Just days earlier, the German government had proposed mass data collection to trace the spread of the new coronavirus. The Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in the central German city of Halle advocated the voluntary collection of mobile phone data, in order to gain a better overview of the epidemic, even suggesting that data protection legislation be “reevaluated and, if necessary, adjusted in the short term.” Involuntary mass collection of location data has also been floated at the government level, before being withdrawn.

In an exceptionally privacy-conscious society such as Germany, these ideas have sparked a debate about how much state intrusion citizens are willing to accept, in order to bring an end to the national lockdown.

Compared to other European countries Germans “are much more sensitive towards privacy,” said Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, of the Berlin-based Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. “This is really a German thing, the importance of data protection.”

As the newspaper Handelsblatt explains, “angst about potential surveillance is rooted in Germany’s past.” The combined legacy of the Nazi Gestapo and the East German Stasi are thought to be part of the reason Germany has been a pioneer in data protection — with legislation dating back to the 1970’s. This attitude to personal data has been tested, however, by recent discussions about the extent of measures that the government can take to control the Covid-19 pandemic.

Initial plans

In Asian countries like China and South Korea, data collection has been key to controlling the outbreak from the beginning, often to invasive ends, like South Korea publicizing infected patients’ travel histories. Initially, it seemed that Germany might follow a similar path. 

In mid-March, a proposed bill was leaked to the press, which would have given the government powers to “apply technical means to trace” people who had been in physical contact with infected individuals. A major political and civil-society backlash followed — the bill was interpreted as a mandate to seize individual users’ cell phone location data from telecom providers.

Two days later, on March 23, Health Minister Jens Spahn, seemingly chastened by the reaction, distanced himself from the plan. Still, he appeared to leave the door open for such policies in the future, if support for such measures grows “in the political and societal arena.” 

Though plans to track individuals were put aside, other forms of data collection have still taken place. On March 18 the German cell network giant Telekom announced it would voluntarily give anonymized location data to public health authorities. Another company, Telefonica, soon followed suit. The data was intended to measure whether the population as a whole was obeying social distancing regulations, not what any given person was up to. Even this softer form of surveillance caused some stark reactions.

“Here, in Germany! With your phone!” said one journalist at a Bavarian public broadcaster, in a YouTube video posted on March 21. “Welcome to the surveillance state.” 

The possibility of the state suddenly introducing invasive programs of public surveillance has shocked some commentators. “Why are we doing something that we’d previously thought was morally reprehensible — namely, introducing soft cyber-dictatorship measures?” asked Markus Gabriel, a well-known German philosopher public intellectual who teaches at the University of Bonn, in an interview with Deutschlandfunk, a major public broadcaster.

The App

The latest German initiative to limit the spread of Covid-19 is a yet-to-be-released cell phone tool that uses Bluetooth to gather data about who a user has been in physical proximity to. If the user is confirmed as having contracted the virus, individuals who have been in contact with them will get a notification. 

The technology is being developed by a large consortium of European organizations, including a leading German public health authority, called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Testing (PEPP-PT), which is working on a common technological framework for a virus tracking technology. The group is developing a combination of tools and standards that developers can use to build their own apps, all of which will be interoperable. In its literature, the consortium has assured the public that the data will be anonymized and not stored in central databases, instead offering a kind of grassroots, peer-to-peer surveillance. 

A number of academics have warned governments around the world not to commission coronavirus contact-tracing apps that collect and store personal data. Earlier this week, an open letter signed by professors from 26 countries urged governments to ensure the safeguarding of privacy. In the letter, the academics warned that the centralized approach could "catastrophically hamper trust in and acceptance of such an application by society at large." 

It’s not entirely clear what form the technology will take in Germany. There has been talk of  integrating the common European framework within existing apps, like the government’s NINA emergency notification app. Users can then decide whether to turn on the tracking feature. The technology might ship as early as this week.

Some commentators have greeted this idea as a significant improvement on earlier, more invasive proposals.

“If the app adheres to these standards, it could be a reasonable and useful tool,” said Felix Maschewski, who lectures on the philosophy of technology at Free University of Berlin and co-authored “The Society of Wearables”.

But concerns remain, he said, as “to what extent it could really be effective.” 

Others had similar worries. “On closer inspection, this ‘hope’ for salvation...disappears,” reads an article published in the German publication Netzpolitik. The authors go on to cite the “unwieldy” performance of Bluetooth tech, as well as “doubts about the anonymity of data.” Similar criticisms have greeted a recent announcement that Apple and Google have teamed up to develop their own contact-tracing app.

Public attitudes

Polls show an uneven response to plans for the app among the German public. In response to a survey by an international team of academics, over 70 percent said they would be willing to install it. 

But another survey by the public-service broadcast group ARD has 47 percent of Germans saying they would download a contact tracker, while 45 percent said they would not. Almost half of the negative respondents cited privacy concerns. 

In spite of the widespread public outcry in March, concerns remain that data-collection initiatives might escalate beyond the voluntary. Earlier this month, Hansjörg Durz, a digital issues-focused legislator from the governing coalition, suggested that, if people refuse to volunteer sufficient data, “limiting the right to privacy shouldn’t be taboo.” 

Dr. Elke Steven, managing director of the Berlin-based digital rights organization Digitale Gesellschaft, is worried that people might progressively acquiesce to ever more stringent and problematic data-gathering initiatives as the crisis wears on.

“The longer this lasts, the more people will be prepared to agree to these surveillance measures, in order to maintain their other freedoms,” she said.

The post Coronavirus tests Germans’ devotion to privacy appeared first on Coda Story.

The internet sovereignty side was represented by China and Russia, and when we needed a header image for our article about it, we made the one above.

But how united are China and Russia really, in their approach to the internet?

That’s the question a new report from the Hague Program for Cyber Norms, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tries to answer.

On the surface, the two countries share a lot. For one, both national governments exhibit a kind of siege mentality about online information, viewing the free flow of ideas on the internet as a national security threat. “[B]oth countries see online information as the primary risk,” the report concludes.

But there is one crucial difference as well: China has a massive tech industry, and Russia… well, it’s not as big. From the crackdown on Uyghurs to the digital components of Belt and Road, a powerful Chinese tech industry fuels key pillars of national policy. Russia, despite some advances, is lagging behind.

Even in their hacking operations abroad, the two countries are different. Russia “seems to pursue a policy of political destabilization of Western countries,” while Chinese hackers “have mostly concentrated on economic targets”—stealing intellectual property to benefit domestic industries. In essence, Russia trolls, China steals.

On the whole, a picture emerges of China as a rising digital and economic superpower with long-term ambitions and serious investment in technology. Russia, on the other hand, comes across as a laggard that fears the internet at home while using it to muddy the waters abroad.

This week in Coda

If that report suggests the “authoritarian” countries differ in their cyberspace philosophy, the same can be said for “free” countries. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the EU, through initiatives like the GDPR, is paving a “third way,” distinct from both America and, say, China: a relatively free internet that still acts aggressively to contain the excesses of surveillance capitalism.

Regular Coda contributor Filip Brokes went to a conference attended by some of Europe’s leading minds in tech regulation. “We just want them [tech platforms] to share with the public the decisions behind building these algorithms,” Katarzyna Szymielewicz from the Polish NGO Fundacja Panoptykon told him. Read his dispatch here.

