Diagnostic Workshop.
Poland's scars, your terrain, one toolkit.
Yerevan · 10-12 August 2026
Two countries, one machine.
For a year, Armenia was the number-one target of Russia's most active disinformation network. A decade earlier, the same machine was pointed at Poland. We are not here to tell you about Armenia. We are here to tell you what it did to us, what we built against it, and to put the tools on the table.
You are the experts on Armenia.
- The terrain.
- Real cases.
- The judgement.
- Poland's scars.
- The toolkit, live.
- A course you will own.
What we do this week.
One clear picture of what targets Armenia. You draw it; we hold the marker and the method.
A Polish fake torn apart live, then the same bench on cases you bring. Hands on the keyboard.
The 54-hour course, written together, ready to run in October. Yours to own by spring.
This is what the world reads about you.
The external paper trail: ISD, DFRLab, CheckFirst. Sample finding: 72 fake sites aimed at your election, 17 recycled from France. The exercise: what did they get right, what did they miss, where are they wrong? Your gap list feeds the curriculum. Every image links to the original report.
The fakes, as documented.
Fabricated newscasts, AI-generated 'supporters', the PM's cloned voice: all documented by fact-checkers, yours and international. This is the artefact pool Day 2 draws from. Click any image for the full debunk.
The PM's face. The PM's voice.
Both already faked, both already documented. Click for the full debunks.
Real or fake?
A verified-looking account. A translated caption. A video of the Prime Minister. 34,700 views. Your call:
We were the test range.
They cloned our newsrooms.
Pixel-accurate copies of TVN24, Onet, Interia and Wprost at look-alike addresses, publishing invented stories with our mastheads on top. Exposed by Demagog's investigation and state institutions working the same case.
Armenia got the France24 clone. Same factory, different masthead.
Drones first. Fog within hours.
The night Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace, the information operation was already running: 'a Ukrainian provocation', 'NATO staged it', 'Poland is at war'. The physical incident and the information incident are one event.
The Polish stack.
State layer. NASK runs a standing counter-disinformation unit: monitoring, election protection, public alerts, takedown coordination.
Civic layer. Demagog, Konkret24 and academic teams do the daily debunking and the deep investigations, independent of government.
EU layer. EEAS FIMI reporting and the DSA give the national layers leverage against platforms.
The transferable part is not any single institution. It is the division of labour.
What we got wrong.
- Started late. Years after the first attacks.
- Debunks lagged. Lies in minutes, corrections in days.
- Silos. State, media, NGOs barely shared.
- Politicisation. A suspected referee loses every room.
- Platform dependence. Tools kept dying under us.
Same stories, new masthead.
Cloned TVN24, Onet, Interia, Wprost: our four biggest newsrooms, at look-alike addresses.
Cloned France24; faked CNN and Reuters logos.
'NATO faked the 2025 drones', to drag Poles into war.
'You'll end up like Ukraine.'
PM cast as a 'puppet of Brussels' who sold out the country.
The prime minister smeared, with AI deepfakes.
'Poland bankrupts itself for Ukraine', plus the 1943 Volhynia massacre used to split Poles from Ukrainians.
Fear of attack, economic ruin, grievance.
AI Shield at a glance.
RITA - Region in Transition (Polish-American Freedom Foundation)
June 2026 - May 2027
CSIN (Poland) · AIISA (Armenia)
PLN 81,260
A: experts (analysts) · B: wider circle (CSOs, media)
5 measurable results
A cascade of capability.
- Track A: experts. 12 to 15 analysts from AIISA and partner institutes go deep.
- They become trainers. Those analysts then train the next, wider group, in Armenian.
- Track B. 30 to 36 civil-society and media staff. Broad reach.
The real test of success is not what we teach you, it is what you teach others. Track B is delivered by AIISA, not by us.
Where this workshop fits.
1
Diagnostic Workshop
2
Training the trainers
3
Pilot workshops
4
Toolkit, report, panel
What we leave the room with.
- Threat map. Yours, in DISARM language.
- Gap list. Where reports end, you begin.
- Tested toolkit. Tried on real cases.
- Draft course. Ready for October.
The landscape. Split screen.
- We talk: Poland. Clones, drones, the stack, the failures.
- You talk: the gap. Reports versus what you know.
- Together: the wall map.
- Debrief. What we dig into tomorrow.
Five minutes on how the trick works.
A short explainer we play in the room: the anatomy of information manipulation, in plain language, before we touch any tool. Sources it points to: EUvsDisinfo and EDMO.
You bring the cases. We bring the bench.
Material like this is your daily reality; you know it better than any visitor. What we add is a repeatable bench process: the same artefact, taken apart the same way, every time, producing evidence that holds up.
Yardstick from your own record: the June 2025 audio deepfake reached 280,000 views in 36 hours and was debunked in 9.
The training goal is simple: from 9 hours to 2.
60 minutes, one fake, full teardown.
We open the September 2025 'Ukrainian provocation' drone fake, a Polish case whose ground truth we know end to end, and take it apart on the projector:
The post, the account, the claim. What exactly are we testing?
InVID WeVerify: keyframes, reverse image search, prior appearances.
FotoForensics ELA and Hive: what was pasted, what was generated.
Domains, DNS history, archives: who registered what, when.
TGStat and Telemetrio: which channels moved first, how tightly timed.
Gephi: the amplification network, drawn from the data on screen.
The plugin, shown by the people who built it.
AFP's own four-minute walkthrough of InVID-WeVerify, the browser add-on we drill on Day 2. Watch it once here, then do it yourself on a real Armenian case.
The toolkit, hands-on.
Every tile links to the tool itself. Free or freemium, so nothing dies with the project budget.
From channels to the map.
The method matters more than the tool. Tools die; the bench process survives them. Plus: InVID WeVerify ↗ · Hive ↗ · Telemetrio · NodeXL
Designing the programme.
- The 54-hour course, written together.
- The pass mark: a measured 30% jump in skill.
- The people: your strongest 12 to 15.
- Roles and dates for October.
How we work, and the rules of the room.
Division of labour
Rules of the room
- Nothing is quoted by name, so speak freely.
- Our working language is English.
- Candid beats polite.
- Everything this week is a working draft.
What we ask of you.
- Your candid read. You live this, we don't.
- Real cases for the bench.
- Your strongest 12 to 15.
- Honest feedback.
- Ownership by spring.
Beyond the workshop.
- An Armenian team that works alone.
- Findings reaching ministries and the EU.
- A joint NATO bid in 2027.
- A model for the region.
Your terrain. Our scars. One shield.
Thank you. Let's get to work.