Election related disinformation is at an all time high as multiple countries across the world head to the polls; AI-manipulated deepfakes are the trend of the season. 

The United States kicked off the trend in January, when some U.S. voters received automated calls featuring an AI-generated voice clone of President Joe Biden discouraging them from going to the polls. Now, once again, an alarm has been raised over the potential threat of bad actors creating deepfakes of Biden’s voice. The concerns are such that the Justice Department is recommending that an audio recording of the president’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur not be released to the public. “If we were to go with this strategy, then it is going to be hard to release any type of content out there, even if it is original,” Alon Yamin, co-founder of Copyleaks, an AI-content detection service, told AP. 

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to return for a third term, albeit with a significantly smaller share of votes, after an election that was rife with AI-manipulated deepfakes of Bollywood stars and even opposition leaders campaigning for him. Face-swapped politicians trash talking their own parties were common on social media platforms and in forwarded WhatsApp messages. But Rest of World reports that the damage was far less egregious than one might expect, closer to trolling than outright deception. 

In South Africa, where former President Jacob Zuma staged a dramatic comeback with his newly formed uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party in the election on May 29, conspiracy theories about vote-rigging plagued the electoral process. Our partner Daily Maverick wrote in an insightful piece about this “big lie” and how it was pushed by the MK party, covering its parallels with former U.S. President Donald Trump and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign strategies. Zuma’s daughter appears to be a superspreader of disinformation, according to Wired. Unsurprising, given the parallels with Trump, one of her tweets includes an AI-manipulated video of Trump urging South Africans to vote for Zuma.

Research from the The Center for Countering Digital Hate suggests that the flood of AI-manipulated disinformation has only just begun. CCDH tested some of the most popular AI audio tools on the market and found the platforms rarely prevented the cloning of world leaders’ voices, even when researchers fed them speeches with incendiary and downright false information. 

WATCHING THE WATCHDOG

Journalists have long been ringing alarm bells over the ways in which AI will and has affected the media industry. With local news outlets closing down in the U.S., news apps that publish licensed content with the help of AI tools have filled the void, but at what cost? A report in Reuters looks at one such app, its links to Chinese state media and the impact of AI-authored fake news.   

The New York Times’ report on former Florida deputy sheriff John Mark Dougan who sought political asylum in Russia paints an astonishing picture of a DIY media empire built in Dougan’s bunker. Using AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, Dougan created more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the U.S., U.K. and France. The sites are populated with thousands of articles, some factual and several fabricated. Combined with news of Russian disinformation network Pravda’s expansion in the EU, it appears that at least one kind of journalism is thriving — and that is a terrifying prospect. 

THE NEW INFLUENCERS OF RESISTANCE 

TikTok is a battleground for influence in election season across the world. On the one hand, it is plagued with disinformation, manipulated videos and abusive content. On the other hand, the app has emerged as a hope for educators, activists, business owners and marginalized groups.

In the U.S., TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government to block the possibility of a ban under President Joe Biden. But in Ukraine, the Chinese-owned social media company, along with platforms like X and Telegram, has been invited to open fully staffed offices in the hope of countering Russian-led disinformation.

Andriy Kovalenko, who heads Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council’s department on Russian disinformation, told Bloomberg that the scale of Russia’s disinformation was difficult to counter because there were comparatively fewer Ukrainian bloggers on TikTok, and they received far less engagement than accounts that spread disinformation. Kovalenko himself routinely posts updates about the war in Ukraine on his TikTok.

Julia Tymoshenko is among the many Ukrainian TikTokers who joined the platform during the pandemic as a form of entertainment and later pivoted to making content about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For her, posting on TikTok about the reality of living under siege was a way to counter the absence of Ukrainian voices in mainstream media. 

“There were quite a few analytical articles from big media about whether Russia was going to invade, a lot of speculation, none of which was coming from young people in Ukraine who actually have stakes in the situation,” Tymoshenko said, speaking from Kiev. “Often it was just Western expats talking, not even realizing the larger context. My goal was to fill that gap with my content.”

Tymoshenko, who currently works as the social media and communications manager for the Ukrainian brand Saint Javelin, said she now finds TikTok emotionally draining because of the level of disinformation and abuse.

“I created a few videos about Russia and Ukraine and the first few comments are OK, but when the algorithm kicks in and I get more views, I immediately start getting some accounts with African names using Russian words to say something like ‘Ukraine should not exist’ or to call me a Nazi,” she said. “Obviously I have no way to prove if these are Russian bots, and I learned not to pay attention, but it was crazy at the beginning.”

Tymoshenko is still posting on TikTok because she believes it's important to share the impact of life under occupation. She has found inspiration and solidarity on the app as well, but thinks it is unlikely that individual bloggers and influencers can combat the scale of disinformation online.

“I do believe that it's good for democratic governments around the world, including Ukraine, to be more systematic in approaching Russian disinformation and also counteract it with the same tools and means that Russia uses. For decades, nobody was paying attention, authoritarian regimes like Russia, China and Iran created such a polluted information space that people don't really believe anything anymore, which is why it is easy to manipulate them.”

WHAT WE ARE READING: 

• Why is preserving historical records crucial for the health of democracies? Why do autocrats always target libraries, schools and archives? This piece in The New Yorker is a timely warning as well as a reminder: “After the Berlin Wall fell, agents of East Germany’s secret police frantically tore apart their records. Archivists have spent the past thirty years trying to restore them.” 
• If you’re craving a spine-chilling read, don’t bother looking for fiction. This report from The Washington Post on a Kremlin-backed media outlet has it all: spies, fake news, scandals and cash. 
• There’s a bromance brewing between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal has the details on the possibility of Musk becoming an advisor for the Republican Party.

The post Hearing voices, seeing things: How deepfakes are derailing the electoral process appeared first on Coda Story.

Massive floods in Brazil’s southernmost region of Rio Grande do Sul have displaced over 580,000 people and spawned a web of narratives that paint President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government as ineffective at best or at worst intentionally obstructive of relief efforts. As might be expected after a natural disaster that offers, to quote the NGO Climate Observatory, a “raw state warning for climate change,” the flooding also has been met with a fair amount of climate change denialism and claims that it was the result of God’s wrath.

Curiously, Lula hasn’t been the only focal point of these narratives. An analysis of cross-platform disinformation by NetLab, a research laboratory at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, has revealed disinformation that attempts to paint Elon Musk as a hero of these calamitous times. Following a public plea for aid from model Gisele Bundchen, who is from Rio Grande do Sul, Musk donated 1,000 Starlink terminals to the state to enable internet access. However, according to NetLab, several publications in Brazil have falsely claimed that the tech titan’s satellite internet system was the sole internet operational in the state, helping volunteers to coordinate rescue efforts.

The contrasting narratives are interesting considering Lula and Musk have been at loggerheads in the past. Musk’s Starlink satellites, which first became available in Brazil in 2022, have ushered in an era of high speed internet to remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. They are also beloved by illegal miners in the region.

Speaking before the floods at an event related to combating deforestation, Lula indirectly referred to Musk when he spoke of “billionaires trying to build a rocket to find something in space.” The Brazilian president continued: “He's going to have to learn to live here, he's going to have to use a lot of the money he has to help preserve this here, to improve people's lives.”

The coordinated wave of positive publicity generated for Musk by right-wing influencers and publications in the wake of the floods seems to be exploiting tragedy to score a political point — by praising Musk’s generosity, strong work ethic, wealth and success, along with making claims that no rescue missions would be possible without Starlink internet, critics are able to tear down Lula and the government’s own relief efforts.

“Similar patterns are evident in Europe and the UK, where parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Reform Party UK exploit climate policies to stoke cultural divisions and polarize public opinion,” Pallavi Sethi, a policy fellow of climate change misinformation at the Grantham Research Institute in London, told Coda. “These narratives typically feign concern for ordinary citizens while demonizing the ‘corrupt elite,’ in this case, the pro-climate policy government.”

HALLUCINATING GENIUS 

Since its launch on May 14, Google’s new AI search feature has come up with highly meme-worthy and deeply unhinged answers to questions from users. Feeling depressed? AI Overview suggests throwing yourself over the Golden Gate Bridge. Pregnant? Smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day. Want to eat healthy? Chomp a couple of rocks. The company hasn’t pulled the feature, even as it belches surreal and downright dangerous disinformation out into the information ecosystem, but has said it is working on refining the tool. It’s just the latest example of how tech giants keep underplaying the dangers of AI run amok in a post-truth world. 

At a tech conference last year, Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, described concerns about AI hallucinations as “naive.” “If you just do the naive thing and say, ‘Never say anything that you’re not 100% sure about,’ you can get them all to do that. But it won’t have the magic that people like so much,” he told the audience. In an interview with The Verge in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai repeated the idea that hallucinations were part of AI’s secret sauce, an “unsolvable problem” but also what made it so creative. “ Which is part of why I feel excited about Search,” he said. “There are still times it’s going to get it wrong, but I don’t think I would look at that and underestimate how useful it can be at the same time. I think that would be the wrong way to think about it.”
Since AI models are trained on the same toxic soup that is the entire internet, they’re bound to replicate the same biases and randomness. In February, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin admitted Google had “messed up” after its Gemini image generation tool came up with images of Black Nazis. Unfortunately, it is up to humans to clean up the mess: Google is racing to try and fix its AI search problem by manually taking down problematic answers when they are flagged (or memed). Therein lies the problem: The AI model can’t check its own homework, and even when it lies, we are told that we must consider this evidence of its own genius.

THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES  

Elections are currently underway in the world’s largest democracy: India. Approximately 968 million people are eligible to cast their vote in seven stages to decide whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing nationalist party can return for a third term.

In the continuing romance between elections and disinformation, an investigation by The Guardian in India has revealed that Meta approved AI-manipulated political advertisements on its social media platforms. The ads favored Modi’s party and called for violence against Muslims and for Muslims to “leave India.”

AI deepfakes have also proliferated on the Indian internet during election season, with videos of deceased politicians and Bollywood actors campaigning for political parties. The BBC reported that Indian deepfake creators have had to rely on personal ethics to refuse requests from politicians who ask them to create slanderous and often pornographic content about rival candidates. 

Modi, of course, is a fan of AI — in the weeks leading up to the election, he praised an AI-generated video that showed him dancing in his trademark orange waistcoat. Prior to that, he told Bill Gates that the word for mother in some Indian languages, “ai,” is the same as AI, and so Indian children speak of artificial intelligence in the same breath as they speak of their mothers. Results from the vote will be declared on June 4, after which the work of dissecting the role of AI in the election will no doubt continue.

WHAT WE ARE READING: 

• “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar): Whether you are on the side of tech optimism or deeply distrustful of artificial intelligence, AI entrepreneur and skeptic Suleyman’s book is a must-read for what to expect in the coming years. 

• Troll farms in Bulgaria are now recruiting “freelancers” to spread Russian propaganda. This piece by RFE/RL digs into the Bulgarian-based content-sharing platform “share4pay” that “promises hassle-free income from personal websites in return for replicating stories around the clock. Share4pay.com's statistics claim that it has a corps of more than 10,000 registered individuals for whom it has set up one or more sites to "monetize every minute of your free time.”’
• We think that “Draft Four” by Cristian Lupsa, former editor of Romanian magazine Decat O Revista (DoR for short), is the best new thing on Substack. Maybe because we recognized ourselves? “This is how you know you’re among journalists: the expectation, oftentimes, is of confrontation, rebuttal, skepticism, engaging with anything from a critical standpoint (to the point of engaging from a standpoint of criticism).”

The post What do climate change, AI and election season have in common? appeared first on Coda Story.

Second, Scarlett Johansson’s dispute with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman this week offered another insight into our AI-driven future. The actor accused Altman of stealing her voice, after she explicitly refused to give his company permission to use it for their ChatGPT tool. Here’s her full statement via NPR’s tech reporter Bobby Allyn. Altman apologized and said he never intended the voice to resemble hers. Still, OpenAI pulled the voice, called “Sky,” after Johansson threatened to sue. Welcome to the future, where anyone can take your voice (and then say they didn’t mean it).

Information pollution — whether it is caused by humans or AI — is certainly a big reason behind our dwindling attention spans. Between former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hush money trial, Russia’s terrifying new offensive in Ukraine, events in the Middle East and everything else happening in the world, it’s not hard to miss the story about the possible disappearance of an entire democracy from the world map. The democracy is Georgia, where protesters have stepped out in force to demonstrate against what they believe is an existential threat to their freedoms and the country’s sovereignty after the government introduced a so-called foreign agents law, closely modeled after Russia’s own legislation. But even those who are understandably more consumed by problems closer to home may want to pay attention. Georgia could be a warning to the U.S. and a case study of how democracies die.

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE: Lessons from Georgia

Georgia has become a front line in the battle against rising authoritarianism. With thousands protesting against the new "foreign agent" law, the country's centuries-long struggle for freedom now faces a turning point. It also epitomizes the global demise of democracy and how geopolitics are rapidly changing. Although people are in the streets, Russia’s vision of the world has the official government backing of what was, until even last year, the U.S.’s closest ally in the strategic Caucasus region. 

According to historian Anne Applebaum, who was among 10 speakers at Coda’s “Georgia at the crossroads” discussion on Sunday, the events in the Caucasus should receive intense media attention precisely because they are happening in a democracy. We’ve grown accustomed to witnessing autocracies in places like Belarus, Russia or Egypt, which have all adopted and weaponized similar laws in the last few years, but Georgia has long been among the freest places east of Berlin. The story of its quiet decline into authoritarianism shows that autocrats no longer need tanks or coups d’etats to kill democracies. Today, the death of democracies happens through hijacking of democratic institutions, like elections, courts and media.  

“There is a threat that a second Trump term could devolve in that direction. We see some state governments in the United States have made moves in that direction. What we're talking about is the creation of a one-party state and the way to get there is precisely through legal and sometimes very technocratic-sounding crackdowns like the one we're seeing in Georgia,” Applebaum, who is from the U.S., said.

Georgian journalists Mariam Nikuradze and Nino Japiashvili said that even before the final adoption of the law, the government began an unprecedented campaign of violence and intimidation against journalists. Georgian academic Gia Japaridze described how the police beat him, causing serious injuries to his back and his head. 

Disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev said the events in Georgia highlight a crucial distinction between the way Washington and Moscow treat geopolitical crises. 

“I live in Washington, D.C., a city that loves to see, especially under the current administration, all the problems as discreet little boxes. Here is the Gaza problem, and here is the China problem, and here is the Ukraine problem. And here is something happening in the Caucasus which we now annoyingly have to deal with,” Pomerantsev said.  

Moscow, he pointed out, takes a different approach. Seeing all these events as an interconnected, nuanced web of crises affords Moscow a clear advantage because everything that’s happening around the world is connected. “Autocrats borrow tactics from one another, they watch one another,” he said. If Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Georgian oligarch and founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, “wins in Georgia despite having 80% of the population against him, you can guarantee that others will try the same.”

“The domino effect is real,” agreed Georgian activist Tamara Arveladze. “If Russia wins here, they will win elsewhere. Besides, call me biased, but I think Georgian people really deserve to win.” 

BACKGROUND 

The crisis in Georgia centers around a law that will force nongovernmental organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register with authorities as a foreign agent. The government says this will ensure transparency, but similar laws have been deployed to diminish activism and free media across the world, everywhere from Russia to Nicaragua. Under pressure from mass protests, the Georgian president has recently vetoed the legislation, but parliament can and is expected to overrule the veto. The U.S. is considering sanctions against the government. 

Georgia’s government representatives declined our invitation to join the discussion. But you can watch it in full here. And feel free to comment below the video to balance out the government trolls who seem to be on a mission. 

The post How democracies die appeared first on Coda Story.

Re-writing Georgia’s recent history, Ivanishvili said that Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 were the fault of the West.

The speech follows days of popular protests against the so-called “foreign agents law”, a piece of legislation that wants to force civil society organizations to register if they take money from foreign entities, or face penalties. In his speech, Ivanishvili called Georgia’s vibrant civil society part of a Western spy network and announced their “destruction” after the October elections.

The “foreign agents law” is an important tool in the government’s arsenal. The law is a carbon copy of the Russian legislation which the Kremlin used to attack Russia’s independent media and civic activism. What’s interesting about the law is that it has become a Russian soft power export and a major feature of a modern day authoritarian playbook around the world from Nicaragua to Egypt.

In Georgia, alliances with the West against Russia — which occupies a fifth of the country — is seen by the majority of people in Georgia as an existential necessity. The ambition to integrate into NATO and the European Union is actually written into the country’s constitution. So the adoption of this openly Russian-style law constitutes not only a move towards authoritarianism but also a major geopolitical shift. “It’s a turning point because he (Ivanishvili) officially declared a foreign policy shift,” tweeted Atlantic Council’s analyst Eto Buziashvili.

As I write this, the news has come in that the Georgian parliament has passed the legislation, and more massive protests are being planned. More context on this story in our previous reporting here, and we’ll keep you updated as this story develops.

JOURNALISTS KETTLED AS NYPD STORMS COLUMBIA ENCAMPMENT

5,000 miles away from Tbilisi, where riot police are spraying protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, the The NYPD has been out in force on Manhattan’s 116th street. Decked out in full riot gear, they stormed the encampment of students occupying Columbia University last night, making dozens of arrests.

“I just can’t believe that Western society, or the world in general, is so terrified in 2024 of college students sleeping in expensive tents,” Columbia Journalism School student Bence Szechenyi told me in a voice note as he disembarked from the 1 train at New York City’s 116th street yesterday morning. He was heading to the gates of his — and my — alma mater, where negotiations between pro-Palestine protesters occupying the campus and the university were at an impasse. Students were occupying a building on campus, Hamilton Hall, renaming it 'Hind's Hall', in memory of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli tank fire in northern Gaza in January.

For Szechenyi, the response from both the University and the media over the Columbia protests has been perplexing. “We are talking about college students having a protest. That’s what college students do. The hysteria around it is confusing to me. I’ve spent a lot of time around the camps and it’s literally a drum circle. It looks like Coachella.” He described the distinctly teenage detritus of the camp — Capri-sun juice boxes and packets of skinny popcorn, hipster tote bags and yoga mats. Israeli counter-protester flags have been left untouched by the pro-Palestine students, he said, of whom dozens are Jewish, and have been holding Seder dinners in the encampment over Passover.

Life in the camp sounds pretty kumbaya: there are regular yoga classes, even a pop-up library. “In the more cynical parts of my mind I would call it less of a revolution and more of a Taylor Swift fan club… one thing I can say for certain about the 18-23-year-olds in that encampment is that they’re definitely not Hamas. But you couldn’t always tell that from the institutional reaction.” Classes at the Journalism School have been canceled so far this week — something Szechenyi is outraged by. “We’re supposed to be journalists, we cannot be afraid of 18-year-olds in Covid masks.”

He continued voice-noting me late into the night yesterday, as the NYPD encircled Hamilton Hall and kettled journalists. “We’re cordoned in a little pen right now and they’re arresting people,” he said, as the police stormed the building and rounded up the students, as journalists begged the cops to let them out for bathroom breaks. “It’s crazy that they pushed all the press out.” Szechenyi described the sheer volume of cops out in force in their riot gear — it would, he said, have been “a great night to commit a crime in Brooklyn.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

• We’ve grown horribly accustomed to the fact that all our data — from social media posts, to emails, to fertility tracking, is harvested up by tech giants and used to sell us stuff or peddle disinformation or, frankly, whatever the companies want to do. Now, our brain waves are up for sale — but a new Colorado law wants to expand privacy rights to protect the insides of our own heads, too. 
• This crazy story about a Baltimore County principal who was seemingly caught on recorded audio making blatantly racist and anti-Semitic comments. But investigation revealed that the audio was an AI-generated fake, in a plot by the schools’ former athletic director.

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

• Pedro Sanchez is not resigning. The Spanish PM’s announcement marks the end of a week of speculation over whether he would step down campaign of harassment by right-wing opponents targeting his wife. Allegations of "influence peddling" against her, led by the far-right group Manos Limpias ("Clean Hands"), have been backed up by dubious journalism from Spain’s right-wing media ecosystem. This also shows us something else — how the information ecosystem takes no prisoners, turning people off public roles and pushing political leaders to consider just checking out completely.

The post Georgia’s new iron curtain appeared first on Coda Story.

For my podcast The Day After Tomorrow, I spoke to investigative reporter Irina Pankratova of The Bell about how Telegram has been overwhelmed by wartime propaganda. Access to The Bell, an online Russian-language newspaper, was blocked in Russia last year and its founders have been designated as foreign agents. Pankratova herself was forced into exile in 2022, as it became increasingly dangerous for her to work in Russia. 

This conversation has been translated into English from Russian and edited for length and clarity.