OTHER NEWS:

• I recommend this thoughtful critique of “data is the new oil” metaphors. Yes, data is valuable, but calling it oil takes for granted that it’s a commodity, and suggests the best we can hope for is a better-regulated surveillance capitalism. (Real LIfe)
• You probably saw, or at least heard of, Sacha Baron Cohen’s address about social media last week. Not everyone is enthusiastic about it, even those often critical of tech. The Verge’s Casey Newton, for example, usually quite critical of bad social media moderation, has written an in-depth, thoughtful critique arguing that Cohen’s proposals are inadequate. (The Verge)
• China used to be skeptical of Bitcoin, but now seems to be pivoting to adopting digital currency on a government level. This article argues that cryptocurrency could become the foundation for Chinese soft power. (Observer)
• Fresh reporting on Western tech companies’ complicity in China’s crackdown in Xinjiang. (WSJ)
• Why are data centers so often in abandoned industrial buildings? Sure, maybe it’s convenient. But what if it’s actually because of neoliberalism? That’s what this journal article tries to explain. (Work Organisation, Labour, and Globalisation)

The post China & Russia: Two different approaches to ‘internet sovereignty’ appeared first on Coda Story.

“They created a rechargeable world,” reads the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release announcing the award.

Chances are, the phone that’s no more than a meter away from you, or on which you are reading these words, has a lithium battery in it, which is why the lithium-ion battery is so important: It made powerful electronic devices — like smartphones — portable in a way they hadn’t been before. This, in turn, set the stage for the smartphone revolution over the past decade and a half.

And the lithium-powered rise of the smartphone has had profound consequences, including political ones, because it’s largely through smartphones that internet browsing has permeated the world’s population at an unprecedented scale.

Earlier this year, three researchers tried to figure out what those political consequences have been.

“There is a heated debate on the political implications of the spread of internet...Previous studies — mostly carried out in one country setting — produced evidence for both optimistic and pessimistic points of view,” one of the authors, Sciences Po professor Sergei Guriev told me over email. “We decided to look at the global evidence. Our results are also suggesting that both optimists and pessimists are partially correct.”

For governments, the results don’t look good.

“The expansion of mobile internet networks leads to a reduction in confidence in government when the internet is uncensored,” the recent paper, called “3G Internet and Confidence in Government,” argues. By using statistical methods and survey results, Guriev and co-authors Ekaterina Zhuravskaya and Nikita Melnikov show there is a strong correlation between increased 3G internet access and distrust in government.

“What surprised us was the magnitudes of the effects, which were quite large,” Guriev said.

Disappointingly, they don’t find this strong effect when the internet in a given region is censored. So their research both vindicates and undermines Bill Clinton’s now-somewhat-infamous 2000 speech that touched on internet censorship.

“In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” Clinton said then. On this, the paper seems to agree with him: 3G helps expose government corruption.

But then Clinton went on: “Now there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-Oto the wall.” 

This now seems naive, and the 3G paper is one more piece of evidence suggesting you can nail Jell-O to the wall — that is, successfully censor the internet to stifle dissent. This is why Foreign Policy dubbed China’s former internet czar, Lu Wei, “The Man Who Nailed Jello to the Wall.” Internet censorship kind of works.

My favorite Coda Story this week

Speaking of 3G internet, it’s worth revisiting Keren Weitzberg’s piece on how smartphone lending has helped financial credit systems burrow deep into the lives of ordinary Kenyans. “We use smartphone data to build a financial identity for applicants,” said one company representative. That includes how often you call your mom.

OTHER NEWS:

• Researchers at Georgia Tech have been experimenting with having AI read fiction to make it more empathetic. (LitHub)
• Here’s a very well-done visualization of social media content removal requests by country, though it’s important to note that we can’t simply draw conclusions about which are the “worst” countries for internet censorship. Russia has one of the highest rates, but France has ten times more requests than China. Still, the data is fascinating and worth exploring. (Comparitech)
• Digitized welfare systems are rising across the world. But a new report from a United Nations expert warns that the world “needs to alter course significantly...to avoid stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia.” (UN)
• China’s Xi Jinping ideology app apparently spies on its users. (Coda)

The post The Nobel prize recognizes the influence of lithium-ion batteries appeared first on Coda Story.

“I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of ‘epistemic violence,’ rooted...in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.”

So, in 1967, the U.S. military was already doing something that we can now see as the “abstraction of life into a...data trace.” 

If this isn’t authoritarian tech, what is? That’s not a rhetorical question. We at Coda chose to create a channel called “Authoritarian Tech” because we think that something interesting is happening at the intersection of politics and technology. But what is that something, and is it a coherent phenomenon we can name? More and more, I think the “abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace” is at the center of the answer.

I’m reading a book called New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, by James Bridle. It argues that digital technology has, among other things, reduced our ability to know and act on the present. This is a paradox: The proliferation of data, the universal availability of more and more information, and the increased sophistication of computer models all suggest the opposite. But, to Bridle, when life gets digitized, we lose sight of it. Crucially, this distortion is political. When we pass the world through a technological lens, we get a version that reflects the political views of those who created the technology. Twitter, say, reflects a certain view of what a public sphere means, how political discourse happens, and what a user is interested in seeing. 

“Technology is not mere tool making...it is the making of metaphors,” Bridle writes. “In making a tool, we instantiate a certain understanding of the world that...is capable of achieving certain effects in that world.”

So here is how I see this as connected to authoritarian tech: Technology is a tool, but it is a tool shaped heavily by corporations and governments with specific political agendas. The technology we use, in turn, shapes our view of the world, our ability to make decisions, and circumscribes the realm of political possibility. 

This is a political power grab, away from the democratic subject, and towards unaccountable product designers, government censors, and technocrats. “Computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack,” Bridle writes, “offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine.”

Further reading:

• Web browsers are uniting to stop Kazakhstan’s plans to monitor citizen’s internet use. (Axios) 
• Climate change endangers the internet. This article about it is interesting, but it focuses entirely on the literal physical effects of a warming planet on internet infrastructure. There’s surely a political-sociological side to this story that is just as interesting, if more speculative. (Gizmodo)
• How Spain’s far-right Vox party is mastering social media to reach young voters. (Open Democracy)
• AI is being pitched as a way to reduce hate speech on social media. There is one problem: *drum roll* the AI might itself be racist. (Vox)
• Is technology actually addictive? Skip the tepid debates and read this in-depth psychology paper trying to answer the question in good faith. (Journal of Public Policy & Marketing)

The post The abstraction of life into a…data trace appeared first on Coda Story.

But others have suggested these weren’t really WhatsApp problems — they were problems associated with social and religious issues in India that manifested on WhatsApp. “Technology is what we make of it,” wrote Indian economist Mihir Sharma. “If we in India choose to use convenient messaging to form lynch mobs, that tells us more about India than it does about WhatsApp.”

A big Wired story this week seems to vindicate this approach — that WhatsApp was the facilitator, not the cause. India’s latest scapegoat is the Chinese video app TikTok, which has been hosting caste-based hate videos. “TikTok is fueling India's deadly hate speech epidemic,” reads the article headline. The actual body of the article is more equivocal, talking about centuries old and entrenched caste issues as “massive problems [TikTok] faces in the country,” thereby granting that TikTok did not exactly create India’s caste system.

Most technology scholars I’ve talked to fall pretty squarely on the entrenched-problem side of things: That is, they think hate and violence issues that manifest online ultimately reflect real-world issues. To be fair, it’s hard to find people who disagree with that statement.

