It looks like the streaming giant is now siding with the big names of Big Tech, Google, Amazon, Meta who have all taken a side in the Middle East war and who have much to account for, according to a report by Access Now: 

Meta has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian voices on all its platforms and possibly sharing the Whatsapp data of Palestinians with Israel. Meta has publicly denied handing over people’s data to the Israeli government, but as this newsletter notes, there is still no evidence to show that it has taken any concrete action to protect people’s privacy or to ensure that its metadata is not exploited to train and run dystopian AI systems. 

Google, under its Project Nimbus, provides Israel with advanced AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and text, which has long been used for the surveillance of Palestinians by the IDF. Despite reports of Israel using AI-powered programs like Where’s Daddy and Lavender to isolate and destroy non-military targets, Google signed a new contract with Israel’s defense ministry in 2024 — when Google’s workers revolted over this new contract, the company fired 50 of its own employees. In a statement to Time, Google said “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” 
Amazon, meanwhile, enables the Israeli army to store intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS. Israeli military also confirmed to +972 that on some occasions, AWS services helped the IDF confirm airstrike targets. Despite this, AWS still claims to be committed to its cause of building “responsible AI.”

In a recent essay for Coda, Judy Estrin, CEO of JLABS, LLC quoted the first law of technology: it’s neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It’s unsurprising  that in a year of horrors, Big Tech has amplified the human capacity for cruelty and war, from assisting the spread of garden variety disinformation to AI-powered weapons that methodically pick non-military targets to destroy. The steady march to this dystopian moment has come about through the slow stripping away of human rights via old-fashioned  surveillance and censorship.

You can join petitions, write to Netflix or check out the Palestine Film Index offers a selection of hundreds of Palestinian films, documentaries and writings (with links to access them all) here.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

The post What’s leaving Netflix? Palestine. appeared first on Coda Story.

These currents connect the crises happening in different parts of the world into a global web of intricately connected problems. It may not be obvious, but Silicon Valley is right at the very heart of this web. Home to some of the richest and most powerful men on earth, Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the technology that has given us so much convenience and also taken so much away from us. 

The world may be on fire, but things are going well for Silicon Valley’s most powerful men. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is now officially worth $157 billion and Mark Zuckerberg, whose $72 billion dollar wealth surge this year could now make him the richest person on earth. 

Both are in a position to address some of the world’s greatest problems, yet both choose to avoid any responsibility, and instead choose to obscure and deflect. 

Take AI-powered disinformation in this election for example. It’s rampant, scary and consequential for American democracy. Sam Altman’s response? He wants us to be patient. In his recent letter worthy of a techno-optimism medal Altman argues that it would be a “mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems”.  

Zuckerberg says he wants Meta to be remembered for “building big,” not safe. Meta no longer even engages in a whack-a-mole game of fact checking and content moderation. Along with Google, Amazon and X, Meta has essentially dismantled its Trust and Safety team that at least tried to mitigate the real life damage caused by the algorithmic promotion of hateful content. Mark Zuckerberg, who wore an “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil.” “Either Zuck or Nothing” shirt as he presented his latest meta verse at the company’s annual developer conference. As for life in this world, he is apparently done with politics. 

It takes a very special kind of privilege to ask for patience in the face of a major, life threatening, world changing crises. The attitude is familiar to anyone who has seen authoritarianism up close: the goal of an authoritarian is to secure a monopoly on money and power. Maintaining a monopoly of the narrative is the way of achieving that. Human suffering may not be the objective, but if that’s what it takes to achieve the desired outcome, then it’s just collateral damage. 

I spent a lot of my week speaking to people who could be considered “collateral damage”: people in Beirut, where unprecedented escalation of violence between Israel and Iran is wreaking havoc on millions of lives. Friends in Ukraine, where Russia is making territorial gains while continuing to bomb, kill and maim civilians.  

As well as my own family in Georgia, where the Kremlin is making political gains: the Russian state propaganda machine is now openly backing an autocratic, populist government that is about to use a democratic tool–elections–to pull the country deeper into its autocratic orbit. The government’s campaign strategy resembles blackmail. “If you don’t vote for us, Russia will do to you what it did to Ukraine,” is literally the message of the election billboards the Georgian government put up this week.  

The roots of each of these crises are buried deep in the history of individual places, but so much of the journalism we do at Coda brings us back to Silicon Valley. 

The valley is the modern day equivalent of the heart of the Roman empire; a place of extreme abundance, fantastic innovation and terrifying detachment from the rest of the world.  
For this reason, it has never been more important to connect the dots between the patterns that weave into the web of our modern life.

The post Global crises, local consequences: how Silicon Valley shapes our world appeared first on Coda Story.

Anthropologist Dragana Kaurin told me this week about a strange encounter she had with it some years back.

“I opened Facebook and I saw a face and a name I recognized. It was my first grade teacher,” she told me. Kaurin is Bosnian and fled Sarajevo as a child, at the start of the war and genocide that took hundreds of thousands of lives between 1992 and 1995. One of Kaurin’s last memories of school life in Sarajevo was of that very same teacher separating children in the classroom on the basis of their ethnicity, as if to foreshadow the ethnic cleansing campaign that soon followed.

“It was widely rumored that our teacher took up arms and shot at civilians, and secondly, that she had died during the war,” she said. “So it was like seeing a ghost.” Now at retirement age, the teacher’s profile showed her membership in a number of ethno-nationalist groups on Facebook. 

Kaurin spent the rest of that day feeling stunned, motionless. “I couldn’t function,” she said.

The people who designed the feature probably didn’t anticipate that it would have such effects. But even after more than a decade of journalists like The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill showing various harms it could inflict — Facebook has suggested that women “friend” their stalkers, sex workers “friend” their clients, and patients of psychiatrists “friend” one another — the “People You May Know” feature is still there today.

From her desk in lower Manhattan, Kaurin now runs Localization Lab, a nonprofit organization that works with underrepresented communities to make technology accessible through collaborative design and translation. She sees the “People You May Know” story as an archetypical example of a technology that was designed without much input from beyond the gleaming Silicon Valley offices in which it was conceived.

“Design is always political,” Kaurin told me. “It enacts underlying policies, biases and exclusion. Who gets to make decisions? How are decisions made? Is there space for iterations?” And then, of course, there’s the money. When a feature helps drive growth on a social media platform, it usually sticks around.

This isn’t a new story. But it is top of mind for me these days because of the emerging consensus that many of the same design mistakes that social media companies have made over the past 15 years will be repeated in the so-called “AI revolution.” And with its opaque nature, its ability to manufacture a false sense of social trust and its ubiquity, artificial intelligence may have the potential to bring about far worse harms than what we’ve seen from social media over the past decade. Should we worry?

“Absolutely,” said Kaurin. And it’s happening on a far bigger, far faster scale, she pointed out.

Cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier and other prominent thinkers have argued that governments should institute “public AI” models that could function as a counterweight to corporate, profit-driven AI. Some states are already trying this, including China, the U.K. and Singapore. I asked Kaurin and her colleague Chido Musodza if they thought state-run AI models might be better equipped to represent the interests of more diverse sets of users than what’s built in Silicon Valley.

Both researchers wondered who would actually be building the technology and who would use it. “What is the state’s agenda?” Kaurin asked. “How does that state treat minority communities? How do users feel about the state?”

Musodza, who joined our conversation from Harare, Zimbabwe, considered the idea in the southern African context: “When you look at how some national broadcasters have an editorial policy with a political slant aligned towards the government of the day, it’s likely that AI will be aligned towards the same political slant as well,” she said.

She’s got a point. Researchers testing Singapore’s model found that when asked questions about history and politics, the AI tended to offer answers that cast the state in a favorable light.

“I think it would be naive for us to say that even though it’s public AI that it will be built without bias,” said Musodza. “It’s always going to have the bias of whoever designs it.”

Musodza said that for her, the question is: “Which of the evils are we going to pick, if we’re going to use the AI?” That led us to consider that a third way might be possible, depending on a person’s circumstances: to simply leave AI alone.

This piece was originally published as the most recent edition of the weekly Authoritarian Tech newsletter.

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The post How tech design is always political appeared first on Coda Story.

This story was updated at 6:30 ET on October 16, 2023

Wabe didn’t expect to see his friends’ faces in the shadows. But it happened after just a few weeks on the job.

He had recently signed on with Sama, a San Francisco-based tech company with a major hub in Kenya’s capital. The middle-man company was providing the bulk of Facebook’s content moderation services for Africa. Wabe, whose name we’ve changed to protect his safety, had previously taught science courses to university students in his native Ethiopia.

Now, the 27-year-old was reviewing hundreds of Facebook photos and videos each day to decide if they violated the company’s rules on issues ranging from hate speech to child exploitation. He would get between 60 and 70 seconds to make a determination, sifting through hundreds of pieces of content over an eight-hour shift.

One day in January 2022, the system flagged a video for him to review. He opened up a Facebook livestream of a macabre scene from the civil war in his home country. What he saw next was dozens of Ethiopians being “slaughtered like sheep,” he said. 

Then Wabe took a closer look at their faces and gasped. “They were people I grew up with,” he said quietly. People he knew from home. “My friends.”

Wabe leapt from his chair and stared at the screen in disbelief. He felt the room close in around him. Panic rising, he asked his supervisor for a five-minute break. “You don’t get five minutes,” she snapped. He turned off his computer, walked off the floor, and beelined to a quiet area outside of the building, where he spent 20 minutes crying by himself.

Wabe had been building a life for himself in Kenya while back home, a civil war was raging, claiming the lives of an estimated 600,000 people from 2020 to 2022. Now he was seeing it play out live on the screen before him.

That video was only the beginning. Over the next year, the job brought him into contact with videos he still can’t shake: recordings of people being beheaded, burned alive, eaten.

“The word evil is not equal to what we saw,” he said. 

Yet he had to stay in the job. Pay was low — less than two dollars an hour, Wabe told me — but going back to Ethiopia, where he had been tortured and imprisoned, was out of the question. Wabe worked with dozens of other migrants and refugees from other parts of Africa who faced similar circumstances. Money was too tight — and life too uncertain — to speak out or turn down the work. So he and his colleagues kept their heads down and steeled themselves each day for the deluge of terrifying images.

Over time, Wabe began to see moderators as “soldiers in disguise” — a low-paid workforce toiling in the shadows to make Facebook usable for billions of people around the world. But he also noted a grim irony in the role he and his colleagues played for the platform’s users: “Everybody is safe because of us,” he said. “But we are not.”  

Wabe said dozens of his former colleagues in Sama’s Nairobi offices now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Wabe has also struggled with thoughts of suicide. “Every time I go somewhere high, I think: What would happen if I jump?” he wondered aloud. “We have been ruined. We were the ones protecting the whole continent of Africa. That’s why we were treated like slaves.”

To most people using the internet — most of the world — this kind of work is literally invisible. Yet it is a foundational component of the Big Tech business model. If social media sites were flooded with videos of murder and sexual assault, most people would steer clear of them — and so would the advertisers that bring the companies billions in revenue.

Around the world, an estimated 100,000 people work for companies like Sama, third-party contractors that supply content moderation services for the likes of Facebook’s parent company Meta, Google and TikTok. But while it happens at a desk, mostly on a screen, the demands and conditions of this work are brutal. Current and former moderators I met in Nairobi in July told me this work has left them with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, insomnia and thoughts of suicide.

These “soldiers in disguise” are reaching a breaking point. Because of people like Wabe, Kenya has become ground zero in a battle over the future of content moderation in Africa and beyond. On one side are some of the most powerful and profitable tech companies on earth. On the other are young African content moderators who are stepping out from behind their screens and demanding that Big Tech companies reckon with the human toll of their enterprise.

In May, more than 150 moderators in Kenya, who keep the worst of the worst off of platforms like Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT, announced their drive to create a trade union for content moderators across Africa. The union would be the first of its kind on the continent and potentially in the world.

There are also major pending lawsuits before Kenya’s courts targeting Meta and Sama. More than 180 content moderators — including Wabe — are suing Meta for $1.6 billion over poor working conditions, low pay and what they allege was unfair dismissal after Sama ended its content moderation agreement with Meta and Majorel picked up the contract instead. The plaintiffs say they were blacklisted from reapplying for their jobs after Majorel stepped in. In August, a judge ordered both parties to settle the case out of court, but the mediation broke down on October 16 after the plaintiffs' attorneys accused Meta of scuttling the negotiations and ignoring moderators' requests for mental health services and compensation. The lawsuit will now proceed to Kenya's employment and labor relations court, with an upcoming hearing scheduled for October 31.

The cases against Meta are unprecedented. According to Amnesty International, it is the “first time that Meta Platforms Inc will be significantly subjected to a court of law in the global south.” Forthcoming court rulings could jeopardize Meta’s status in Kenya and the content moderation outsourcing model upon which it has built its global empire. 

Meta did not respond to requests for comment about moderators’ working conditions and pay in Kenya. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Sama said the company cannot comment on ongoing litigation but is “pleased to be in mediation” and believes “it is in the best interest of all parties to come to an amicable resolution.”

Odanga Madung, a Kenya-based journalist and a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, believes the flurry of litigation and organizing marks a turning point in the country’s tech labor trajectory. 

“This is the tech industry’s sweatshop moment,” Madung said. “Every big corporate industry here — oil and gas, the fashion industry, the cosmetics industry — have at one point come under very sharp scrutiny for the reputation of extractive, very colonial type practices.”

Nairobi may soon witness a major shift in the labor economics of content moderation. But it also offers a case study of this industry’s powerful rise. The vast capital city — sometimes called “Silicon Savanna” — has become a hub for outsourced content moderation jobs, drawing workers from across the continent to review material in their native languages. An educated, predominantly English-speaking workforce makes it easy for employers from overseas to set up satellite offices in Kenya. And the country’s troubled economy has left workers desperate for jobs, even when wages are low.

Sameer Business Park, a massive office compound in Nairobi’s industrial zone, is home to Nissan, the Bank of Africa, and Sama’s local headquarters. But just a few miles away lies one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, a sprawl of homes made out of scraps of wood and corrugated tin. The slum’s origins date back to the colonial era, when the land it sits on was a farm owned by white settlers. In the 1960s, after independence, the surrounding area became an industrial district, attracting migrants and factory workers who set up makeshift housing on the area adjacent to Sameer Business Park.

For companies like Sama, the conditions here were ripe for investment by 2015, when the firm established a business presence in Nairobi. Headquartered in San Francisco, the self-described “ethical AI” company aims to “provide individuals from marginalized communities with training and connections to dignified digital work.” In Nairobi, it has drawn its labor from residents of the city’s informal settlements, including 500 workers from Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. In an email, a Sama spokesperson confirmed moderators in Kenya made between $1.46 and $3.74 per hour after taxes.