Ivan Makridin: If I think back to 2016, Telegram was such a hotbed of liberalism. It was a place of freedom, where all sorts of opposition bloggers and journalists and politicians gathered. But then it changed quite dramatically. Tell us what happened.

Irina Pankratova: That’s the price of operating in Russia. Telegram could have been blocked like Instagram, like Facebook. The point of it being available and not being blocked is that propaganda is produced on the platform. If we take the top 10 most popular Russian-speaking channels on Telegram by number of subscribers, I think nine out of 10 will be propaganda channels. And because of that — despite the fact that there is also a lot of opposition and independent content on Telegram — the Russian authorities have no reason to block it. But this is the price that I assume the creators of Telegram quite consciously decided to pay.

One of the major investigative stories you published last year with reporters at Meduza was about a shadowy non-profit called Dialog and its influence on Telegram channels. Can you tell us a little bit about Dialog and who is behind it?

We did a couple of pieces. One was more focused on Dialog. There was also a piece we did about Rostec, which supplies military hardware to the Russian army. Rostec uses its wealth and power to coerce Telegram channels to spread propaganda. In essence, both Dialog and Rostec are organized in the same way. Public money is allocated and distributed for the development of propaganda on Telegram. Their budgets are astronomical. And if the administrators of channels do not compromise they find themselves facing criminal charges. 

I want to ask you about the Telegram channel War on Fakes. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, I remember many of my friends sent me posts from War on Fakes. In retrospect, it was innovative back then to pretend to be fighting propaganda while actually creating it.

This is exactly the Dialog project. To come up with innovative ways to spread propaganda. When you analyze the content on War on Fakes, it’s obvious that they are verifying and promoting false narratives. But they claim shamelessly to be fighting false narratives. And there are now dozens of similar channels — a whole network that quotes each other and just makes up stories and fakes screenshots and video images. But this fake content has a long shelf life on the internet because even when you fact-check, the same fake images keep showing up. And most people don’t bother to check the content they’re viewing, especially when the content is branded as a war on fakes. It’s simple but very effective.

And when there's a million subscribers.

Exactly. The numbers reassure readers, as does the name “War on Fakes,” that they are reading accurate information.

War on Fakes was registered the day before the invasion of Ukraine. Was it some kind of preparation?

I don’t think they knew that the reason to create the channel was to justify the invasion of Ukraine. But I think they were given a deadline for when to produce their content. It tracks across a huge number of channels, especially these anonymous, pro-war military correspondents whose channels were all actively posting by the end of February 2022 and in early March. It’s impossible to believe that it was a coincidence that so many people were prepared to launch channels as soon as the invasion began. They must have been funded and given some sort of cue, without anyone explicitly saying, “Guys, we're starting a war now and you have to propagandize it.” 

You mentioned the Telegram channel Rybar in your investigations into Kremlin propaganda channels. I subscribed to it in 2017-2018, because they were the only ones who were writing about what the Wagner Group and other paramilitary groups were doing in Africa and the Middle East. I even saw an infographic from Rybar in, I think, The New York Times…

You can't objectively say that Rybar are just stupid propagandists. It's not War on Fakes, where 10 idiots are sitting there cranking out fake news. Rybar has a real editorial office, with real employees. There are people there who know several languages, who can read Arabic. They have people translating propaganda in French so they can spread it in Europe. They even gave a course on working with open data at some university in Russia. So this is an active, strong, serious resource. And that makes Rybar more dangerous. 

I also wanted to ask about your recent piece about the reaction of Russian Telegram channels to Alexei Navalny's death. You wrote that the channels began their coverage much earlier than traditional news agencies like TASS and RIA Novosti. Does this mean that the Kremlin now treats Telegram channels as a more convenient and effective way to put out information?

Yes, I think so. In addition, the channels themselves can find and post information quickly. In the case of Navalny's death, I found at least one channel, a small channel, published the news of Navalny’s death by mistake before the official announcement. Literally three minutes before. So the channel already had it — they were told in advance, so that when the announcement was made they could immediately upload content that spread the Kremlin’s version. The channel only had like 2,000 subscribers, so nobody noticed. I also found a chat in which the administrator seemed to hint 24 hours before Navalny’s death that he was getting information from his “partners” that there was going to be breaking news.

What does that mean?

That maybe Navalny's assassination was planned in advance? That Kremlin-friendly Telegram administrators already knew to expect something and to prepare their scripts in advance. It was all coordinated.

GLOBAL NEWS

The antipathy many Israelis feel towards Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu was evident in mass protests even as the country prepared to be attacked by Iran over the weekend. But in the aftermath of that attack, the antipathy some Iranians feel towards their own leadership made itself clear. Graffiti reportedly from Iran that encouraged Israel to attack Iran's much-hated Revolutionary Guard was seen across social media. Inevitably, the Iranian authorities responded by announcing that it would arrest citizens who showed support for Israel on social media. Talk about false narratives — two unpopular regimes threaten to lead the world towards war in defense of their people who have made it clear that war is not what they want.

Social media networks may have given Iranians an outlet to air legitimate grievances against their leaders. But, predictably, these networks were also awash with misinformation in the hours after Iran fired drones and missiles directly at Israel last week in an act of largely performative retaliation. Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue noted that dozens of "false, misleading, or AI generated images and videos" received "over 37 million views" on X alone. A significant majority of accounts spreading disinformation were paid-for blue tick accounts, which means that their posts were amplified by X’s algorithms. Armchair war correspondents purporting to use open source intelligence are particularly enthusiastic spreaders of conspiracies and falsified footage. As journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh posted on X, "posting unverified and unsourced videos from Telegram isn't osint work."

Incidentally, Pavel Durov is the latest high-profile Russian to submit himself to a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson. Debuting his Telegram channel with the interview, Carlson used it to make his usual partisan arguments. Pausing the interview to "point something out," the conservative pundit praised Durov for choosing to leave Russia rather than compromise "his commitment to free speech." You "gotta compare that to what Mark Zuckerberg did or Parag Agrawal,” Carlson said, referring to Meta’s CEO and the former CEO of Twitter, respectively. “Both of them have collaborated with governments to censor people and that's shameful." This led Carlson to describe Telegram as a "bastion of free speech." Later in the interview, Carlson prompted Durov to reveal that he had received a letter from an unnamed Democratic U.S. congressman to share all the data he had "in relation to what they called this 'uprising,'" a reference to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. So, Carlson weighed in, "they wanted data on people who voted for the other guy in the election?" As if the request covered any supporter of former President Donald Trump rather than those involved in the riots. Carlson should feel right at home on Telegram with its legions of right-wing conspiracy theorists and propagandists.

WHAT WE’RE READING

As global panic (or belated recognition) grows about the effect of disinformation on every aspect of our lives, Manvir Singh suggests in The New Yorker that “it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation.” More than “Russian bots or click-hungry algorithms,” he writes, “a crisis of trust and legitimacy seems to lie behind the proliferation of paranoid falsehoods.”

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post How Telegram became the hub of Russian propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

Brazil’s contention in its bid to regulate platforms is that they need to take more responsibility for the spread of disinformation, which can have devastating consequences for democracies. Microsoft released a “threat intelligence” report last week that claimed “as populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections.” The threat, Microsoft says, of actually swaying voters is low, but the disinformation campaigns are a valuable testing ground for memes that stick. The intelligence report was released just as Microsoft was at the end of a scolding from a U.S. government committee that described the tech giant’s security as “inadequate.” Microsoft’s “cascade of avoidable errors” resulted in allegedly state-backed Chinese hackers breaking into the email accounts of senior U.S. officials. A threat, it would appear, to be taken considerably more seriously than that reported in Microsoft’s intelligence report.

For a while now, the Indian government and its supporters have accused opposition parties and independent media outlets of taking Chinese money to spread anti-India propaganda. Prabir Purkayastha, a veteran editor and founder of NewsClick, a news website that leans left and focuses its coverage on progressive movements, has been in jail since October. He was arrested after allegations that NewsClick was funded by China. Last week, the Delhi Police filed an 8,000-page document outlining the charges against Purkayastha, even as Indian opposition leaders said the government was using the state machinery to “suppress dissent.”

Why crony capitalism allegations haven’t dented Modi’s image

The Indian government’s treatment of Purkayastha is in keeping with its intimidation of media it considers unfriendly. Muzzling independent journalism is a crucial part of the strategy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, as they move quickly to check off items on their Hindu nationalist agenda.

Modi’s control of the mainstream media means that news stories that would be scandals in other democracies receive desultory coverage. For instance, how would the news be received in another democracy that the governing party managed to garner about $750 million in funding via anonymous, tax-free bonds? Opposition parties also received funding through these bonds, but nowhere near as much as the BJP, which instituted the scheme in 2018, having become India’s governing party a little under four years earlier.

Last month, India’s Supreme Court, having declared electoral bonds to be illegal, forced the State Bank of India to publish details of donors. It ruled that the bonds violated the electorate’s right to know who was funding political parties. As information about donors was consequently published, it became apparent that the bonds functioned as a way for companies being monitored by the authorities to convince them to go easy and even drop investigations. Other companies, it turned out, paid the BJP millions in donations and then found themselves the happy recipients of lucrative government contracts.

While the evidence is only circumstantial, and the BJP is not the only party to have received funds through electoral bonds, the Supreme Court decision should have been a gift for opposition parties not long before elections. Instead, despite the dogged coverage of a few small digital media operations and one or two mainstream newspapers, it appears electoral bonds and their suggestion of an attempt to legalize crony capitalism will not affect Modi’s chances of winning a third consecutive term when Indians go to the polls on April 19. 

Modi has said little about the Supreme Court’s verdict on electoral bonds. Instead, he endorsed an oblique letter written by pro-BJP lawyers warning the chief justice about an unnamed “vested interest group” that is “trying to pressure the judiciary, influence judicial process and defame our courts.” The implication is, presumably, that the Supreme Court which had just ruled against electoral bonds was somehow being manipulated by opposition parties — because Modi having any connection to corrupt activities would be completely outside the realm of possibility. Modi has crafted an image of himself as an incorruptible prime minister, a man who is entirely dedicated to serving the people. But he is pointedly not ordering an investigation into electoral bonds, into any quid pro quo arrangements or sweetheart deals that were made as a result of funds injected into the coffers of political parties, including the BJP. 

Instead, he has doubled down on his self-declared incorruptibility. On March 31, in his first major election campaign speech, Modi said he had spent 10 years as prime minister fighting corruption. It was “Modi’s guarantee,” he said, using a popular election slogan, that corruption would be removed. The fact that Modi is confident enough to continue to portray the opposition as corrupt and his government as honest, despite the electoral bonds revelations, is testament to the power of narrative capture.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Internal Kremlin documents given to The Washington Post by a European intelligence agency show that state-backed trolls were instructed to write “thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments” as part of a strategy to “promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions.” The campaign gleefully amplified any statements by U.S. congressmen that echoed Russian talking points.
• This newsletter regularly puts the spotlight on tech platforms and how they enable lies to metastasize and false narratives to spread. But sometimes it’s nice to be able to celebrate tech’s capacity to share information. The non-profit Internet Archive now houses the entire digitized archives of the Caribbean island of Aruba, preserving its entire historical record online. The only shadow cast across this sunny report in Wired is the question of whether the Internet Archive itself can survive the various legal challenges it faces over copyright claims by record labels and publishers.

The post India’s Teflon prime minister appeared first on Coda Story.

Frequently, these journalists are held without charge for as long as the authorities deem necessary. In India, similar rules that equate journalism with terrorism are invoked to detain journalists, in the disputed territory of Kashmir for instance, without formally charging them with a crime. In February, Aasif Sultan, the editor of a now defunct online magazine, was arrested again two days after being released from prison where he had been held without charge for five years. Pointedly, he wore a T-shirt with the words "Journalism is not a crime" emblazoned across his chest as he was led in handcuffs to another stint in arbitrary detention. 

This week, the Israeli parliament approved a temporary law that enables the government to ban foreign news networks it believes pose a threat to national security. Already, it appears, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will use the powers granted him by the new law to ban the Qatari government-funded network Al Jazeera — which Netanyahu described as a "terrorist network" — from Israel. 

Given the size of the protests against Netanyahu in Jerusalem this week, he has more pressing problems than the reporting of international journalists. But the focus on international journalists — alongside the suspicion of domestic media — is a growing trend in increasingly flawed democracies such as Israel and India, which are both sliding down global press rankings. Last month, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute published its annual democracy report, downgrading Israel from a liberal democracy for the first time in 50 years in part because of the government's attempt to weaken institutions including the judiciary and the press. India was downgraded to an electoral autocracy in 2018 and V-Dem in this year's report describes the country as "among the worst government offenders when it comes to increasing their efforts to censor the media."  

V-Dem also included India in a list of 18 countries in which the "indicator for free- and fairness of elections deteriorated substantially and significantly." With general elections in India just two weeks away, this is an alarming diagnosis. 

Both India and Israel seem closer to Russia and China in their intolerance for journalism than they do to other democracies. In Seoul last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that a “flood” of disinformation was creating “suspicion, cynicism and instability” in democracies around the world. In Israel and India, at least, the wounds appear self-inflicted.

GLOBAL NEWS

The once noisy independent media in Hong Kong has been almost completely silenced since the 2019-2020 pro-democracy protests. Last week, another alternative voice, Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the United States government, shut down its Hong Kong office after 28 years. It said a new law that came into effect on March 23 gives the authorities the power to treat journalists as national security threats. Broadcast in 10 languages, including Cantonese and Mandarin, Radio Free Asia's news bulletins are intended to counter the Chinese state's monopoly on news and information. Unsurprisingly, its exit was celebrated by Chinese state-sponsored news outlets, with the daily tabloid Global Times describing the broadcaster as an "anti-China agency" that had "fled in panic."

Radio Free Asia is modeled on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a service rooted in the ideological battles of the Cold War. In February 2024, the Kremlin declared RFE/RL to be an "undesirable organization," making it a crime to work for the station or distribute its content. But even before then, authorities found ways to go after the broadcaster’s journalists. In October 2023, RFE/RL editor Alsu Kurmasheva, who holds both Russian and American passports, was arrested on charges of not registering as a foreign agent and of spreading falsehoods about the Russian military. On April 1, a Russian court extended her pre-trial detention. Kurmasheva, like Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who has spent a full year in pre-trial detention, is one of 12 foreign-national journalists being held in Russian prisons.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia holds a “disproportionate” 12 of the 17 foreign journalists detained in prisons across the world. The overwhelming majority of detained journalists, though, are local. At the same time that media attention was turned towards Gershkovich's continued detention without trial last week, six Russian journalists were arrested within a few hours of each other. One of the journalists, Antonina Favorskaya, was arrested as she was being released following 10 days in jail for “disobeying the police” after laying flowers at the grave of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. She now faces more serious charges of “extremist activities” related to her coverage of Navalny and has been sent to pre-trial detention at least until the end of May. With reporters being sentenced to years in prison for posts they make on social networking sites like VK (formerly VKontakte), and as many as 1,800 Russian journalists in exile, Putin's mission to destroy independent media is making smooth progress.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• On the subject of India’s upcoming elections, Access Now and Global Witness submitted 48 advertisements to YouTube that deliberately and flagrantly violated the platform’s policies. YouTube claims to review political ads before running them but somehow signed off on every single one, including disinformation about changes to the voting age and “incitement to prevent certain groups from voting.” India, with 462 million users, is YouTube’s largest market and a vital source of information. The mind boggles.
• Havana Syndrome is the name given to a number of mysterious symptoms that have affected U.S. diplomats and military personnel posted in various countries including India and Cuba, where the first reports of the condition surfaced around 2016. A lengthy investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel and 60 Minutes suggests that the ailments bear “all the markings of a Russian hybrid warfare operation.” Is it, the article asks, “one of Vladmir Putin’s greatest strategic victories against the United States?”   

The post Shooting the messenger appeared first on Coda Story.

Disturbingly, none of us were particularly shocked. Forced to observe Russia from the outside, the news from our country is unremittingly grim. Many of us are in a state of perpetual despair. This might be an awful thing to say, but I expected to feel more — more anger? more sorrow? — after I heard about the attack. A few years ago, the emotional intensity of my response would have been different. On Friday, though, I just felt flat, dulled by the reality of the past two years — a reality in which hundreds of people die every day because of Putin's war in Ukraine. You have to live your life somehow, right? Find a way to cope as you hear about near-constant carnage.

Apparently, Putin's emotions have been dulled too. Less than a week after his re-election, after the worst mass murder on Russian soil in years, the Russian president was absent. And when he did finally appear, it was to make a canned address in which he claimed that the suspects had planned to escape into Ukraine. Presumably, under the noses of the ranks of Russian soldiers that Putin has amassed at the border.

Russia is in mourning, but for the president it's business as usual, spinning tragedy into disinformation and conspiracy. The Kremlin failed to protect Russians from a terror attack. To avoid admitting to that failure, Putin pretends to be looking for deeper truths than those staring him in the face. The Islamic State group may have claimed responsibility for the attack. There may be a recent history of IS attacks in Russia. Russian security services may have recently claimed to have foiled several such plots. There may have been a warning from U.S. intelligence that an attack was forthcoming, a warning dismissed as "blackmail." Still, Putin wants Russians to focus on chasing shadows.

Obligingly, the usual voices on state television and social media have continued to push Putin's propaganda, flailing wildly in an effort to cast blame on Ukraine. Only the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally, has gone off script. According to Lukashenko, the suspected perpetrators of the attack only changed course and headed towards the Ukrainian border once they realized they could not "enter Belarus by any means."

It's a depressing cycle. There is barely time to think of the dead, to comprehend the lives lost in Moscow, before we find ourselves once more in the thick of the "narrative," once more being manipulated into accepting the Kremlin's paranoid worldview.

GLOBAL NEWS

European courts are beginning to hold companies accountable for their "overly rosy" climate commitments. KLM was the latest to catch heat, with a court in the Netherlands ruling that the airline's claims of practicing sustainable aviation were "misleading and therefore unlawful." And earlier this month, a farmer backed by international organizations such as Greenpeace sued TotalEnergies in a Belgian court, accusing the oil and gas giant of, among other things, promoting climate disinformation for its own profit. Can European courts set a precedent, forcing companies around the world to accept responsibility for their impact and make genuine green transitions rather than simply greenwash their questionable records?

If only the standards applied to advertising in Europe applied to making political propaganda under the guise of commercial films. With general elections in India beginning in just three weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ideological positions, already amplified by a pliant media, have been getting the Bollywood treatment. The latest box office hit is a biopic of Vinayak Savarkar, whose writings laid the foundation for Hindutva, the Hindu nationalism professed by Modi. A slew of similarly Modi-friendly films are scheduled to be released in the coming weeks. These films are hyper-nationalistic, not constrained by fact and suspicious of alternative views. Their aims are plainly political. Indian elections are governed under a "model code of conduct," rules designed to prevent political parties from unfairly influencing and prejudicing voters. Sidestepping those rules via Bollywood is a disinformation tactic Modi's opposition cannot counter.

The Modi government pairs disinformation campaigns with suppressing political opposition. It’s a pattern that plays out in other electoral autocracies, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Last week, for instance, poet Alexander Byvshev was sentenced to seven years in prison for a short poem he wrote on his Facebook page two years ago. He was charged with calling for terrorism because he made a reference in his poem to Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. And on March 26, a Russian court extended the pre-trial detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich until at least June 30. Gershkovich has already been in jail for about a year. As my colleague Ivan Makridin writes below, Putin is so busy jailing poets and journalists and labeling them terrorists that he has failed to deal with real threats of terrorism.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• “Concerns about Kremlin interference around Brussels are at fever-pitch” in the run-up to elections for the European parliament in June, reveals Investigate Europe. This comprehensive article shows the extent to which Russia seeks to spread its influence across Europe, a multi-pronged strategy ranging from dropping spies onto European campuses, running disinformation campaigns and seeking out friendly parliamentarians, including far-right politicians in Germany and Italy.
• The United Arab Emirates is investing billions of dollars in becoming influential in the artificial intelligence industry, currently dominated by the U.S. and China. In this extensive report by Billy Perrigo, Emirati officials point to the country’s lack of democracy as a strength: “Yes, you need some checks and balances. But in many places it is overdone.”

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post After terror, it’s business as usual appeared first on Coda Story.

Putin’s supposed landslide victory with 87% of the vote has been dismissed in the West. But standing in that line, I was reminded of the power of Russian disinformation, of the hold that Putin’s conspiracy theories have on voters. 