But for journalists, platform-based analysis is low-hanging fruit: You find a few instances of hate speech that weren’t taken down, interview a gullible user or two, quote a few concerned experts, and you have an exposé of a platform unable to contain the spread of digital violence. It’s not wrong to criticize these platforms, of course, but we see these kinds of articles over and over. This summer, we have seen this done for YouTube in Brazil and YouTube in the US, and one publication did a deep dive essentially listing YouTube channels it thinks should have been deleted but weren’t. (They were probably right — but you could write these pieces regularly.) These articles all point to the same conclusion: A platform is censoring things, but it should be censoring more things.

Again, it may well be true that the platforms aren’t censoring enough, and criticism is healthy. But the Wired story I mention here quotes a government official who said TikTok is “degrading culture.” Does anyone consider such a statement to be remotely true?

OTHER NEWS

• This interview with a data scientist offers one of the best explanations I’ve seen of the current era of Artificial Intelligence. It connects the exaggerated hype around AI to the shady practices of those who use it. And it offers an amazingly intuitive and morally clear explanation of what exactly it means for AI to be “racist.” Highly recommended. (Logic Magazine)

• We’ve written before about the threat posed by “cyber sovereignty” to the free internet. Some have even warned of a “splinternet,” where the web bifurcates into a restricted authoritarian network and a “free” internet. Now, a new Foreign Affairs op-ed argues that the West should welcome and even accelerate this split. That is, authoritarian countries should be kicked off the free web. It’s a strange argument, but worth reading. (Foreign Affairs)
• Speaking of cyber sovereignty, Russia’s attempts to create a sovereign internet could make things harder for its infamously brazen hackers. (The Register)
• Arzu Geybullayeva, a previous Coda contributor, reports on how the Turkish government is abusing Twitter’s own rules to get its enemies banned (Global Voices). That reminds us of a similar phenomenon Umer Ali reported for us from Pakistan (Coda Story).
• Is tech addictive? I think so, but Vox’s Ezra Klein debates an author who thinks that’s not a useful way to talk about it. Though his ideas and books seem interesting, his dismissal of tech addiction strikes me as unpersuasive. (Vox)
• A ranking of the world’s most-surveilled cities. The top ones are in China. It’s worth taking a look just to get a sense of the numbers of cameras — they are very large. (Comparitech)
• Once again, a massive database of private information is found to be badly secured. (The Guardian)

The post WhatsApp, TikTok and the question of the chicken and the egg appeared first on Coda Story.

A side note: For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to historians of technology for another Coda project, and a few of them have expressed sentiments about the inadequate framing of conversations about technology. Our debates about technology are too much about technology, they say. Is AI dangerous? Is facial recognition racist? Is social media bad for our politics?

Back to the Guardian article on surveillance balloons, where there’s an interesting quote in the piece: “[I]f they decide that it’s usable domestically, there’s going to be enormous pressure to deploy it,” said an ACLU representative.

Notice the word “pressure.” What is this “pressure”? Where is it coming from?

The premise behind these questions is that technology is the actor. Once you have the technology, it changes society in a certain way. Certainly, people talk about regulation, but it is usually conceived of as a Sisyphean task, perpetually a step behind the tech. But what these scholars have suggested to me is that we’re missing the human element: The way we design and deploy technology, as well as the way we talk about it, are human constructs.

So let’s revisit this balloon program: The U.S. is testing a balloon mass-surveillance system. If it works, it may be deployed across the country. There would be “pressure” for this to happen. But the pressure is not neutral, or inherent in the technology. According to Allied Market Research, the global video surveillance market will be worth more than $80 billion by 2025, while US defense companies spend over $100 million on lobbying members of Congress every year. The company behind the balloons, Sierra Nevada, spent over a million last year. These processes, not the balloons themselves, are the cause of proliferating mass surveillance.

A similar “just because we can” attitude in tech circles also came up in a recent New York Times op-ed from, of all people, Palantir founder Peter Thiel.
Thiel is upset that Google opened an artificial intelligence lab in China, which could easily expose its AI advances to the Chinese military. “A.I. is a military technology,” writes Thiel. He quotes Google saying that “A.I. and its benefits have no borders.” Here, Thiel criticizes a similar mentality, a pressure, if you will, to advance and spread innovation, the idea that more technology in more places and more deployments is always good.

A similar attitude is the subject of an article Charles Rollet reported for us last week, on the role of Western academic institutions in developing “ethnicity detection” technology in China. It seems that there, the idea that scientific knowledge is always good, and should be shared, became an alibi for developing racist technology.

In a newsletter from three months ago, I mentioned a researcher who had suggested that China’s social credit system might become a kind of trade barrier by discouraging Chinese consumers from purchasing foreign products. Something not entirely dissimilar is beginning to happen, but instead of consumers the social credit system is targeting foreign companies directly, according to Axios.

An interesting example: Remember when China told U.S. airlines to stop listing Taiwan as an independent country? Apparently, a potential punishment for non-compliance was to reflect “your company’s serious dishonesty” through the social credit system.

OTHER NEWS:

• “Gamification” has been a buzzword for years, fueled by excitement about using technology to make boring tasks more exciting. But a Logic Magazine essay, built around a Lyft driver’s personal experience, persuasively argues that gamification makes it easier to exploit workers. Workers, rather than seeing a situation in which they get mistreated, focus on beating “the game.” The illusion of possible victory makes them both more productive and more docile. Of course, governments are happily applying these lessons to ideology — recall China’s now-notorious Xi Jinping education app that gamified party indoctrination. (Logic Magazine)
• China’s state-sponsored hackers are likely hacking video games on the side — yet another snapshot into the links between government and criminal hacking. (MIT Technology Review)
• In April, we reported on two Saudi sisters who escaped their country by breaking into an app that regulated their travel. Media organizations are reporting those travel restrictions have been relaxed. (Channel 4)
• New U.S. government rules will make it more difficult to legally go after algorithmic discrimination. (Vice)
• A new report analyzes the possibility of “rogue” countries like North Korea setting up an alternative financial system based on cryptocurrency. This would help them evade US sanctions. (Foundation for Defense of Democracies)

The post Pentagon piloting swarms of surveillance balloons; Thiel upset with Google; and China’s social credit system appeared first on Coda Story.

His 22 students sat in rows discussing the text. Then, a male, conservative-leaning student began to speak.

“I don’t trust the media,” Samet remembers him saying. “You’ve shown me, right here in this text, how it is that facts get manipulated. I don’t believe now what I’m seeing in the New York Times.”

Another student, a progressive, agreed.

Samet was floored. “What the heck just happened?” he thought. He was trying to help students understand how journalists deliver facts and present reality. Now his teaching methods have revealed that students consider mainstream outlets like the Times as propaganda.

“That’s not the response I was expecting,” Samet said. Then he added: “But it makes perfect sense.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of humanities and social science scholarship punctured the idea of objective truth. Scholars like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway traced the ways that the truth wasn’t “out there,” but manufactured by researchers, academics, and journalists. The idea was known as “social constructivism,” or simply postmodernism. It took humanities disciplines like literature, anthropology and some social sciences by storm.