Grace Mutung’u, a Nairobi-based digital rights researcher at Open Society Foundations, put this into local context for me. On the surface, working for a place like Sama seemed like a huge step up for young people from the slums, many of whom had family roots in factory work. It was less physically demanding and more lucrative. Compared to manual labor, content moderation “looked very dignified,” Mutung’u said. She recalled speaking with newly hired moderators at an informal settlement near the company’s headquarters. Unlike their parents, many of them were high school graduates, thanks to a government initiative in the mid-2000s to get more kids in school.

“These kids were just telling me how being hired by Sama was the dream come true,” Mutung’u told me. “We are getting proper jobs, our education matters.” These younger workers, Mutung’u continued, “thought: ‘We made it in life.’” They thought they had left behind the poverty and grinding jobs that wore down their parents’ bodies. Until, she added, “the mental health issues started eating them up.” 

Today, 97% of Sama’s workforce is based in Africa, according to a company spokesperson. And despite its stated commitment to providing “dignified” jobs, it has caught criticism for keeping wages low. In 2018, the company’s late founder argued against raising wages for impoverished workers from the slum, reasoning that it would “distort local labor markets” and have “a potentially negative impact on the cost of housing, the cost of food in the communities in which our workers thrive.”

Content moderation did not become an industry unto itself by accident. In the early days of social media, when “don’t be evil” was still Google’s main guiding principle and Facebook was still cheekily aspiring to connect the world, this work was performed by employees in-house for the Big Tech platforms. But as companies aspired to grander scales, seeking users in hundreds of markets across the globe, it became clear that their internal systems couldn’t stem the tide of violent, hateful and pornographic content flooding people’s newsfeeds. So they took a page from multinational corporations’ globalization playbook: They decided to outsource the labor.

More than a decade on, content moderation is now an industry that is projected to reach $40 billion by 2032. Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote the definitive study on the moderation industry in her 2019 book “Behind the Screen.” Roberts estimates that hundreds of companies are farming out these services worldwide, employing upwards of 100,000 moderators. In its own transparency documents, Meta says that more than 15,000 people moderate its content in more than 20 sites around the world. Some (it doesn’t say how many) are full-time employees of the social media giant, while others (it doesn’t say how many) work for the company’s contracting partners.

Kauna Malgwi was once a moderator with Sama in Nairobi. She was tasked with reviewing content on Facebook in her native language, Hausa. She recalled watching coworkers scream, faint and develop panic attacks on the office floor as images flashed across their screens. Originally from Nigeria, Malgwi took a job with Sama in 2019, after coming to Nairobi to study psychology. She told me she also signed a nondisclosure agreement instructing her that she would face legal consequences if she told anyone she was reviewing content on Facebook. Malgwi was confused by the agreement, but moved forward anyway. She was in graduate school and needed the money.

A 28-year-old moderator named Johanna described a similar decline in her mental health after watching TikTok videos of rape, child sexual abuse, and even a woman ending her life in front of her own children. Johanna currently works with the outsourcing firm Majorel, reviewing content on TikTok, and asked that we identify her using a pseudonym, for fear of retaliation by her employer. She told me she’s extroverted by nature, but after a few months at Majorel, she became withdrawn and stopped hanging out with her friends. Now, she dissociates to get through the day at work. “You become a different person,” she told me. “I’m numb.”

This is not the experience that the Luxembourg-based multinational — which employs more than 22,000 people across the African continent — touts in its recruitment materials. On a page about its content moderation services, Majorel’s website features a photo of a woman donning a pair of headphones and laughing. It highlights the company’s “Feel Good” program, which focuses on “team member wellbeing and resiliency support.”

According to the company, these resources include 24/7 psychological support for employees “together with a comprehensive suite of health and well-being initiatives that receive high praise from our people," Karsten König, an executive vice president at Majorel, said in an emailed statement. "We know that providing a safe and supportive working environment for our content moderators is the key to delivering excellent services for our clients and their customers. And that’s what we strive to do every day.”

But Majorel’s mental health resources haven’t helped ease Johanna’s depression and anxiety. She says the company offers moderators in her Nairobi office with on-site therapists who see employees in individual and group “wellness” sessions. But Johanna told me she stopped attending the individual sessions after her manager approached her about a topic she shared in confidentiality with her therapist. “They told me it was a safe space,” Johanna explained, “but I feel that they breached that part of the confidentiality so I do not do individual therapy.” TikTok did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

Instead, she looked for other ways to make herself feel better. Nature has been especially healing. Whenever she can, Johanna takes herself to Karura Forest, a lush oasis in the heart of Nairobi. One afternoon, she brought me to one of her favorite spots there, a crashing waterfall beneath a canopy of trees. This is where she tries to forget about the images that keep her up at night. 

Johanna remains haunted by a video she reviewed out of Tanzania, where she saw a lesbian couple attacked by a mob, stripped naked and beaten. She thought of them again and again for months. “I wondered: ‘How are they? Are they dead right now?’” At night, she would lie awake in her bed, replaying the scene in her mind.

“I couldn’t sleep, thinking about those women.”

Johanna’s experience lays bare another stark reality of this work. She was powerless to help victims. Yes, she could remove the video in question, but she couldn’t do anything to bring the women who were brutalized to safety. This is a common scenario for content moderators like Johanna, who are not only seeing these horrors in real-time, but are asked to simply remove them from the internet and, by extension, perhaps, from public record. Did the victims get help? Were the perpetrators brought to justice? With the endless flood of videos and images waiting for review, questions like these almost always go unanswered.

The situation that Johanna encountered highlights what David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California at Irvine and the former United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, believes is one of the platforms’ major blindspots: “They enter into spaces and countries where they have very little connection to the culture, the context and the policing,” without considering the myriad ways their products could be used to hurt people. When platforms introduce new features like livestreaming or new tools to amplify content, Kaye continued, “are they thinking through how to do that in a way that doesn’t cause harm?”

The question is a good one. For years, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously urged his employees to “move fast and break things,” an approach that doesn’t leave much room for the kind of contextual nuance that Kaye advocates. And history has shown the real-world consequences of social media companies’ failures to think through how their platforms might be used to foment violence in countries in conflict.

The most searing example came from Myanmar in 2017, when Meta famously looked the other way as military leaders used Facebook to incite hatred and violence against Rohingya Muslims as they ran “clearance operations” that left an estimated 24,000 Rohingya people dead and caused more than a million to flee the country. A U.N. fact-finding mission later wrote that Facebook had a “determining role” in the genocide. After commissioning an independent assessment of Facebook’s impact in Myanmar, Meta itself acknowledged that the company didn’t do “enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence. We agree that we can and should do more.”

Yet five years later, another case now before Kenya’s high court deals with the same issue on a different continent. Last year, Meta was sued by a group of petitioners including the family of Meareg Amare Abrha, an Ethiopian chemistry professor who was assassinated in 2021 after people used Facebook to orchestrate his killing. Amare’s son tried desperately to get the company to take down the posts calling for his father’s head, to no avail. He is now part of the suit that accuses Meta of amplifying hateful and malicious content during the conflict in Tigray, including the posts that called for Amare’s killing.

The case underlines the strange distance between Big Tech behemoths and the content moderation industry that they’ve created offshore, where the stakes of moderation decisions can be life or death. Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School of Business who authored a seminal 2020 report on the issue, believes this distance helped corporate leadership preserve their image of a shiny, frictionless world of tech. Social media was meant to be about abundant free speech, connecting with friends and posting pictures from happy hour — not street riots or civil war or child abuse.

“This is a very nitty gritty thing, sifting through content and making decisions,” Barrett told me. “They don't really want to touch it or be in proximity to it. So holding this whole thing at arm’s length as a psychological or corporate culture matter is also part of this picture.”

Sarah T. Roberts likened content moderation to “a dirty little secret. It’s been something that people in positions of power within the companies wish could just go away,” Roberts said. This reluctance to deal with the messy realities of human behavior online is evident today, even in statements from leading figures in the industry. For example, with the July launch of Threads, Meta’s new Twitter-like social platform, in July, Instagram head Adam Mosseri expressed a desire to keep “politics and hard news” off the platform.

The decision to outsource content moderation meant that this part of what happened on social media platforms would “be treated at arm’s length and without that type of oversight and scrutiny that it needs,” Barrett said. But the decision had collateral damage. In pursuit of mass scale, Meta and its counterparts created a system that produces an impossible amount of material to oversee. By some estimates, three million items of content are reported on Facebook alone on a daily basis. And despite what some of Silicon Valley’s other biggest names tell us, artificial intelligence systems are insufficient moderators. So it falls on real people to do the work.

One morning in late July, James Oyange, a former tech worker, took me on a driving tour of Nairobi’s content moderation hubs. Oyange, who goes by Mojez, is lanky and gregarious, quick to offer a high five and a custom-made quip. We pulled up outside a high-rise building in Westlands, a bustling central neighborhood near Nairobi’s business district. Mojez pointed up to the sixth floor: Majorel’s local office, where he worked for nine months, until he was let go.

He spent much of his year in this building. Pay was bad and hours were long, and it wasn’t the customer service job he’d expected when he first signed on — this is something he brought up with managers early on. But the 26-year-old grew to feel a sense of duty about the work. He saw the job as the online version of a first responder — an essential worker in the social media era, cleaning up hazardous waste on the internet. But being the first to the scene of the digital wreckage changed Mojez, too — the way he looks, the way he sleeps, and even his life’s direction.

That morning, as we sipped coffee in a trendy, high-ceilinged cafe in Westlands, I asked how he’s holding it together. “Compared to some of the other moderators I talked to, you seem like you’re doing okay,” I remarked. “Are you?”

His days often started bleary-eyed. When insomnia got the best of him, he would force himself to go running under the pitch-black sky, circling his neighborhood for 30 minutes and then stretching in his room as the darkness lifted. At dawn, he would ride the bus to work, snaking through Nairobi’s famously congested roads until he arrived at Majorel’s offices. A food market down the street offered some moments of relief from the daily grind. Mojez would steal away there for a snack or lunch. His vendor of choice doled out tortillas stuffed with sausage. He was often so exhausted by the end of the day that he nodded off on the bus ride home.

And then, in April 2023, Majorel told him that his contract wouldn’t be renewed.

It was a blow. Mojez walked into the meeting fantasizing about a promotion. He left without a job. He believes he was blacklisted by company management for speaking up about moderators’ low pay and working conditions.

A few weeks later, an old colleague put him in touch with Foxglove, a U.K.-based legal nonprofit supporting the lawsuit currently in mediation against Meta. The organization also helped organize the May meeting in which more than 150 African content moderators across platforms voted to unionize.

At the event, Mojez was stunned by the universality of the challenges facing moderators working elsewhere. He realized: “This is not a Mojez issue. These are 150 people across all social media companies. This is a major issue that is affecting a lot of people.” After that, despite being unemployed, he was all in on the union drive. Mojez, who studied international relations in college, hopes to do policy work on tech and data protection someday. But right now his goal is to see the effort through, all the way to the union’s registry with Kenya’s labor department.

Mojez’s friend in the Big Tech fight, Wabe, also went to the May meeting. Over lunch one afternoon in Nairobi in July, he described what it was like to open up about his experiences  publicly for the first time. “I was happy,” he told me. “I realized I was not alone.” This awareness has made him more confident about fighting “to make sure that the content moderators in Africa are treated like humans, not trash,” he explained. He then pulled up a pant leg and pointed to a mark on his calf, a scar from when he was imprisoned and tortured in Ethiopia. The companies, he said, “think that you are weak. They don’t know who you are, what you went through.”

Looking at Kenya’s economic woes, you can see why these jobs were so alluring. My visit to Nairobi coincided with a string of July protests that paralyzed the city. The day I flew in, it was unclear if I would be able to make it from the airport to my hotel — roads, businesses and public transit were threatening to shut down in anticipation of the unrest. The demonstrations, which have been bubbling up every so often since last March, came in response to steep new tax hikes, but they were also about the broader state of Kenya’s faltering economy — soaring food and gas prices and a youth unemployment crisis, some of the same forces that drive throngs of young workers to work for outsourcing companies and keep them there.

Leah Kimathi, a co-founder of the Kenyan nonprofit Council for Responsible Social Media, believes Meta’s legal defense in the labor case brought by the moderators betrays Big Tech’s neo-colonial approach to business in Kenya. When the petitioners first filed suit, Meta tried to absolve itself by claiming that it could not be brought to trial in Kenya, since it has no physical offices there and did not directly employ the moderators, who were instead working for Sama, not Meta. But a Kenyan labor court saw it differently, ruling in June that Meta — not Sama — was the moderators’ primary employer and the case against the company could move forward.

“So you can come here, roll out your product in a very exploitative way, disregarding our laws, and we cannot hold you accountable,” Kimathi said of legal Meta’s argument. “Because guess what? I am above your laws. That was the exact colonial logic.”

Kimathi continued: “For us, sitting in the Global South, but also in Africa, we’re looking at this from a historical perspective. Energetic young Africans are being targeted for content moderation and they come out of it maimed for life. This is reminiscent of slavery. It’s just now we’ve moved from the farms to offices.”

As Kimathi sees it, the multinational tech firms and their outsourcing partners made one big, potentially fatal miscalculation when they set up shop in Kenya: They didn’t anticipate a workers’ revolt. If they had considered the country’s history, perhaps they would have seen the writing of the African Content Moderator’s Union on the wall.

Kenya has a rich history of worker organizing in resistance to the colonial state. The labor movement was “a critical pillar of the anti-colonial struggle,” Kimathi explained to me. She and other critics of Big Tech’s operations in Kenya see a line that leads from colonial-era labor exploitation and worker organizing to the present day. A workers’ backlash was a critical part of that resistance — and one the Big Tech platforms and their outsourcers may have overlooked when they decided to do business in the country.

“They thought that they would come in and establish this very exploitative industry and Kenyans wouldn’t push back,” she said. Instead, they sued.

What happens if the workers actually win?

Foxglove, the nonprofit supporting the moderators’ legal challenge against Meta, writes that the outcome of the case could disrupt the global content moderation outsourcing model. If the court finds that Meta is the “‘true employer’ of their content moderators in the eyes of the law,” Foxglove argues, “then they cannot hide behind middlemen like Sama or Majorel. It will be their responsibility, at last, to value and protect the workers who protect social media — and who have made tech executives their billions.”