Sunday was the day of the Navalny-inspired “Noon Against Putin” protest, in which Russian voters stood together in muted solidarity at the appointed hour to show their disapproval. Reports in the press suggested that thousands queued up, perhaps offering some flickering hope for the future of Russian democracy. The people in those queues probably have some great stories to tell. I, on the other hand, was surrounded by mostly elderly Putin supporters. One older gentleman in the queue gave an impromptu speech about Western Europe being on the brink of a religious war because “Muslims have overrun France and Germany.” His speech echoed Putin’s contempt for European decadence, though Putin would have made the politically expedient argument that conservative Christians and Muslims are united in their distaste for a Europe that has departed from the “family values” it once held dear.

A woman I recognized as a pro-Kremlin blogger introduced herself to people in line as a journalist. She was there, she said, to ask questions about the election, but she mostly spoke about the suppression of freedom of speech in Latvia. Many of the Russians in the queue, most of them Latvian citizens too, nodded their heads in agreement.

Another woman, old enough to be my grandmother, loudly called Putin’s political opponents “scum.” She said she had been born in Latvia and had lived her entire life in the country, but then said angrily to someone in the line that “Russia doesn’t need people like you,” as if Latvia were somehow an extension of Russia. She then turned on me, accusing me of trying to commit voter fraud. According to her, I had already voted and was now back in line trying to “steal” another vote away from Putin. In the end, the embassy staff had to intervene and tell her to calm down.

Eventually, it was my turn to vote. Inside the embassy, the courteous staff offered a contrast to the Putin propaganda outside. I duly spoiled my ballot and so denied Putin at least one vote. The next morning, I felt groggy, a little sick, having perhaps caught a bug in the hours I spent queuing. Official exit polls had been published. In Riga, where many independent Russian journalists and media are now based, Putin had received over 70% of the votes.

GLOBAL NEWS

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi once did what most demagogues do — pander to the prejudices and anger of their support base. After 10 years in office though, Modi leaves the pandering to others. He focuses instead on creating the illusion of ubiquity. Last week, most Indians with a mobile phone received a WhatsApp message from the government with an attached personal letter from the prime minister addressed to “My dear family member.” The letter, which was a barely disguised election speech, raised data privacy concerns over the use of the app to send unsolicited political messages. The opposition has accused Modi of using the offices of the Indian state to spread political propaganda. Maybe once Modi is reelected next month for a third term in office, he will transcend politics and channel Louis XIV: “L'état, c’est moi.”  

Modi was once frequently compared to fellow demagogues Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. But if Modi stands on the cusp of winning a third five-year term as Indian prime minister, former Brazilian President Bolsonaro might be on the cusp of some prison time. He was accused this week of tampering with public records to falsify his Covid vaccination status to travel to the United States. Brazilian police recommended that Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a conspiracy to insert fake information into the national health database so that he and his young daughter could travel to the U.S. after his election defeat in 2022. Though Brazilians took the vaccine in large numbers, Bolsonaro himself said he wouldn’t take it and argued that it was a matter of choice, of “freedom above all.”

Bolsonaro is also facing legal heat for plotting to remain in power regardless of results in the 2022 election. Like Trump, Bolsonaro is accused of fomenting riots because of his refusal to accept defeat. But unlike Trump, Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until at least 2030 because he abused his power as president. Trump continues to show little remorse for his role in the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, calling convicted rioters “unbelievable patriots” at a campaign rally in Ohio on Saturday. He also promised that there would be a “bloodbath for the country” if he wasn’t elected president in November. He may have been, as Republicans contend, referring to a bloodbath for the auto industry, but the phrase carried chilling reminders of the political violence after the 2020 election. The narrative that Trump continues to push that the election was stolen from him has proven astonishingly effective: A poll last August found that nearly 70% of Republicans and those who lean conservative say President Joe Biden’s win was not legitimate. As my colleague Ivan Makridin argues below, it is the lies that demagogues tell to their own people that are the most dangerous.

WHAT WE’RE READING

“Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works,” say Damien Hirst’s lawyers. The Guardian claims Hirst deliberately misled curators, buyers and his audience by dating three of his sculptures of animals preserved in formaldehyde to the 1990s — which is when he first pickled a shark in the substance — even though the sculptures were made in 2017. The works, Hirst says, were “conceived” in the 1990s. But when were they made? Does it matter? And if not, why put a year at all?

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post Voting against Putin in Riga appeared first on Coda Story.

I met Shannon in Glastonbury. She invited me back to her cottage right by the town’s famous tor, a spooky tower on a sandstone hill that looks out over the Somerset Levels. We sipped tea as we talked about her fears and premonitions surrounding the pandemic and her conviction that the vaccine was a “population control” project. All at once, she leaned in and started talking about the then-Prince Charles. “He’s changed, you know. If you look at pictures of his face over the last few months, it has completely changed.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, cautiously.

“I’m not saying anything,” she said, with a conspiratorial smile. “Just that the Prince Charles from before the pandemic is not the same man as we’re seeing now. It’s probably a body double.”

Shannon was the first person I thought of as the mysterious saga of Catherine, Princess of Wales, made global headlines. Since her reported abdominal surgery in January and subsequent disappearance from public view, a number of bizarre theories have taken root. My favorite is that she is waiting for her fringe to grow out.

To put an end to the rumors and the gossip, the royal family released a Mother’s Day photo that they said was taken by Prince William, featuring a supposedly post-op Kate back in the bosom of her family. But the wannabe sleuths of X and TikTok soon figured out that the photo had all sorts of things wrong with it: strange sleeves, weird-looking fingers, mismatched patterns on clothes. And then international photo agencies pulled the image, saying it had been tampered with. That was enough to tip even mainstream journalists over the edge into full “Katespiracy” land.  

“Oh wow. Ok I am now fully on board the Kate Middleton truther train,” wrote Guardian columnist Owen Jones on Monday morning. “I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist,” wrote ITV’s royal correspondent Chris Ship. “But… there are serious questions for Kensington Palace.” He then asked if any of his followers were botanists and could identify whether the foliage in the background of the photo should be in leaf in early March. 

Cue Kate posting on X, admitting the photo had been shopped: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” her statement ran. Cue my X feed exploding. “WE DEMAND A VIDEO OF KATE HOLDING A DAILY TELEGRAPH WITH TODAY’S DATE NOW,” wrote one joker. 

The parodies and real analyses of Kate’s edited family photo are now indistinguishable from one another. And while some legitimate analysts are pointing out real problems with the image, the answers to why the photo was doctored range from the speculative to the seriously unhinged. It also shows how easily a lack of information can tip over into disinformation. And the royal family’s ham-fisted attempt at “transparency” only fueled further disinformation.   

Given the future we’re all hurtling towards, in which AI-generated images and video will be impossible to tell from the real thing, even the most logical among us might never be satisfied by hard evidence again.

GLOBAL NEWS

Arguably, the only suspense related to the Russian elections is whether Yulia Navalnaya will be able to carry forward her husband’s legacy. Though President Vladimir Putin is assured of victory this weekend, he remains deeply wary of the threat represented by Navalny’s movement. Last week, Navalnaya echoed her husband’s call for Russians to protest by turning out en masse to vote at noon on March 17, the last day of the unprecedented three-day process. As Russia intensifies its crackdown on dissidents, turning out at the appointed hour would itself be considered, Navalnya suggested, an act of civil disobedience. It would serve as evidence that opposition to Putin — Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin — remains viable, even as he prepares to extend his rule up to 2036. 

If Putin is a shoo-in to be re-elected as president over the weekend, Narendra Modi is only marginally less likely to be re-elected prime minister of India after elections anticipated to be held in May. But the Indian government remains sensitive to narratives around Modi’s perceived authoritarian streak. Last week, it warned Big Tech to prevent artificial intelligence products from “threaten[ing] the integrity of the electoral process.” It was likely a response to the headlines created when Google’s newly launched Gemini tool responded equivocally to the question: “Is Narendra Modi a fascist?”

In wartime, can literature bridge divides? And can writers, as PEN America tweeted, “help guide the rest of us across that bridge?” Staff resigned en masse after Guernica, an online magazine, published a personal essay by an Israeli writer that the magazine’s co-publisher deemed to be a “hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” Guernica eventually took the story down. But even in wartime, surely the sophisticated, often privileged readers of a magazine like Guernica can be trusted to both abhor the loss of life in Gaza and read the words of an Israeli writer struggling with her conscience.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Meduza, an independent Russian news website produced in exile in Latvia, anticipates that the Russian presidential elections might prompt authorities to fully restrict access to the internet. Millions of Meduza’s readers, the site says, live in Russia. Since Navalny’s death, independent news sites have faced a barrage of cyberattacks. In response, Meduza has prepared an “SOS newsletter” it can send to readers via email, which is harder to shut off.
• In the “college of today,” argues William Deresiewicz, a writer and former faculty member at Yale University, “[y]ou start with theories and impose them on texts.” It means that the students, still overwhelmingly drawn from the “top 20% of the income distribution,” who become journalists learn to “have faith in expertise, to speak its language and accept its values.” The result in journalism, he writes, is an increasing disconnect with readers and a tendency towards activism rather than skepticism.

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post Calamity Kate and the failed Photoshop appeared first on Coda Story.

And then its text-based counterpart outraged U.S. conservatives, many of whom accused it of treating Republican politicians and even right-leaning journalists more negatively than their Democrat counterparts. Peter J. Hasson — a Fox News editor who wrote a book in 2020 about Big Tech's political bias — revealed that Gemini had even actively manipulated information, citing fake reviews and making up quotes, to denigrate his book.

And what of the rest of the world? Last week, for instance, when asked by a popular Indian writer and columnist if Narendra Modi was a fascist, Gemini responded that the Indian prime minister had "been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist." This led another Indian editor to claim that Gemini was "not just woke" but "downright malicious" and to call on the government to respond, which Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a minister in the Modi government, duly did, warning Google that its AI tool had violated "several provisions of the Criminal Code."

Google, perhaps fearing the wrath of the Indian government, said in a statement that Gemini might "not always be reliable, especially when it comes to responding to some prompts about current events, political topics, or evolving news." Why did Google back down so quickly? Gemini's answer to the question was reasonable and measured. Modi, after all, by some standards can and has been described as an autocrat. Under his watch, the press is less free, the political opposition is often criminalized and religious minorities are suppressed.  

Made aware of the howls of outrage emanating from Delhi, Gemini now bats away most questions about Modi. Ask it, as I did, if Modi has ever answered a question in a press conference in India since becoming prime minister, and it refuses to play ball. "I'm still learning how to answer this question," it says, as if the answer weren't readily available — he has not. 

But Gemini is not consistent in its treatment of people or issues. It now sidesteps my question about whether Modi shows authoritarian tendencies with its customary disclaimer that it is “still learning.” But Gemini feels no compunction claiming that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan does exhibit “strong authoritarian tendencies” and even offers me “a breakdown of the reasons why.” While Modi and Erdoğan are different, as are the countries that they lead, there are plenty of similarities. Gemini doesn’t want to go there though, having bowed to political pressure.  

“AI doesn’t have a point of view, it doesn’t have a perspective, it doesn’t think,” says Christopher Wylie, a data consultant and writer who became known around the world as the whistleblower in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 when the data of millions of users was harvested and used for political advertising. “It is what’s often called the stochastic parrot, providing an output based on statistical inference.” 

This means the tech is only as good as the data it’s fed. “You can never create a neutral tool because there’s no such thing as a neutral data set on the nature of evil, say, or which political philosophy is more correct or less correct,” Wylie said. The problem, he added, “that a lot of these public-facing tools have is that people expect some sense of neutrality without realizing that there’s no such thing as neutrality in totally subjective questions and subject matter. You can’t have an objective truth on a subjective question.” 

In 2020, more than 86% of donations from Alphabet, the parent company of Google, went to Democrats, compared to less than 7% to Republicans. Could conservatives in the U.S. be right then that Gemini betrays a Democratic bias? But, Wylie warned, bias extends beyond the concerns of parochial U.S. politics. “What we’ll start to see more of is American values and American political perspectives being integrated into these types of tools in ways that might not fit for other parts of the world. Are we creating tools that implicitly will be colonial?” 

Can LLMs, in other words, resist their own training and pay heed to the world beyond the United States? Vast swathes are currently given short shrift in Gemini’s context-free and generally shallow answers. And in countries that represent strong commercial interests, such as India and China, the government’s narratives are treated with outsize respect and caution. It’s as if the tool was made to spread disinformation and rewrite history.

GLOBAL NEWS

Speaking of the ubiquity and banality of AI, last week, a young man died in a skiing accident at the Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont. It's the kind of story that local news outlets report sensitively and effectively. But in our current world of click-farming “journalism,” thousands read about it on BNN Breaking, a site based in Hong Kong that likely used large language model technology to generate its stilted, yet oddly florid prose. It’s alarming that the priorities of Big Tech platforms mean such mediocre but persistent aggregation can result in the layoffs of hundreds of local journalists and the shuttering of local newsrooms that do the job better.

From the banality of AI to the banality of evil in Putin’s Russia, where absurd legalistic processes take place in arid courtrooms. Yesterday, Oleg Orlov, a prominent human rights campaigner and co-chair of the Nobel Prize-winning organization Memorial, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. In December 2022, Orlov wrote an article that described Russia as a fascist state. Last year, he was fined for that “crime,” a verdict so lenient that prosecutors argued he be tried again. And so Orlov, 70, was hauled once more into court, a process he mocked by reading Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” as the lawyers made their arguments. In response to his sentencing, Orlov said Russia was "sinking ever more deeply into darkness." Putin may be tightening his grip on power, but his fear of dissent has never been more stark.

If the criminalization of dissent in Russia is tragic, the parody of dissent offered by the likes of British member of parliament Lee Anderson is a farce. “When you think you are right,” Anderson said, after the Conservative Party suspended him, “you should never apologize because to do so would be a sign of weakness.” He was defending his right to link London Mayor Sadiq Khan to Islamists purely on the basis of his race and religion. “He's actually given our capital city to his mates,” Anderson said on the hard right channel GB News. But Anderson was only following the example set by his party. Earlier this month, the Conservative Party posted an edited video of Khan on X in which he said he was "proud to be both anti-racist and antisemitic." Khan immediately clarified that he meant "tackling antisemitism." Still, the Conservatives tweeted: "Sadiq Khan says the quiet part out loud." No one apologized for passing blatant disinformation off as political commentary then, so why expect Anderson to do any different?

WHAT WE’RE READING

• “Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero,” writes the neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel, “we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.” The depressing truth about AI is that it’s just a cheap way to generate clicks and eyeballs, the currency of the internet economy. Quality (and humans) be damned.
• Despite the pro-Ukraine position expressed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, her neo-fascist coalition partner Matteo Salvini — the deputy prime minister — remains a Putin acolyte. In the Financial Times, Amy Kazmin and Giuliana Ricozzi report on a fresh surge of Russian propaganda in Italy.

The post The gaffes and biases of Google Gemini appeared first on Coda Story.

Ukraine, while staving off Russian bombardment, also finds itself trying to reverse a gloom-laden narrative gaining traction in the West.

With a bill to further fund Ukraine's war effort languishing in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress, it appears as if American domestic politics outweigh any concern for the fate of Ukraine. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin aired a sentiment common among Republicans as he explained why he voted against the bill. "Vladimir Putin is an evil war criminal," Johnson said. But, he clarified, "Vladimir Putin will not lose this war."

This week, former U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking on Fox News, described Russia as a "war machine." Russians, he said, "defeated Hitler, they defeated Napoleon," seemingly reiterating the case Putin made in his interview with conservative pundit Tucker Carlson that defeating Russia on the battlefield is "impossible by definition." And only 10% of people recently polled across 12 European Union countries said Ukraine would win the war, albeit only 20% said Russia would win it. A far bigger share, 37%, said they anticipated both sides would be "reaching a compromise settlement."  

Last year, to mark the first anniversary of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted defiantly that "2023 will be the year of our victory!" Over the course of this last year, though, much of that spirit has withered away in the West. My colleague Avi Ackermann spoke to Coda contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev, currently a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. According to Pomerantsev, despite "moments of alliance," the West "as we knew it, the West that won the Cold War, is over." In Russia's view, the collective West "has no will, they're incapable of acting," he added. 

The kind of indecision Pomerantsev is referring to has, arguably, emboldened China to step up as a potential peacemaker. At a security conference in Munich, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi this week described China as a "force for stability in a turbulent world." The Global Times, a Chinese state-sponsored, English-language tabloid, in a recent editorial argued that NATO's "footsteps are moving towards Asia," that NATO is turning Russia's war with Ukraine into a world war. 

Trump, of course, recently claimed that were he to become president he would meet Putin and Zelenskyy and "within 24 hours that war will be settled, that war will be over." For such election promises to come good, Pomerantsev said, "clearly it requires Ukraine to be on the ropes." 

As the war enters its third year, disinformation and narrative manipulation continue to be vital, effective weapons in the Russian arsenal. The Kremlin, capitalizing on parochial political divisions within the U.S., is, with increasing effectiveness, undermining the West's war effort. In a fraught election year, will American voters be persuaded that helping to defend Ukraine is crucial to their own interests and to their global influence? And given their domestic preoccupations, will they care enough?

GLOBAL NEWS

Despite the obvious success that Russia is having outside its borders with manipulating the narrative in its favor, the Kremlin continues to crack down on all forms of dissent at home. This week, Russian pro-war blogger Andrey Morozov was said to have died shortly after he was told to delete a post on Telegram. In the post, Morozov, a soldier, said 16,000 Russian troops died and 300 armored vehicles were destroyed in the bid to capture Avdiivka, a Ukrainian stronghold in the Donbas region. This apparently angered both Kremlin apologists and unnamed figures in the Russian army. Morozov wrote that he was forced to delete his post about Avdiivka by “generals ready to sacrifice thousands of soldiers just to ‘distinguish’ themselves” and “journalists who build their careers on lies from the screen.” While confirmation has been hard to come by, Morozov reportedly shot himself.

And on the theme of Russian crackdowns, Ksenia Karelina, a citizen of both Russia and the United States, was imprisoned after she donated $51.80 to a Ukrainian charity. According to various media reports, she was accused of treason and arrested in the city of Yekaterinburg, close to the Ural Mountains. Karelina worked at a Beverly Hills spa and had been in Russia for a month before she was arrested. She could face up to 20 years in prison for her alleged crimes, which include taking part in public demonstrations in the U.S. against the invasion of Ukraine.

And finally… Jon Stewart has the best (and funniest) take on Tucker Carlson’s mad caper through Moscow’s metro stations and supermarkets. If, like Carlson, you are baffled by the splendor of the Moscow subway, it is because it was intended as a shrine to Joseph Stalin, or at least to his Soviet ideals. And now another dictator runs it. A couple of years ago, our reporter Marina Bocharova spent some time with Kirill, a young man who was fired from his job as a Moscow metro train driver for signing up to Alexei Navalny’s mailing list from his private email address. Marina was investigating how Kirill’s boss and his boss’s bosses in the Russian government knew that Kirill had signed up to the mailing list, and what that knowledge implied for Navalny’s reliance on Big Tech to spread his message. For more on that, read the piece we published earlier this week on how Silicon Valley let Navalny down.

The post Is Ukraine being left to fend for itself? appeared first on Coda Story.

I don’t know if Carlson feels the same way about Russian hamburgers, but it was broadcast on prime time news that he visited a branch of “Vkusno i tochka” (translated as “Tasty, that’s it”), a local replacement for McDonald’s, which pulled out of Russia in May 2022. Apparently, he ordered two burgers. 

As a Russian journalist in exile, I maintain close contact with people back home. Most people I spoke to had no idea who Carlson was and found the state media’s celebration of an American journalist “weird.” There was even a dissenting voice within the state media. The journalist Andrey Medvedev posted sarcastically in Russian on his Telegram channel: “How wonderful, an American has come to visit us! How happy we are.” A pro-war account on Telegram compared the rapturous Carlson coverage to Soviets who cursed the West but loved blue jeans, rock ‘n’ roll and American movie stars. 

Largely, though, the tone of the coverage in state media of Carlson’s quasi-state visit was adoring, like a cargo cult, a Russian friend messaged me, with Carlson playing the charismatic visiting prophet. TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency, reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said after Carlson’s interview that “the world has changed.” He meant, despite criticism of the interview in the West, Putin’s message “cannot be blocked” from reaching the world.

Not that Carlson tried too hard to block anything. Even Putin appears to have expected more resistance from the American. Speaking to Pavel Zarubin, a pro-Kremlin journalist, Putin claimed to have prepared “for so-called sharp questions” because it would give him “the opportunity to respond in the same way.” But for all Putin’s talk of being prepared for tough, challenging questions, the Kremlin routinely refuses supposedly unfriendly media requests for interviews. No independent Russian outlet has had access to Putin for years. 