But in the past decade, and more notably since 2016, American political conservatives have unsheathed a bastardized form of social constructivism. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway defended “alternative facts,” while his lawyer Rudy Giuliani has claimed that “truth isn’t truth.” Outraged commentators say we now live in a “post-truth” age, and some have found a culprit for the upheaval: academics. Two recent books, Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth and Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth both blame “post-modern” academics for helping erode the idea of shared reality. Kakutani writes that the constructivists “paved the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers.” Meanwhile, in The New Yorker alt-right troll Mike Cernovich cited postmodernist theory to defend his online misinformation campaigns.

Academics in the humanities dismiss the idea that they somehow caused global post-truth disruptions. Yet a growing number of them worry about how to teach constructivism in an era where “alternative facts” have become partisan talking points and disbelief in data about climate change and public health is hastening global catastrophe.

The idea that knowledge is shaped by people and politics is likely obvious to most people. What sets social constructivism apart is its focus on how “truth” is related to power. Constructivism is a subtle, rigorous set of ideas. But it has been hard to teach. Students haven’t always absorbed the subtlety, and instead digested a distorted summary: “there is no truth.”

Professor Latour, who helped invent social constructivism in the late 20th century, vocalized these qualms in a famous 2004 essay. “Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth,” he wrote. “While dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.”

Recovering from his shock of his students’ views of The New York Times, Samet had a similar thought.

“We’re letting students into the world with a worldview that can become deeply cynical very, very quickly,” he said. “I think most of our students just get to that point. And that’s where we abandon them.”

Colten White, 22, a senior studying English and Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a similar experience with cynicism. When he first began studying social-constructivist literature, his interpretation echoed Samet’s students.

“I certainly had overly simplistic views of critiquing realism,” he said. “I had perhaps overly pessimistic views about our ability to know empirical reality.”

He says it took time and deeper study to recognize empirical reality more strongly.  While White doesn’t blame constructivist professors for the “post-truth” moment, he does agree that some academics have been careless with constructivist language. And that carelessness may have had an impact.

“Before the last couple of years, I think [academics would] say ‘there’s no real impact to someone misconstruing what I’m saying.’ I think the last couple of years has shown that there is,” White said.

There are signs that professors are beginning to take their role in the “post-truth” environment more seriously.

Natalia Roudakova is an anthropologist who studies the decline of truth in modern Russia. Just a few years ago, she said, this made her an outsider among her colleagues because she treated “truth” as a positive thing, something to be defended. When she would tell colleagues about her research, they used to immediately default to constructivist talking points.

“Colleagues would say, ‘Well, what do you mean by truth? What kind of truth? Whose truth?’ ” Roudakova said. But once the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign got underway, and “fake news” became a household term, Roudakova said her colleagues began to understand her research. The idea of “truth” as something to take seriously began to make sense to them.

Professor Latour, one of the founding fathers of constructivism, sees its study as a tool to help society move beyond the post-truth era. In a new book, Down to Earth, he writes that “truth” appears broken because most citizens have lost touch with the institutions that produce facts. To repair trust, he says, it’s not enough to tell people they are wrong. “It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes,” he wrote.

Back in the classroom, Samet is busy revising his teaching methods to cope with a cynical mindset among students.

He’s added material from Roudakova’s new book, Losing Pravda, as a way for them to see how Russians dealt with their own social meltdowns in the last decade.

He’s now teaching with a new goal in mind: “To steer students away from that kind of cynical reading of media and of the world around them.”

The post Can we make Truth great again? appeared first on Coda Story.

A Kremlin spokesperson swiftly dismissed the protesters’ concerns as a “misconception,” and claimed internet freedom was safe. But then, this week, President Putin signed two laws restricting online speech: one imposed fines on fake news and the other prohibited “disrespect for authorities and state symbols.” Both are seen as censorious.

In other words, Russia’s government is tightening its control over the internet. And in this push, Russia is not alone.

Russia and a set of less-than-democratic countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have certain aspirations for the internet. Domestically, these countries want control and think governments should get to decide what information flows across their borders. Globally, they want governments, not companies and NGOs, to be in charge of the internet.

Taken together, these goals are an attempt to align cyberspace with national borders, so they are sometimes dubbed the “cyber sovereignty” doctrine. The term comes from China, whose internet censorship system, called the Great Firewall, is the vanguard of the global cyber-sovereignty push. In 2014, Chinese internet czar Lu Wei wrote an op-ed titled “Cyber Sovereignty Must Rule Global Internet.” Under Lu’s leadership, China’s cyberspace agency released a much-ridiculed musical ode to cybersecurity, which included the line: “A cyberpower: Where the Internet is, so is the glorious dream.”

The vision of effective cyber-sovereignty is expanding to new horizons. A November report from Freedom House examined 65 countries and found since the previous year that internet freedom declined in 26 of them. Chinese-style “digital authoritarianism,” meanwhile, is growing in influence as China exports both its surveillance known-how and technology.

And even Western democracies, once more-or-less committed to the open internet, are increasingly mirroring cyber-sovereignty talking points.

Early Setback

The Chinese model wasn’t always on the rise. Just six years ago, cyber-sovereignty was dealt a major setback when China and its allies tried to stage a “takeover of the internet.” At a 2012 meeting of the International Telecommunications Union, Russia, China, and a group of countries tried to pass a mostly symbolic resolution, one that would have endorsed certain cyber-sovereignty principles and given the United Nations greater power over the internet. But large tech companies and the U.S. Congress made strong statements condemning the move, and the U.S. and European countries refused to sign.

Without their signatures, the effort failed to move the needle in favor of cyber-sovereignty. Had it succeeded, China and its digital policy allies would have helped resolve a longtime problem for authoritarian regimes, which is that nobody is quite in charge of the internet. In its allocation of power, the web pays no particular respect to the nation-state; governments administer the internet together with companies, NGOs, academics, and other parties, an arrangement that severely curtails the influence of states.

For example, the Chinese government has taken its embarrassing cybersecurity anthem off the internet, but copies remain online. These copies are stored on websites registered by ICANN, the international organization of domain names. If governments like China had power over this organization, they could make these websites disappear entirely. For advocates of internet freedom, this is the nightmare scenario.

“If [governments] are in charge of this organization, then they would definitely think about 'How can I regulate content at the global level and take websites down?’” said Ferzaneh Badiei, an internet governance researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For cyber-sovereignty advocates, on the other hand, giving governments final say over the global internet is the ultimate goal.

Grassroots Sovereignty

After the 2012 effort to bring the internet under U.N. control seemed to go nowhere, the cyber-sovereignty debate has shifted to domestic politics. A recent report from New America, a non-partisan think tank, concluded that nations have realized that “the battle today is over how states should model their internets domestically."

Accordingly, rather than relying on international treaties, China has begun exporting its internet censorship regime to other countries, changing the internet from the bottom up. According to Freedom House, at least 36 governments have received closed-door Chinese trainings on “new media and information management.” These include Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. The content of these trainings is unknown, but after Vietnamese officials were trained in 2017, Vietnam passed Chinese-style cyber legislation, in 2018. There is also evidence that some countries, like Uganda, have used Chinese-made software to monitor their local internets, ostensibly to fight crime.

This evangelism helps legitimize China’s authoritarian internet approach, solidifying its approach to governance.

“The new international ideological battle is authoritarianism versus liberal democracy,” said New America cybersecurity analyst Robert Morgus, framing China’s cyber-evangelism as a matter of soft power. “Spreading an authoritarian model for the internet will help spread authoritarian approaches.”