But there is still a long road ahead, for the moderators themselves and for the kinds of changes to the global moderation industry that they are hoping to achieve.

In Kenya, the workers involved in the lawsuit and union face practical challenges. Some, like Mojez, are unemployed and running out of money. Others are migrant workers from elsewhere on the continent who may not be able to stay in Kenya for the duration of the lawsuit or union fight.

The Moderator’s Union is not yet registered with Kenya’s labor office, but if it becomes official, its members intend to push for better conditions for moderators working across platforms in Kenya, including higher salaries and more psychological support for the trauma endured on the job. And their ambitions extend far beyond Kenya. The network hopes to inspire similar actions in other countries’ content moderation hubs. According to Martha Dark, Foxglove’s co-founder and director, the industry’s working conditions have spawned a cross-border, cross-company organizing effort, drawing employees from Africa, Europe and the U.S.

“There are content moderators that are coming together from Poland, America, Kenya, and Germany talking about what the challenges are that they experience when trying to organize in the context of working for Big Tech companies like Facebook and TikTok,” she explained.

Still, there are big questions that might hinge on the litigation’s ability to transform the moderation industry. “It would be good if outsourced content reviewers earned better pay and were better treated,” NYU’s Paul Barrett told me. “But that doesn't get at the issue that the mother companies here, whether it’s Meta or anybody else, is not hiring these people, is not directly training these people and is not directly supervising these people.” Even if the Kenyan workers are victorious in their lawsuit against Meta, and the company is stung in court, “litigation is still litigation,” Barrett explained. “It’s not the restructuring of an industry.”

So what would truly reform the moderation industry’s core problem? For Barrett, the industry will only see meaningful change if companies can bring “more, if not all of this function in-house.”

But Sarah T. Roberts, who interviewed workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines for her book on the global moderation industry, believes collective bargaining is the only pathway forward for changing the conditions of the work. She dedicated the end of her book to the promise of organized labor.

“The only hope is for workers to push back,” she told me. “At some point, people get pushed too far. And the ownership class always underestimates it. Why does Big Tech want everything to be computational in content moderation? Because AI tools don’t go on strike. They don't talk to reporters.”

Artificial intelligence is part of the content moderation industry, but it will probably never be capable of replacing human moderators altogether. What we do know is that AI models will continue to rely on human beings to train and oversee their data sets — a reality Sama’s CEO recently acknowledged. For now and the foreseeable future, there will still be people behind the screen, fueling the engines of the world’s biggest tech platforms. But because of people like Wabe and Mojez and Kauna, their work is becoming more visible to the rest of us.

While writing this piece, I kept returning to one scene from my trip to Nairobi that powerfully drove home the raw humanity at the base of this entire industry, powering the whole system, as much as the tech scions might like to pretend otherwise. I was in the food court of a mall, sitting with Malgwi and Wabe. They were both dressed sharply, like they were on break from the office: Malgwi in a trim pink dress and a blazer, Wabe in leather boots and a peacoat. But instead, they were just talking about how work ruined them.

At one point in the conversation, Wabe told me he was willing to show me a few examples of violent videos he snuck out while working for Sama and later shared with his attorney. If I wanted to understand “exactly what we see and moderate on the platform,” Wabe explained, the opportunity was right in front of me. All I had to do was say yes.

I hesitated. I was genuinely curious. A part of me wanted to know, wanted to see first-hand what he had to deal with for more than a year. But I’m sensitive, maybe a little breakable. A lifelong insomniac. Could I handle seeing this stuff? Would I ever sleep again?

It was a decision I didn’t have to make. Malgwi intervened. “Don’t send it to her,” she told Wabe. “It will traumatize her.”

So much of this story, I realized, came down to this minute-long exchange. I didn’t want to see the videos because I was afraid of how they might affect me. Malgwi made sure I didn’t have to. She already knew what was on the other side of the screen.

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"What's on your mind?" it read at the top. Beneath the standard status update prompt were a series of messages written in Vietnamese that extended a warm welcome to the prime minister, underscoring the collaboration between his government and the social media giant. Sunny statements are reported to have dominated the meeting in which the two sides rhapsodized about bolstering their partnership.

Prime Minister Chinh highlighted the instrumental role American companies, Meta in particular, might play in uncorking the potentials of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that the U.S. and Vietnam cemented in mid-September. He encouraged Meta to deepen its ties with Vietnamese firms to boost the digital economy. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice president for U.S. public policy, indicated willingness to support Vietnamese businesses of all sizes, adding that the company hopes to continue producing “metaverse equipment” in the country. 

The warm aura of the meeting obscured an uncomfortable reality for Meta on the other side of the Pacific: It has become increasingly enmeshed in the Vietnamese government's draconian online censorship regime. In a country whose leaders once frowned upon it, Facebook has seen its relationship with the Vietnamese government morph from one of animosity to an unlikely alliance of convenience. Not a small feat for the social media giant.

Facebook has long been the most popular social media platform in Vietnam. Today, over 70% of Vietnam’s total population of nearly 100 million people use it for content sharing, business operations and messaging.

For years, Facebook’s approach to content policy in Vietnam appeared to be one of caution, in which the company brought some adherence to free speech principles to decision-making when it was faced with censorship demands from the government. But in 2020, it shifted to one of near-guaranteed compliance with official demands, at least in the eyes of Vietnamese authorities. It was in that year that the Vietnamese government claimed that the company went from approving 70 to 75%% of censorship requests from the authorities, to a staggering 95%. Since then Vietnamese officials have maintained that Facebook's compliance rate is upwards of 90%.

Meta’s deference to Vietnam’s official line continues today. Last June, an article in the Washington Post quoted two former employees who, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Facebook had taken on an internal list of Vietnam Communist Party officials who it agreed to shield from criticism on its platform. The undisclosed list is included in the company’s internal guidelines for moderating online content, with Vietnamese authorities having a significant sway on it, the Post reported. While the Post did not cite the names of the Vietnamese officials on the list, it noted that Vietnam is the only country in East Asia for which Facebook provides this type of white-glove treatment.

Also in June, the government instructed cross-border social platforms to employ artificial intelligence models capable of automatically detecting and removing “toxic” content. A month earlier, in the name of curbing online scams, the authorities said they were gearing up to enforce a requirement that all social media users, whether on local or foreign platforms, verify their identities.

These back-to-back developments are emblematic of the Vietnamese government’s growing confidence in asserting its authority over Big Tech.

How has Vietnam reached this critical juncture? Two key factors seem to account for why Vietnamese authorities are able to boss around Big Tech.

The first is Vietnam’s economic lure. Vietnam's internet economy is one of the most rapidly expanding markets in Southeast Asia. According to a report by Google and Singapore's Temasek Holdings, Vietnam's digital economy hit $23 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach approximately $50 billion by 2025, with growth fueled primarily by a thriving e-commerce sector. 

Dangling access to a market of nearly 100 million people, Vietnamese authorities have become increasingly adept at exploiting their economic leverage to browbeat Big Tech companies into compliance. Facebook's 70 million users aside, DataReportal estimates that YouTube has 63 million users and TikTok around 50 million in Vietnam.

Although free speech principles were foundational for major American social media platforms, it may be naive to expect them to adhere to any express ideological value proposition at this stage. Above all else, they prioritize rapid growth, outpacing competitors and solidifying their foothold in online communication and commerce. At the end of the day, it is the companies’ bottom line that has dictated how Big Tech operates across borders.

Alongside market pressures, Vietnam has also gained leverage through its own legal framework. Big Tech companies have recognized that they need to adhere to local laws in the countries where they operate, and the Vietnamese government has capitalized on this, amping up its legal arsenal to tighten its grip on cyberspace, knowing full well that Facebook, along with YouTube and TikTok, will comply. Nowhere is this tactic more manifest than in the crackdown on what the authorities label as anti-state content. 

Over the past two decades, the crackdown on anti-state content has shaped the way Vietnamese authorities deployed various online censorship strategies, while also dictating how a raft of laws and regulations on internet controls were formulated and enforced. From Hanoi’s perspective, anti-state content can undermine national prestige, besmirch the reputation of the ruling Communist Party and slander and defame Vietnamese leaders.

There is one other major benefit that the government derives from the big platforms: it uses them to promote its own image. Like China, Vietnam has since 2017 deployed a 10,000-strong military cyber unit tasked to manipulate online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s line. The modus operandi of Vietnam’s cyber troops has been to ensure “a healthy cyberspace” and protect the regime from “wrong,” “distorting,” or “false news,” all of which are in essence “anti-state” content in the view of the authorities.

And the biggest companies now readily comply. A majority of online posts that YouTube and Facebook have restricted or removed at the behest of Vietnamese authorities were related to  “government criticism” or ones that “oppose the Communist Party and the Government of Vietnam,” according to the transparency reports by Google and Facebook.

The latest data disclosed by Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications indicates that censorship compliance rates by Facebook and YouTube both exceed 90%.

In this context, Southeast Asia provides a compelling case study. Notably, four of the 10 countries with the highest number of Facebook users worldwide are also in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Across the region, censorship requests have pervaded the social media landscape and redefined Big Tech-government relations. 

“Several governments in the region have onerous regulation that compels digital platforms to adhere to strict rules over what content is or isn’t allowed to be on the platform,” Kian Vesteinsson, an expert on technology and democracy at Freedom House, told me. “Companies that don’t comply with these rules may risk fines, criminal or civil liability, or even outright bans or blocks,” Vesteinsson said.

But a wholesale ban on any of the biggest social platforms feels highly improbable today. These companies have become indispensable partners in Vietnam’s online censorship regime, to the point that the threat of shutting them down is more of a brinkmanship tactic than a realistic option. In other words, they are too important to Vietnam to be shut down. And the entanglement goes both ways — for Facebook and Google, the Vietnamese market is too lucrative for them to back out or resist censorship demands.

To wit, after Vietnam threatened to block Facebook in 2020 over anti-government posts, the threat never materialized. And Facebook has largely met the demands of Vietnamese authorities ever since.

Last May, TikTok faced a similar threat. Vietnam launched a probe into TikTok's operations in Vietnam, warning that any failure to comply with Vietnamese regulations could see the platform shown the door in this lucrative market. While the outcome of the inspection is pending and could be released any time, there are already signs that TikTok, the only foreign social media platform to have set up shop in Vietnam, will do whatever it takes to get on the good side of Vietnamese authorities. In June, TikTok admitted to its wrongdoings in Vietnam and pledged to take corrective actions.

The fuss that Vietnamese authorities have made about both Facebook and TikTok has likely masked their real intent: to further strong-arm these platforms into becoming more compliant and answerable to Vietnamese censors. Judging by their playbook, Vietnamese authorities are likely to continue wielding the stick of shutdown as a pretext to tighten the grip on narratives online, fortify state controls on social media and solidify the government's increasing leverage over Big Tech.

Could a different kind of platform emerge in this milieu? Vietnam’s economy of scale would scarcely allow for this kind of development: The prospect of building a more robust domestic internet ecosystem that could elbow out Facebook or YouTube doesn’t really exist. Absent bigger political and economic changes, Hanoi will remain reliant on foreign tech platforms to curb dissent, gauge public sentiment, discover corrupt behavior by local officials and get out its own messages to its internet-savvy population.

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The speech came back to haunt him on June 29, when Meta’s Oversight Board recommended that the company suspend the prime minister for six months for breaking the platform’s rules against threatening or inciting violence.

Later that day, Hun Sen beat the company to the punch and deleted his own page. It was a stunning move in Cambodia, where the prime minister has used the platform to trumpet his policy positions and lash out at his opponents to the nearly 14 million followers he has amassed since joining Facebook in 2015.

Some of his posts have had immediate real-world consequences. In February 2023, the forced closure of one of Cambodia’s last independent news outlets, Voice of Democracy, played out entirely on Hun Sen’s Facebook over two days. Angered by an article he claimed was erroneous, Hun Sen threatened in a post to revoke VOD’s license if the outlet didn’t apologize promptly.

After VOD expressed “regret” for any confusion the story caused, Hun Sen responded via Facebook that the statement was insufficient and said that the Cambodian Ministry of Information would revoke the outlet’s license.

“Is it acceptable to use words of ‘regret’ and ‘forgiveness’ instead of the word ‘apologize?’ For me, I cannot accept it,” Hun Sen wrote in the post. “Look for jobs elsewhere,” he added. Police and ministry officials arrived at VOD’s office the next morning with an order to cease publishing.

But now the future of Hun Sen’s page is uncertain. A few weeks after he deleted his account, his assistant reinstated it, ahead of the national elections. And Meta, which owns Facebook, has yet to officially decide whether to follow the recommendation of its Oversight Board and proceed with the six-month suspension. This means that the account could go offline again — and take with it a digital archive attesting to the more recent chapters of Hun Sen’s 38-year regime.

“Facebook was the key, important way for him to communicate his political messages to his audience and fans,” said Sokphea Young, a Cambodian research fellow at University College London who has studied the visual messaging of Hun Sen’s Facebook page. “However many people don’t like Prime Minister Hun Sen, the account is very important for the collective memory of Cambodian people and Cambodian history.”

And Cambodia is hardly alone in this. Around the world, speech coming from government officials has increasingly spilled over onto social media platforms. But companies like Meta and Twitter can decide to remove posts or entire accounts at any moment, regardless of how this might affect public access to information about state actors and institutions. Neither company has a policy on archiving state accounts, and, with a few exceptions, states don’t require companies to do this either.

In the mid-1990s, libraries, universities and governments around the world became concerned about losing electronic records to the fast-evolving digital sphere. But archiving from social media platforms has remained an “unloved” area of public policy, even as more and more government data has landed there, said William Kilbride, the executive director of the U.K.-based Digital Preservation Coalition, an advocacy group that works with public and private institutions around the world on archiving. 

Some governments with robust archiving capabilities deal with social media platforms on an individual basis to maintain records. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, for instance, has worked with Twitter to “freeze” previous versions of accounts linked to the presidency on the original platform. The U.K.’s National Archives maintains a social media database with Twitter and YouTube archives.

But major platforms have not created broader global policies around such programs, and they aren’t always transparent about how long they internally retain deleted or suspended accounts or those of deceased people. There are also technical challenges: Meta actively works to prevent scraping, a technique that archivists use to gather and then preserve such data. Finding automated ways to capture pages’ full context — such as comments on posts — is also “really difficult,” Kilbride said. 

Even within existing archival relationships, platforms still have the upper hand. After the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington, D.C., Twitter announced it would not allow a federally preserved version of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump tweets — which the National Archives had been working to preserve — to appear on the site after it “permanently banned” him, as would be typical with other accounts linked to the presidency.