Still, did Putin score the propaganda win he wanted? By expressing disappointment in Carlson’s credulous questioning, he appears to have understood that he came across more dull than decisive. That said, over 200 million people have seen Carlson’s post of the interview on X (if not the two-hour-long video of the interview itself). And if it helps fuel the U.S. right wing’s unease with continuing to fund Ukraine’s resistance, the Kremlin will have achieved its aims.

GLOBAL NEWS

Unofficial early counts show that Indonesian voters, who went to polls on February 14, will overwhelmingly elect Prabowo Subianto as their new president. Subianto, currently the defense minister, has been accused of committing human rights abuses and war crimes while he was a special forces officer in the military. Married to the daughter of the late Indonesian strongman Suharto, who led Indonesia for over 30 years as a military dictator, Subianto has tried and failed before to be elected president. This time around, using TikTok, media and an artificial intelligence-generated cartoon image of himself, Subianto appealed to Indonesia's vast youth vote by portraying himself as a cuddly granddad with awkward dance moves. It's digital disinformation, but how do you fact-check likeability?

In Israel, denying or even "downplaying the dimensions" of the October 7 attacks will likely become a crime on par with Holocaust denial. Last week, the Israeli parliament took preliminary steps to pass a bill that would hand down five-year prison sentences to people who make statements that deny or express sympathy with the massacre, in which Hamas militants murdered an estimated 1,200 people (about 700 of whom were Israeli civilians). Sections of the Israeli press have reported that the "broad wording" of the proposed legislation is "raising red flags" over free speech and blurring the line between critical debate and criminality.

On Monday, barely two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its third year, French authorities accused Russia of running "Portal Kombat," a disinformation campaign that spread propaganda across Europe through at least 193 sites and was aimed at disrupting key events including the European Parliament elections in early June. French accusations emerged in the wake of controversy generated by former U.S. President Donald Trump, who publicly boasted that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO countries — allies of the U.S. — that he believed had failed to pay their share of the Western military alliance’s bills.

WHAT WE’RE READING

This week, India has once again demonstrated its current bull-in-a-china-shop approach to press freedom. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting demanded that the widely respected, award-winning magazine The Caravan take down reporter Jatinder Kaur Tur’s story about the Indian army torturing and murdering civilians in Jammu and Kashmir, where there has been separatist violence at varying levels of intensity for over 30 years. No reason has been offered. But the ministry’s order will no doubt draw far more attention to the story than it might ordinarily have received, and it has already prompted people to preserve it online for Indians to read despite the takedown order. The three murders that Tur describes are already subject to an inquiry by the army, so why the Indian government should suppress reporting on the incident baffles most people who retain faith in the idea of India as a democracy with a robust press.

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post Russia fawns over Tucker Carlson appeared first on Coda Story.

As we’ve noted before in this newsletter, it was a moment of triumph for Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, the political arm of a near century-old Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization. The BJP owes much of its current dominance of Indian politics to the movement that began over 30 years ago to replace the mosque with a temple dedicated to the god Rama, the hero of one of India’s two great epics.

The mosque, according to Hindus, had been built over a temple that marked Rama’s birthplace in the city of Ayodhya. In 1992, a huge mob of Hindu nationalists destroyed the mosque using makeshift tools and their bare hands. And in 2019, India’s Supreme Court decided that even though the act of demolishing the mosque was illegal, a Hindu temple could be built on the site.

Last month, the process of replacing, even erasing, the mosque, was completed with the inauguration of the temple. Modi stood front and center at the ceremony, an act deemed so political that opposition leaders turned down invitations to attend. 

Many Hindu nationalists, including BJP members, say tens of thousands of other Hindu temples were destroyed by the medieval Muslim rules of the Mughal empire, and that they should all be rebuilt. Delhi University historian Ruchika Sharma told me that “the whole idea that we should undo historical wrongs” was suspect. There’s also the question, she said, of using so-called historical justice as a means to stigmatize communities. The president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board recently said Indian Muslims felt “threatened and suffocated” by disputes over the legitimacy of mosques throughout the country.  “It’s a ridiculous idea, that religious communities or ethnic communities today can be punished for the past,” Sharma told me. 

In any case, she added that “massive amounts of disinformation” have turned messy, tangled Indian history into a simple tale of evil invaders (Mughals, though many Mughal emperors were born in India and had mixed ancestry) and Hindu victims. On social media in particular, the suggestion that replacing a mosque with a temple represents justice is widely accepted as a self-evident truth.

“It’s frightening,” says Karen Rebelo, who works for Boom, a prominent Indian fact-checking website. “The discourse is polemical and polarizing and there is no doubt in my mind that it will lead to further offline harm,” she told me. 

Sure enough, violence flared up in the northern state of Uttarakhand this week, as a mosque, said to be an illegal construction, was torn down, leading to riots in which at least 60 people were injured. And in Uttarakhand, a mountainous state revered by Hindu pilgrims, as Tusha Mittal and I reported in November, there is an ongoing campaign to turn it into a Hindu holy land. Ground zero, if you like, for the Hindu, rather than constitutionally secular nation of India.

GLOBAL NEWS

“We're in journalism,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on X, as he explained why he had traveled to Moscow to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Our duty is to inform people." The resulting interview, however, comprised over two hours of Putin presenting his worldview, including tortuous, mostly uninterrupted, quasi-historical “justifications” for invading Ukraine. Putin last spoke with a U.S. media outlet in 2021, and by the Kremlin’s own admission, Carlson was handpicked to break that streak because Putin wants a platform to state his case. And Carlson let Putin do exactly that. On a Kremlin-supporting Telegram channel, the interview was described as an "information bomb of monstrous power." The word information, in this context, is presumably being used with the same cynicism that Carlson uses "journalism."

Should blatant propaganda be aired on television? Hulu, the Disney-owned streaming service, broadcast advertising paid for by the Israeli government that likely incorporated images generated by artificial intelligence. It showed an imagined Gaza, all Dubai-style five-star hotels, boardwalks and shopping malls, before showing Gaza as it "really" is: militants, rockets, tunnels and children holding guns. None of these conditions are ascribed in the ad to Israeli policy itself — or occupation — but to the influence of Hamas alone. 

In Pakistan, where voters went to polls on February 8, AI-generated campaigning was the only way for the jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan to give speeches and otherwise promote his party. Access to mobile internet was cut in Pakistan on polling day, a reminder that elections can be manipulated by an incumbent government as they cite disinformation and threats to security as reasons to order internet blackouts. But, if clearly labeled, can AI-generated content be a legitimate way for politicians to surmount deliberate suppression?

What we’re reading:

• “By building language tools that are designed to be impersonators, to mimic sentience, we are inviting confusion, misinformation, and mistrust,” writes Carissa Veliz in this carefully argued piece on generative AI. The effect on democracy, as we are already seeing, could well be calamitous.
• “Lately, a lot of powerful people, especially men, have been loudly proclaiming themselves to be silenced, powerless victims,” writes Katie Kadue. This brilliant piece made me think about cancel culture and about why authoritarians like Modi and Putin refer to it in their speeches. It’s because, I learned, they are “sore whiners,” reveling in the performance of loss and victimhood even as they exercise dominance.

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post How not to right historical wrongs appeared first on Coda Story.

Late last year, for instance, the Russian authorities were given the right to take away citizenship from naturalized citizens. Criticizing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine or spreading "disinformation" about the war effort could leave you effectively stateless if you weren’t born into Russian citizenship.

The law currently affects those who "acquired" their citizenship, whose origins lie in other countries. But even before it was passed, Russian-installed legislators from annexed regions of Ukraine proposed expanding it to strip citizenship from anyone who dared to criticize the Kremlin. As a Russian journalist in exile who left precisely to be able to publicly question the actions of the authorities, such laws directly concern me.

When you live in exile, these issues become the soundtrack to your life, always playing in the background. Yes, you must be cautious, and yes, you might find yourself on the foreign agent list that the Kremlin updates nearly every Friday (we dissidents call it "Black Friday"). But these problems seem tame compared to the problems faced by dissidents still in Russia.

And yet, my compatriots in high office continue to find new ways to go after people like me. This month, a Russian court fined an activist who gave an interview to a TV station two months after the station had been deemed “undesirable,” a status the Kremlin invented to criminalize independent media, nongovernmental organizations and other similarly critical groups. Engagement with such entities is punishable by up to four years in prison for a repeat offense. An interview given to any media declared “undesirable” is considered “engagement” with its activities. While reading about the case — even though the sentence was only a relatively small fine ($56) — I remembered that I had given such interviews at least three times. And it only takes two to land you behind bars.

Being a Russian exile also means you now keep a wary eye on the Kremlin as you plan any travel. This month, members of the popular Russian rock band Bi-2 were detained in Thailand. Although they allegedly lacked the necessary documents to perform in the country, it later emerged that the arrests were made at the behest of Russian authorities. Bi-2 left Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. The band's lead singer was dubbed a “foreign agent” after he criticized Putin online, a charge that can lead to a five-year prison sentence. 

I cannot lie, as a journalist who flies frequently, the prospect of an all-expenses-paid extradition trip back to Moscow worries me. But then I asked a friend and fellow exile what kept him awake at night, as the Kremlin flexes its muscles, eager to show that it can go after any Russian exile anywhere. He reminded me that he had recently heard his father was gravely ill. “I probably won't be able to attend his funeral,” he told me.

GLOBAL NEWS

A group of anonymous pro-Israel cyber vigilantes is harnessing artificial intelligence to wage “digital warfare against antisemitism.” The tactics of the group, known as the Shirion Collective, include doxxing, using whatever information it can glean — for which it claims it is willing to pay up to $15,000 — and “scraping digital fingerprints” to publicly accuse people of being antisemitic. The goal is to intimidate and create suspicion around people who openly support Palestine. And now in Australia, self-proclaimed members of the Shirion Collective say they have met with government ministers to present them with lists of people they accuse of being antisemitic and having effectively committed hate crimes and hate speech.

In the U.S., former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were sending “Mr. Putin's message.” While offering no evidence to back her allegations, she called on the FBI to investigate the financing of pro-Palestine demonstrations and any links to Russia. Video has also emerged of her telling antiwar Code Pink protestors camped outside her house to “go back to China where your headquarters is [sic].” It’s hard to take politicians’ protests about disinformation seriously when they resort to it as soon as they feel flustered.

The Russian Duma passed a bill that gives authorities the power to seize property belonging to people convicted of spreading disinformation about the military. The bill now goes to the upper house of parliament, before landing on President Vladimir Putin's desk to be signed into law. Spreading disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine already carries a 15-year jail sentence. As the Duma passed the bill, Boris Nadezhdin, a former local councilor, who has described Russia's war in Ukraine as “catastrophic,” announced that he had collected the 100,000 signatures he needed to stand against Putin in the presidential election in March.

MAGA’s Swift mania

It's not U.S. President Joe Biden that Donald Trump supporters have in their crosshairs. It's not Biden who they say is conspiring to keep their man from retaking the White House. It's Taylor Swift. The MAGA legions are the most committed Swifties around, following her every move with goggle-eyed fervor. It all began in September, when Swift urged her followers to register to vote and 35,000 responded. Trump and his followers apparently believe Swift will endorse Biden, as she did in 2020, and they're getting their retaliation in early. Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the Republican primaries at the first hurdle, described Swift and her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs football player Travis Kelce, as “an artificially culturally propped-up couple.” It was his awkwardly phrased version of the right-wing conspiracy theory, spread by a Fox News anchor, that Swift is a Pentagon asset, a “psyop,” a “front for a covert political agenda.” Or something like that.

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post Surviving Putin in exile appeared first on Coda Story.

The Kremlin appears to believe that its existing powers to jail critics for years, classifying them as terrorists and foreign agents, are not repressive enough. It needs more excuses to throw people in prison, like former journalist and opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023 for supposedly spreading misinformation about the Russian military. In December, a popular Russian-Georgian novelist, known by his pen name Boris Akunin, was added to the register of “terrorists and extremists” and is now being investigated for allegedly spreading fake information about the Russian army. Akunin, who doesn’t hold back his disdain, most recently called Putin a “psychologically deranged dictator.” He responded to being added to the register by dismissing the charge succinctly on Facebook: “Terrorists declared me a terrorist,” he wrote from his home in London.

But Akunin, by being sentenced in absentia, is one of the luckier ones. Writers, dissidents and anti-war activists in Russia have been beaten and sentenced in show trials to several years of imprisonment. In March, Russia holds its presidential election. Putin will likely now have another legal means, alongside new media restrictions, to clamp down on any kind of opposition.

The dozens of other countries going to the polls this year have to be vigilant to prevent organized interference from, among others, Beijing and Moscow. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported that it had “uncovered a covert campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate Taiwan’s recent election through AI-Generated Disinformation.” On January 13, Taiwan re-elected the candidate of the governing Democratic Progressive Party despite warnings from China that it would exacerbate conflict. According to the institute’s report, inauthentic social media accounts linked to the Chinese authorities used artificial intelligence to spread false stories that the presidential candidate was “America’s pet” and had signed under-the-table agreements to buy billions of dollars worth of arms from Washington. 

Although Chinese efforts to exert influence in Taiwan’s vote amounted to little, it hasn’t stopped them from spreading a similar misinformation campaign in India, where elections are expected to be held between April and May. In Meta’s third quarter “Adversarial Threat Report” released in November, three separate “covert influence” operations were found to have violated inauthentic behavior policies. Two originated in China, and the other one in Russia.

In Berlin, the local government has decided to scrap a controversial antisemitism clause it inserted into applications for arts funding. The language would have required applicants to commit to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been used by some institutions to stifle criticism of Israeli policy, especially as it relates to the Palestinian people. Some 6,000 artists had signed a petition decrying what it described as the “political instrumentalization of antisemitism clauses.” 

In November, we discussed in this newsletter how the search committee tasked with hiring an art director for Documenta, arguably Germany’s biggest, most important festival of contemporary art, had resigned en masse, torn apart by accusations of antisemitism leveled at a committee member, the Indian art critic Ranjit Hoskote. He had signed an open letter in 2019 describing Zionism as a “racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights.” The remaining members of the committee resigned because, they said, they no longer thought there was “space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas.” In Germany, at least 40 projects have reportedly been canceled in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel. In October, the famous Frankfurt book fair refused to host a ceremony intended to honor the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, as if public recognition of her work was a comment on the war between Israel and Hamas. To the Berlin government’s credit though, it paid heed to what the artists described as their rejection of “political interference in the function, methods and freedom of cultural production.”

In Modi’s India, report bad news at your peril

On January 26, India celebrated its 75th Republic Day, the date its constitution came into effect, a couple of years after it achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1947. This year, French President Emmanuel Macron was the guest of honor. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, led by Amit Shah — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s closest ally — decided to commemorate Macron’s visit by threatening a French journalist with expulsion. The reason, ministry sources claimed, was “malicious” reporting that apparently helped create a “negative perception” of India. Anecdotally, I know of other Western journalists, one working for a well-known international broadcaster, who have had their applications to renew their journalism visas and permits denied. In this case, the journalist Vanessa Dougnac has been living in India for 22 years. She is married to an Indian citizen and has an Overseas Citizen of India card. In India, where dual citizenship is not allowed, the OCI card recognizes people of Indian origin as well as those with other ties to the country without conferring full citizenship rights; OCIs, for instance, cannot vote. 

It is this card that the ministry is threatening to revoke, effectively expelling Dougnac from the country altogether. She has been given two weeks to respond to the allegations. “I love India,” Dougnac said in a statement after news of the ministry’s allegations broke. “India is my home, a country which I deeply love and respect, and I have never engaged in any acts that are in any manner prejudicial to Indian interests as is being alleged.” The authorities have not cited particular articles or provided details about how Dougnac’s work, published in French publications, could have “provoked disorder” or “disturbed the peace.”

The Ministry of Home Affairs, under Shah’s watch, has revoked Overseas Citizen of India cards before. Writing for Time magazine in May 2019, Aatish Taseer — son of a prominent Indian columnist and a Pakistani politician who was assassinated by his own bodyguard in 2011 for criticizing his country’s blasphemy law — described the “advent of Modi” as “at once an inevitability and a calamity for India.” The magazine’s cover, just as India was preparing to reelect Modi for a second term, dubbed the prime minister as the “divider-in-chief.” By September, Taseer — a U.K. citizen at the time (he is now also a U.S. citizen) — was informed by the government that it intended to revoke his OCI card. And by November, despite Taseer contesting the government’s claims, he found himself exiled from the country where his mother and grandmother live and where he was raised. He says he cannot even visit as a tourist.

Dougnac’s case is less high profile than Taseer’s but she too appears to be a victim of bullying by the Indian government. The capricious nature of the process, with opaque charges and little consistency, is at odds with India’s self-image as, in Modi’s words, “the mother of democracy.” Unsurprisingly, India is currently ranked a lowly 161 out of 180 countries assessed in Reporters Without Borders’ annual World Press Freedom Index. 
And the World Economic Forum, in its Global Risks Report this month, published to coincide with its annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, ranked misinformation and disinformation as the biggest threat to India in 2024 (an election year), bigger even than infectious diseases and wealth inequality. It is in keeping with a country where local and international journalists are expected to toe the government’s line of India’s unstoppable rise to global prominence — or suffer its wrath.

The post From India to Russia, no country for bad news appeared first on Coda Story.

In 1992, thousands of activists from a number of Hindu supremacist groups tore down the Babri Masjid, a mosque that had stood in Ayodhya since the 16th century. Its demolition was the product of campaigning that began to gain momentum around 1989. The Hindu groups claimed that the mosque had been built over a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama, hero of the Ramayana, one of the two great Hindu epics. Many Hindus celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, as the day Rama returned to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile, having rescued his wife Sita and defeated her abductor, the 10-headed demon king Ravana. Rama, in Hindu tradition, embodies righteousness — his victory over Ravana is the victory of good over evil.

The campaign thrust the Bharatiya Janata Party into the national consciousness as a viable political force. In 1984, the BJP had only two seats in India’s 543-seat lower house of parliament. By 1991, on the back of the campaign to restore the supposed site of Rama’s birth to Hindus, the BJP — the political expression of Hindu supremacy — won 120 seats. And by 1999, the BJP had enough seats to form government, though it was voted out of power five years later. 

Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP now controls 303 seats and has governed India for the last decade. This is an election year in India and it is widely expected that Modi will win a third consecutive five-year term in May. The new Rama temple, even if only half built, is symbolic of the BJP’s hold over Indian politics, both electoral and cultural. And such is the strength of Modi’s self-possession that it is possibly also symbolic of Modi’s triumph over all opposition.

Just months after Modi was re-elected for a second term in 2019, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the demolition of the mosque in 1992 violated Indian law. Nevertheless, the court still turned the site over to a trust to be formed by the government to build a Rama temple where the mosque once stood, arguing that the Hindu belief that the site was the birthplace of Rama could not be disputed. An alternative site, the court said, should be provided by the government to build another mosque in Ayodhya. The verdict was a victory of “faith over facts,” said prominent opposition politician Asaduddin Owaisi, one of the vanishingly few Muslim representatives in India’s parliament, even though Muslims make up over 15% of the country’s population. 

Not surprisingly — given that the campaign that led to the 1992 destruction of the mosque put the BJP on India’s electoral map — Modi has spun the inauguration of the temple on January 22 as one of the many gifts given by the Modi-led BJP to the nation. He has publicized that he is undertaking an 11-day training regime, which includes fasting and religious study, to prepare himself to preside over the rituals that will mark the opening of the temple. 

Hindu nationalists, including those in the BJP, believe that India should not be a secular nation but a Hindu one. And on January 22, Modi will effectively abdicate prime ministerial duties to take on priestly ones, as is befitting the leader of a supposedly Hindu nation. Plans have also apparently been made to screen the ceremonies in Indian embassies across the world and even in Times Square in New York City. 

What is being omitted from the official narrative is the years of rioting between Hindus and Muslims that have resulted in thousands of deaths and can be directly linked to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. What is being omitted is that by forcefully and illegally destroying a mosque and replacing it with a temple, the Modi government is doing what it accuses India’s Muslim rulers in the 16th century of doing — that is, destroying a temple to make way for a mosque. What is being omitted is that the cry of “jai Shri Ram” (victory to Lord Rama) is increasingly associated with violence and hate crimes against Muslims. 

Hate speech and disinformation have been at the core of the successful campaign to convince a significant majority of Indians that the illegal destruction of a centuries-old mosque is actually, as a major Hindu nationalist leader put it, a liberation from slavery. India is celebrating a temple built through brute majoritarianism, as a symbol not of the country’s fading constitutional secularism but of its growing confidence as a newly assertive global power.