Just as China has largely been training and equipping developing countries, there are growing signs that liberal Western democracies are warming to internet control. The New America report contained data showing that the cluster of countries with open internets and less government intervention has begun moving just in the past several years “towards a more statist and closed approach to the internet.”

This puts numbers on something analysts had already suggested: Chinese- and Russian-style paranoia about unrestricted online discourse is beginning to resonate in the West.

“Cyber 9/11”

In his 2017 book The Darkening Web, cyber policy expert Alexander Klimburg writes that “the ability to define information as a weapon is the ultimate goal” of cyber-sovereignty advocates. Because if information is a weapon, censorship is a legitimate matter of national security.

As a side effect of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, this effort has mostly succeeded. Digital information warfare is now a hot topic, and a legible threat, among Western elites. This was evident when Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking in 2016 as a “cyber 9/11,” or when Robert Mueller began to indict Russian citizens for crimes adjacent to internet trolling.

In this atmosphere, some Western democracies are, like their authoritarian peers, seeking  more control. In a speech at 2018’s Inter-Governmental Forum for internet governance in Paris, an institution that has generally respected the limited role of governments in the internet, French President Emmanuel Macron, who faced an email hack in the final days of his presidential campaign, painted cyberspace as a dangerous realm.

“Today, when I look at our democracies, the Internet is much better used by those on the extremes,” Macron said to a packed room. “It is used more for hate speech or dissemination of terrorist content than by many others.” He then appeared to call for a government-led crackdown on the internet’s worst tendencies.

Badiei, the internet governance expert, attended the Paris conference and said many in the room were shocked by Macron’s language. “If this speech was made by an oppressive regime leader, people would have walked out,” she said. It is “concerning when the president of a democratic country insists that the internet should be regulated providing similar reasons to that of oppressive regimes.”

Hans Klein, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, attended both the French conference and a state-sponsored internet conference in China. He observed that both meetings echoed the “same concerns” about “the need for greater state involvement.”

This is not to say that Macron has been won over by Chinese propaganda. Kieron O’Hara, a computer science professor and expert on internet governance, says Western democracies are merely converging with China and Russia on common fears. This leads to a shared affinity for something like an “authoritarian internet” model.

“In fact, maybe ‘authoritarian internet’ wasn't even the best name for it,” O’Hara said. “Maybe ‘paternalistic internet’ might be a better name. And of course, paternalism appeals to everybody.”

The post The global rise of Internet sovereignty appeared first on Coda Story.

There have been a number of developments since. The “feels bad man” frog turned out to be named Pepe and, in 2015, his face was tweeted by the future President of the United States. Following that tweet, it took less than a year for the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol, used as a mascot by white supremacists. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, published a solemn explainer. “That cartoon frog,” it read, “is more sinister than you might realize.” Matt Furie, the artist who had created Pepe as a lovable stoner in the 2000’s, was forced to act. By the time Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, Pepe was canonically dead, buried by his friends in a final one-page comic.

In more than one way, Pepe’s vertiginous rise and fall is emblematic of what has happened to public perception of the internet in the last decade. The internet, once celebrated as a cultural leveller despite corners which were filled with trolls and crime, now attracts everything from liberal moral panic about the corrosion of democracy to right-wing triumphalism about the insurgent power of memes. “We did it,” said one Republican voter on the day before Trump’s inauguration. “We memed him into the presidency.”

An Xiao Mina’s Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power is an attempt to sketch a kind of political economy of the internet. Focusing on memes, it turns out, is a particularly lucid way of doing that. In ways both good and bad, however, the book feels a few years removed from the present.

Ours is a moment of trembling fear about online influence campaigns, fake news, and echo chambers. These fears cast the average internet user as a powerless victim of propaganda and falsehood. But what Mina suggests, compellingly, is that we should stop seeing the user as a pawn.

Take the issue of fake news. In a commonplace fantasy of 2016, an unintentional conspiracy between Russian agents, clickbait sites, and Facebook’s callow business model thrust fake news upon a helpless, untrained population and helped damage American democracy. Mina rejects this patronizing approach.

“It’s tempting,” she writes, “to think of fake news as a series of falsehoods.” But this casts the people sharing news simply as dupes. When people share fake news, they are not just making a claim about what is true; a fake news post, like a meme, helps communicate political allegiances, drive attention to pet issues, and “perform a political identity.” Mina argues that fact-checking does nothing to address the fundamental reasons people decide to share lies.

As Mina makes this argument, Memes to Movements’ recurring focus is on memes, rather than online journalism or debate on Twitter. This is a clever move by the author. You can fact-check a Tweet or an article, but any discussion of a meme’s “accuracy” is beside the point. Instead, we should ask what the meme is doing for the person sharing it.

Mina’s definition of “meme’”is broader than than the usual application, and this helps her consider a wide variety of media both online and offline. She sees that memes spread because people spread them and that their reasons for doing so often reflect offline political realities. Her empathetic attention to the grassroots of internet culture is the book’s greatest strength.

What the book does with that framework, however, leaves something to be desired. Over a large number of case studies, the book shows how memes can drive attention to causes, build political narratives and create digital communities. Mina also spends some time demonstrating that humor and seriousness are deeply intertwined, that online culture bleeds into the physical world and that memes can both challenge and strengthen power. In a world where Pepe the Frog is a serious political issue, none of this is surprising. Mina occasionally seems to be addressing uninformed readers. “When someone says ‘internet meme,’” she writes, “you might think of just cats,” a sentence that sounds like it was written in 2006.

The book’s occasional naiveté might be a helpful corrective to the past two years of gloom about the internet’s political potential. Though Mina shows how memes can serve powerful interests, she never loses her excitement about the potential of grassroots memes to challenge hierarchies and empower the powerless.

This cautious optimism offers a marked contrast to another recent book about the internet, P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking’s bombastic LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. The authors, who appear out of breath as they summarize the political crises that have unfolded online, are determined to convince us that the internet, which they describe as a “toxic swamp,” is a sinister battlefield where dark political forces prey on the vulnerability of democratic societies.

“The internet,” they write, “once a light and airy place of personal connection,” is now “a battlefield where information itself is weaponized.” The following is an incomplete list of other articles the authors say have become “weaponized”: “viral marketing,” “the personalization afforded by social media,” “modest lies,” smartphones”, “memes”, and “our own brains.”

It’s not exactly that these things cannot be weapons. But this eagerness to cast everything as a weapon sounds like a war drum, and its own form of propaganda. The perils of describing information in military terminology are clearest when the authors say: “Media weapons [can] actually be more potent than atomic bombs.” The source of the quote? ISIS.

Naturally, once you’ve defined a menace to society, the next step is to offer a remedy. Where Memes to Movements ends on a hopeful note extolling memes as the “mighty forest of our times,” the authors of LikeWar offer a series of chilling recommendations. They want the United States to engage in propaganda against its own citizens by creating a Centers for Disease Control to combat “viral outbreaks” of misinformation; people who share Russian disinformation should be “seen for what they are...they are aiding and abetting enemies that seek to harm all of society.”

The fundamental misstep that LikeWar makes and that Memes to Movements avoids, is to treat every new form of digital contestation as a threatening novelty. Mina reasonably sees the meme wars as an outgrowth of millennia of human history and power struggle. In Mina’s framework, what Brooking and Singer call “LikeWar” is not a shocking new “weaponization” of digital communications by men like Vladimir Putin, but the sound of centuries-old conflicts entering the digital sphere. The internet may be a game-changer, but the game has always existed.