But after Elon Musk bought the company, the account was reinstated on Twitter. In an email exchange, the National Archives would not confirm whether its prior efforts to preserve @realDonaldTrump are ongoing but said to “continue to check back for addition[al] content as it is added in the future.” The handle does not appear alongside other accounts the agency has made separately available on its website.

“The public record has been privatized and now sits on these platforms,” Kilbride said. “Suddenly, it’s the National Archives’ or whoever’s job to try to figure out what on earth to do.”

“They have no duty of transparency,” Kilbride added of the platforms. “There’s no accountability.”

Although most governments have national archiving laws, many lack the resources to enforce them on social media or store mass amounts of data on independent servers, putting them at a further disadvantage in preserving material when accounts — or an entire platform — suddenly go dark.

In June 2021, former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari received a 12-hour suspension on Twitter over a tweet targeting Igbo people, one of the biggest ethnic groups in the country, writing he would “treat them in the language they understand.” Two days later, he blocked access to Twitter countrywide, making his own and other government-related accounts inaccessible within Nigeria.

‘Gbenga Sesan, the executive director of the digital rights group Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, said that in his circles, “nobody cared” at the time about preserving Buhari’s account locally: He was more focused on the thousands of requests for help accessing virtual private networks (VPNs) pouring in from across Nigeria. Plus, digital experts knew that a local block on Twitter didn’t mean the accounts had been lost, he said. 

In fact, as Nigerians continued to access Twitter with VPNs, Buhari’s account — mainly a place to share propaganda and party information — was little-missed for the roughly six months that Twitter was officially blocked. “I don't ever remember going there to check what was said. A few times, I tweeted that silence was a better option for Buhari, because every time he speaks, the country gets angry,” Sesan said.

Still, Sesan wants to see social media platforms create archiving partnerships with governments on a global scale. But the Buhari episode also showed the need for a more expansive view of preservation: On its own, Buhari’s account would provide a slim portrait of Nigeria’s online history at the time. And what’s more, governmental partnerships would only work if both sides had mutual good will to preserve materials.

“You’ll find the digital aides sharing more historical facts than the president himself,” Sesan said.  “That, I think, is the major context when it comes to presidential archives and information: That kind of information also matters.”

Challenges with archiving also arise when it comes to posts that shine light on human rights abuses, war crimes and other atrocities that demand documentation in the service of future legal investigations and historical inquiry, particularly on Meta and YouTube. Last month, Meta’s Oversight Board called on the company to publicly address archiving practices in a decision about a video of Armenian prisoners of war. The video showed the faces of injured and deceased soldiers, raising questions about revealing the identities and locations of prisoners in conflict zones. Although the board agreed Meta was correct to leave up the content with a warning screen, it recommended the company commit to preserving evidence of atrocities, develop public protocols for preservation and explain how long it internally retains data and considers preservation requests. Meta has not yet responded publicly and did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, social media platforms have faced scrutiny for helping to spread hate speech and disinformation in places such as Myanmar, Kenya and India, making the platforms eager to appear quick to remove content or accounts spewing violent rhetoric. 

While deplatforming violent actors can be crucial to limiting offline violence, digital historians and researchers say it also causes public records to disappear from the internet before they have the chance to collect them.

The nonprofit Mnemonic grew out of the civil war in Syria and maintains four archives documenting evidence of potential human rights violations in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Ukraine. As social media platforms have increased their use of automated tools that try to remove harmful content, the group has seen human rights-related material taken down more frequently, according to Maria Mingo, a policy and advocacy manager at Mnemonic. 

The organization stores its archives on independent servers. About one-quarter of the two million YouTube videos it has archived from Syria since 2014 have disappeared from YouTube itself. About one-tenth of the 2,000 Twitter accounts from the same archive have been removed during the same period.

In May 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would begin removing and archiving “inactive” accounts. Mingo said that rule could present a “huge problem” for jailed activists whose accounts, and the information they collected at great personal risk, suddenly disappeared.

“If the content is taken down so, so quickly — unless platforms preserve and are able to engage with relevant stakeholders about the existence of the content — we won’t be able to do anything with it, we won’t be able to request it, we won’t be able to in any way try to use it,” Mingo said. 

“We can’t preserve something that no longer exists, or that we don’t know exists,” she added.

In Cambodia, questions around preservation and collective memory have persisted for decades. During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge genocide wiped out nearly one-quarter of the population. Images of torture, starvation and detention have become irreplaceable to “memorialize how things went wrong in that period,” said researcher Young.

Right now, Hun Sen’s Facebook page provides an unmatched record of the current regime, replete with personal exchanges between Hun Sen and his followers. But it also has a more reflective style. He has long favored posting black-and-white or old photographs of himself or family members, dating back to shortly after the Khmer Rouge era when he came to power. In a recent post after the account was reinstated, he shared an undated photograph of himself as a young man walking in a green, placid background, along with a message about the upcoming one-sided national election, which his party won in a landslide.

“Today is the last day of the party campaign, and also the day of great expectations for the Cambodian People’s Party in the upcoming election. I wish you all, the family of the ‘angel party,’ success countrywide,” the caption read, referring to the ruling party’s logo.

Such photographs have been central to the page for years, according to Young, who, over four years, has tracked the prime minister’s habit of contrasting black-and-white and color photos as a visual representation of his mythical political journey.

The idea is to show himself bringing Cambodia out of the darkness and into the light, a human representation of peace protecting the country from plunging back into civil war.

“As a copy of the history of Cambodia, maybe [his account] should be in a museum somewhere, in the next 40, 50 years, so the new generation can see,” Young said. “This is what Facebook was like, and this is what the prime minister was like, during the new era of digitalization.”

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As Lithuania joined the ranks of countries across the globe imposing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, LRT saw an avalanche of likes and shares descend upon its Facebook page. Posts that would normally receive 40 or 50 views were getting tens of thousands of interactions. And roughly half of the comments posted by LRT’s suddenly enormous audience espoused pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian sentiments — an unusual dynamic in a country where support for Ukraine has been strong since the first days of the invasion. Analysis by Debunk, a Lithuanian disinformation research group, later found that much of this activity was driven by accounts situated in either Asia or Africa. This was a coordinated effort, one that almost certainly relied on automated accounts or bots. 

Now, a bill moving through Lithuania’s parliament is attempting to rein in this kind of activity. Representatives are deliberating on a set of proposed amendments to the country’s criminal code and public information laws that would criminalize automated account activity that poses a threat to state security. 

Under the changes, it would become a crime to distribute “disinformation, war propaganda, [content] inciting war or calling for the violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Lithuania by force” from “automatically controlled” accounts. Violators could face fines, arrest or even three years’ imprisonment, depending on the particulars of the content in question.

The legislation is also expressly written to hold major social media platforms accountable for this kind of activity. It would empower the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission to issue content and account removal orders to companies like Meta and Twitter.

Proponents of the legislation argue that social media companies have been ineffective in the fight against digital disinformation in Lithuania. In an explanatory note, lawmakers said the amendments would “send a clear message to internet platforms that an ineffective or insufficient fight against this problem is unacceptable and has legal consequences.”

“Right now, there is no regulation or legislation against bots,” said Viktoras Dauksas, the head of Debunk, the disinformation analysis center. But, he noted, “you can deal with bot farms through dealing with Meta.”

Twitter is a target of the policy too. In January 2022, a month before the invasion, U.S.-based disinformation researcher Markian Kuzmowyczius uncovered a bot attack on Twitter that falsely claimed that the Kremlin was recalling its diplomatic mission to Lithuania due to malign U.S. influence in the country. Removing diplomats is often a signal that the threat level to a country is high.

More than Meta, Twitter has long been a hub for automated accounts of all kinds. This was a key talking point for Elon Musk, who vowed to tackle the problem of malicious bots once the company was in his possession. While the company’s account verification policy has zigged and zagged since Musk’s takeover, it also appears to be honoring more requests for content removals that it receives from governments than it did under Jack Dorsey — in what could be a boon for Lithuania.

As for Meta, what the company terms “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has long been a violation of company policy, but its track record on enforcing this rule is mixed. The proposed amendments in Lithuania are meant to put the company on notice so that it is prepared to respond to requests from Lithuanian authorities in this vein. This is nothing new for Meta, which has faced regulatory measures around the world that are intended to ensure that content on the platform adheres to national laws. But Lithuania is among the smallest of countries that has attempted to bring the company to heel in this style. 

Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act, casually referred to by policymakers as “Lex Facebook,” requires platforms above a certain size to remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours of receiving notice or face fines that could easily rise to tens of millions of euros. India’s 2021 IT Rules require large platforms to establish offices in the country and to dedicate staff to liaise with government officials seeking content removals or user data. In each case, the company has ultimately opted to comply, and it’s easy to see why. India represents Meta’s largest national market worldwide — it is unquestionably in Meta’s best interest to stay in good standing with regulators. And Germany’s position within the EU would have made it politically risky for the company not to fall in line.

But can Lithuania expect the same results? In December, Meta responded to allegations that Facebook was blocking pro-Ukrainian content in Lithuania and even sent representatives to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to discuss the matter with policymakers. But two months later, Meta issued a formal response to Lithuanian politicians insisting that the platform's moderation principles were applied equally to both sides of the conflict and that the algorithm did not discriminate. The incident highlighted the small Baltic nation’s willingness to stand up to the tech giant as Facebook continues to be the most widely used platform in the country. But it also demonstrated Meta’s confidence in asserting its power in the region.

A month later, the heads of state from eight European countries, including Lithuania, wrote an open letter to tech firms calling on them to fight disinformation that “undermines” peace and stability.

Weeding out harmful bots is a complicated exercise in any country that wants to uphold freedom of expression. Although the proposed amendments would only apply to bots spreading information that is already prohibited under Lithuanian law, the criminalization of activity by an automated account still treads into relatively new territory. Lithuanian supporters of the two amendments, including Dauksas, argue that a clear line can be drawn between trolls, who are often people or profiles for hire, and bots, who Dauksas says should not be afforded human rights protections. Scholars like Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts, take a different stance. “Even in a bot farm, there are humans clicking the buttons and directing these armies of automated accounts. The distinction between human and automation is more nuanced and there are many layers of complicity,” he argues.

Speaking from the sidelines of TrustCon, a meeting of cyber security professionals in San Francisco, Ong was eager to stress that blunt force regulation is often not the answer to the complex set of challenges that arise when combatting bots. 

“We all agree that some regulation is necessary, but we need to be extremely careful about using punitive measures, which could create further harm,” he said. 

In Ong’s view, we need to be cautious about what kind of information is shared between platforms and governments and what data is exchanged between platforms and law enforcement agencies, all of which would depend on sustained levels of trust and transparency. While Lithuania is rated “Free” in Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report, such legislation could pave the way for new forms of censorship in countries where democracy is under pressure or has been eroded completely.

Underlying all of this is also a persistent dearth of independent research on these dynamics, research that would require full cooperation from companies like Meta and Twitter where the vast majority of operations like these play out. Calls for more transparency around bot and troll farms have been ongoing from analysts and scholars, but, so far, no social media platform has been open to independent audits of their own investigations, Ong said.

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The latest flare-up occurred in mid-April, when the American streaming giant scrambled to remove the first episode of the docuseries “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” from its service in Vietnam. The Vietnamese authorities excoriated the three-episode show over what they characterized as “inaccurate and unsubstantiated” information about Vietnam’s search-and-rescue operation to locate flight MH370, the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished in 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.

This wasn’t the first show to go. Before that, it was “Little Women,” a K-drama about three sisters living in modern day South Korea. The show was axed by Netflix in Vietnam last October after the authorities claimed it distorted Vietnam War history. And in 2021, Vietnam ordered Netflix to stop showing the Australian spy drama “Pine Gap,” which included footage of a map showing Beijing’s unilaterally declared “nine-dash line” that defines its expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea.  

The removals followed an eerily similar pattern: To justify their censorship demands, Vietnamese censors invoked the “hurting the feelings of the people” narrative either in their own statements or by way of reports in state-controlled media.

But to what extent does this “hurt feelings” rhetoric actually reflect popular opinion on the ground?

Public opinion and state actions — which drives which? 

The rationale of the Vietnamese authorities for flagging the MH370 docuseries could be boiled down to a just single line in the first episode, which featured a family member of a missing Chinese passenger desperately urging her country to step in: "We hope the Chinese government can quickly send a search-and-rescue team, as the Vietnamese [government] doesn't seem to have much ability." 

The government claims that the show caused “an uproar among the populace.” But it is hard to fathom why the Vietnamese public would get riled up about a single line quoting a plea made by an ordinary citizen. Lam Nguyen, a 22-year-old student in Ho Chi Minh City who managed to watch the series before it was flagged by the authorities, told me that she was “a little surprised, but not frustrated” by the scene. The bottom line, Lam said, is that people in her social circle — herself included — feel that the Vietnamese government’s response to that line was an “overreaction.”  

“While some believe that the Vietnamese government put a lot of effort in the search, it is unfair to criticize the docuseries that captured the anger and fear of family members who were desperate to find their loved ones,” Lam said. 

The online backlash against the MH370 docuseries also played out primarily inside a bubble of pro-government Facebook groups and state-aligned media coverage. This means that, at best, the justification by the Vietnamese authorities stands on empirically thin ice. At worst, such nationalist sentiments were likely manufactured to rationalize censorship demands.

In asking Netflix to remove “Pine Gap” in 2021, the Vietnamese authorities claimed that the show “angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam.” Few moves risk stirring up a hornet’s nest in Vietnam more than one that validates China’s maritime claims — the Vietnamese public likely would have objected to the display of the nine-dash line if they had seen the drama. But it’s unlikely that many ordinary Vietnamese, let alone the “entire” population, had a chance to take in the mini-series before it disappeared.

And in the case of “Little Women,” while ordinary internet users did join the chorus of criticism about the show, this only happened after pro-government groups lit the flames.

It all comes at a time when Vietnam’s state-sponsored cyber troops are growing more and more adept at manufacturing public sentiment online. “Astroturfing” — state-orchestrated efforts to manipulate online discourse — likely had some role in what played out online. In a country where the public at large increasingly balks at the chance to express political opinions, what might have looked like grassroots public opinion may have been shaped or even dictated by online propagandists. 

These reactions — whether genuine or not — gave the Vietnamese authorities the right pretext to ask Netflix to remove the content they deemed harmful and helped drive home their demands through the mainstream media. The streaming platform quickly accommodated the censorship orders.