India’s media is participating in the fiction that this is a moment of cultural celebration and pride for India. But as every schoolchild knows, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Climate denial turns personal

Attacking the messenger is perhaps the oldest trick in the propagandist’s book. Why bother to take on arguments, or counter reason with reason, when you can demonize your opponents instead? The Center for Countering Digital Hate notes in a new report that there has been a noticeable change in the tactics used by climate change deniers to spread disinformation. Rather than attack the idea of climate change itself, critics have cast doubt on the research behind it, how that research is being interpreted and the researchers themselves.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, writes in his introduction to the report that it is “vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly.”

The “Old Denial” as characterized by CCDH might be something as straightforward as claiming global warming is a fiction. The “New Denial” is a slightly more subtle tactic of arguing that global warming is not necessarily man-made or that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or that the solutions being proposed to mitigate the impact of global warming won’t work. 

According to CCDH’s research, some 70% of climate change denial on platforms such as YouTube take the form of “New Denial,” particularly assertions that proposed solutions cannot work. The report also quotes media figures such as the American conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who has spread online conspiracy theories to the nearly 2 million followers of his Blaze TV channel on YouTube. “They know that climate change is not going to kill millions around the world,” intones Beck over ominous music. “No, this is all about gaining power and control over you.”

The report adds ballast to survey results from a poll published by Global Witness in April last year, in which 39% of the climate scientists surveyed reported experiencing online harrasment and abuse. The number went up to 49% if the scientists had published more than 10 papers and far more dramatically to about 75% if they had appeared regularly in the media.

It all adds up to the same gloomy picture — that online discussion is now effectively an oxymoron.

What we’re reading:

This piece in Foreign Policy warns against the kind of moral panic displayed in the sentence above. In this bumper election year, with some 65 countries including India and the United States, going to the polls, it is perhaps too easy to put the blame entirely at the feet of tech barons. “Anxieties abound that social media, further weaponized with artificial intelligence, will play a destructive role in these elections,” notes the writer of the article, Princeton University professor Jan-Werner Müller. But, he argues, “social media is not inherently populist.” Instead democracies have failed to strategize effectively to counter the harms done by platforms, whether it’s through the capriciousness of owners, like Elon Musk, or the control exercised by increasingly autocratic governments, such as Narendra Modi’s in India. But if social media is not inherently populist, it does seem inherently unable to cope with nuance, equivocation and doubt. It’s a medium that rewards certainty — and that’s more worrying than Müller is willing to concede.

The post Why a half-finished temple is the symbol of Modi’s Hindu nationalist India  appeared first on Coda Story.

But over the last week or so, this parliamentary session has turned into one of the most extraordinary in Indian history. On Monday, December 18, a record 78 members of the opposition in both India’s lower and upper houses of parliament were suspended for the remaining week of the parliamentary session. This was followed on Tuesday by a further 49 suspensions. Added to the 14 who were suspended in the previous week, 141 members of the opposition cannot take part in parliamentary proceedings for the rest of the session.

The lawmakers were suspended for disruptive behavior as they demanded that India’s Home Minister Amit Shah explain a serious lapse in parliamentary security in person. On December 13, two protestors were able to get past security, enter the lower house of parliament and set off two smoke canisters. Shashi Tharoor, an opposition member of parliament and bestselling author, wrote that he heard a “panicky” colleague “screaming ‘poison gas,’” as she ran out of the chamber. Other members rushed to tackle the intruders, while one threw the canister out into the grounds. 

It was over in minutes, Tharoor said. But the fiasco happened on the anniversary of the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament which resulted in the deaths of nine people, apart from five allegedly Pakistan-sponsored terrorists who were killed in a shootout with security. Eight Delhi police personnel who were on duty at the time of last week’s protest have been suspended. The police report to Shah and national security is the responsibility of his office. “The home minister’s stubborn refusal to attend the House and speak there,” argued Tharoor, “is at the heart of the current dispute.”

India has a total of 788 members of parliament. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party alone accounts for 384 members across both houses, and with its allies has 431 seats. With the suspensions, it now means an already strong government with a clear majority stands virtually unopposed. Parliamentary business, including the passing of bills, is going forward without debate.

With the cooperation of the Modi-friendly media and the vast army of Modi supporters online, including among the Indian diaspora in the West, a narrative is being created that the opposition has made India ungovernable. That it does not take the business of governing seriously, preferring to showily protest rather than vote on new laws in parliament. The coverage that has followed the security breach and the opposition suspensions has fed into this narrative. 

Modi said little publicly about the security failure, except to call for an investigation rather than address the issue in parliament. However, he has reserved his greatest scorn for the opposition, reportedly condemning its “abject theatrics,” referring to the conduct of a suspended member of parliament who mocked India’s vice president, as other opposition MPs laughed and filmed it all on their phones. 

Equal weight is being given by the media to the mockery of the vice president, as to the breach of parliamentary security and the unprecedented suspension of 141 members of parliament. Speaking in Hindi, Tharoor chided a reporter from the Press Trust of India who asked about the members who poked fun at the vice president. “Why are you wasting hours on this trivial affair,” Tharoor asked (in my rough translation) “when there is an ongoing attack on Indian democracy by the government?” 

The official position on the suspension of opposition members of parliament appears to be a huge roll of the eyes, a stance that is being encouraged by media coverage. As a researcher wrote, without discernible irony, in an article published on the website of British-based think tank Chatham House, “While India has become less liberal, governance has arguably improved.” And it gets easier when there’s no opposition. The problem, as BJP member of parliament and Bollywood superstar Hema Malini says, is that the opposition just “asks too many questions.”  

Punch through the noise

As another year prepares for its curtain call, it is tradition to offer some sort of summary of the months gone by. Is there an insight to offer to readers that can bring shape to chaos? Only that trying to control chaos — through assiduous and determined fact-checking, for instance — is a Sisyphean task. Every time you push the boulder close to the top of the hill, down it rolls again, even larger, more swollen with lies, propaganda and distortions. 

So I’m going to defer to my colleague Natalia Antelava, Coda’s editor-in-chief who used to write this newsletter and is currently at Stanford University, tasked, alongside the other 2024 Knight Fellows, with thinking through some of the major, even existential problems that currently confront journalism. In a recent essay, she noted: “I believe we made a terrible mistake when we framed disinformation as a ‘fake news’ problem.” It meant journalists became “reactive, defensive and focused on symptoms, rather than underlying causes of disinformation.” Instead of embracing the Big Tech platforms as allies, Natalia argued, journalists should have been taking aim at a “business model built on monetizing the loudest and most obnoxious voices.” 

Because even as these companies argued that they were making room for new voices, they benefited from the expansion of noise.In that sense, X, Meta and the like are not so much the town square as the town bar. And they’re helping the burly drunks push their way to the front. At least part of Natalia’s work at Stanford will be to figure out how to turn the tables, how to help journalism that is slow-burn and carefully reported “punch through the noise.”

What we’re reading:

This incredibly long piece by former New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet in 1843 magazine about the anger and outrage he faced from colleagues after the decision to publish an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton in 2020 in which Cotton called for the National Guard to be deployed to deal with street protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. While I don’t necessarily recommend you read all of it, this part deserves to be quoted at length:

“The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative — whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears — has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.”

This seems to me disingenuous, especially in the context of Cotton’s truth and ideas-free op-ed. And as our experience with disinformation and the manipulation of narrative shows us, truth is a fragile, gossamer thing. Whoever controls the narrative and sets the terms does have the whip hand. This idea only appears to be a cynical position to people who enjoy the privilege, as Bennet once did, of controlling the narrative.

The post India’s media shrugs its shoulders over ‘attack on democracy’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Such reports, thundered the Ministry of External Affairs, “are fake and completely fabricated.” If a tweet can be described as frothing at the mouth, this one surely was. “This is part of a sustained disinformation campaign against India,” the ministry’s statement read. “The outlet in question is known for propagating fake narratives peddled by Pakistani intelligence.” While the Ministry of External Affairs did not clarify the basis for its claim, it could have been referring to a report in The Intercept last month that alleged, based on leaked documents from Pakistani intelligence,  that India’s Research and Analysis Wing (roughly equivalent to the CIA) were “planning assassinations targeting Sikh and Kashmiri activists living in foreign countries.”

By attempting to foment conspiracy theories about “fake narratives peddled by Pakistani intelligence” and anti-India disinformation campaigns, the Indian government leaves itself open to suggestions that it is throwing stones from a glass house.  

In September, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, directly accused the Indian government of being involved in Nijjar’s assassination, adding that such extrajudicial killings on foreign soil were “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open and democratic societies conduct themselves.” The Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reacted to Trudeau’s claims with outrage and contempt, calling them “absurd,” accusing Canada of sheltering terrorists and alleging that the Canadian leader was acting out of political desperation, seeking to ingratiate himself with the influential Sikh diaspora.

Canada’s Western allies initially appeared to distance themselves from Trudeau, and analysts in the Modi-friendly Indian media began to crow that this lack of support was indicative of India’s growing global clout. But on November 29, United States prosecutors revealed that an unnamed Indian government official was connected to a bid to assassinate a Sikh separatist leader in New York City.

India has promised a high-level investigation into the plot laid out in the U.S. prosecutors’ indictment. Speaking to the Canadian press this week, Trudeau, perhaps feeling vindicated, said that “too many Canadians were worried that they were vulnerable.” And that “all the quiet diplomacy” had to be bolstered by a “further level of deterrence” that “put a chill on them continuing or considering doing anything like this.”

Bagchi, India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, responded to the U.S. indictment by saying such a plot was “contrary to government policy.” His statement qualified as a “non-denial,” according to Sushant Singh, an Indian Army veteran, journalist, writer and current visiting lecturer at Yale University. It may not be government policy, Singh said, quoting a character from the 1980s British political satire “Yes Minister,” but “it appears to be government practice.”

The specter of Sikh separatism has been repeatedly raised during Modi’s nine years in office, particularly in his second five-year term, which began in 2019. A movement for a separate Sikh homeland, named Khalistan, reached its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s; its embers still glow in Western countries where there is a substantial Sikh diaspora. In March and April, the Indian media was captivated by the story of radical Sikh preacher Amritpal Singh who, wanted on charges of attempted murder, evaded the Punjab police for 35 days. He was, the police said, a Pakistani intelligence plant with links to the global Khalistan movement. 

For decades, that movement has been dormant. The calls for Khalistan, a state that could potentially straddle areas in both India and Pakistan, now seem fanciful and the security threat posed to India’s sovereignty negligible, but evoking Sikh separatism plays well for Modi domestically, Singh argued. “The government likes to appear strong in its response to ‘anti-India’ forces,” he told me. Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters are eager to believe that India is no longer a soft touch, but a country that takes its enemies on, wherever they may be, including the West. As Singh points out though, only Russian President Vladimir Putin has been proven to assassinate his critics in Western capitals — company that Modi, given his growing closeness to Western leaders keen to position India as a rival to China, might want to avoid. Western governments will also look askance at a partner in India that is willing to sow discord and exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions among diasporic communities living in allied nations. 

In India, with elections looming in 2024, Modi will continue to promote himself as the only leader in independent India’s history strong enough to defend the country’s national interests and security, strong enough to confront not only Pakistan but also China and the West, if necessary. It appears that the Modi government is willing to burn diplomatic bridges in the service of a parochial, internally focused agenda. According to Singh, it is this possible use of “sensitive intelligence operations for domestic political propaganda that is the most dangerous aspect of the whole saga.” 

Disinformation about Khalistani activism was especially ramped up after farmers in Punjab proved to be the most obdurate opposition that Modi has faced in his two terms in office. The so-called farmers’ protests, which lasted through 2020 and 2021, put Modi on the back foot, forcing his government to repeal legislation as pictures were broadcast across the world of protests in Delhi. It was a rare moment of weakness in the face of determined domestic opposition. In 2021, India’s attorney general even argued before the Supreme Court that “Khalistani elements” had “infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

Now, India waits to find out if a court case in New York can show that politically motivated disinformation by the Indian government has tipped over into politically motivated assassination.

Free speech absolutists come for Ireland

Rocked by scenes of violent disorder in Dublin on November 23, after rumors spread that a man who had stabbed three schoolchildren and a teacher’s aide was living in the country illegally, the Irish government said it would fast-track proposed new hate speech laws. “I think it's now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us,” said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, “that our incitement to hatred legislation is just not up to date. It's not up to date for the social media age.” It turned out that the attacker was an immigrant but had lived in Ireland for a couple of decades and was a naturalized Irish citizen. Platforms, like X and TikTok, refused to accept blame for the disinformation being disseminated about the stabbings. In fact, X owner Elon Musk was quick to respond to Varadkar’s talk of new hate speech legislation in the wake of the riots by tweeting provocatively: “Ironically, the Irish PM hates the Irish people.”

Conservatives, particularly in the U.S., have expressed concern about the new Irish laws, even though implementation will be delayed until some time next year. “I urge your government to consider the impact of this legislation on Ireland’s proud tradition of free speech,” wrote Republican Senator J.D. Vance to Geraldine Byrne Nason, the Irish ambassador to the U.S. And writing in Newsweek, Kristen Waggoner, the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group, argued that it was “not hard to imagine Ireland rapidly descending into an authoritarian state with the passage of this law.”

A couple of newsletters ago, I pointed to the research of Eileen Culloty, a professor at Dublin City University, whose work has documented the exponential growth of  disinformation in Ireland since the pandemic and the close ties that it has to disinformation trends in the U.S. and the U.K. “There is,” she told me over the phone last week, “a disconnect between American ideals of free speech and how free speech is understood in Europe.” In Europe, she said, free speech is a “fundamental, not absolute right.”

Musk, she added, is a self-declared free speech absolutist “and goes further than the First Amendment.” The influence on public conversation in Ireland, the evidence suggests, is pernicious. Culloty argued that governments should renew their commitment to funding media that reports in the public interest as a counter to the disinformation that is rife on Big Tech platforms. But publicly funded media is a model, she acknowledged, that is “attacked and undermined by conservative governments” and increasingly lacks authority.   

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• The Indian government has frequently alleged that it is the target of a disinformation campaign undertaken by a comically wide range of enemies, from Pakistan and Chinese intelligence services and the billionaire philanthropist George Soros to lawyers, journalists, writers and academics who are classified as not just ideological opponents but seditionists. So it was with a sense of grim irony that I read The Washington Post’s investigation into “Disinfo Lab.” According to the Post, the website is a “covert influence operation” run by Indian intelligence to spread the Modi government’s talking points and propaganda.
• Early this year, the Indian government declared a two-part BBC documentary about Narendra Modi to be “hostile propaganda” and “anti-India garbage.” But has the BBC, or at least its Hindi service, been brought to heel by the government? “Our stories are not different from any other Indian media house,” a BBC journalist tells Indian magazine The Caravan. “We are forced to operate like them — majoritarian ideological bent and all.

The post India struggles to deny plot to kill Sikh secessionists appeared first on Coda Story.

1.5 C refers to the legally binding treaty agreed to by practically every state in the world (Iran is the only major holdout) at COP21 in Paris in 2015 to limit the levels of global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. Cutting fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is universally acknowledged to be the path to achieving that target.

Despite the clear evidence that emissions continue to rise — provided by organizations dedicated to tracking emissions, using satellite data and artificial intelligence technology to provide a fuller picture than provided by governments — and that the world is behind on its pledges, al-Jaber was able to say with both confidence and aggression that he was not “signing up to any discussion that is alarmist.”

Weaponizing the phrase trotted out to justify all government actions during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, al-Jaber claimed his position was a product of “respect [for] the science.” This, even though as the head of the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, al-Jaber has signed off on spending $150 billion by 2027 on, among other things, boosting its oil production capacity to 5 million barrels per day. By comparison, the United Arab Emirates (the whole country, not just the state-run oil company) expects to spend $54 billion over the next seven years on tripling its renewable energy capacities. 

For a powerful lobby, kicking the green transition can as far down the road as possible is the preferred strategy. That lobby, of course, includes producers of fossil fuels such as the UAE — hosts of a conference intended to map the way towards eliminating the use of fossil fuels. 

After sustained criticism of al-Jaber’s comments that phasing out — or “phasing down” in the oil industry’s preferred term — fossil fuels was not going to “achieve 1.5 C,” he held a press conference to further explain his position. “I honestly think,” he said, “that there’s some confusion out there, some misinterpretation.” It is, al-Jaber insisted, “the science that has guided the principles of our strategy as the COP28 presidency.”

But the science is clear: An international body of climate scientists put together by the United Nations has said that by 2030 we need to reduce emissions by 43% to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. At the present rate, we will have only reduced emissions by 2% by 2030. 

We need to dramatically reduce our coal, oil and gas usage by the middle of the century to avert crisis. Al-Jaber claims phasing out fossil fuels is “inevitable” but “we need to be real, serious and pragmatic about it.” Pragmatism has been the mantra of politicians worldwide when it comes to enforcing the changes necessary to achieve carbon neutrality. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, at COP28, said “climate politics is close to breaking point.” What is needed, he argued, is “to meet our targets in a more pragmatic way that doesn’t burden working people.” What this means in practice, Sunak does not define, but part of this pragmatism appears to be to renege on commitments that might help scale down emissions sooner rather than later.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also at COP28, said India “has set an example of a balance between ecology and economy.” He spoke about India’s historically negligible contribution to global warming and the relatively low intensity of its per capita emissions. What he left out is that India is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses and in absolute terms is a significant obstacle on the road to “net zero.” Despite enhancing its generation of renewable energies, coal is still overwhelmingly a major source of Indian electricity. How long can Modi talk about climate justice in global forums, calling out the developed world for causing global warming at the expense of poorer nations, while refusing to phase out India’s coal use in the short term?

A new report by the Delhi-based Centre of Science and Environment revealed that India had suffered an extreme weather event “nearly every day in the first nine months of this year — from heat and cold waves, cyclones and lightning to heavy rain, floods and landslides.” When India argues about the need to burn fossil fuels to uplift poorer people, it is evasive about the effects of both extreme weather as a result of climate change and pollution as a product of fossil fuels on those same people.

Climate skepticism and deliberate disinformation is often blamed for undermining the global effort to tackle climate change. But a bigger concern appears to be the willingness of governments to put politics and supposed pragmatism above “the science,” while claiming to be solely guided by evidence. Increasingly, hosting the COP summit gives the appearance of being serious about climate change, while doing little to actually effect a green transition. Incidentally, while in Dubai, Modi pitched India as the host for COP33 in 2028.

Climate disinfo as geopolitical tool 

A report by Climate Action Against Disinformation released last week showed how Russian state propagandists spread disinformation about climate change online to undermine the West and exploit tensions with developing countries. It pointed to the need for a “shared understanding of climate change” and how the lack of consensus is exploited online. Russian state propaganda, the authors of the report argued, is directed by geopolitical considerations rather than any ideological principles on global warming. 

Part of the strategy, it appears, is to portray efforts to tackle climate change as an extension of Western imperialism. This is not unlike points both al-Jaber and Modi made in Dubai. “Please help me,” al-Jaber told former Irish President Mary Robinson in a tense exchange, “show me a roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuels that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Modi, in his speech in Dubai, said gravely: “Over the past century, a small section of humanity has indiscriminately exploited nature. However, [all of] humanity is paying the price for this, especially people living in the Global South.​​”

But these calls for equitable development and social justice are fig leaves for a lack of political action and urgency. With the UAE, the conflict of interest is evident. But India would benefit hugely from weaning itself off from its debilitating dependence on coal and imported oil and gas.

Who needs social media to spread disinformation, when global leaders are only too willing to amplify Russian talking points when it suits their political agendas?  

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• Joan Donovan, a widely cited and respected scholar of disinformation, has alleged she was fired by Harvard University to appease Meta, reports The Washington Post. Much of Donovan’s work involved the divisive impacts of disinformation spread on social media platforms that profit from these falsehoods. Donovan was dismissed, she says, shortly after a foundation run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university to set up a center focused on artificial intelligence.

• In Harper’s magazine, writer Ben Lerner details his early experience as a Wikipedia editor, when he set out a kind of project for himself to inhabit different voices and become an internet-fueled authority on any number of subjects. “The work was a bizarre mixture of utter boredom,” he writes, “and exhilaration.” By the end of the piece, he hands the reins over to ChatGPT “because you represent the end of Wikipedia.”  

The post Why climate conferences are now hubs of disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israeli civilians, Hinkle has devoted himself to posting anti-Israel content on social media, particularly X. Nearly all of his posts are blatant falsehoods and manipulations. Recently, for instance, he claimed that Israeli authorities staged a scene for Elon Musk, who recently visited the country, with unfired bullets in a crib. It was soon pointed out, however, that the bullets had indeed been fired. Nevertheless, the tweet is still up. Hinkle doesn’t bother with deleting posts or taking them back after errors have been exposed. He just continues to post more — and it works. His audience impressions over the last month alone run into the billions.  