The post As Concerns Over Technology Increase, a New Book Reminds Us the Internet is Made Up of Human Beings appeared first on Coda Story.

Her apparent crime? A social media post attributing the killing of American missionary, Charles Wesco, to the Cameroonian military.

“I was in shock,” Mefo told me. “I was really in shock. But not surprised, in the sense that we are in a country where journalists are thrown into jail for doing their job.”

The bigger surprise was the charge laid against her: propagating “false information,” according to her lawyer. Or, to put it more bluntly, spreading fake news.

Mefo had become another victim of a growing worldwide trend, of authoritarian governments exploiting the global crusade against disinformation as a pretext for going after the media and clamping down on dissent.

Cameroon has, in effect, become one of the testing grounds. The west African state has been an unsafe place for journalists for many years. But amid a spiralling civil war, the government has become especially keen to intimidate the media, with more than 12 journalists detained or questioned in the past year.

“It’s a terrible problem for us — fake news, disinformation, poisoning,” said Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the country’s communications minister, as he sought to defend Mefo’s arrest to the Washington Post.

“At least 28 journalists worldwide were in jail on “false information” charges by the end of 2018.” 

The Committee to Protect Journalists

By the end of last year, at least 28 journalists worldwide had reportedly been jailed on “false information” charges, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a sharp rise from previous years. Cases have included efforts by the authorities in Myanmar to silence investigative reporting they considered inconvenient. A growing list of governments have now passed or are in process of drawing up laws against fake news, albeit with widely differing mindsets and motives.

Among the first to act was Germany, in 2017, concerned about the threat of Russian-inspired disinformation fueling its widening internal divisions. Belarus, Kenya, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Egypt have since passed their own laws — but they have been widely criticized as efforts to censor freedom of expression. Russia is currently debating its own version, even as the country is accused of helping to foment the global disinformation panic.

In total, at least 17 governments have now taken legal action against disinformation, including passing restrictive laws, forcing social media companies to censor, arresting bloggers, shutting down the internet, or opening investigations against citizens, according to the Poynter Institute of Media Studies.

An Old Fear

You have likely heard this story: On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast an adaptation of  H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel “The War of the Worlds” on an American radio network. In the days that followed, newspapers reported that it had sparked widespread panic.

The nation, they said, had been “terrorized” by what people thought was a real news broadcast and they pointedly blamed their still fledgling competitor. "Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses,” the New York Times declared. It may not have been called “fake news” then, but historians now believe newspapers wildly exaggerated the effect of the broadcast on Americans.

Thus, the War of the Worlds drama is a story not just of how fake news can mislead the public, but of how powerful institutions can exploit the fear of fake news. And just as US press barons jumped on an opportunity to further their interests in the 1930s, groups such as Freedom House fear that authoritarian leaders are exploiting today’s legitimate fears about fake news for their own ends.

Initially regretful over accusations his broadcast had caused panic, Welles reportedly later embraced the story as part of his personal narrative. And if 1930s America helped create a model for the use and abuse of fake news, it has played a similar role this time round.

The War of the Worlds drama is a story not just of how fake news can mislead the public, but of how powerful institutions can exploit the fear of fake news.

It’s hard to remember now, but current fears about fake news actually began to spread before the November 2016 US election, with Buzzfeed helping things along with a blockbuster feature about teenagers in Macedonia getting rich by duping Trump supporters with hoax stories.

Then came the first of an avalanche of reports on Russia’s efforts to influence the vote with fake news. It was “pretty crazy” to think Facebook had played any role in this, said Mark Zuckerberg in the days after the election. By the following week, he had been forced to unveil a plan to tackle fake news on his platform. Before November 2016 was out, it had become conventional wisdom in the West that fake news was an “epidemic” or a “cancerous trend.”

Concerned at the potential threat inside its borders, the German government was quick to react. “We need to fully utilise all the legal authority at our disposal” to fight fake news, Germany’s justice minister said in December, a month after Trump’s won the presidency.

That same month, The Straits Times, widely seen as the mouthpiece of the Singaporean government, started writing about ways to fight the “scourge of fake news.”  By the time Donald Trump first tweeted the phrase "fake news" to refer to his critics in December 2016, the phrase had already caught on worldwide.

The German government has found itself on the defensive, by becoming the first to pass so-called “anti-fake news” laws. Conscious of the country’s history, it believed it needed to update its methods of protecting against online hate speech and the new legislation imposed stringent rules on internet platforms, requiring them to delete content deemed illegal or defamatory under its existing criminal code. But that led to criticism that it was bringing in "overbroad censorship,” and that this would also serve as encouragement to other, less-democratic, governments to follow suit.

Sure enough, Russian lawmakers cited Germany’s example to justify bringing its own anti-fake news restrictions, which critics say is simply another censorship tool. So too did

Singapore's Ministry of Information, as it lobbied for similar restrictions, highlighting pro-Trump fake news as a cautionary tale. Singapore is set to introduce a fake news law later this year.

When the US first began talking about fake news, and contemplating ways to deal with it, some commentators on the Right warned it would lead to “censorship” by the left.

Instead, this approach has been exported abroad, where authoritarians happily adopted the language of combating informational threats. "The real danger is blowing up countries from within,” said Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, justifying Egypt’s new fake news legislation.

The fake news scare “started in the United States of America. It came to Africa and it extended to Cameroon.”

Mimi Mefo Takambou, Cameroonian journalist jailed on “false information” charges

Some analysts say the media should take some of the blame for allowing concerns about disinformation to be abused in this way. "We did this to ourselves, and by 'we', I mean the media," Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute told the BBC, referring to what he sees as the overuse of the term “fake news” in the US and wider Western press.

Back in Cameroon, journalist Mimi Mefo Takambou is working again. Her case garnered widespread attention, leading to the charges against her being dropped. She walked free after just a week in jail, and sounded defiant when we spoke. “They cannot threaten me, because I have an assignment, I have an obligation to the audience, to the population of Cameroon, to inform them.”

Yet the threat has not gone away. Three other Cameroonian journalists remain in prison on “false news” charges. And Mefo said the government continues its crusade against “fake news,” widely seen as code for any coverage it doesn’t like.

She is now speaking out on behalf of the jailed journalists. But Mefo is clear where this current threat began. “I can say that it started from the United States of America. It came to Africa and it extended to Cameroon.”

The post From Fake News To Real Censorship appeared first on Coda Story.

It was 1 p.m. in the Washington, D.C. studios of “Current Time,” the U.S. government-funded channel aimed at Russia and Russian speakers, and another edition of one of its flagship shows “Current Time America” was going on air.

”Let’s check the clock against the current time from our studio in Washington,” said Mamonov, his trademark opening line.

Current Time started out as a daily program almost four years ago, before becoming a 24-hour channel last year.

Mamonov has an interesting backstory. A decade ago, he was doing the same job in Russia, for the Kremlin-linked channel NTV, anchoring puff pieces about Vladimir Putin. Now, after claiming political asylum in the U.S., Mamonov has switched sides.

Or, as he put it when we met, “I was on a different side of the barricades.” He quickly added that he meant “barricades” as a joke. “I don’t want a fight,” he explained. “I have my family [in Russia], and it’s more than enough for me to hear from my mom that I was brainwashed.”

This show of nerves is not just about his mom though. It’s a reflection, too, of wider tensions over the channel’s aims and identity. After all, the channel was born at the instigation of American foreign policymakers, as a reaction to the 2014 Crimea crisis.