Vietnam’s growing leverage over Big Tech

While the authorities were explicit in asking that Netflix remove “Pine Gap” and “Little Women” in their entirety, they were less specific when it came to the MH370 docuseries. In fact, they only requested the rectification and removal of “inaccurate information” related to the country’s search efforts in the show. But Netflix gutted the entire episode instead, in what looked like a bid to get on the good side of the officials who regulate it.  

This underlines Vietnam’s growing leverage over western tech companies, many of which are making a lot of money in Vietnam. Facebook is especially dominant. Vietnam ranks seventh among the ten countries boasting the highest number of Facebook users worldwide, an estimated 70 million. The company reportedly generates annual local revenue of more than $1 billion. But others aren’t far behind. DataReportal estimates that YouTube has 63 million users in Vietnam and TikTok has around 50 million. 

State-orchestrated efforts aimed at reining in public discussion have bred increasingly subservient responses from the industry. The state has wielded the stick of shutting down disobedient social media platforms altogether — it threatened to block Facebook in 2020 over political posts. And it has dangled the carrot of access to a lucrative market of 97 million people. In recent years, Big Tech firms — chief among them Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok — have shown increasing willingness to honor content removal demands. Hanoi now openly brags about high compliance rates among those platforms, which all exceed 90%.

So Netflix is straddling a treacherous line. As content removal has remained a key tactic in Vietnam’s online censorship dragnet, resisting the government’s takedown requests does not seem to bode well for Netflix’s future. But placating such requests has proved equally daunting in a country where an arbitrary censorship regime makes it impossible to pinpoint precisely what kind of content will be seen as crossing a line.

Nationalism, weaponized

The need to safeguard national prestige online has dictated Vietnam’s internet controls. But this kind of censorship overdrive, compounded by the apparent manufacturing of public opinion to buttress their rationale, only lays bare the insecurity of the Vietnamese authorities when faced with inconvenient narratives.

Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asian politics and security issues at the National War College in Washington, D.C., told me he was “puzzled by the hypersensitivity” of the government over the MH370 show. “When the planes came down, I was quite impressed with how quickly Vietnam responded and how well coordinated their efforts appeared,” Abuza said of Vietnam’s search efforts. “To be fair, Vietnam has very limited numbers of aircraft that are suitable for maritime search and rescue but responded in remarkable speed to a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said. 

The facade of toughness in axing “Little Women” appears to be a politically expedient ploy to paper over a reality in which the Vietnamese government has never publicly pushed for an official apology, much less reparations, from South Korea for its atrocities during the Vietnam War. This could invite public criticism that the Vietnamese authorities are preaching nationalism while at the same time drinking foreign Kool-Aid, given the economic leverage South Korea has established in Vietnam. 

There have been times when the Vietnamese government has genuinely needed to appeal to nationalism to justify its foreign policy decisions. Case in point: In registering its indignation with Beijing’s muscle-flexing moves in the South China Sea, Hanoi has more than once tapped into anti-China sentiments to rally the public behind the flag. This dynamic manifests most often in cyberspace and sometimes in mainstream media. On a few occasions, Vietnam has even green-lit anti-China protests.  

But moving forward, the more the manufacturing of public opinion becomes a pattern, the more likely foreign observers are to accuse the Vietnamese government of crying wolf about the need to protect nationalist sentiments. China may be especially equipped to do so, given the parallels between the regimes and their respective playbooks.

Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese leaders are probably well aware that in addition to the country’s rising standard of living, nationalism remains a crucial tool for maintaining the regime’s legitimacy. But exploiting nationalism for authoritarian control could eventually end up chipping away at the very legitimacy the Vietnamese state is craving. The public’s eyes are discerning.

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On April 6, Trixie found herself standing on a stage, before the shaven-headed, heavyset Baba himself. With cameras rolling, two men held her in place while the Baba, draped in long white robes, accused her of being infected with the “disease of queerness.” By posting videos like these on social media, the Baba has made a fortune in just three years. He claims to have a “godly” cure for terminal illnesses and a variety of other personal and psychological complaints. 

He also specializes in conversion therapy — in which he claims to “pray the gay away” — and offers a special prayer package to “reconvert” transgender people and align their gender identity to the sex they were assigned at birth. Trixie’s family paid about $1,830 for her “treatment,” a sizable sum in a country in which the average monthly wage is below $500.

The Baba’s promises to banish homosexuality and to “cure” transgender people appeal to longstanding popular prejudices in Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India. Even the federal government is currently arguing in the Indian Supreme Court that gay marriage is an “urban elitist concept.” For most of the country, the government insists as it attempts to put the brakes on the Supreme Court hearings that would determine whether India should legalize same-sex marriage, the “notion of marriage itself necessarily and inevitably presupposes a union between two persons of the opposite sex.” And this notion is “deeply embedded in religious and societal norms.”

From his estate, the Baba regularly livestreams his “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. His most popular videos on YouTube, where he has a verified channel, have surpassed one million views. He also commands an impressive following on Facebook, where he maintains multiple pages. His social media pages all link to the ashram’s website, which boasts testimonials from his patients, instructions for devotees and a market for the Baba’s health products.

The Baba — aka Santosh Singh Bhadauria — is what is known in India as a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has managed to persuade people that he possesses spiritual powers. Godmen are similar to televangelists, and their followers might once have been called holy rollers. As with televangelists, godmen are frequently found to be conmen, criminals and sex offenders. Bhadauria has been in trouble with the law for decades, accused of various crimes though yet to be convicted of any.

Last month, a doctor who challenged Bhadauria by calling out his theatrics as cheap quackery was allegedly assaulted at Bhadauria’s behest. Among the types of cures Bhadauria enacts in public spectacles on his estate, attended by thousands of followers, is the ritual “murder” of “Muslim ghosts” that he claims have possessed the bodies of Hindus. The Muslim ghosts are exorcised with a toy gun.

Trixie knew little about Bhadauria’s methods before agreeing to visit his ashram. She was just trying to keep her parents happy. On reaching the estate, she found that a recording of his exhortations was being broadcast to hundreds of devotees. People were screaming and crying as if they'd been possessed by a spirit, she said.

Uncomfortable with the atmosphere, Trixie tried to walk away but says she was physically restrained by the Bhadauria's security. The next morning, Bhadauria showed up in person. He addressed Trixie’s family directly. Homosexuality, he said, was a disease, and Trixie, as someone infected by it, was “filled to the brim with filth.”

Her mother stood beside her, silently watching as Bhadauria continued to rant. That was when Trixie realized, she told us, that she had lost her mother to the propaganda, a far more cruel betrayal than Bhadauria’s crude abuse. 

“Parents can be wrong sometimes too,” she told her mother in front of Bhadauria and the audience. They were the only words she would utter during the “therapy” session. Had she tried to argue her case, she told us, she would have felt “like a dog barking without reason.” 

Bhadauria’s conversion therapy is emblematic of the transphobia and homophobia of Indian society. This prejudice is seeing a resurgence as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the question of same-sex marriage. Despite a long history of gender fluidity in Indian theology, mythology and culture, the Hindu nationalist government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi argues that the push for LGBTQ rights is a result of increasing Western influence and the decline of so-called Indian values. 

The Indian judiciary, though, has taken a more liberal line. Consensual gay sex was decriminalized in India in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned a colonial law. “History owes an apology to members of the community,” said one of the judges, “for the delay in ensuring their rights.” And last year, a state high court ordered the prohibition of conversion therapy, ruling that it constituted misconduct when performed by medical professionals. 

If the Supreme Court does legalize same-sex marriage, it would be yet another ruling that defies the values and beliefs of some of India’s most powerful political actors. While no judgment has yet been made, trolls have targeted the court on social media and its chief justice was attacked as “woke” even before he was appointed to the bench. Government officials and mainstream media personalities have also piled on, insisting that the judges would be undermining tradition and imposing their own values on the country. Religious representatives from all of India's major religions, in a rare show of togetherness, have teamed up to oppose the marriage equality petition before the Supreme Court.

Social activist Indrajeet, the founder of “Yes, We Exist,” a digital LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, told us in an interview that although the Indian right wing says same-sex marriage is a Western imposition, Indian conservatives are also taking their cues from the West. In the West, particularly in the United States, transphobia has become an endemic political hot-button topic and is similarly framed as an issue beloved by liberal elites rather than one of existing civil rights being unequally applied. 

The Indian government says it is for elected legislators to decide on the fate of same-sex marriage rather than for unelected judges. But the Indian constitution — as a government website helpfully points out — gives all Indians the right to equal treatment before the law.

It is to the courts that a transgender woman like Trixie has to turn to get redress for the ordeal she was forced to endure at Bhadauria’s ashram. “If you do not self-determine and do prayers to be a boy,” Bhadauria said to Trixie, “you'll become a girl and will get beaten by boys. Even if you marry a boy, he will beat you too.”

Turning to Trixie’s mother, Bhadauria said, “The only way left to cure him is by doing prayers. If he doesn't do it by himself, you should do this for him.” Bhadauria also insinuated that Trixie’s transition was sexual in nature, a perversion rather than a deeply felt identity. This vein of transphobia has been contested at length by scholarship on and by queer people. 

Pointing to the scholarship, though, is not always a helpful strategy when confronted by hate speech on social media and the socially permitted behavior of quacks like Bhadauria. Indrajeet, the founder of the LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, explained that social media sites have become key platforms for the likes of Bhadauria. Their brand of hate is easily spread on these platforms and enables them to attract new followers and expand their reach. It also allows them to monetize their polarizing content. 

Although many of these social media pages and channels are riddled with hate speech and discriminatory messages, platforms routinely fail to take action against violations of their own rules of conduct.

For instance, though Meta does not offer clear guidance about organic content promoting conversion therapy on Facebook, the company expressly prohibits advertisements offering such services. Google (YouTube’s parent company) prohibits the promotion of conversion therapy in its publisher policies. Both companies have a broad ban on the kinds of hate speech and discriminatory language that characterize Bhadauria’s content.

Bhadauria’s video of his encounter with Trixie was highly visible both on Facebook and YouTube for two weeks after their “therapy session.” It has since been removed from Facebook, but the video is still up on YouTube, where Bhadauria has 439,000 followers. Indrajeet and other activists we spoke with expressed concern that these videos, spread by spiritual leaders with significant social influence, could be used to justify physical attacks on queer people in the public eye.

Zainab Patel, a trans woman, activist and one of the petitioners in the pending marriage equality Supreme Court case, told us that Bhaduria’s attempt to “treat” Trixie is against Indian law. All forms of conversion therapy against queer people were banned in 2021 by the National Medical Commission of India which described such therapy as “professional misconduct,” following an order from the Madras high court which has jurisdiction in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. 

These therapies can take the form of pseudo-religious rituals but can also involve measures as extreme as “corrective rapes.” Independent research has proven that conversion therapy practices increase the risk of self-harm among queer people. It is why, Zainab says, it is essential that legal action is taken against self-appointed holy men like Bhadauria.

“After watching Trixie's video,” Zainab told us, “we can say that she has been subjected to humiliation, stigmatization and discrimination.” Trixie’s parents, Zainab added, “along with the spiritual person to whom she was taken, can both be punished under the Transgender Protection Act.” This also means that both Facebook and YouTube could be compelled, by a court order, to remove the material. But so far, most of the footage remains online, garnering thousands of views and untold advertising revenue.

Akkai Padmashali, a transgender rights activist, pointed out that while in other democracies the numbers of openly homosexual and bisexual legislators are growing, India’s LGBTQ community has no representation in parliament to stand up for their concerns. Instead, the court case on marriage equality has become an opportunity for politicians to grandstand on matters of religious tradition. "I believe that I am bound to follow constitutional morality,” Akkai told us, “and not any social construct, cultural or religious morality.” But, in India, that is an increasingly rare position.

For Trixie, her ordeal does have a silver lining — she has found her voice and an inner strength. She counts it as a small victory that the video of her conversion therapy is no longer on Facebook. Now, she says, she is ready to take on more transphobic propaganda on her Instagram, where she has found many new supporters and followers.

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Maya Amerson is one of these people. Amerson began working as a content moderator for Reddit in 2018, reviewing violent and disturbing content and identifying posts that violated the company’s terms of use. After three years on the job, she began suffering from panic attacks and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She repeatedly sought support from her employer but didn’t get it. Now, she is taking Reddit to court.

Currently pending before the San Francisco Superior Court, Amerson’s lawsuit alleges that the Reddit management ignored her requests to move to a different position with less exposure to this kind of material, even after she returned from a 10-week medical leave following her PTSD diagnosis. The lawsuit also claims that Amerson’s supervisors belittled her after she came back to the office. This led to her resignation in September 2022. She filed the suit three months later. When we asked Reddit for its side of the story, we were told that we could attribute the following to a company spokesperson: “At Reddit, our employees' well-being is a top priority and we offer a robust set of resources for content moderators.”

The allegations in Amerson’s lawsuit are specific to Reddit, a social media giant valued at $6.6 billion that has garnered praise for its unique and decentralized approach to content moderation. But they tell a story that goes well beyond Reddit. A growing number of legal actions are taking aim at tech platforms over their treatment of content moderators and the psychological hazards of the work. These cases highlight the tension inherent in a job that cannot yet be automated and is routinely exported to low-wage contractors overseas.

They also raise an essential and unresolved set of questions: Is vicarious trauma inevitable in the work of content moderation? Or can the tech giants who hire scores of moderators around the world do more to meet the psychological needs of the workforce? If so, are any of the major platforms doing it right?

A brief history of the “front page of the internet”

Founded in 2005 as the aspirational “front page of the internet,” Reddit allows people to create discussion groups, known as subreddits, on topics that interest them. Each of the over 100,000 subreddits across the platform has its own ethos and culture. And each subreddit has its own set of rules that are enforced in addition to the company’s own content policy.

What makes all this work? At the heart of Reddit lies an army of thousands of volunteers who carry out the grueling work of content moderation. Known on the platform as mods, these volunteers oversee each subreddit, removing content and banning accounts that violate their established community rules and norms. Some of the platform’s largest subreddits, like r/politics, have more than 1,000 volunteer mods. The company also employs a paid staff of moderators, like Amerson, to ensure that the content posted on the site does not run afoul of the law or of the company’s own content policy.

Across Reddit, it is these volunteer mods who conduct most of the content moderation on the site. According to Reddit’s most recent transparency report, volunteer moderators were behind 59% of all content removals in 2021, while paid content moderators handled most other removals. 

Reddit characterizes its moderation approach as “akin to a democracy, wherein everyone has the ability to vote and self-organize, follow a set of common rules, and ultimately share some responsibility for how the platform works” and maintains that its bottom-up system “continues to be the most scalable solution we’ve seen to the challenges of moderating content online.” 