Before the Hamas attacks, Hinkle spread Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. “Putin has God on his side in his quest to defeat NATO satanists,” Hinkle posted on X back in July. While Hinkle no longer posts about Ukraine, he is still serving Russia’s interests. On Nov. 27, for instance, Hinkle faithfully reported that “Hamas has released a Russian-Israeli citizen as a ‘thank you’ to President Putin for supporting Palestine!” More generally, though, the war in Gaza is an opportunity for Hinkle to do what the Kremlin most wants — focus online attention on the West’s seemingly unreflecting and hypocritical support for Israel. 

Hinkle has become a leading figure in that strange, social media-based netherworld of conspiracy theorists who have moved seamlessly from raging (or rather fomenting rage) about Covid vaccines, to raging about U.S. support for Ukraine, to now raging about the war in Gaza.

According to Pekka Kallioniemi, a propaganda researcher from Finland, these issues are “part of the same disinformation package.” In 2022, Kallioniemi began Vatnik Soup, a website and series of tweets in which he exposed, often sardonically, people and organizations he saw as “vatniks,” or useful idiots who would parrot Kremlin talking points online.  

Often, he told me, it is the same people who spread disinformation about Covid and vaccines and then about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, who are now spreading pro-Hamas disinformation. “Their style is distinctive," Kallioniemi said, because they have so successfully adopted the Russian propaganda technique of “high volume and multichannel disinformation.”

Posting on X, Kallioniemi recently noted the rapid proliferation on TikTok of videos purporting to show that Russian troops had been dispatched to “help” Palestinians defend themselves. “This is of course not true,” he wrote. But it didn’t matter. The larger narrative purpose was served — Russia is an ally and friend to those bullied by the West. “October 7,” he said, “was a big win for the Kremlin. It took the attention completely off the invasion of Ukraine. You began almost immediately to hear about an unwillingness to fund Ukraine’s defense indefinitely and about the need for peace talks.”

It is to Russia’s benefit, he added, that deliberate disinformation about Israel be allowed to infect the global conversation. “There has been a coordinated effort,” Kallioniemi told me, “to lower people’s trust in the authorities and to weaken democratic functioning.” A low-trust society, as the U.S. has gradually become, is “very vulnerable to disinformation and deep-state conspiracies,” he said. The pandemic proved to be particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories, giving fresh impetus to a narrative about a globalist elite plotting to take over the world. Globalist narratives tend to be antisemitic, with Jewish people accused of being loyal to supranational entities that enhance control over, say, international banking or the media. In 2020, a study commissioned in the U.K. revealed that antisemitic content was rife in 79% of 27 leading anti-vaccine forums. 

The only long-term fix, Kallioniemi said, is education. “What Finland gets right,” he told me, “is that media literacy, critical thinking and checking sources are introduced very early. Even in pre-school, there is some understanding of the concept of disinformation and its impact.”        

Sometimes, though, education and critical thinking are not strong enough to withstand emotion and ideology. Jewish groups have long claimed that antisemitic disinformation is rampant on American university campuses. Some of these groups have just filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley for enabling “unchecked” antisemitism. If Russian propaganda about Gaza, spread by the likes of Hinkle, is finding an audience, it is because it cleverly exploits existing tensions.  

Dublin’s disinformation riots

Even broad educational achievements and moderate politics can fail to make societies immune to disinformation, as Ireland discovered last week. On Nov. 23, three young children and their teacher were stabbed in Dublin. Far-right groups called for young men to descend onto the scene of the crime, claiming that the stabbings had been committed by an illegal immigrant. The crowd quickly became violent, smashing storefronts and setting police vehicles and buses on fire. It took the police by surprise and hours elapsed before the riot was brought under control. The authorities quickly assigned blame to a far-right faction that they said had been “radicalized” online. It turned out that the attacker was an immigrant, an Algerian who had lived in Ireland for 20 years and was an Irish citizen. For what it’s worth, he was prevented from doing further damage by a much more recent immigrant, a Brazilian delivery driver who knocked him to the ground with his motorcycle helmet. 

If the rioting was shocking, disinformation experts argue that it could have been anticipated. Eileen Culloty, a professor in the communications department at Dublin City University, has written that “the COVID-19 pandemic marked a major turning point for disinformation in Ireland as various conspiracy theorists, anti-establishment actors, and, in particular, right-wing and far-right extremists mobilized online and offline.” Anger over lockdowns and vaccines curdled into anger over immigration, as Ireland took in a disproportionate number of refugees from Ukraine in addition to record numbers of asylum seekers. Contributing to the anger were a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and the belief that local people were being cut off from benefits and forced to compete for scarce resources. Over the last year, there have been a number of protests. Inevitably, the social frustration has been amplified by deliberate and targeted disinformation on social media, including from X owner Elon Musk. As Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called after the riots for new legislation to deal with hate speech, Musk weighed in. “Ironically,” he posted, “the Irish PM hates the Irish people.” Not the first time Musk has aligned himself with right-wing xenophobes. Varadkar’s father, incidentally, was an Indian-born doctor.

Rise of the trolls

And speaking of right-wing xenophobes: Dutch politician Geert Wilders is poised to form a coalition government in the Netherlands, after his party’s surprising success in snap elections earlier this month. If he can persuade anyone to work with him, that is. It is likely to prove challenging because in his public comments about Muslims in particular, Wilders can sound like an internet troll. He says his leadership style will be less confrontational, that he will be a prime minister for all Dutch people. Though he has yet to get the top job, his election success has already been celebrated by his far-right counterparts across Europe, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and France’s Marine Le Pen. He has also received acclaim from fellow Islamophobes in India. Last year, Wilders became a hero for Hindu nationalists when he defended Nupur Sharma, at the time a confident, abrasive spokesperson for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. Sharma had appeared on a television debate show and made unprintably offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad and his third wife, a child bride, which provoked violent demonstrations in India and a diplomatic backlash from important trading partners such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. The BJP ultimately suspended Sharma, but Wilders described her as a “hero who spoke nothing but the truth.” He added that “Hindus should be safe in India. It is their country, their homeland, it’s theirs! India is no Islamic nation.” It’s a sentiment that has won Wilders friends for life among Hindu nationalists in India, however rooted his words are in disinformation and conspiracy theory. 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• Foreign-born media owners are not unheard of in the U.K., including Rupert Murdoch and Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former KGB spy. So why is it causing such consternation that a consortium led by former CNN boss Jeff Zucker and funded largely by the vice president of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is seeking to buy conservative broadsheet The Telegraph? Surely there is something concerning when a senior member of the autocratic government of a country not known for encouraging the free press finances the takeover of a national newspaper in another country? The soft power benefits to the UAE seem obvious, but what will the consequences be for The Telegraph?
• “Across Ukraine at least two dozen Pushkin statues have been removed from their pedestals since the war began,” writes Thomas de Waal in Englesberg Ideas. Given that the 19th-century poet, novelist and dramatist is considered to be Russia’s “national writer,” de Waal adds, “take down Pushkin’s statue and you are challenging Russia as a whole.” This excellent essay makes a compelling case for the need to emancipate rather than fetishize Russian literature.

The post Russian propagandists turn their attention to Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

Nearly anyone can be silenced. On Nov. 9, the leading German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung denounced Indian art critic Ranjit Hoskote for signing an open letter in 2019 that described Zionism as a “racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights.” 

Hoskote was of interest to the German media because he sat on a search committee tasked with appointing the next art director for Documenta. Founded in 1955, Documenta is an internationally significant exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in the historic city of Kassel in central Germany. Within days of the newspaper’s article, Hoskote resigned. Documenta had precipitated his resignation by publicly declaring that his conduct in signing the letter four years ago “was not remotely acceptable” because of its “explicitly anti-Semitic content.”

Even before Hoskote resigned, the Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger stepped down from the search committee, citing her inability to continue to participate, describing the feeling of being “paralyzed under rockets, with the details of the massacre committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, women, and babies, and of the kidnapping of children and babies and civilians, being streamed on my screen during our lunch and coffee breaks.” Though the allegations against Hoskote were public by the time Ettinger resigned, she said they had nothing to do with her decision.

In the wake of both resignations, the remaining four members of the search committee stepped down last week. “In the current circumstances,” they wrote, “we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas.” Intellectual discourse in Germany, they argued, was falling prey to “over-simplification and prejudgments.” Hoskote defended himself in his own lengthy resignation letter. “I feel, strongly,” he said, “that I have been subjected to the proceedings of a kangaroo court.”

Documenta is particularly sensitive to any association with antisemitism because the 2022 edition, intended to foreground perspectives from the Global South, was mired in controversy before the exhibition even opened. An Indonesian collective included caricatures on a 60-foot-long painted banner that the Israeli embassy in Germany said was “Goebbels-style propaganda.” One of the figures on the banner was a soldier with a pig’s head. He wore a Star of David bandana around his neck and a helmet with the word “Mossad” on it, the name of Israel’s intelligence service. In addition, the curators of the exhibition had reportedly not invited any Jewish or Israeli artists to participate. Seven academics conducted an inquiry into events at Documenta, concluding that the exhibition was “an echo chamber for Israel-related antisemitism, and sometimes for pure antisemitism.” 

Keen to avoid a repeat of the 2022 scandal, Documenta urged Hoskote to distance himself from the letter. Instead, he chose to resign, claiming he was “being asked to accept a sweeping and untenable definition of anti-Semitism that conflates the Jewish people with the Israeli state.”

What happened at Documenta mirrors similarly anguished resignations around the world, including within the media. The question we seem unable to answer collectively is this: When does free speech curdle into unacceptable, even hateful speech?

The open letter that Hoskote signed in 2019 condemned an event being held at the Israeli consulate in Mumbai that celebrated the shared purpose of Zionism and Hindutva, the aggressive Hindu nationalist ideology embraced by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hindutva is usually traced back to the early 1920s and the ideas of V.D. Savarkar, an admirer of Nazi Germany.  Just as Savarkar saw Germany as an example of how to deal with minorities, so his Hindutva descendants now see Israel.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters identify closely with Israel, believing that they share a common enemy in Islamist terrorism. Israel, in their view, is a model for a future Hindu nation in which minorities, particularly Muslims, will have to know their place. This attitude has turned India’s traditional support for Palestine on its head. On social media, Hindutva supporters have been at the forefront of spreading Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian disinformation. Police in India have also been quick to arrest pro-Palestinian protestors, with as many as 200 students detained at a single protest in Delhi last month. In the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, the government banned all expressions of pro-Palestinian protest.

Free speech, and the right to offer your opinion, however contested, did not apply to either Hoskote or the pro-Palestinian protesters arrested in Delhi. Instead, they were silenced by a narrative that brooks no departures from the ruling party line — whether in Germany or in India.  

Argentina’s AI election

With elections in the United States and India scheduled next year, Argentina’s recently concluded two-part presidential election offers a dire prognosis — expect artificial intelligence to feature prominently. Both candidates in the run-off, Javier Milei (the eventual winner) and Sergio Massa, used AI technology to generate campaign propaganda. Some of this material was satirical, mocking and stylized, but plenty of it was also misleading. The potential is there to fabricate entirely convincing deep fakes in which a person’s image and voice can be manipulated to say and do things they have never said or done.

Should all AI-generated images now carry a disclaimer? Meta, whose social media sites Facebook and Instagram are major platforms for digital advertising, says that from next year it will require advertisers to declare if and how they’ve used AI. Meta also said it would bar political campaigns and advertisers from using Meta’s generative AI technologies.

Massa’s communications team told The New York Times that their use of AI was strictly intended as entertainment and was clearly labeled. But is the point of AI-generated content not to persuade voters that particular images are real? I’m not sure. I think what draws political campaigns to AI is the volume and variety of messages that can be created. The ease with which images are proliferated at scale means that voters will be provided with a carefully constructed picture of candidates and their rivals — one in which fiction is impossible to separate from fact.

Russia jails yet more critics

With so much of the media’s focus on Gaza, the Kremlin can get on with the business of jailing its critics in relative obscurity. Too little attention was paid to the conviction of Sasha Skolichenko, an artist who was arrested last year for swapping out price tags in supermarkets with anti-war messages. She was arrested just a month after Russia passed a law criminalizing any public comment on the war that contradicted the official narrative. On Nov. 16, Skolichenko was sentenced to seven years in prison. “Everyone sees and knows that it’s not a terrorist you’re trying,” she told the judge. “You’re trying a pacifist.” Since the new law came into effect, nearly 20,000 Russians have been arrested for protesting against war in Ukraine.

Just yesterday, a court in Moscow issued a warrant for the arrest of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk rock protest group. She is reportedly not in Russia right now and at least temporarily safe from the long arm of the Kremlin. Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in a Russian prison back in 2012 for breaking into a Moscow cathedral as part of an anti-Putin protest. The crime Tolokonnikova is now accused of committing seems practically invented for Pussy Riot — “insulting believers’ religious feelings.” 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• The Washington Post has been doing some terrific reporting out of India, shedding light on the contours of India’s increasingly undemocratic shape. In this recent dispatch, Gerry Shih and Anant Gupta ask industry insiders about Netflix and Amazon preferring to self-censor and pull out of politically and religiously sensitive projects rather than risk annoying the Hindu nationalist government and their fervent online troll army.

• There’s one more resignation letter that merits mention this week, and that comes from Anne Boyer. The now-former poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine writes that she would rather resign than continue to work alongside “those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering.” “No more ghoulish euphemisms,” she writes about the coverage of Gaza. “No more warmongering lies.” 

The post Stamping out hate speech or stifling free speech? appeared first on Coda Story.

Inevitably now, these stories are about death and displacement. Last month, Mahmoud al-Naouq, the 25-year-old brother of “We Are Not Numbers” co-founder Ahmed al-Naouq, was killed, along with several other members of his family. Mahmoud had just received a scholarship to go to graduate school in Australia. Al-Naouq is hardly the only local journalist in mourning. A correspondent for Al Jazeera was on the air when he heard that his wife, 7-year-old daughter, teenage son and baby grandson had all been killed in an Israeli airstrike. He is filmed, in tears, standing over his dead son’s body. “I suppose I should thank God,” he says, “that at least some of my family survived.”

Among the thousands of people who have been killed in Gaza are dozens of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 42 journalists and media workers have been killed (as of Tuesday, November 14) during this conflict, 37 of them Palestinian. The CPJ says these numbers are unprecedented since it began keeping such records in 1992. Just as Israel is paying little heed to civilian casualties in Gaza in the course of its stated mission to obliterate Hamas, it refuses to take responsibility for killing journalists. The Israeli Defense Forces told major news wires including Reuters and Agence France-Presse that it could not guarantee the safety of their employees in Gaza. In fact, not only are authorities in Israel not guaranteeing the safety of journalists, they have been conflating journalists with terrorists.

Israeli government officials have openly claimed that Gazan journalists are siding with Hamas and are therefore legitimate targets. On X, Benny Gantz, a former defense minister of Israel and currently part of the country’s wartime cabinet, posted that journalists who knew “about the massacre, and still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered — are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.” 

Based on scanty and circumstantial evidence, a pro-Israel media watchdog accused photojournalists who have worked for the wire services, as well as The New York Times and CNN among others, of having prior knowledge of the October 7 attacks. One of these journalists, Hassan Eslaiah, has found himself singled out. In 2020, he posted a photograph of him being kissed by a Hamas leader believed to have masterminded the October 7 attacks. Eslaiah also took some of the earliest photographs of the Hamas attacks. Both the Associated Press and CNN had used Eslaiah’s photographs but now said they would no longer work with him. “While we have not at this time found reason to doubt the journalistic accuracy of the work he has done for us, we have decided to suspend all ties with him,” said CNN in a statement. 

What evidence Israel has to denigrate and doubt the integrity of the journalists they threaten may be unclear. But what is clear is that it will be left to the consciences of individual journalists to stick up for their Gazan colleagues. 

About 900 journalists have signed an open letter dated November 9 that declares their support for journalists in Gaza. “Without them, many of the horrors on the ground would remain invisible.” The letter writers, “a group of U.S.-based reporters at both local and national newsrooms,” note that “taken with a decades-long pattern of lethally targeting journalists, Israel’s actions show wide scale suppression of speech.” This suppression is abetted, the writers contend, by “Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”  

In 1982, Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said wrote about “those who go on sanctimoniously about terrorism and are silent when it comes to Israel’s almost apocalyptic state terrorism.” Over 40 years later, almost nothing has changed when it comes to the mainstream Western media’s coverage of the conflict. As Israel flattens Gaza, the Western media ties itself in semantic knots — insisting, for instance, on using phrases such as “Hamas-run health ministry” to shroud casualty figures in doubt or worse, to do Israel’s job for it by associating all residents of Gaza with terrorism. It is, as the letter writers put it, “journalistic malpractice” to fail or refuse to tell the whole story. The people who are best able to tell the story and whose voices are so rarely prioritized are in Gaza, silenced by both Israeli brutality and Western media outlets still unable to shake their biases and narrative tropes.

Ukraine’s forgotten children

Russia’s notorious children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, has been inviting foreign journalists from the United States, Finland and Japan to visit camps in which thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of abducted Ukrainian children are held. In March, the International Criminal Court put a warrant out for Lvova-Belova’s arrest, alongside that of her boss, Vladimir Putin, for unlawful deportation of children, a war crime. But this has yet to stop them. And now they’re putting the children on display. A documentary that recently aired on British television showed how the children were often duped into thinking they were being taken to a holiday camp and then subjected to “re-education,” including being told to speak only Russian and singing patriotic Russian songs in front of inspectors. 

Attempts to portray life at these camps as idyllic will strike most viewers as obvious propaganda, but Lvova-Belova is not giving up trying to persuade us otherwise. In social media posts — which my colleague Ivan Makridin translated for me — she recently described the meeting between the journalists and the children as a “mentorship” opportunity. The young Ukrainians apparently asked their foreign visitors what they thought of the camp. “I like it very much,” Lvova-Belova quotes a Japanese journalist as saying. “I think your faces are all beautiful, cheerful and happy.”

When you know you are meeting children who are being held captive and who are not speaking freely while the press officer is in the room, why go through with it? While I understand the journalistic impulse of wanting to see the camps and meet the children, I find the ethics of agreeing to go on a guided tour dubious. Especially when Lvova-Belova is going to twist your presence into “proof” that these children are somehow better off at a camp in Russia than with their families. Back in May, Coda’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava criticized Vice for agreeing to interview Lvova-Belova and failing to hold her to account. Instead, Antelava wrote, Vice gave Lvova-Belova and the Kremlin “a platform to spin and legitimize their narrative.” This latest invitation to foreign journalists looks like more of the same.

India’s creepy deep fakes

Last week, a Bollywood film star’s face was attached to another woman’s body in a salacious deep fake that went viral. It caused outrage, at least in part because of how convincing the video was and how easy it now seemed to use generative artificial intelligence to spread mischievous misinformation. Celebrities, the government and national newspaper editors made public calls for draft legislation that would punish the creators of fake videos. But that’s easier said than done — defining “fakeness” under the law is harder than it sounds — and any law attempting to rein in this kind of material could pave the way for government overreach. It could also add fuel to the Indian government’s case against end-to-end encryption, since this kind of technology could help mask the identities of people creating deep fakes. If this should come to pass, the pitfalls for privacy and opportunities for mass surveillance will be significant, and could have much more profound effect on many more millions of people than a handful of salacious videos have had.

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• I enjoyed this lengthy meander through the origins of machine-generated text by the academic Richard Hughes Gibson. In the 1960s, Gibson reveals, the author Italo Calvino was already prepared to concede that the “literature machine” might match or outdo the human writer. What the machine couldn’t do, though, was replicate the reader and the particularity the reader brings to the text — the sudden associations and minor epiphanies. “Calvino,” writes Gibson, “anticipated the urgent question of our time: Who will attend to the machines’ writing?”
• The International Olympic Committee is hopping mad. A slick four-part Netflix documentary, narrated by Tom Cruise no less, reveals that corruption within the IOC is destroying the Olympics. Except, the “documentary” is fake: Cruise’s voiceover is AI generated and no such program can be found on Netflix. The nine-minute episodes were uploaded onto a largely Russian language-dominated Telegram channel, which unlike YouTube has not taken the videos down. Is it a coincidence that they started emerging after the IOC banned the Russian Olympic Committee for its decision last month to recognize regional federations in occupied regions such as Kherson and Donetsk? This inquiring mind wants to know.

The post Gaza’s journalists, caught between bombs and disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

In the last incarnation of this newsletter, Coda’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava worked each week to examine the disinformation being generated around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Deliberate distortion of the truth had long been a weapon in Vladimir Putin's arsenal, but the war laid bare just how ineffective we were at countering it. Fact-checking alone is of little use in the face of targeted lies intended to sow division and advance particular narratives. 