Current Time’s head, Daisy Sindelar, is open about the fact that the channel “was created in the aftermath of the Russian occupation of Crimea.” But the aim, she says, was to give “Russian speakers, in particular in Crimea, in Eastern Ukraine, but everywhere in the world, an opportunity for an alternative source of information.”

The channel is co-produced by two U.S. government-funded entities with long Cold War histories, the Washington-based Voice of America and the Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). In turn, they are overseen by a federally-funded government body called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which lists “Advancing American Influence” as a key goal in its strategic plan for the next four years.

In the eyes of the Kremlin and its supporters, this backstory makes Current Time simply a propaganda mouthpiece for the United States government. It was immediately on the Kremlin’s radar. When it was first launched, state-owned Russia 24 aired a sensationalist report about “what Current Time is really up to,” in effect accusing it of being an American version of the Kremlin-controlled RT network.

But this comparison also misses profound differences in the political systems and journalistic traditions underpinning the two networks. “A lot of people ask me: ‘Oh, are you American propaganda?’” Mamonov said. “The answer is ‘No.’”

Unlike Current Time, RT’s operations, including its budgets and governance structure, are highly opaque. In Russia, the network discloses the bare minimum of what it needs to publish as a government-funded organization, and it only started doing so recently. Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst and research fellow at the University of Southern California, told me, “for nine years, [RT] were not filing, or at least not publishing, the reports about their funding.”

Fair Criticism?

Mamonov’s show focuses largely on American society and politics, and the day I was in the studios the first major item was about fire safety in the U.S. The broadcast led off with a shot of the ceiling sprinkler. “Just these kinds of systems,” said Mamonov in Russian, “are installed in our studio.”

There had been a fatal fire in Siberia a few days earlier, and the Russian authorities had been sharply criticized for their response. And Russian state-media had been accused of deliberately undercovering the story. But Current Time had given the fire extensive coverage.

You could read Mamonov’s fire safety segment both as a dig at Russia, and as a self-congratulatory comment on the U.S. approach to safety and, by extension, America itself.

But when we spoke afterwards, in a room decorated with photos of U.S. presidents, Mamonov pushed back at that interpretation. “That was not about ‘[America is] greater’ in any way,” he said. Instead, he argued, it was simply public service journalism, looking at how the U.S. deals with fire risks and makes systemic change when disasters happen.

Young Radicals

Almost two years ago, in the confusing aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, I had a chance to pay a similar visit to the studios of RT America, the network’s U.S.-focused division (before it was forced to register as a “foreign agent.”) The tonal difference was striking. The RT staff were young American radicals, more interested in rocking the boat politically than reporting what was going on in the country.

And, as its output has shown, RT is far more concerned with sowing confusion or attacking the West than trying to provide balancing reporting.

At least with Current Time’s reporting on American domestic issues, a clear contrast emerges: “Current Time America,” for instance, is filled with reports highlighting U.S. government failings or problems inside America.

After last year’s Charlottesville protests, the channel devoted a long segment to criticism of Trump’s response. A recent episode looked at links between Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a Russian oligarch and an update on the Mueller investigation led the hour.

In covering Trump’s recent meeting with Kim Jong-Un, the show echoed the skepticism of America’s mainstream press. Their correspondent in Singapore even slipped into a healthy dose of sarcasm, nothing that the summit generated few concrete agreements, “yet much was beautifully stated about the sunny future.”

It is hard to find examples of RT or other international-facing Russian government media outlets running similarly critical coverage of Vladimir Putin.

Truth is the best propaganda

Editorial objectivity is protected, say Current Time executives and defenders, by a metaphorical “firewall” that separates journalists from government policymakers. And the stated idea that balanced, fact-based journalism can serve a foreign policy agenda is hardly new. The U.S. government claims to have been pursuing this approach for decades. “We must make ourselves heard round the world in a great campaign of truth,” said U.S. President Harry S. Truman in 1950, as he called on the nation to rally against propaganda promoting communism. In an interview earlier this year, Current Time feature programming director Kenan Alyiev told the National Review that “We don’t do propaganda. We believe that truth is the best propaganda.”

But there are caveats. Journalists working for U.S. government-funded broadcasters still have to observe certain big-picture parameters aligning with American policy positions, according to Jeffrey Gedmin, a former president of RFE/RL. “There’s no such thing in my job,” Mamonov told me, “as countering Russian propaganda. I do news.”

As an example, he cited reporting about NATO’s operations in Afghanistan by Radio Liberty’s Afghan service. It would have to clarify that troops from the U.S.-led alliance are not there “for imperial conquest, not to take oil or dominate territory,” said Gedmin, and that “NATO has been invited by” the Afghan government.

Still, Current Time maintains a stated commitment to balance and a level of transparency you won’t find from RT or other Russian government-funded outlets. For instance, the mission statement for Voice of America (VOA) says “it will present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, and will also present responsible discussions and opinion on these policies.”

But with Current Time effectively split between different locations and management bodies, critics point to a divergence in editorial approaches within the channel.

There have been questions over the balance of Current Time’s reporting on Russia itself that is produced from the channel’s offices at RFE/RL headquarters in Prague (distinct from the “Current Time America” program run from the VOA offices in Washington D.C.). Much of its coverage of Russia has the feel and tone of an opposition media outlet, according to Gatov, with the goal of showing “that your rival, your competitor, is bad.”

“The work of Current Time, as well as the work of Russia Today in America or anywhere in the world, provides disturbance, provides negation, and cynicism,” Gatov said. In his view, this approach invites a counterproductive backlash from viewers.

Current Time director Daisy Sindelar responded that “Current Time aims to provide Russian-speakers with an alternative to Kremlin-controlled media. This means providing balanced and factual reporting about the political developments and social issues — positive and negative — that most impact our viewers’ day-to-day lives.”

The Broadcasting Board of Governors executives, too, try to toe the line between embracing information warfare and maintaining the organization’s self-perception of objectivity. Their 2018 budget request for Current Time reflects the fact that the channel exists largely as a reaction to Russia’s information operations, but emphasizes the importance of “balanced, accurate, topical, and trustworthy information.”

Current Time’s mission is split between the political task of countering Kremlin narratives and the more humble mission of providing a service to its Russian-speaking audience. Back in his studios on Capitol Hill, Mamonov is clear about which of these missions he identifies with: “There’s no such thing in my job,” he told me, “as countering Russian propaganda. I do news.”

For decades, the coverage of U.S. government-funded broadcasters has been underpinned by the broad ideological beliefs of American foreign policy, coating U.S. interests in the language of democracy and human rights.

But these underpinnings are increasingly vulnerable. Trump has so far been disdainful towards efforts to promote democracy. And there have even been fears that he would try to turn U.S. government-funded media into an overtly partisan propaganda arm.

Current Time and its sister outlets also face domestic pressure from conservative voices who have long criticized what they see as liberal bias in their programing. The Trump administration has recently indicated it will nominate Michael Pack — an ally of Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon — to head the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and critics feared this will lead to the Voice of America’s being turned into President Trump’s political megaphone.

The post Don’t call us information warriors appeared first on Coda Story.

“You guys feel comfortable? No? Excellent!” shouted correspondent Naomi Karavani.

