Mexico Can Annul Elections Over Disinformation, Scammers Deepfake the Bankers, and Russia Targets the Vote in Armenia

Mexico Writes Disinformation Into Its Constitution

Mexico has made foreign interference a reason to throw out an election. After a marathon overnight session, the Chamber of Deputies approved the amendment 307 to 128 on May 28, and the Senate followed 85 to 42. The definition lawmakers settled on is wide. It covers illicit financing, propaganda, the systematic dissemination of disinformation, digital manipulation, and the involvement of foreign governments, then stretches further to reach acts of political, economic, diplomatic or media pressure meant to move public opinion.

Sheinbaum backed the reform and said she had seen foreign money reach local candidates before. Ricardo Monreal, who runs the ruling Morena bloc, called it a sovereignty safeguard and pointed to alleged US meddling in the region, citing Honduras in 2025. Electoral changes must be in place 90 days before a vote, so the measure will not touch the June 2027 federal contest. Opposition coordinator José Elías Lixa of the PAN rejected the premise outright.

The opposition’s objection is the part worth weighing. The terms doing the work here, disinformation and digital manipulation and media pressure, have no settled legal definition, and the body that would rule on a challenge is an electoral tribunal whose judges the same legislative package keeps eligible for reappointment. A measure written to keep foreign operators out could reach an election-monitoring mission, a foreign-funded NGO, or a critical newspaper, depending on how those words are read. For now the reform sits with the states, where 17 of 32 legislatures must ratify it.

The Same Fake, Now Wearing a Banker’s Face

South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority spent May 29 warning traders about an old trick with a new face. Fraudsters are running deepfake videos of business leaders, officials and television presenters, among them mining magnate Patrice Motsepe and President Cyril Ramaphosa, to give fake trading platforms the look of a genuine endorsement.

The loss figures show why. A Surfshark analysis of deepfake fraud since 2019 put celebrity and official investment endorsements at 52% of reported losses, with executive-impersonation transfers, the fake CEO calling finance for an urgent wire, another quarter.

Russia’s Whole Influence Machine Points at Yerevan

Armenia votes on June 7. A Repsense FIMI executive report published this week tracked 678 TikTok accounts, 300 Telegram channels, 440 Facebook pages and 14 YouTube channels from November 2025 through April 2026. The operation it documents is not new – it is the same playbook Repsense traced during Moldova’s 2025 elections, barely localised. Templates recovered from Telegram channels tell operators to swap “Moldova” for “Armenia” and “Sandu” for “Pashinyan.” Fourteen of them turned up in the dataset.

TikTok is the main front. In the closing weeks of the monitoring period, 6,821 political videos pulled 107 million views. Thirteen coordinated Armenian-language opposition accounts churn out most of the anti-government content. The report traces where the lines come from: a pair of Russian-language Telegram channels were posting near-identical sentences within 36 minutes of each other – 1,655 times. That kind of synchronisation points to shared back-end infrastructure. But the same talking points only reach Armenian TikTok three to four months later. If the domestic accounts were getting instructions directly from Moscow, you would see hours or days, not a 99–111 day gap. What the report shows instead is that the Armenian opposition accounts have absorbed the framing and reproduce it independently, on their own schedule. Cut one off and the others keep posting. The narrative has already been internalised – there is no single pipeline to break.

The report’s sharpest finding sits in the polling data. Asked whether Armenia should diversify its partnerships or stay with Russia, the public leans clearly toward diversification. The media environment leans the other way. The gap between the two – 1.06 points, the largest mismatch in the dataset – has widened since April. What Armenians see in their feeds is moving away from what most of them actually think.

Read the full report →