We relaunch now as the war in Gaza appears to have destroyed any lingering optimism about citizen journalism, open-source intelligence and the free flow of information helping to dispel disinformation rather than be hijacked by bad actors. In this newsletter, we will continue to scrutinize narratives and the way information is deployed by people in power.

I'm based in New Delhi, which is fast becoming one of the disinformation capitals of the world. We will be watching India closely, but the Coda team is scattered around the globe — in Rome, Istanbul, London, Washington, D.C. and beyond. The patterns of misinformation we will examine here are global as are their impacts.

The online discourse is dominated by unreliable narrators as never before. 2024 is an election year in India and the United States, and sophisticated disinformation is likely to play major roles in both. Understanding and shedding light on how narrative is manipulated and why is work we all have to be prepared to do.

Why India is awash with anti-Palestine disinformation

Talk of unreliable narrators brings us with a sad inevitability to India’s Hindu nationalist troll army. On Sunday, October 29, near the coastal city of Kochi in the southern state of Kerala, a meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses was bombed. Three people died and more than 50 were injured. 

Almost immediately, Hindu nationalists — including those within India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party — went online to cast blame. At the time the bomb went off in Kerala, the state’s chief minister was in Delhi at a protest to express solidarity with Palestine — India’s traditional position, albeit one that is now contrarian because the BJP stands firmly with Israel. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, wrote on X that the Kerala chief minister’s “shameless appeasement politics” meant he was “sitting in Delhi and protesting against Israel, when in Kerala open calls by Terrorist Hamas for Jihad is causing attacks and bomb blasts on innocent Christians.” Chandrashekhar, despite his important role as a government minister, seemed to have no qualms speculating about the Kochi bombing and assigning guilt. 

Kerala is governed by a left-wing coalition, making it a favorite target of Hindu nationalist scorn. Amit Malviya, head of the BJP’s National Information and Technology department, followed his party colleague’s lead. The Kerala chief minister “seems more worried about Israel defending itself against Hamas, a terrorist group,” wrote Malviya, than Christians being attacked in Kochi. Alongside the BJP bigwigs, a chorus of Hindu nationalists made their feelings clear.  

The day before the bombings, in another part of Kerala, a pro-Palestine rally had been held. Khaled Mashal, the former head of Hamas, addressed the crowd virtually from his home in Qatar. “Together,” he said, “we will defeat the Zionists.” Posting a video of the rally on X, a popular Hindu nationalist account drew a link with the bombing of the Jehovah’s Witness meeting. “Jews are targeted,” the account claimed falsely. “Do we even need an inquiry to know who did it???” Of course, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Jewish and, as it turned out, the Kochi bombing had nothing to do with Muslims, much less Hamas. 

A former Jehovah’s Witness confessed on Facebook and then to the Kerala police that he was behind the bombings. The police are currently verifying his claims. But Chandrasekhar, the cabinet minister, doubled down. Quoting former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he wrote on X: “You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” In 2011, Clinton warned the Pakistani government about harboring terrorist networks. Chandrasekhar used her words to argue that “appeasement politics” – shorthand for the supposed liberties extended to minorities, particularly Muslims, at the expense of Hindus – had somehow led to the Kochi blast. 

Blaming Muslims for the Kochi bombing, regardless of the facts, is in keeping with the disinformation techniques frequently used by Hindu nationalists. Hindu nationalist trolls have been prolific and persistent spreaders of false anti-Palestinian information about the war in Gaza. It advances their narrative that Islam and terror are synonymous and that India, with its large Muslim minority, is in the same boat as Israel. 

This is a new, specifically Hindu nationalist position, and it has never been the official Indian position. In fact, India, with its long standing desire to be a leading voice of the decolonized Global South, has always supported the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. India  was first among non-Arab countries to forge diplomatic relationships with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (as far back as 1975) and promptly recognized Palestinian statehood in 1988, after Arafat’s declaration of independence. 

It wasn’t until 1992 that India formally established diplomatic relations with Israel. In 2017, Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, signaling his desire to forge a deep friendship between countries that he said had much in common. Modi’s warmth towards Israel reflected both India’s relatively recent reliance on Israeli defense and cybersecurity products — spyware among them — as well as the admiration that Hindu nationalists have for what they see as a muscular state unafraid of militarily asserting its interests. Israel, Hindu nationalists say, is a model for their own dream of establishing India as a Hindu nation.

It’s an ideological position that helps explain why on October 27, India chose to abstain rather than vote, like most other countries, to pass a non-binding resolution to seek a “humanitarian truce” in Gaza. Sharad Pawar, a veteran politician, criticized India’s abstention as “the result of total confusion in the Indian government’s policy.” 

The Modi government’s official line is that it has suffered intensely from terrorism and now takes a “zero-tolerance approach to terrorism.” But Islamophobia is at the heart of Hindu nationalist support for Israel's war in Gaza. And India’s Hindu nationalist trolls appear to be willing to tell whatever lie is necessary to advance their single-point agenda. “What Israel is facing today,” posted the official BJP account on X on October 7, “India suffered between 2004-2014. Never forgive, never forget.” 

This is politicized misinformation by the governing party of India. The years referred to span the two terms of Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, the message being that without the BJP India is vulnerable to Islamic terror. Not surprisingly, a BJP member later argued that “Hindu nationalists see Israel’s war on Gaza as their own.” 

Past Indian governments have labeled insurgents of all religions (and none) as terrorists at one time or another, and terrorist activity in India far predates 2004. But it suits the BJP to act as if it alone can protect Indians from terror. By claiming that Indian Hindus are in the same existential struggle as Israeli Jews — both facing down Islamic terrorism — Hindu nationalists, including those in government, are advancing their narrative that India must abandon its constitution and become a Hindu nation. War in Gaza gives them the opportunity to use misinformation tactics that have been perfected in domestic politics on the global stage.

The BJP’s chokehold on information

Last month, the X account belonging to the Indian American Muslim Council was censored in India after a request from the Indian government. This effectively means that users in India will be barred from seeing any IAMC tweets, as well as those of the IAMC’s ally, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Hindus for Human Rights. Both organizations have been critical of Indian government policies and drawn attention to minority rights and caste issues that Modi sweeps under the carpet on his visits to Western capitals. “We were not expecting it,” IAMC’s Executive Director Rasheed Ahmed told my colleague Avi Ackermann about being booted off X in India. “But we were not surprised.” By “complying with these censorship requests,” Ahmed wrote in an email, “X and Elon Musk have effectively abetted the Indian Government’s effort to expand its authoritarian censorship campaign overseas.” 

The Indian government is trigger happy when it comes to depriving people of access to information, shutting down the internet a world-leading 84 times in 2022. It has blocked the social media accounts of credible if critical sources, including journalists, on the grounds of national security. At the same time, the government ignores trolling and the spreading of disinformation by its Hindu nationalist supporters. And — in the words of Apar Gupta, founder of the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation — has framed digital data laws to “enable unchecked state surveillance.” The Modi government is a disinformation triple threat. 

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• This piece by Nilesh Christopher in Rest of World is simultaneously funny and scary, though by the end more scary than funny. In India, Instagram reels are being made with voice cloning tools powered by artificial intelligence that show Modi singing hit songs in numerous Indian languages from Punjabi to Tamil. As Christopher points out, “the videos, though lighthearted, serve a larger political purpose.” By cloning his voice, Modi can be made accessible to parts of the country where most people don’t speak Hindi, the language in which Modi gives most of his speeches. With elections coming up next year, this could be a boon for him in south India, where Modi has little support.   

• “Taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction,” wrote Pamela Paul in The New York Times about the decision to not publicly honorthe Palestinian author Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair for having won a German literary prize. In a different life, I edited a couple of short stories by Shibli for a little magazine. When I reached out to her, Shibli was gracious enough to thank me (twice!) for my concern. As for the cancellation of the ceremony — we truly live in morally vacuous times.

The post Why India is awash with anti-Palestine disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

An interview with Lvova-Belova is a legitimate journalistic enterprise but there should have been red flags the moment the Russian government agreed to make her available to Vice. The Russian government has massively cracked down on independent journalists, recently jailing Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent. Why was it so willing to allow Vice to speak to Lvova-Belova? Did the Kremlin anticipate that she would be allowed to make her case to a Western audience? What could have been a unique opportunity for Vice to challenge Lvova-Belova became instead a platform for an alleged war criminal and an example of how journalism can be used as a tool of disinformation.

“Are you a war criminal?” is the opening question of the interview. Lvova-Belova laughs. “That’s very funny,” she says. “I am a mother.” Dressed in white, 38-year-old Lvova-Belova is given the space she needs to dismiss every allegation against her. She comes across as polite, reasonable and driven, first and foremost, by her motherly instincts. She is after all a mother to 23 children, 18 of them adopted, including a teenage boy from Mariupol who she adopted in November 2022. 

In keeping with her self-image, her voice is steely as she talks about how little Ukraine did to safeguard Ukrainian children. And she smiles as she talks about her own “love” for Ukrainian children, including the boy she adopted. Throughout the interview, she is permitted to position herself exactly as the Kremlin state media portrays her — a passionate humanitarian concerned about children’s rights. When Lvova-Belova tells Vice that Ukraine did not arrange humanitarian corridors from Mariupol, the reporter replies that “Ukraine disputes this claim,” missing an opportunity to remind Lvova-Belova — and Vice viewers — that Ukraine couldn’t establish any humanitarian corridors because Russia was relentlessly bombing civilian targets.

In another example, footage is shown of Ukrainian children being wheeled out onto a stage to thank Russian soldiers for “saving hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol” in front of a crowd of cheering Putin supporters in Moscow’s vast Luzhniki stadium. The Vice reporter asks: “Are these children being used as propaganda tools by the Russian state?” Employing her most reasonable tone, Lvova-Belova says the children were thanking the soldiers for “evacuating” them from a war zone. “Since when,” she asks unchallenged, “do words of gratitude constitute propaganda?” 

The interview is an extraordinary example of how the right mix of naivety and complacency can turn a well-intentioned journalist into a messenger for an authoritarian state. Good journalism challenges lies with facts, presents information in context and, yes, listens to all sides but not uncritically. The Vice report fails on all of these fronts. Lvova-Belova’s lies go largely uncontested. Context is scarce. And the Ukrainian side is gestured at but isn’t called on to speak for itself. Vice was also loose with the facts. In a throwaway line in the text that accompanied the video interview, Vice accepted that Crimea was a part of Russia. It later issued a correction, acknowledging that “Crimea is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine.” 

Isobel Yeung, the Vice interviewer, in a tweet promoting the interview with Lvova-Belova, wrote: “We feel it’s important to hold the powerful to account.” It is. Yeung did well to secure the interview. But even making allowances for the fact that Russia is not a comfortable place right now to visit as a journalist, what Yeung failed to do was to hold Lvova-Belova to account. Instead, Vice, which coincidentally is also headed for bankruptcy after years of mismanagement and scandals, gave her and the Kremlin a platform to spin and legitimize their narrative. 

WHAT WE ARE WATCHING: 

• Dmitry Kiselyov, Putin’s propaganda tsar, is very upset about the fate of Tucker Carlson. In his latest show, watched by millions across Russia, he asked who would “clean up America’s transgender garbage now?” Carlson has been a darling of Russian state media and his firing, according to Kiselyov, was “an example of cancel culture.” According to Kiselyov, Tucker was canceled for his attempts to save the United States from cruelty, greed and cowardice.
  
• As Sudan enters its third week of fighting, there is increasing evidence that the Russian mercenary group Wagner has been supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces with missiles to aid their fight against the country’s army, according to CNN. But this nuanced discussion from the International Crisis Group on the situation in Sudan injects some healthy skepticism about Wagner’s possible role in the conflict.
  
• South Africa is pushing for a “virtual” Putin visit to solve the International Criminal Court arrest warrant dilemma. Moscow and Pretoria are engaged in high-level talks that could see Putin avoid traveling to South Africa to avert a diplomatic fallout over the warrant.
  
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and China’s President Xi Jinping finally had their long-awaited telephone call. China will be sending a special envoy to Ukraine in an effort to step up Beijing’s role as a “peace broker.” We covered Xi’s visit to Moscow earlier in the spring and explained why so many Ukraine watchers are skeptical about Beijing’s vague 12-point peace plan. This Global Times editorial, though, argues that China can provide a path to peace “full of Eastern wisdom.” 

And before we wrap up for today, make sure to read and tweet:

• Coda’s Amanda Coakley, reporting from Ukraine, as she explores how the LGBTQ rights debate is testing the country’s commitment to Europe.
  
• This thought-provoking piece by Alexander Wells on Australia’s search for national identity in the trenches of WWI and the warning Australian memory culture offers for the United States.
  
• This poignant letter by Financial Times journalist Polina Ivanova to her friend Evan Gershkovich in a Russian jail. 

The post How not to interview a war criminal appeared first on Coda Story.

From Nigeria to Kenya, news outlets across the African continent celebrated Russia’s decision to cancel Africa’s $20 billion dollar debt. The news was announced by Vladimir Putin himself at an international parliamentary conference in Moscow titled “Russia-Africa in a multipolar world.” Putin also spoke about doubling trade with the continent and increasing the number of scholarships for African students to study in Russia. But it was the debt write off that grabbed the headlines. And that story is fake news, a classic piece of spin and disinformation piled upon a tiny kernel of truth from the distant past. Many of the African newsrooms that ran the story missed the fact that this debt has been written off many times before. The debt was owed to the Soviet Union when it collapsed in the 1990s. Since then, Russia, the self-appointed successor of the USSR on the global stage, has regularly relieved Africa of the burden of the debt it owes to a country that no longer exists. This piece by a Nigerian analyst puts together examples dating back over 20 years of Russian officials generously forgiving Africa's debt. The number cited is always $20 billion and the fact that it is owed to the Soviet Union is never mentioned. 

Russia’s charm offensive in Africa taps into the continent’s genuine disillusionment with the West, but it is based on false narratives and half-truths. Surprisingly, one person willing to call out the Kremlin on its duplicity is Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, a notorious private militia that is closely tied to the Russian state. The Wagner Group has an extensive presence in Africa, particularly in the Sahel region, which stretches west to east across the continent. While Putin has been promising a bright new dawn in Russia-Africa relations, Prigozhin has criticized Russian officials for being all talk and no action. “French and other players on the African continent are many times, ten times, hundreds of times more active than we are,” Prigozhin wrote on Telegram. Some suggest that Prigozhin, increasingly outspoken about the Kremlin’s failings, has political aspirations and wants to project himself as a statesman and potential leader of Russia. 

PRIGOZHIN PLOTS POWER GRAB 

By: Frankie Vetch

Last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin was reported to have been trying to secure control of a political party in Russia as part of his long-standing desire to acquire political power and presence in Moscow. The question is, will the Kremlin further enable the erratic, unpredictable owner of the Wagner Group of mercenaries?

Prigozhin doesn’t lack chutzpah. Last month, he wrote magnanimously to the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, inviting him to “support Wagner PMC’s efforts in ensuring safety and security in Africa by sponsoring a new project named Wagner Safe Africa (WSA), in which you can invest, thereby saving American taxpayer money.” Yes, you read that correctly. The leader of an organization the U.S. has designated as a “significant transnational criminal organization” for its role in conducting mass executions, rape and child abductions in the Central African Republic and Mali has sent a request offering Washington the opportunity to invest in those very same operations.

Certainly, Prigozhin has been more successful in Africa than in Ukraine where the Wagner Group is fighting a long, bloody and costly battle over the eastern town of Bakhmut. A recent Bloomberg article indicated that he may be considering shifting his attention, and troops, away from Ukraine and toward Africa. Two confusing recent statements may be further evidence of his intentions. On April 7, he wrote about how Russia was far less active than the U.S. and France in Africa, arguing there was a need to change this. A week later, Prigozhin said the ideal option would be for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine, claiming Russia had already achieved its goals.

In Africa, the Wagner Group functions as the Kremlin’s sword, providing military assistance where necessary, but also as the vanguard of Russian disinformation and propaganda. In December, my colleague Amanda Coakley and I wrote about how French-Beninese influencer Kemi Seba was helping to spread the Kremlin’s line on the war in Ukraine. A recent investigation conducted by several organizations, including the news outlet Jeune Afrique, uncovered just how deep the relationship between Prigozhin and Seba runs. The investigation reads like a script for a spy movie, with Seba assigned a designated handler, provided with lavish trips to Russia and paid thousands of dollars in return for spreading disinformation to his followers on social media, much of it designed to reinforce anti-French sentiments.

It is easy to see why many believe Russia’s approach is working. In October 2022, civilians and troops took to the streets waving Russian flags in Burkina Faso. By February, French troops were forced to leave Burkina Faso, after years of providing security, raising fears that, as had previously happened in Mali, Wagner mercenaries would fill the void. Anti-Western sentiments are growing. Last month, Burkina Faso suspended France’s state-owned international news channel, France 24.  

“Russia has won in Africa,” one senior European diplomat, who did not want to be named, told my colleague Natalia Antelava. But Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, disagrees. He told me that despite the Wagner Group’s presence in Mali and Burkina Faso, its overall influence in the Sahel region is limited. 

On a visit to Africa last month, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million investment in West African security. Many countries know that if they work with Wagner, they risk losing funding from the U.S., which recently tried to force Sudan and Libya to expel Wagner mercenaries. But, as conflict erupts in Sudan, it might have been too little too late. The Wagner Group has been in Sudan for years, allegedly mining Sudanese gold, which now helps to pay for the war in Ukraine. And, down the road, may help Prigozhin finance a bid for power in Moscow.

DON’T MISS:

• This piece from Meduza that looks at the life of Vladimir Kara-Muza, a Russian opposition politician who fought the Russian elite, survived two attempts on his life and has now been found guilty of treason and “spreading fake news” (read: condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine). Kara-Muza has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
  
• This piece from Reuters on a new proposed government-backed fact checking unit in India that promises not to silence journalists.

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

Evan Gershkovich, our colleague from the Wall Street Journal, faces up to 20 years in prison on absurd espionage charges. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Thank you to all the Disinfo Matters readers who have already done so. If you haven’t, please consider it. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention. 

The post Wagner boss Prigozhin bids for more power in Moscow appeared first on Coda Story.

I’ll describe it to you so that you don’t have to watch it: One of the students in the audience asked the Dalai Lama if he could hug him. The octogenarian invited the boy to come up to the stage. As the boy leaned in toward the Dalai Lama to pay his respects, the Dalai Lama planted a kiss on the boy’s lips, then put his forehead against the boy’s, stuck his tongue out and said: “Suck my tongue.” The boy moved away while the Dalai Lama giggled and pulled him in for another hug. 

The Dalai Lama’s office issued an apology, and media outlets around the world were quick to resurface the 2014 BBC article that explained how sticking your tongue out, while rude in most cultures, is a greeting in Tibet. Lhagyari Namgyal Dolkar, a Tibetan activist and member of the Tibetan parliament in exile, stretched the bounds of credulity to “argue” that the Dalai Lama’s bizarre behavior could not be interpreted through a “vividly westernized” lens. 

At a time when the United States has been demanding that China restart talks over Tibetan self-determination with the Dalai Lama, this video is proving to be a gift to Chinese propaganda. The state-funded Global Times almost immediately argued that the video “raises concerns about the Dalai Lama’s private life” and that the only reason we don’t know of other occasions when he must have “asked someone to kiss his tongue publicly” is because of his “carefully crafted” image in the Western media.

“After decades of channeling funds to the Dalai Lama (via the CIA and associated organizations) as part of an ongoing campaign to weaken and destabilize China, will Western liberals finally feel a bit of buyers’ remorse?” asked a Western influencer who runs a pro-China platform called Friends of Socialist China.

But it’s not just Chinese propagandists who seized on the video to promote their political agendas. In the United States, right-wing conspiracy theorists have been pushing a dark fantasy about a pedophilic global elite, mostly comprising Democrats and Hollywood stars. Vladimir Putin echoed some of these themes in his rambling state of the nation speech in February, when he said that in the West “the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to pedophilia, are advertised as the norm.”

Unsurprisingly, on Twitter, if you search for “Dalai Lama,” among the top entries are tweets from accounts with names like “End Wokeness” and close to a million followers that compare Joe Biden to the Dalai Lama and use the video to encourage you to draw the conclusion that Biden, like the Dalai Lama, a celebrity darling, touches children inappropriately.

In Kyiv, A Spring Offensive is in the Air

By: Amanda Coakley

I recently returned from Ukraine following an assignment that took me across the country. At the dawn of spring, it was an interesting time to be there. The pride of having successfully made it through the winter, despite Russia’s targeting of key energy infrastructure was palpable among the people I met. In Kyiv, the spring air had returned the city’s coffee crowd to the pavements, the restaurants were buzzing, and at times it seemed the capital had returned to normal. 

