¿Donde Esta la Phonexia?

Welcome to Memetic Warfare.

This week we’ll take a look at Honduras Gate, a probable influence operation in Latin America brought to my attention by multiple friends of the blog.

The site claims to represent Honduran journalists exposing Israeli and American interference in Latin America, published in collaboration with the far-left Spanish outlet Canal Red.

Canal Red, I’d add, is known for its pro-Russia stance, often “echoing” pro-Russia content and having employed past RT correspondents. Its founder used to collaborate with HispanTV, Iran’s state media outlet in Spanish, as well. In short, I wouldn’t put it past them - knowingly or not - to be a part in a Russian or other influence operation.

Let’s take a look and see what’s happening. I’ll start off by saying that their operational security is good, I didn’t find any solid pivot points to use. For those curious, they use Floki for anonymous hosting, have a Swiss TLD presumably for more privacy, and also use PGP and other privacy-forward methods.

The site itself screams Claude in terms of aesthetics:

The site publishes selected parts of recordings of phone calls. The operators try to confirm their authenticity with Phonexia.

The phone calls themselves are short, sound selectively and arguably overly explicit in many of their admissions. I’ve listened to a few and they sound stilted and edited at best, and in some cases still seem unnatural.

It’s quite possible that the audio is also selectively manipulated as well to fool Phonexia, or that the Phonexia results themselves are fake or misleading. If you want, you can check out the audio clips yourself on the site or on their YouTube channel - I personally was unimpressed.

This is evident in the level of verification provided. By their own admission on many of these clips, characteristics such as “naturalness” are not say 95+ percent there. I’d lean towards manipulation of existing audio or high-quality audio deepfakes as the most probable source of most, if not all, of the audio.

The investigations they’ve published are also super out there in terms of content, just see below. As everyone knows, Honduras is a lynchpin of Israeli foreign policy and national security interests.

Jokes aside, the claims are just ludicrous. How convenient that the president of Honduras says, on a phone call, that the prime minister of Israel had “everything to do with my release” and that Israel funded his campaign?

Guys, Israel has a lot of other things going on at the moment. Honduras is not that important in the grand scheme of things.

Their other “investigations” are also suspicious at best. Their most recent article claims that their site is “under attack” by Israel and the US.

They base this just on alleged “attacks” or “intrusion attempts”.

They claim to geolocate these “attacks” by IP address, showing that they originate in the US and Israel. My brother in Honduras, if the US and Israel wanted to take this site down:

• They could.

• They wouldn’t target it via US or Israel-based hosts.

Their behavior is also telling. In contrast to many legitimate journalists and investigative outlets, they love covering coverage of themselves. They have no qualms retweeting pro-Russia wackjob outlets such as the Grayzone:

Pro-Hizballah Al-Mayadeen:

And of course RT:

They love sharing reactions to their content, including by paragons of virtue like pro-Russia influencer Fiorella Isabel and Evo Morales:

So, let’s review what we have here in bulletpoints. Honduras Gate is a suspicious media outlet that:

• Is tied to pro-Russia outlet Canal Red.

• Amplifies pro-Russia, anti-West content of questionable provenance.

• Is frequently amplified by other far-left and pro-Russia groups groups like the Grayzone and RT, and even some other axis of resistance-aligned groups like al-Mayadeen..

• Possible audio deepfakes or otherwise manipulated audio files. Russia is suspected of having done this a few times, including most effectively in Slovakia.

• Desperately seeks to promote it self and its own media content.

On the whole, I’d call this an influence operation with a pretty high degree of confidence. Hopefully more will come out soon.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.