In doing this work, however, volunteer mods are providing essential quality control services for Reddit without getting paid a dime. A 2022 study from Northwestern University attempted to quantify the labor value of Reddit’s estimated 21,500 volunteer moderators and concluded that it is worth at least $3.4 million to the company annually. 

While the volunteer moderators do their work for free, many are unaware of the monetary value of the labor they perform for the company. “We wanted to introduce some transparency into this transaction to show that volunteer moderators are doing a very valuable and complex job for Reddit,” said Hanlin Li, the co-author of the report.

Volunteer moderators often describe their work as a “labor of love,” Li explained, but they also have been forthcoming about the need for more institutional support to combat hate speech and harassment. “Over the years we’ve seen a lot of protests by moderators against Reddit, essentially because they thought that they were not supported adequately to do this volunteer job,” she explained. 

This has been a longstanding tension at Reddit, which developed a reputation early on for taking a laissez-faire approach to content moderation and hosting subreddits rife with bigotry and hate speech. This came to a head with a misogynistic incel community that formed on the platform in 2013 and became the ground zero for the 2014 Gamergate online harassment campaign that targeted women in the video game industry. The following year, when Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao announced that the platform would ban five subreddits for harassment, she was inundated with online abuse. Shortly after, she resigned. The incel subreddit‌ wasn’t banned by the website until 2017.

Despite its unique reliance on a volunteer-driven content moderation model, the site has flown under the radar of researchers and reporters, generating less attention than other social networks. But the lawsuit could change this.

Lawsuits target tech giants over moderator trauma, mistreatment

Maya Amerson’s case against Reddit is a reminder that the company, despite its unique approach to moderation, is not immune to the same kinds of allegations of worker harm that have formed the basis of lawsuits against the world’s largest tech platforms. 

That includes TikTok, Facebook and YouTube. TikTok was sued by two former content moderators last spring: They alleged that the company failed to create a safe and supportive working environment as they reviewed disturbing material including videos of bestiality, necrophilia and violence against children. Facebook agreed to a $52-million settlement in 2020 to compensate former content moderators who claimed their work caused psychological harm. And YouTube recently settled a $4.3-million lawsuit filed by former moderators who said they developed mental health issues while on the job. 

These suits all focus on a relatively new labor force and speak to an industry-wide concern about the toll of moderators’ work. “Generally speaking, content moderation is kind of the new frontier,” Nicholas De Blouw, one of Amerson’s attorneys, told me. “In 1992, there wasn’t such a thing as content moderation. I think that’s the interesting aspect of these cases, is seeing how the law protects people that are in roles that never really existed.”

Many social media platforms have shifted away from employing moderators in-house and now outsource their jobs to third-party contractors. Vendors like Accenture, CPL and Majorel employ people all over the world, from India to Latvia to the Philippines, typically expecting fast turnaround times on content review but offering relatively low hourly wages in return. In lawsuits, employees allege they’ve been exploited, made to work in substandard conditions and denied adequate mental health support for the psychological effects of their work. 

After TIME magazine showed how moderators in Kenya — working for Sama, a subcontractor of Meta — were paid as little as $2.20 per hour to review violent material while operating in a “workplace culture characterized by trauma,” one worker took both Sama and Meta to court. Sama has since canceled its remaining contracts with Meta. A separate investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism highlighted the plight of a “legion of traumatized” and underpaid Colombian moderators working under grueling conditions for a TikTok contractor. “You have to just work like a computer,” a moderator said of the job in Colombia. “Don’t say anything, don’t go to bed, don’t go to the restroom, don’t make a coffee, nothing.” 

Some social media researchers have suggested that eliminating the outsourced labor model could be a step toward improving conditions for workers. New York University professor Paul M. Barrett, who authored a 2020 report on outsourced content moderation, has called on companies to stop farming out the work and instead employ moderators in-house, where they would theoretically have more access to mental health support, supervision and proper training. 

But moving the job in-house alone won’t resolve all the alleged issues with this line of work, as Amerson’s lawsuit against Reddit makes clear. After all, she was not an outsourced moderator — she was a direct employee of the company. As Barrett explained, directly employing moderators does not guarantee that they will receive everything that employees in these roles need.

“There’s an irreducible aspect to this work that makes it hazardous,” he said. “If you’re doing this work, there’s a danger you’re going to run into very difficult, offensive, and unsettling content. You can’t really completely avoid that. The question is: How well-trained are you, how well-supervised are you, and are there options for you to get the kind of mental and emotional support that would seem to be common sense in connection with this kind of work?” 

Are any companies doing this well? Barrett said he was “unaware of a major platform doing content moderation well in terms of directly employing moderators who receive proper training, supervision and mental health support.”

What would incentivize platforms to implement these changes? While they could reform themselves, put an end to outsourced moderation and provide in-house employees with better benefits, compensation, oversight and training, there’s no reason to expect this to happen. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, Twitter has moved in the opposite direction, gutting content moderation teams. Layoffs at YouTube have left the company with just one employee overseeing global misinformation policy.

In an area that shows no appetite for self-regulation, actual oversight may be the only solution. Barrett has proposed enhancing the consumer protection authority of the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the social media industry. Such an expansion could give the FTC the authority to ask companies outright about their content moderation practices and to verify whether they live up to their commitments to consumers outlined in their terms of service and community standards guidelines, Barrett explained.

“They make promises just like other companies,” he said. “My argument is that the FTC could ask: So how many moderators do you employ? Do you have enough people to get this done? How do they interact with the automated system? And is all of that adequate, really, to fulfill the promises you make?”

A policy shift like this also would require Congressional action, which is hard to imagine in our gridlocked era of governance. But without major changes to the industry, it’s also hard to imagine lawsuits like Amerson’s — and the concerns that undergird them — going away anytime soon.

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“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”

“You can’t go live for 63 days”

For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France.

He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation. 

Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. 

The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly. 

Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back. 

As Karimi was pleading with one Meta employee, I cornered another one across the crowded reception hall, to deliver a similar message from a different part of the world. A friend working for an independent television station in Georgia had asked me to pass on that her newsroom had lost a staggering 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine.  The station, called Formula TV, made countless attempts to contact Meta but received no response. 

Was there anything these Meta staffers could do to help?

‘Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying’

“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself. 

This seemingly technical error caused the station to lose 90% of its audience, but also a chunk of its revenue. “Monetization has been suspended. It is a harsh punishment,” Ugulava said. 

The Tbilisi-based opposition TV station Mtavari saw similar declines when it ran a story about Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian volunteer paramilitary group that has been defending Mariupol, where some of the worst atrocities of the war have occurred. Facebook removed the story on grounds that it was “a call to terrorism.” The Azov Battalion is controversial because of the far-right and even neo-Nazi leanings of many of its members, but only Russia categorizes it as a terrorist organization. 

“We were already under constant attacks from Georgian government troll farms, but since the invasion Russian-backed organizations began reporting us too. Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, the channel’s Director General told me. 

Gvaramia says many of the Ukraine-related stories that Mtavari posted in early March were taken down by Facebook in early April, weeks after they were first published and seen by millions of people. The Mtavari team has good reason to believe they are being reported by Kremlin-backed accounts. 

“The worst part is that there is no warning mechanism, there is no obvious criteria for these takedowns and appeals to Facebook take weeks … Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying,” Gvaramia said. His channel’s engagement, he said, dropped from 22 million in early March to 6 million in early April.  

For a place as small as Georgia (population 3.5 million) the consequences of these takedowns are huge. Like in many countries outside the West, Facebook has become the nation’s virtual public square – the place where people gather to discuss and debate their future. This discussion is existential in Georgia, because the future is so precarious: twenty percent of the country is already occupied by Russia, and many fear that Ukraine’s invasion will push Georgia further into Moscow’s embrace. Kremlin-funded disinformation campaigns have put independent media covering the situation under massive pressure. When media outlets like Formula TV and Mtavari disappear from people’s Facebook feeds, the very ideas of liberal democracy disappear from the public debate. 

“The power that Facebook has is scary. The way it is using it is even scarier,” a Russian journalist, who did not want to be named due to security concerns, told me. Her account was suspended after she was reported to Facebook by numerous accounts accusing her of violating community standards. She suspects the accounts that reported her were working on behalf of the Russian government. Like Karimi, who says Facebook is helping the Taliban, she says Facebook’s policies are aiding Vladimir Putin’s agenda. 

“Silicon Valley is helping Putin to win the information war. It is insane and it has to stop,” she said “But we don’t know how to tell them this, because it is impossible to speak to them directly.”

None of this is new

Meta has been accused of promoting hatred and disinformation around the world before, from Nigeria to Palestine to Myanmar where the company was famously accused of fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. And experts in regions like the Middle East and Africa have noted that even though tech platforms are failing to adequately address the content crisis around Ukraine, they have brought a faster and more robust public response in this case than in places like Syria or Ethiopia. 

With each new crisis, Meta has made new promises to better account for all the cultural and linguistic nuances of posts around the world. The company even put out an earnest-sounding human rights policy last year that focused on these issues. But there’s little evidence that its practices are actually changing. Facebook does not disclose how many moderators it employs, but estimates suggest around 15,000 people are charged with vetting content generated by Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users globally. 

“It is like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier,” one moderator told me. I cannot name him, or say where he is, because Facebook subcontractors operate under strict non-disclosure agreements. But he and other people with access to moderators told me that the Ukraine war is the latest proof that Facebook’s content moderation model does more harm than good. 

Facebook moderators have 90 seconds to decide whether a post is allowed to go up or not. From Myanmar to Ukraine and beyond, they are dealing with incredibly graphic images of violence or highly contextual speech that typically doesn’t line up with Facebook’s byzantine rules on what is and is not allowed. The system, in which posts live or die depending on a quick decision of an overworked, underpaid and often traumatized human, takes a toll on the mental health of the moderators. But it is also damaging the health of the information ecosystem in which we live. 

“The weight of this war is falling on outsourced moderators, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm,” says Martha Dark, director of Foxglove Legal, a UK-based tech justice non-profit group that is working on issues of mistreatment of Facebook content moderators around the world.   

“Despite its size and its colossal profits, Ukraine has shown that Facebook's systems are totally unequipped to deal with all-out information war,” says Dark. “No one is saying moderating a war zone is an easy task. But it's hard to shake the sense that Facebook isn't making a serious effort at scaling up and fixing content moderation – because to do so would eat into its profit margins. That's just not good enough,” Dark said.

Facebook has pledged to reply to my questions about the cases of Shafi Karimi from Afghanistan and FormulaTV in Georgia in the coming days – I’ll report on it as soon as I hear back. In the meantime, my contacts there offered this response, which is attributed to a “Meta spokesperson”: 

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.”

It’s true that the company has deplatformed some of the most prominent sources of Russian disinformation, such as Russian state broadcasters. And we can’t know what impact some of these other measures are having, due to the company’s lack of transparency about its actual day-to-day content moderation decisions. But the real power of Facebook, which is arguably the most potent communication tool in the world at the moment, lies in organic, peer-to-peer shares and that’s where so much disinformation flourishes. 

“We can no longer cover the war,” says the Georgian journalist Salome Ugulava. “Our followers are not seeing us on their feeds.” 

It’s not just Facebook: Twitter is facing similar accusations of doing a terrible job policing its platform when it comes to Ukraine. “You are failing,” tweeted journalist Simon Ostrovsky who is covering Ukraine for PBS Newshour. “Hundreds of sock puppet accounts attack every tweet that counters the Kremlin narrative, meanwhile you fall for coordinated campaigns to suspend genuine accounts.”

This story originally ran in our our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

The post How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war appeared first on Coda Story.

According to Claudio Michelizza, founder of the Italian fact-checking site Bufale.net, during the first wave of Italy’s coronavirus crisis, “disinformation websites contributed to the climate of uncertainty. People started believing that Covid was planned.”

The online spread of misleading narratives is a particular cause for concern in Italy. According to an April 2021 report by the global activist platform Avaaz, Italian speakers are the non-English users in Europe “least protected” against disinformation on Facebook, with 69% of the content examined not fact-checked by the platform’s moderators. And while social networks like Facebook and Twitter have removed many “superspreader” accounts, a multitude of smaller pages still seem to fly under their radar — including Oltre.Tv, which had operated on Facebook since 2011.

In December 2020, the global misinformation-tracking organization NewsGuard identified an network of seven Italian websites and Facebook pages that shared each other’s posts and articles almost simultaneously. The network includes Oltre.Tv. NewsGuard calculated the network’s reach at over 1.5 million followers. Since then, a sister site to Oltre.tv has appeared — Gasp.News — that publishes and shares similar content.

The network of Facebook pages mainly share articles from Oltre.Tv with false claims about the pandemic, such as an interview with an Italian psychiatrist who referred to Bill Gates as “a nerdy psychopath”, whose efforts to fund Covid vaccines would transform people into robots.

From the outset, Oltre.Tv had strong anti-science leanings. “The Facebook page was born with a focus against multinationals. Its first name was ‘Let’s boycott multinationals,’” said Luca Nicotra, a campaign director at Avaaz, who has been following Oltre.Tv’s network since 2019. “Since the beginning, it had an anti-vax position.”

Oltre.Tv’s Facebook page was taken down in May 2019, after an investigation by Avaaz revealed its participation in a wide network promoting the populist Five Star Movement and right-wing Lega Nord, which swept Italy’s Parliamentary elections in 2018 and 2019. Over 23 Italian Facebook pages that had been posting disinformation and hate speech in support of the parties were removed.

Days later, however, a new Oltre.Tv Facebook page appeared. It has been sharing questionable content ever since. 

Oltre.Tv and Gasp.News both run ads through Google. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra has stated that the network could generate between 2,000-4,000 euros a month. 

Oltre.Tv and Gasp.News share a publishing team and an owner — ArcanetWeb SRLS, a digital marketing and communication company. The sites’ content editor, Daniele di Luciano, told Coda in an email that he does indeed run the seven Facebook pages that NewsGuard identified and the Gasp.News page. NewsGuard also characterizes Oltre.Tv’s content as having a right-wing, anti-immigration and anti-abortion bias.

Di Luciano disagreed with NewsGuard’s findings and said Oltre.tv is neither right nor left wing. He also questioned NewsGuard’s rating and analysis process. Writing in Italian, he said, “Oltre is a simple news site, like many others.”

The post The Italian disinformation networks flying under Facebook’s radar appeared first on Coda Story.