Then, the much-anticipated entrance: Our host, comedian Lee Camp, 36, with his asymmetric middle-part and Jesus beard, appeared abruptly through the door and traversed the small crowd. Raucous cheers and applause greeted him as he reached his desk and began to hover over his chair. While a production assistant hooked a cable up to his ear, Camp spread the lapels of his blazer and rotated his body, slowly, so all could see that his t-shirt bore a logo for Ingsoc, the ruling party from George Orwell’s “1984.”

It was nine days after the U.S. election, and we were in the Washington, D.C. studios of the Kremlin-funded TV network Russia Today, branded RT America in the U.S.

For more than two years, Lee Camp has hosted RT’s satiric weekly “Redacted Tonight.” It’s a show in the spirit of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” That means punchy comedic riffs, plus displays of outrage, news clips and crudely photoshopped collages. Camp’s own style is dense and preachy, and he expresses himself in a flat, nasal shout. But his anger is authentic.

“Outward anger is a representation of an internal anger that’s real, about our situation,” Camp told me.

By “our situation,” he means an unchallenged corporate kleptocracy that, he claims, controls mainstream American media, rigs elections and marginalizes dissent. Camp is a left-wing populist in the tradition of Occupy Wall Street, and his show is a sustained critique of American neoliberalism or, more broadly, the “system.”

He thinks of “Redacted Tonight” as an activist collective. “You know you’re part of a sentiment, a passion, an energy that grows in the country,” he said.

When I visited the show in November, the audience was a ragtag assemblage of contrarians across the age spectrum. Some were longtime Camp fans, others were first-timers, attracted by the promise of a grittier Jon Stewart.

There were Diane and Danash, both 31. They looked hip, dressed in muted colors and no logos. They had followed election night on RT America. “[CNN] is like a big show, a production, with no substance. No substance,” Danash said. “But RT, they were actually talking about the issues,” Diane, his companion, added. “[CNN] is like a big show, a production, with no substance. No substance,” Danash said. “But RT, they were actually talking about the issues,” Diane, his companion, added.

Did the channel’s Russian funding bother them? “I don’t know,” Diane said. “If I started seeing things that are obviously propaganda, then I would be bothered. But it seemed very objective to me.” Danash compared RT to Voice of America, a US-government-financed global media organization. “America funds all kinds of stuff,” he said.

Lee Camp began to perform stand-up comedy at 17, with dreams of becoming a TV comedian like Jerry Seinfeld. But as his career progressed, so did his political consciousness.

“I wanted to be talking about something important,” he said. “I wanted to at least leave a little something in the mind of the audience that wasn’t just laughter.”

According to Camp, his political views killed his chances of landing a TV gig. “It became pretty clear that I couldn’t be on a network who is funded by advertisement because they don’t want you really attacking corporations,” he said.

As he performed stand-up, he channeled his TV dreams into a YouTube channel, which included a news-commentary series called “Moments of Clarity.” The series had low production values, but its weekly schedule got him in the habit of writing political comedy quickly and consistently. It became the prototype for “Redacted Tonight.”

RT first started inviting him as a commentator on other shows. Then, the network saw the potential for something more.

“They came to me and they said, ‘Can you create a comedy show?’ and I basically said, ‘Let’s do it!’” Camp recalled.

There are no signs that the Russian-government funding bothers him. When asked about it, he lambasted mainstream American media, which he claimed is so dependent on advertising that criticizing corporations is taboo. He said RT’s reliable Russian funding allows him to criticize everything other networks can’t, and called allegations that he is a Russian propagandist “hilarious.”

“I have immense freedom to say the same things I’ve been saying since long before I came to RT. ‘Moments of Clarity’ went for three years and three-hundred-some episodes and it’s all the same stuff that I’m doing now,” he said. “I have immense freedom to say the same things I’ve been saying since long before I came to RT.”

Camp sees hypocrisy in media outlets’ tendency to question his ties to Russia, but not mainstream media personalities’ ties to corporations.

“What I find truly insane is that we all know that NBC or CNN, etc. are largely funded by and supported by weapons-manufacturers and the military industrial complex,” he said, citing, for example, weapons-contractor GE’s co-ownership of NBC. “Yet never is an NBC anchor asked why they work for a company that helps blow up children on a daily basis.”

On an early episode of “Redacted Tonight,” Camp defended his choice to work for RT in simple terms: It was the only outlet that would give him a platform. In the segment, he implied that his choice to work for RT was like an environmentalist flying on an airplane—a necessary sacrifice toward a larger goal. There is little reason to doubt his sincerity.

Camp almost never mentions international politics, but that doesn’t mean his show doesn’t benefit his sponsors, the Russian government. In some ways, the relationship between “Redacted Tonight” and the RT propaganda machine best resembles the relationship between a television show and its advertisers.

Few people will turn on their television just to watch advertisements, so corporate networks create shows that trick audiences into watching commercials. Similarly, almost nobody wants to watch propaganda, so a propaganda channel like RT has to create compelling content—bells and whistles—that will attract audiences to its brand. And those bells and whistles need not necessarily be propaganda themselves.

Leeds University scholar Ilya Yablokov, who has researched Russia Today, points out that, most of the time, the channel operates just like a normal television network, trying to build as big an audience as possible.

“When there is no sharp conflict between Russia and the West, [RT] covers anything which would appeal to a potential audience,” he said. “And who is this audience? Who cares! Maybe that’s their strategy.”

When Russian propaganda does happen, it happens mostly in RT’s news programs. Camp told me as much, referring to a kind of separation of powers.

“RT America has kind of two sides to it,” he said. “It’s got the news and it’s got the opinions side. And you know the news is the news side, and if you look on their website they say RT News is the Russian perspective of news events in the world. The opinion side is our own shows.”

Still, “Redacted Tonight’s” avoidance of international politics and its anti-establishment bent fit comfortably within RT’s overall politics. The network’s slogan—”Question More”—reflects its embrace of fringe views as a matter of policy. While Camp is not a conspiracy theorist per se, he often veers into a level of skepticism that puts him at the fringes of accepted discourse.

In a 2015 paper, Yablokov warned that conspiracy theory is central to Russia Today’s political mission.

“The populist, anti-elitist claim of conspiracy theorists in RT’s programmes aims at uniting the imagined global community of ‘the people’ against the dangerous ‘Other,’ represented by the US establishment,” he wrote.

At the bar where Camp socializes with his audience after each show, I met Hristo, a jovial “Redacted Tonight” fan who told me he thought RT doesn’t go far enough for fear of being called conspiracy theorists. A local IBM employee who looked to be in his thirties, Hristo said he was one of only two people in his 56-person workplace who predicted Trump’s victory. I asked him what he thought RT and “Redacted Tonight” would do now that they could no longer cover the election, during which the show saw its YouTube engagement soar.

“I think they will continue pounding the Democrats,” Hristo said, with some satisfaction.

Last week, on December 16, Camp hosted his fourth show since the election; it criticized Trump’s climate plans, Texas’s new abortion law, and Nestlé. But it began with the election, which Camp believes was rigged.

“No, there’s no proof it was Russians,” Camp said, rolling his eyes. But then he considered the possibility. A photo appeared behind him, depicting fictional Russian boxer Ivan Drago from the movie Rocky IV punching an elderly voter. As Camp pantomimed Drago destroying ballots, he joked that he wished it had been the Russians.

“Look, I have a comedy show!” he shouted, turning his palms toward the camera as if pleading for understanding. “If the world’s gonna be shitty, I want it to be shitty in, like, a crazy way.”

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