But signs of the war were everywhere. The air siren continued to cry intermittently across the city, soliciting nods of indifference from residents unless there was additional evidence of a Russian attack. And talk was always there about the frontline. 

Two issues dominated my discussions with sources and friends. The first: Would Bakhmut, a city in eastern Donbas, hold in the face of mounting losses? The second: Theories on how the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive would manifest. On this, everyone had an opinion. It would focus on Melitopol, a colleague told me. The southern city has been under Russian occupation since February 2022 and is a strategic hub. Another source told me earnestly that they believed an amphibious counteroffensive could be on the table. “It might be like D-Day!” they claimed.

This environment of snap analysis points to a serious obstacle when covering the military side of the war in Ukraine — everyone is suddenly an expert. Strategic disinformation is a part of every war and Ukraine is no exception. When a major leak of classified Pentagon documents, which included intelligence on the war in Ukraine, made the headlines earlier this month, a senior Ukrainian official claimed they were inauthentic, had “nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans” and were based on “fictitious information” spread by the Russians. 

The war is stress-testing journalists’ relationships with even the most trusted official sources, as a push-and-pull between protecting the war effort and documenting history plays out. Everyone knows the enemy religiously monitors international and national media, but it is still the reporter's job to write the first draft of history. While being fed strategic disinformation is one thing, being steered to cover the need of the day is another. For journalists often starved of official information and, at times, military access being told to “stay quiet about any counter-offensives” one minute and being given access to report on ammunition shortages the next throws up the question of how the Ukrainian authorities see the role of journalists in this war. 

One example of this is the traffic light system on access to the frontline, which was announced in March. According to the guidelines, reporters would be prohibited from reporting in red zones, require the presence of press officers in yellow zones and work freely in green zones. Reporters without Borders pushed back. “Journalists are denied access to certain areas on a discretionary decision, while one of the major issues since the start of the war has been the dissemination of reliable information obtained thanks to journalists being able to work freely,” they said in a statement. 

On the ground there is still confusion around the traffic light system, and it has been removed from some official resources. The relationship reporters have with individual military press officers remains key.

Ukrainians have made a huge effort to keep the war on the international agenda. Overnight desk reporters have become war reporters, covering a war that is threatening their lives and the existence of their country. Combating the relentless tide of Russian disinformation has added to the complexity of this task. But the fog of war hangs heavy in Ukraine.

DON’T MISS:

• This fantastic op-ed by Maria Ressa and Nishant Lalwani that not only explains that “tyranny’s propagandists are winning” but also offers a solution on how to counter them.
  
• This scoop from RFE/RL about the leaked files that show how China and Russia trade tricks and collaborate on internet censorship.
  
• And this deeply awkward (and rather amusing) video of Vladimir Putin asking for, waiting for and failing to get a round of applause at a meeting with ambassadors in Moscow. It was so embarrassing that state media had to explain the silence, saying that “at protocol meetings such as this people don’t usually clap at all.” But that’s just not true. You don’t have to understand Russian to read the room.

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

Many thanks to all Disinfo Matters readers who have written to Evan Gershkovich, our Wall Street Journal colleague who is in a Moscow jail, facing up to 20 years in prison on absurd espionage charges. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention.

The post The Dalai Lama video is a gift to propagandists appeared first on Coda Story.

Memes and AI-generated images of Trump retiring happily in China are going wild on Chinese social media. People on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, are calling the former president a "Comrade Nation Builder” and say his indictment made the U.S. look so bad — and China so good — that he might as well just hang up his MAGA hat and join the Communist Party of China. 

On Sunday, the Ukraine war came to St. Petersburg when a bomb exploded in a cafe. Vladlen Tatarsky (real name: Maxim Fomin) was a middle-aged, pro-war blogger. A seemingly unlikely target for assassination, he was caught on video accepting a small statue as a gift at a meeting of pro-war conservatives. It was a bomb. A woman has since been arrested for apparently bringing the statue into the cafe. Tatarsky was one of the many obscure bloggers who rose to fame after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, turning Telegram into a major platform for war disinformation. 

TELEGRAMMING WAR PROPAGANDA 

By: Ivan Makridin

The recently assassinated blogger Vladlen Tatarsky liked to criticize President Vladimir Putin. On his fiercely anti-Ukrainian, pro-war channel on Telegram, he bashed the Russian president and other Kremlin officials for not being tough enough in what he described as a “Holy War against the Antichrist.” 

Before the full scale invasion of Ukraine, Telegram, run by the reclusive Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, was seen as a platform for Russian liberals — a “hotbed of liberalism,” in the words of the Russian state media. Next door, in Belarus, Telegram played a crucial role three years ago in the uprising against the country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s closest ally. And then the Belarusian government figured out how to turn the platform into a weapon against the opposition. 

Telegram has followed a similar path in Russia, transforming from an alternative platform into a platform for war-mongering and propaganda. 

Vladlen Tatarsky, who had nearly 600,000 followers on Telegram, was part of a new wave of bloggers who became popular for their gung-ho coverage of the war. They signposted their supposed independence by fiercely criticizing the Kremlin’s management of the war, although always from the position that Russia was not being forceful enough. But Tatarsky was definitely a tool of Russian propaganda, used to fan the hatred and misplaced patriotism driving the popular support for the war.

It is a strategy that proved to be remarkably effective. A recent investigation by the Riga-based Russian and English-language website Meduza revealed that the Russian authorities set up a front organization, a non-profit called “Dialogue,” and tasked it with sending instructions to individual bloggers and media groups on how to cover the war. These individuals — supposedly offering their unfettered, patriotic views on the war — were actually mere mouthpieces. Tatarsky’s channel was just one example. 

Another is a channel run by Readovka. Just a few years ago, Readovka was a small, regional and independent media outlet. It was hard to pin down politically but, as the journalist Irina Pankratova wrote, “never considered a pro-government outlet.” Since the invasion of Ukraine, Readovka has rebranded itself as ultra patriotic and is now enjoying more success, renown and reach than it ever has. Currently, Readovka has more than 1.5 million subscribers on Telegram.

Now, the Readovka feed, like many other pro-war Telegram channels, includes propaganda posts about the secret biological weapons allegedly developed and stored in Ukraine and about the White House forcing TikTokers to blame Putin for the rise of gas prices in the U.S. 

In exchange for their loyalty, Readovka's creators were given the contract to supply winter coats from China to the Russian Defense Ministry and the Wagner PMC group. Individual bloggers like Tatarsky also received perks, including funded opportunities to embed themselves with the Russian military or the mercenaries of the Wagner Group. In fact, Tatarsky, like other bloggers, grew close enough to the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin to start parroting the more radical sentiment that a timid Kremlin was holding back certain Russian military success with its tactics. 

Pankratova, an investigative reporter with The Bell, told me these pro-war Telegram channels are not homogenous. While they all have in common a blind faith and belief in the rightness of the invasion of Ukraine, they often disagree about how the war is being conducted. Some of the channels, she added, also employ credible journalists and produce accurate work. “But then,” she said, “the next piece will be blatant disinformation.”

As an observer of these channels myself, I am often surprised by the vigor with which they express disagreement with and disapproval of the Kremlin. These bloggers bicker and argue about battlefield tactics and about government funds being misspent and criticize both the Kremlin and Putin so harshly that I’ve sometimes wondered how they don’t get into trouble.

Perhaps it’s because they never disapprove of the decision to invade Ukraine, they never wonder if the war is wrong. Not surprisingly, a day after Tatarsky was murdered in that St. Petersburg cafe, Putin posthumously awarded him with the Medal for Courage, for valor displayed on the field of battle, even if that battle was being fought from behind a keyboard.

WHAT WE ARE WATCHING

• In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is a general in the army, has been causing his father a number of foreign policy issues with his erratic tweets. Last year, for example, he threatened Kenya with invasion. Now he is calling on Uganda to send soldiers to “defend Moscow if it’s ever threatened by the Imperialists!” His father is plenty pro-Russian himself, as we reported last week.
  
• It is quite incredible to see footage of hundreds of Russians being allowed to demonstrate. These rare protests in the Kostino-Ukhtomsky district of Moscow have not been broken up by the police or raided by security services. Of course, this seemingly government-sanctioned protest has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. These concerned citizens are upset about the plans to build a new mosque in the area. Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the Muslim leader of the Chechen Republic, suggested that the protesters be mobilized and sent to the front.
  
• This Vice documentary is about anti-Xinjiang propaganda that hides behind young women influencers posting about puppies, travel and make-up. If you are more of a reader than watcher, here’s a piece from Coda’s archives on the same subject.
  
• This video investigation from our partners at Ukrainskaya Pravda tracked down the wife of Russia’s deputy defense minister spending time in Courchevel, the world’s ski capital, “while her husband orders attacks on Ukrainian cities.”

WRITING TO EVAN GERSHKOVICH

The arrest of the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia has sent a chill down the spine of all journalists who cover the region. Evan’s friends and colleagues are encouraging people from around the world to write to him in prison. Evan is allowed to receive letters, although only in Russian. But you can email your message to FreeGershkovich@gmail.com and it will be translated, printed out and mailed to the Moscow prison where Evan is spending two months in pre-trial detention. He faces up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges.  

And I also want to encourage you to read this piece that Evan wrote for Coda back in 2019, when he reported on Putin’s then brand new charm offensive on African nations. “To set Russia apart from the pack, Putin is leaning on a unique pitch: that only Russian support can help protect the sovereignty of African countries,” Evan wrote. A remarkably prescient take, given the extent to which Putin’s bid on the African continent has paid off since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The post Russian keyboard generals turn Telegram into a pro-war propaganda platform appeared first on Coda Story.

“The Western values that reek of Sodom are rejected not only by Russia but by an increasing number of countries,” reads this editorial. It goes on to praise not only Ugandan MPs but also Hungary’s Viktor Orban and governments across the Islamic world which “categorically reject” the West’s “Sodomite agenda.” 

The law is a disaster for people in Uganda and across the continent where many are already pushing to follow suit. In Uganda, homosexuality was already illegal. The new law, though, introduces many new criminal offenses punishable by life imprisonment and the death penalty. In a chilling, Stalinist move, it also obliges friends, family and members of the community to report individuals in same-sex relationships to the authorities. 

Thousands of miles away in Moscow, politicians are celebrating a geopolitical victory, which they see as the direct result of years of their hard, methodical work.

It was about a decade ago that Russia began crafting what would eventually turn into a global anti-LGBTQ hate campaign. It began as a domestic political experiment, when Vladimir Putin, faced with growing dissent, looked for a scapegoat. Gay men and women provided an easy target.

Not necessarily a homophobe himself, Putin turned homophobia into a weapon to strengthen his rule. His government gave an unprecedented platform to Russian traditionalists and Orthodox activists to push for anti-LGBTQ legislation. 

In news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows and feature films, Russian state television was suddenly spending hundreds of hours equating homosexuality to pedophilia, and both to the lapsed values of liberal democracy and the West. Russians, indifferent toward homosexuality in the past, were told to have an opinion. The word “homosexual” or “gay” was replaced with “sodomite,” and experts on Russian television regularly announced that homosexuality inevitably led to incest and pedophilia. As my colleague Katia Patin reported in 2016, a once marginal idea that pedophilia was linked to homosexuality was suddenly presented as a scientific fact across the full spectrum of Russian media. 

Once the state media turned homosexuality into a nationwide emergency, Putin stepped in to save Russia. He positioned himself as the protector of traditional family values, both at home and abroad. 

The false juxtaposition of homosexuality with family values became the single most effective weapon of global Russian disinformation. Because who doesn’t love their family? Who doesn’t want their children protected? The message resonated powerfully among traditional communities in Russia but also beyond, turning people wary of homosexuality into true haters and vigilantes. It also gave Moscow incredible access to the Christian right in the United States, influence that would eventually lead to election interference in 2016. 

By 2016, the “LGBT” acronym became shorthand for anyone representing pro-Western opposition in Russia or neighboring countries. Putin had successfully weaponized homophobia to squash political dissent, exert influence on neighboring nations, bash the West and unleash violence in Ukraine. 

From 2014, pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine would regularly tell me that they were defending Ukraine from “Sodom” and the inevitable invasion by “gay troops.” Europe, they told me, stood for “gender fascism” and homosexuality. “Would you want to be forced into a marriage with a woman?” one man asked in this film for the BBC. Arguing seemed futile. 

Almost 10 years on, these global reactions to Uganda’s horrifying law show that anti-LGBTQ rhetoric continues to be a soft power goldmine for Moscow. And now for Beijing too.

Uganda is among 17 African nations that abstained from a U.N. vote to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine. Of course, their shared anti-gay rhetoric is only a small part of the reason. Russia is a key military partner too. And Moscow didn’t export homophobia to Uganda. Arguably, American evangelicals and Uganda’s colonial past have played a bigger role in paving the way for the passing of this latest law.

But Moscow has played a pivotal role in creating a world in which a country can crack down on basic human rights without worrying about losing face and friends. Days after it was passed, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said he’ll be attending the upcoming Russia-Africa Summit in the summer.

Just like LGBTQ+ people, women make great scapegoats too. In Italy, rafts of accounts spewing hate against women in politics have aligned themselves with Putin, according to new research called "Monetizing Misogyny" by the women's rights group #ShePersisted. And in Hungary, India, Brazil, Italy and Tunisia, the growing movement to target and delegitimize female politicians is bolstering anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion agendas. In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has forced abortion ever higher on the agenda. In Texas, for instance, lawmakers are planning to stop even the spreading of information about abortions, as Coda’s Erica Hellerstein reported. Combine such regressive legislation with silencing, trolling and doxxing women leaders, and it means we're seeing gendered disinformation fly ever higher on our newsfeeds.

Jeffrey Sachs has recently been using his hard-won reputation as an economist to propel some jaw-dropping conspiracy theories. He is now a darling of Russian and Chinese state propaganda outlets. Recently, Sachs has been appearing on the talk show of Russia’s chief propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, who has called for nuclear strikes against NATO countries and suggested wiping Ukrainian cities from the face of the Earth. Sachs’ global renown lends authority to Kremlin sock puppets like Solovyov. A group of prominent economists have tried to bring their famous colleague Sachs back into the fold of reason. They’ve written an open letter to Sachs explaining why he is wrong. The dozens of signatories include many Ukrainian economists. It is a letter worth reading in full. We’ll keep you posted on whether it has any effect. 

China building its influence across Africa is old news. But we now know a bit more about Beijing’s tactics. New research reveals the systematic cajoling and intimidating of African journalists into printing positive stories about China, the training of scores of African media professionals and the filling of African news feeds with “soft,” happy content about China. These reports, says Arthur Kaufman at the China Digital Times, “highlight the CCP’s growing efforts at disseminating external propaganda” and show how China is increasingly recruiting local figures to contribute to the CCP narrative. 

The post Uganda’s anti-gay law is a win for Russia’s family values propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

Beijing is already providing Moscow with crucial propaganda support. Chinese media fuels Putin’s narrative that Ukraine started the war. “Putin states Russia is Invincible” was one of the best performing hashtags across Chinese social media after it was initiated by the state media outlet Global Times following Vladimir Putin’s speech last week. Beijing’s involvement in the war, whatever shape it takes, could seriously alter the course of the conflict. Which is why, Ukraine, clearly aware of the delicate balancing act it needs to play, is downplaying China’s apparent siding with Moscow and U.S. allegations that Beijing is preparing to send weapons. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to meet with Xi Jinping to discuss Beijing’s peace proposal. But Chinese officials have yet to make any public comments about a meeting with Zelenskyy. They have instead invited Putin’s closest ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, to visit Beijing. 

Xi Jinping is rolling out the red carpet for Lukashenko. His four-day state visit, starting today, is a big deal, another sign of China’s growing closeness to Russia. Belarus is a party to the war, having allowed Russia to use Belarusian territory to start its initial incursion into Ukraine. Recently leaked documents show that Vladimir Putin aspires to absorb Belarus into a “Union State” by 2030. Details of Lukashenko’s meetings in Beijing and what’s on the agenda are blurry, but the timing of his visit and China’s unveiling of its “peace plan” and its continued support for Russian propaganda show that Beijing is now firmly on Putin’s side.

NATO countries are no longer our opponents, they are our enemies, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television this week, reflecting on Vladimir Putin’s speech and his decision to end the last nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia, which effectively also ended arms control as we know it. Russia’s global disinformation machine, in the meantime, seems focused on unfounded claims of chemical attacks by Ukrainian forces.  

As Russian artillery pounds eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin is rehashing the old, discredited accusation that Ukrainian forces are preparing to use chemical weapons. Throughout the past year, Russia has repeatedly warned that Ukraine might use non-conventional weapons, including biological weapons or even a radioactive dirty bomb. The claims, labeled a “false flag” operation by Western intelligence, have never materialized. Still, the “news” that Americans have shipped chemical weapons to Ukraine, which apparently arrived in Kramatorsk on February 10, is all over Russian state media and spreading like wildfire across social media. 

WHY DISINFORMATION IS ABOUT ‘SHITTY ENGINEERING’

So much of the disinformation that we track in this newsletter is only potent because of the unprecedented reach that it now enjoys. People, especially those in power, have always lied in pursuit of their agendas. What has changed is that the lies now spread so quickly and so far. 

For instance, the question of whether or not Ukraine is using chemical weapons should never be subject to debate on Twitter. It should be relatively straightforward to establish this truth as a starting point of any discussion. But our inability to agree on even the basic facts is rendering us useless when it comes to producing solutions to crises — be they global warming, the war in Ukraine or vaccine disinformation. 

Is this trend reversible? I spent last week with thousands of people pondering this very question in Paris, at a conference titled “Internet for Trust.” I often find myself at gatherings designed to brainstorm ways out of disinformation rabbit holes but the Paris conference was something else: 4,000 participants from all over the world gathered at UNESCO’s brutalist headquarters. The goal of the conference was to feed into the global guidelines that UNESCO is trying to put together in order to help governments to regulate online platforms and the disinformation that flourishes on them. 

During breaks between sessions, I overheard many delegates questioning the entire exercise.  After all, the guidelines the conference was feeding into were not exactly enforceable. “What good does it do for me, if Facebook can carry on spreading lies in my country,” a government regulator from an African country exclaimed after a session during which a Meta representative used free speech as an argument against regulating Big Tech. 

Much of the discussion felt like going in circles: How do we regulate platforms if regulators don’t understand the tech? How do we do it without affecting free speech? Is content moderation a solution? But how many content moderators does it take to moderate billions of internet users? I have heard all of these questions posed again and again, without much by way of answers. 

It only ever takes one person to say that the emperor has no clothes and in this case it was Christopher Wylie, a data scientist, Cambridge Analyitca whistleblower and author of the fantastic book called “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” who stirred up a debate during a panel on content curation and moderation that I chaired. 

“The fact that you need content moderation shows that you are dealing with design failure,” he told the panel that included representatives from TikTok, the Meta Oversight Board, the African Union and a prominent U.S. human rights lawyer. 

Wylie said the key piece missing from all the debates around regulating platforms to counter disinformation is the fact that at the heart of the crisis is “shitty engineering.” 

“I find a lot of these conferences frustrating,” he said, “because so often we talk about things like transparency, content moderation, the role of journalists and it’s all very important but we don’t address the fundamental problem that a lot of these issues flow from the shitty engineering.” 

“If you look at how we regulate every other technological sector,” Wylie argued, “whether it's aerospace, pharmaceutical or automotive, we regulate through the prism of safety and harm prevention first. That’s how we regulate technology. But when it comes to social media platforms, everyone seems to have moved away from the fundamental line of inquiry: Why are you designing platforms like this? Why is it that there are more safety regulations for the toaster in your kitchen than for platforms that touch the lives of billions of people?”

If, like me, you are obsessed with the subject, I really recommend watching the entire session with Chris Wylie at the UNESCO conference in Paris — you can find it here, starting at around the nine-minute mark from the February 23 recording. And if you want to dig further still, check out Chapter 3, which he authored, of this 2020 report from the Forum on Information and Democracy. 

Why are we going in circles when it comes to countering disinformation on tech platforms? Why aren’t arguments like those made by Wylie cutting through the noise?

One reason: money. Big Tech has invested heavily in lobbying efforts while also announcing major initiatives to support newsrooms, and especially local newsrooms in the United States. Four years after Meta (then Facebook) announced its three-year, $300-million commitment to global “news programs, partnerships, and content,” Tow Center’s Gabby Miller looks at where the money actually went. Spoiler alert: “tracing this funding” was “surprisingly difficult.”

The post Xi leaves no doubt that he is on Team Putin appeared first on Coda Story.