Sparked by unemployment rates that had worsened during the pandemic, the nationwide demonstrations, which began as clashes between police and marginalized youth in mid-January had broadened their scope. Around 1,700 protestors — many of them minors — had been detained and there were reports of police torturing and abusing many of those held in custody. In the capital, hundreds of young Tunisians and civil society activists peacefully took to the streets, calling for economic equality, an end to police brutality and the decriminalization of homosexuality and marijuana.

Photographs of Amdouni — who is openly lesbian and a committed feminist — had begun to circulate on Facebook back in October, when she had protested against a law that stood to shield security forces from criminal liability after the use of lethal force. But the online campaign against her reached its peak at the beginning of this year, when hundreds of photographs of her were posted by various Facebook users, accompanied by captions mocking her size, sexuality and appearance. Other messages threatened her life.

“I will destroy your vagina, you dyke” read one private message on Facebook. Some posts explicitly questioned her gender identity, speculating that she was a man. Others described her as “ungodly” and a “pervert.” Amdouni was also doxxed. After her address and cell number were published, her phone rang constantly with calls from unknown numbers. 

“I received so much hate, so many threats, that I became almost accustomed to it,” said Amdouni, sitting in a bar in central Tunis. “It really affected me. My psychological state is now very fragile because of it. I am so exhausted by these threats. I can’t even go out in the street alone.”

Amdouni had become one of the most recognizable faces of the protests, making it much easier for the police to identify her. She says that officers would frequently stop her and check her ID, sometimes delaying her for up to an hour and echoing the insults she had received online.

On February 27, Amdouni could not take it any longer and headed to her nearest police station to report the harassment she had been subjected to, both online and on the streets. She was arrested on the spot. Two days later, she was formally charged with insulting a police officer — a charge punishable by one year in prison — based on reports that she had shouted and cursed outside the station after officers failed to register her complaint. On March 4, she was sentenced to six months in jail.

Social Media and Surveillance 

Amdouni’s case is an extreme example of how social media is being used in Tunisia as an authoritarian tool. Activists fear that the right to protest in Tunisia has been on a gradual decline in recent years. Many believe that the country is reverting to the police state it was before the 2011 Arab Spring, when a popular uprising ousted the government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Arrests and prosecutions based on Facebook posts have become more frequent. Meanwhile, the police have turned to social media to discredit their critics and stoke violence. During recent protests, observers noticed that members of the LGBTQ community were being repeatedly targeted and mistreated by law enforcement. Despite its shift toward democracy after the revolution, Tunisia remains a conservative, predominantly Muslim society. Homosexuality is still a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years in prison. 

In February, Human Rights Watch released a report that collected testimonies and documented dozens of cases of online harassment, doxxing and forced “outing” of LGBT people. The organization noted that several protestors had also been subjected to arbitrary arrest, physical assault, threats to rape and kill, and that many had been refused access to legal counsel. 

A large number of the social media posts targeting LGBTQ activists were being published on Facebook pages affiliated with the Tunisian police. Much of the harassment Amdouni faced was spearheaded and encouraged by such groups, which activists say gave a green light for further violence and intimidation, online and in the physical world.

Dozens of Facebook pages are associated, both officially and unofficially, with Tunisia’s police unions. The largest, The Syndicate of National Security in Tunisia, has 430,000 followers and was created in September 2011. After the revolution, which called for the end of the country’s police state, officers took advantage of new-found freedoms to unionize and protect themselves. Today, the unions claim to have over 100,000 members, almost the entire number of police officers in Tunisia. 

Rights groups state that the Tunisian government allows the police to act with near total impunity and that such organizations have further entrenched their power. There have also been instances of unions mobilizing to obstruct justice. In 2018, dozens of officers stormed a courthouse in an attempt to disrupt a trial in which five colleagues were facing torture charges.  

The Facebook groups which represent national and regional unions, are very active, posting several times a day and attracting hundreds of likes and shares. Analysis of dozens of such pages found that the majority of the content posted serves to push security forces propaganda, portraying officers as heroic protectors of the nation. The pages mostly show posts about the latest drug bust or the arrest of petty criminals. There are also photographs of heavily-armed officers handing out flowers to women, assisting citizens in distress or posing with small children. Many are religious in nature, while others comment on the politics of the day.

What is of particular concern to rights' advocates, however, is the groups' use of disinformation to incite violence against specific sections of society. Nessryne Jelalia, president of Al Bawsala, a Tunisian NGO promoting democracy and human rights, says that this trend has grown over the past year, with police starting to publish photographs and publicly humiliate individual protestors. 

During the winter demonstrations, surveillance drones were often seen hovering over the crowds and plainclothes officers could be seen filming from rooftops. Aerial shots of the protestors, some with alternative haircuts or piercings, were then posted on Facebook. Images of same-sex couples kissing in the crowd were also captured. In a country where pre-marital sex is illegal and public displays of affection are taboo, the aim was clearly to identify and disgrace the demonstrators.

“The police are making intrusions into people’s private lives — especially gay people, activists and human rights defenders — in order to discredit them. That has always been a technique of the former regime, to discredit opponents,” said Jelalia.

Experts have also noticed that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, previously vital to the success of Arab Spring movements, are now being used to attack pro-democracy activists. 

Marwa Fatafta, Middle East-North Africa policy manager at the digital rights group Access Now, says that this tactic is being reflected across the region. 

“Today, you can’t control the flow of information because, where people use social media to document human rights abuses and speak their mind, the counter effort from the government is to try to spread fake news or disinformation in a way to counter the narrative of the activists and to smear them. It’s hard for activists to fight against this,” she said.

Electronic armies

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Ragheb sat drinking beer and eating lamb couscous with his friends in downtown Tunis. Most of the people at the table were members of the local LGBTQ and minority rights group Damj. Several of the organization’s activists have been targets of online harassment and have collected evidence of it. It was a week or so after Amdouni had been sent to jail and everyone was on edge. 

Suddenly Ragheb got up and went around the room embracing each of his friends in turn. “I’m doing this because we’re never sure how much time we actually have together,” he said. 

Ragheb, who asked for his last name not to be used, had recently taken to wearing a Spongebob mask to the demonstrations, so that his identity would be hidden from the drones and cameras. Although he is out to his family, he comes from a small town outside of Tunis and fears that if neighbors were to see his photograph online, his relatives could be subject to intimidation. 

“The narrative being propagated by these police union Facebook groups is creating rifts within our society and it’s alienating us,” he said. “They try to stir up more angst and anger.” 

Many of the posts use offensive language to describe demonstrators and tend to focus on the most contentious aspects of the protest movement, such as the drive for gay rights and the legalization of marijuana. All neglect to mention that they were also out on the streets to demand economic equality for all Tunisians.

“The posts characterize us in a very specific, extreme way that is intended to offend and shock many members of our society. They construe us as drug addicts, sodomists, atheists,” said Ragheb.

One post, made in March on a page for a police union in the coastal city of Sfax, reads: “What you are seeing is an image of protest that has been imported from abroad —and in excellent taste! Gay boys, stoners, Satan lovers… this is a disgusting class of people who want anarchy.” 

Another, from February, appears to threaten human rights activists directly: “To the NGOs and NGO staff, the eunuchs, the homosexuals, the trashy gays, the revolutionaries, the human rights defenders and their followers: remember that we have the power of bullets — but the bullets are expensive and the target is cheap. Long Live the National Police Unions.” The page has 43,663 followers and the posts were liked and shared hundreds of times.

“We do not allow hate speech directed at the LGBTQIA+ community, harassment or death threats,” wrote a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to Coda Story. “These policies apply to everyone. We’ve recently removed a number of these pieces of content for violating our policies and we continue to investigate to find any others. Keeping people safe on our services is something we take extremely seriously.”

The two posts described above have since been removed. Ragheb explained that many of the posts tend to be disseminated by pro-police “electronic armies” comprised of bots and fake accounts, but also of profiles and pages associated with Tunisia’s leading Islamist parties Ennahda and Al Karama. “We call the Ennahda profiles “blue flies” and the Al Karama profiles “green flies,” he said. 

“Electronic flies” have caused similar havoc in online spaces across the MENA region, from Saudi Arabia spreading disinformation after the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Algeria’s attacks on the pro-democracy movement.

“Because it's a swarm of individuals — some real, some not — it’s hard as an activist to push against these troll farms or shut them down,” said Fatafta. It’s a way of intimidating and silencing activists — especially women and queer people.”

“Why did the police arrest me?” 

On 17 March, Tunis Appeals Court released Amdouni after 19 days in detention. Her case had been fought by at least 20 pro-bono lawyers. She believes that international attention helped to secure her early release.

Enjoying a beer at a popular bar in downtown Tunis a week after her release, Amdouni seemed upbeat and optimistic, already making plans for a performance piece based on her time in prison. A few days earlier, she had been sleeping on the floor of a cramped and filthy cell with 36 other women.

“Why did the police arrest me? Because I was among the main organizers of the protest, because I was very visible, because I declare that I’m a lesbian, that I’m a feminist, that I’m queer,” she said.

"In prison, I was strong but I was also very depressed, very wounded because I knew that I didn’t deserve this. It hurt me that my own country, my own government, was doing this to me. And why? All because I’m different.”

On April 5, Amdouni’s defiant resolve gave way. Left by herself for a moment at home, she took an overdose of medication and was rushed to hospital where she was treated for the next few days. According to friends she was distraught and overwhelmed by recent events. 

After being discharged, Amdouni took to Facebook: “Friends, forgive me, but I’ve recently lived through such disappointing and disgusting things. We make one desperate decision and, in a moment, we can lose everything.”

The post Tunisian police are using drones and Facebook to doxx LGBTQ protesters appeared first on Coda Story.

It proceeded to offer eight pages of reading material that were startling in their breadth. Quotes from the Bible and the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand jostled against 9/11 conspiracy theories, stories of UFOs and antisemitic tropes about the Rothschilds controlling the world. But, above all, there was one overarching theme: that Covid-19 is a hoax, perpetrated by the deep state to oppress the global population.

Friends, living miles away in another London borough, received the same glossy pamphlet. “They must have printed thousands,” one messaged me. The next day, I checked in on my local print store to see if they had fulfilled any bulk orders for material that seemed unusually concerned with Bill Gates. The manager frowned. 

“I would have noticed something like that,” he said. “You don’t mean these?” He then showed me a poster complaining of recent changes to the borough’s parking restrictions. No, I didn’t mean them. 

December turned to January, and more leaflets came. My octogenarian father found one tucked beneath his windscreen wipers, informing him that the deep state would soon be overthrown. During one of my countless government-approved walks on Hampstead Heath, I found another, stuck in the crook of a leafless oak tree: a mud-spattered page of links to conspiracy theory videos such as “Plandemic,” laying out a complex set of beliefs that the lockdown is a plot to reduce and control the population.

The U.K. has endured months of coronavirus restrictions, and now the country’s quiet streets are being littered with anti-lockdown leaflets. On Telegram, thousands of people are rallying to print and distribute material advocating for a “great reopening” of businesses, splitting themselves into groups to cover every county and major city. 

“It is the most organized campaign that I've seen throughout the whole of Covid,” said Aoife Gallagher, a researcher at London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who has been busy studying anti-lockdown movements in the UK and Ireland.

In recent months, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms have cracked down hard on anti-vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories. Now, some anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 deniers have gone back to the drawing board, using age-old methods to spread their message. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20, pamphlets printed by an Italian doctor spread a popular, fantastical theory that the disease was a German bioweapon, deployed against the enemy in the final desperate months of the First World War. A century on, as a different disease rampages across the globe, the same tactics are being used once again.

On Telegram, anti-lockdown campaigners are posting instructions for how to flyer communities. “We suggest you use local printers and make a deal with them, and pay in cash,” the admin of one group wrote, warning users that “agents of the establishment” were watching the conversation. I wondered if they meant journalists, like me. 

I am now a member of dozens of these groups, which ping a constant stream of messages to my phone. Every day, new poster templates are added for people to download and print. Many use an idiosyncratic design style, particular to conspiracist literature: red text on black, dire warnings, prophecies. Others masquerade as government information, complete with National Health Service logos and the royal coat of arms.

The campaigner

In Bishop’s Park, a patch of green in west London, overlooking the River Thames, the late-February sun was sinking on the horizon. Earlier, the park had thrummed with music and was filled with hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters. Piers Corbyn — the climate change denialist, vaccine conspiracist and brother of the former Labour party leader Jeremy — was arrested after making a speech to the crowd, and charged with organizing the event in defiance of coronavirus restrictions. He’s used to it: earlier in the month, he was held for distributing leaflets equating the vaccine program to the Holocaust. In fact, watching Corbyn being led away by the police has become an integral part of such gatherings.

Gradually, people began to disperse, and the half-dozen police vans that had arrived at the park drove away. Campaigners pushed more leaflets into my hands — even a full newspaper. I was also told, many times, to take off my mask.

I talked to Mark, a 51-year-old former lorry driver who has been attending similar events since the start of the pandemic. “I’ve got a better social life than I ever had,” he told me. “It’s something to do every weekend.” 

Mark, who asked me not to use his full name, for fear of repercussions from friends and family, told me that he had been “awake” for the past 30 years. The kind of consciousness he referred to roughly translates as immersing himself in alternative news sources and believing in an array of secret plots against ordinary civilians, orchestrated by a sinister network of self-serving elites. 

His doctor signed him off from work last year after he faced problems with his health. Throughout lockdown, he’s been reliant on benefits, and is keen to get better and get back to work — but told me he can’t get an appointment with his GP. 

Since November last year, he has spent four days a week walking the streets of London, handing out leaflets. It offers a break from the monotony, and a sense of purpose. He has also been campaigning for Corbyn, who is running for London mayor, as well as flyering for an organization called Stand Up X, which contends that the pandemic is a scam and that vaccine programs are a way for the government to conduct covert experiments on humans. He spends hours at a time on the streets, speaking to people and pushing papers through letterboxes. “I get home and my throat — I can feel it burning,” he said. “I’ve been talking so much.” 

His friends at the protests mostly range in age from their 40s to their 60s. For them, he said, old-fashioned forms of campaigning feel more natural and removed from the interference of social media moderation policies. 

“I can see the person’s eyes, and see if they’re taking it in,” Mark added. “Some stuff is only word of mouth. We don’t even discuss it on telephone calls.” 

However, he does worry that some of the people at the protests have sunk too deep into the world of conspiracist thinking. “I’ve seen it creep up on people,” he explained. After events like this, he often takes a walk through the city streets, “to decompress.” 

“I sometimes feel I’m being closed in — even after a really good day,” he said.

