rigged result. Kalshi now bars affiliates from questioning the integrity of an election, and Polymarket said the promoters were not posting on its instructions.
“2028 will be the ‘prediction market election.’”
– Jess Rauchberg, Seton Hall University, to AFPA fake Gaza charity, built for data collection and influence
The same infrastructure, linked to BlackCore, ran something stranger than the election operation. Haaretz and Libération found that servers and domains tied to the firm also hosted “Sadaqah Palestine,” a site that presented itself as a nonprofit for Palestinian families, complete with a donation form and a paid advertising budget on Meta’s platforms. It is no longer online.
The accounts promoting it gave it away as fake: investigators found bogus fitness-coach profiles, bot traffic they traced to Vietnam, and follower lists that didn’t hold up. No registered charity sat behind it in the UK, where some of the accounts appeared to be based. Whether the aim was money, personal data, or a foothold inside pro-Palestinian circles before turning on them, the reporters would not say for certain.
Neither outlet could establish how much money, if any, the page collected before it went offline.
Iceland’s foreign minister fears a ‘Brexit moment’ in the EU vote
Iceland votes on August 29 on whether to resume the EU accession talks it walked away from in 2013 – and its foreign minister, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, told the Guardian she fears the campaign will rhyme with Brexit. She accused opponents at home and abroad of fearmongering and of borrowing the playbook of Nigel Farage and Reform, and warned that misinformation, foreign interference and AI could all shape the result.
“I am fearing that we will face a Brexit moment.”
– Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, Iceland’s foreign ministerShe singled out Russia as a likely source of interference, while Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir said meddling would not be tolerated from any direction – the EU, China, Russia or the United States. The vote was brought forward from 2027, a move the government has tied partly to US pressure over Greenland. Polls are close: roughly 42% back reopening talks and 39% are against. The country’s president has warned that AI can churn out credible-looking but misleading content at speed, and an Icelandic AI researcher found chatbots answering referendum questions in Icelandic from unreliable sources – answers many voters may never think to double-check.
Brazil’s top prosecutor puts deepfakes on watch
Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet told the EsferaCast podcast on June 10 that deepfakes and criminal-faction meddling will draw immediate action in the 2026 elections, admitting it is now hard to separate malicious AI from legitimate content.
Manila braces for an impeachment disinfo wave
With Vice President Sara Duterte’s Senate trial approaching, House prosecutors and the new citizen network Bantay Senado say they are preparing for organised fake-news and troll activity around the proceedings.
An ‘uncensored’ chatbot becomes a conspiracy engine
Euronews found conservative influencers using an alternative chatbot, “Uncensored AI,” to manufacture claims of rigged US elections and staged assassination attempts, and to push pro-Kremlin lines when prompted in Russian.
Storm-1516 turns toward Macron and Merz
As US funding for Kyiv dries up, recent monitoring shows the Russian operation Storm-1516 shifting from anti-Ukraine fabrications toward disparaging France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz, the war’s two loudest European backers.
We flagged a network of cloned FIFA sites gearing up to defraud fans ahead of the 2026 World Cup across the US, Canada and Mexico.
Update: The tournament opened on June 11 in Mexico City, and the scam infrastructure switched on with it. Researchers tracking the operation, which they call “Ghost Stadium,” counted more than 4,300 fraudulent domains impersonating FIFA, registered months in advance and held dormant until ticket demand peaked. FIFA logged over 150 million ticket requests in the first two weeks of sales. The FBI warned on May 27 that spoofed FIFA pages are harvesting payment and personal data, and Canada’s Cyber Centre says it expects threat actors to use the tournament’s coverage to spread disinformation.
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