Behind the pamphlets

In December, Facebook shut down a group called Save Our Rights for posting anti-vaccine videos. Save Our Rights has pushed a conspiracy theory called the Great Reset, in which world leaders are said to have masterminded the pandemic to wrest control of the global economy. Founder Louise Creffield, 34, has since re-established the pages. 

“I think we had like 43,000 in the group. We’re back up now to 26,000,” she said, adding that her followers have been mobilizing locally to distribute pamphlets up and down the country. “Getting out there and doing leafleting and stuff, reaches just a different audience that I can’t otherwise reach, because they’re not on my friends list.” 

The Metropolitan police recently announced that Creffield has been charged with holding and attending gatherings in breach of coronavirus restrictions. She is set to appear in court in May.

Researcher Aoife Gallagher has noticed a growing trend for analog campaigning among anti-lockdown groups. “The platforms are trying to take action against Covid conspiracies, and they realize that,” she said. “So, using flyers, I suppose, is a way for them to get around that. It also helps them to bring the movement to people that may not necessarily be online.”

So far, Gallagher has yet to find a single significant grassroots anti-lockdown movement that doesn’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. “There, are of course, evil forces at play in these groups,” she said, describing how she’s seen Covid denialism give way to QAnon beliefs and white nationalism. 

Looking through the collection of anti-lockdown leaflets I’ve now amassed, one flyer is simply a square QR code, accompanied by the words “Scan me for freedom.” When I followed that instruction, I was taken to a web page filled with links to theories about pedophiles running the world. 

I found the pamphlet’s designer on Telegram. He agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. “I came up with it to wake us Brits up a bit,” he said. “I’m a graphic designer, printer and artist, so creativity comes naturally.” 

Leaflets like his, distributed in the offline world, offer a portal back into the internet’s shadowiest realms. What is more, they are encountered when people are going about their daily lives, simply taking a walk in a park or going through their mail.

In West Kirby, a leafy town in the English county of Merseyside, flurries of leaflets have been landing on residents’ doormats. Not long ago, Daniel Booth, 51, received a Wirral Community Information Newsletter through his letterbox. The leaflet, which he described as “utter tripe,” was jammed with false information about 5G radiation and vaccines. He ignored it, but told me that such unsolicited mail does make him worry for his older, more vulnerable neighbors. 

“I don’t want to patronize elderly people, but if you’re waiting to be vaccinated and don’t have access to other information, and you read all these terrible things, it really could cause you not to have the vaccine,” he said. 

Booth hasn’t been able to check on his neighbors, because of the ongoing lockdown, but he is scheduled to be immunized in the next few months. “I’m looking forward to being controlled by Bill Gates,” he said with a laugh.

The post London is littered with conspiracy leaflets as Covid deniers dodge Facebook moderators appeared first on Coda Story.

“A lot of people in my area, especially in Illinois – they were very doubtful about it. All I would see on social media was that it was a hoax, it wasn't that serious,” she told me during a telephone call.

Then she found a sanctuary — a Facebook group that differed from many of the platform’s pseudoscience and conspiracy pages. It was full of people like her, who were also experiencing the ravages of the virus. She posted about her symptoms, people responded saying they had been through the same things. 

“I can tell you, the first time that happened to me, I believe I cried. I felt very validated. I had a huge list of symptoms, and I thought I was going crazy,” Cruz said. 

Millions of people around the world are now recovering from Covid-19. And thousands are coming together on Facebook to discuss the disease. Cruz is now an admin for the Covid-19 Support Group, which has grown to almost 26,000 members. It’s part of a network of dozens of pages for people who have had the virus. 

In Soweto township, South Africa, Patricia, 36, lives around numerous people who also think Covid-19 isn’t real. “In our townships they don’t believe it’s there. They just don’t believe corona exists, even if you show your pictures in the ICU,” she said during a telephone conversation. “My family and relatives never thought it existed until I got it.” 

Others in her community, however, harbor an abject terror of Covid-19. In August, after a 10-day stay in an intensive care unit with the virus, Patricia, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for fear of being ostracized, found herself alone at home. She was overwhelmed by the thought of going outside. She posted a desperate, tearful video to her personal Facebook page.

“Now, I have to get out of the house and face the world. I’m not ready. I’m not ready. I’m scared,” she sobbed. A friend invited her to join a Facebook group called Recovered n Living, for South African Covid-19 survivors, where she found thousands of people who believed her story.

“You feel like you can only share this experience with the person who's been through it too,” she said. Patricia now uses the group as a way to stand up to the stigma surrounding the virus in South Africa. 

“When you disclose it, people give you a different look. They’re so scared of you. It’s like when HIV-AIDS started, people will just try to run away.” 

But, even among those who have first-hand experience of the virus, conspiracy theories and misinformation have begun to percolate. Some individuals who have recovered from Covid-19 regularly write up their “miracle cures.” 

One group hosts posts advocating the use of a solution of turmeric and black pepper, which some users say saved them from death’s door. Another post extols the therapeutic virtues of a mixture of ocean water and copper. Cruz remembers when President Donald Trump made his comments about hydroxychloroquine – an unproven drug that he said was a viable treatment for Covid-19. The group was flooded with discussions of its supposed merits. 

“It was really hard to let the group understand that, ‘Hey, it’s not a cure,’” said Cruz, who takes hydroxychloroquine for her arthritis. She was forced to go without it for two weeks because of a shortage caused by people buying the drug, believing it would protect them against the coronavirus.

One 19,000-strong group, named Covid-19 Survivors and Support, featured a discussion of whether people who have recovered from the disease would get the standard flu shot this winter. One user wrote, “You’re going to get anti-vaxxers on this post ????,” while others began to discuss how they wouldn’t be getting the vaccine. “As a warning, if I see any of this anti-vaxxer crap, you’re getting deleted,” wrote an administrator. 

“Now, this discussion about, ‘Would I or would I not take a vaccine?’ – that’s a little bit trickier to manage. I’ve been letting people discuss it,” said Chrissi Kelly, the admin of a group for people who have lost their smell and taste after contracting the coronavirus. “Managing it has been an absolute nightmare,” she said of her admin duties.

Kelly, who is the founder of the U.K. charity AbScent, for people experiencing smell loss, added that the group had a zero-tolerance attitude towards junk science. “We stand for evidence-based science, we follow the national guidelines,” she said. 

However, anti-science discussions do still creep in. “We've had a couple about ‘Mask wearing is causing us to lose our sense of smell.’ Those people go straight out the door,” she said. “But people have to be given a place to talk, and we can't be seen to be squashing people on the head. When I get something that really bums me out, because it’s so ignorant, then I send a message to that person."

"Generally, there is quiet acquiescence.”

Illustration by Gogi Kamushadze

The post Fear, stigma and survival: inside Facebook’s coronavirus recovery groups appeared first on Coda Story.

As a parent, when your child is sick, it’s the worst feeling in the world: you feel helpless. As I write this, my son is lethargic on a couch with a nasty ear infection. But it’s just an ear infection, and I know it will pass. 

Parents in the small Pacific country of Samoa haven’t been that lucky. The island nation with a population of less than 200,000, has been struggling with a major measles outbreak for a few months now. The disease has so far infected around 4,500 people and killed 76, of which more than 60 were younger than four.

The outbreak has animated both sides of the vaccination argument. People from all over the world have been passionately arguing about the subject on the government’s official Facebook page.

This horrible tragedy shows what happens when vaccine skepticism takes a hold. 

Vaccination rates in Samoa plummeted to just 31% after July 2018, when two young children died after receiving vaccinations. It was a tragic accident. The nurse administering the vaccines had mixed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine powder with expired muscle relaxant instead of water. But for those already fearful of vaccines, the deaths served as proof that vaccines are dangerous.

With children dying of measles, you may think this clearly shows how dangerous it is to decline vaccinations. But to those who worry vaccines might kill their children instead, a deep-rooted fear has led them to believe in the existence of a massive cover up in Samoa. And they are sharing their views on the government’s official Facebook page. 

Prior to the 5th of December, the government’s official Facebook page had only seven reviews. The recommendations all praised the government and seem to have come from a few of Samoa’s residents. 

But that all changed when Samoa began a mandatory immunization drive in November to vaccinate 90% of the population. Authorities also arrested a prominent anti-vaccination campaigner Edwin Tamasese, charging him with incitement against a government order. Tamasese had described the government’s vaccination program as "the greatest crime against our people", and falsely claimed vitamin C could cure the infected children.

In merely a week, Samoa’s Facebook page became the battleground of a war between anti and pro-vaxxers. 

“A tyrannical government run by the cartel to arrest a man for giving Vit A and C to dying children with measles (who improved), while pharmagov gave out ineffective Tylenol and antibiotics. Government of Samoa places revenue and pride ahead of health safety,” one Facebook user wrote while giving a 0-star review.

Renee DiResta, a disinformation expert recently interviewed by Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell on how anti-vaxxers get around Instagram’s new hashtag controls, noticed an increase in negative reviews regarding the government’s new vaccination policy.

“A brigade of antivax Karens from the US descending upon the FB page of the Government of Samoa *to leave 1-star reviews* is...next level,” she tweeted. 

In response to the reviews from anti-vaxxers, hundreds of Facebook users took to the page to support the government’s mandatory vaccine policy. 

For many, it’s hard to understand why people would be so vehemently anti-vax and the outbreak in Samoa exemplifies how a refusal to vaccinate can kill. But for the anti-vax community, the belief that vaccines kill is stronger and linked to a decline in trust in expertise. 

As mentioned in almost every negative review on Samoa’s FB page, the community believes that the medical establishment - often described as Big Pharma - is paying scientists and governments to push unsafe vaccines. In their defense, it wouldn’t be the first time: medical companies have influenced research on the effects of sugar, exaggerated the importance of cereals for breakfast and downplayed the addictive nature of opioids, resulting in a massive addiction crisis in the U.S. These scandals have contributed to a growing distrust in science and medicine.

Starting in 2020, we are launching our new coverage on the war on science, and we’ll be investigating why people lose trust and how some bad actors take advantage for monetary gain or political power. We hope our coverage will uncover the many layers of this discussion.

My favorite Coda Stories this week:

We recently reported on the disinformation surrounding the measles outbreak in Ukraine. Like Samoa, Ukraine is one of the countries hardest hit, with more than 115,000 cases and 40 deaths since 2017.

Other recommended reads:

• Disinformation has infiltrated the media and elections in the West. In Italy, Russian propaganda now seems to have played a role in a murder trial. (New York Times)
• Read this special issue of the Columbia Journalism Review which focuses on disinformation. (CJR)
• Listen to this Power 3.0 podcast interview with Coda Story’s co-founder Natalia Antelava, in which she discusses new and innovative ways to report disinformation, as well as the impact of authoritarian technologies.

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Adriel Hampton is a liberal activist from San Francisco. He made national headlines back in 2009 for being the first congressional candidate to announce his run on Twitter, a company that at the time Politico described as a “trendy social networking site”.

Hampton lost the race then and it’s pretty likely he’ll lose the election he’s just entered: California’s gubernatorial election in 2022. But he seems to be ok with that.

His campaign is focused on a central goal: “I want to use the governor’s race to continue to talk about Facebook,” he told me when we spoke on the phone.

Hampton wants to see Facebook reverse its policy on allowing politicians to run ads with false messages on the site. Or at least bring some more attention to the company’s controversial rule. So on October 28 he registered for the gubernatorial race to further test Facebook’s policy. It’s earned him another online “first” — Hampton is the only politician or candidate in the U.S. that is ineligible to run false ads on the site.

“This person has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies, so his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking,” wrote a Facebook spokesperson to Recode.

When I spoke with Hampton he was about 50% gleeful in describing Facebook’s one-man exception for his run and 50% earnest about his cause:

“For me this is really high stakes,” Hampton said. “I’m treating it like a joke because that’s a certain way to get yourself into the narrative. But, the pivot is to talk about how serious it is.”

“I feel like that's the most important thing I could do politically right now to ensure fair elections in 2020,” he continued. 

Hampton says a major motivation for his campaign is how he’s seen climate change denialism spread on social media platforms, through conservative news outlets and in statements made by President Trump.

“That threatens the lives of my family,” he said. “The last time the media really had a huge effect in bolstering the government's lies was the Iraq war. And at the time, two of my brothers were in the service and I was just totally blown away. And it really radicalized me.”

Since his last run a decade ago, he’s worked several jobs: as the political editor for the San Francisco Examiner, a social media consultant to progressive campaigns and as an investigator for the San Francisco city attorney’s office.

Hampton is critical of the business connections of California Governor Gavin Newsom and other  former businessmen turned politicians: “They're kind of like golden retrievers for the corporations. I want to be more like a pit bull for the people.”

While 2022 is still a long way off, Hampton’s goal for now is to try to find more loopholes in Facebook’s policies and to get more people registering to run for office in order to run false ads: “I think that's what you have to do to win an activist battle against a large corporation. You have to make it terribly embarrassing.”

Facebook’s Supreme Court

I also asked Hampton what he thinks about another recent policy announcement from Facebook. By the end of the year, the company will create an Oversight Board made up of 40 part-time members tasked with reviewing policy decisions submitted by Facebook. According to the company, the board will act independently, although it will be funded by a trust paid for by Facebook. 

Writing in The New York Times, Kara Swisher enthusiastically embraced the move, even saying that she’d like to apply “to be judge and jury over Mark Zuckerberg” in an opinion piece headlined: “Facebook Finally Has a Good Idea.”

Hampton wasn’t quite as keen for a spot on a Facebook-funded supreme court. “No, I'm interested in getting elected to make such a board accountable to the people and not to Facebook,” he said. “We need independent oversight for Facebook that is elected by the people or is accountable directly to elected officials.”

He’s not the only person who is skeptical about the board. Dr. Jennifer Cobbe, who coordinates the Trust and Technology Initiative at Cambridge University, said she would also decline such an offer. “I wouldn’t join it if Facebook offered me all the money in the world,” she said. “I think generally this proposal is another attempt by Facebook to centralize as much power as possible in the hands of Facebook.”

Whiplash

Talking to Hampton, Cobbe, or other people in the tech field makes me think of all the various family members or friends who have closed their Facebook profiles, or at least deleted the app from their phones. It really does feel like we’re in the middle of a “watershed” moment as described by Hampton.

But here are some numbers I can’t get out of my head:

• Facebook added 39 million monthly active users during its second quarter this year
• Twitter added 5 million daily users in the same quarter
• As of last year, over 25% of American households own a smart speaker like Alexa. (I wonder what that number will that number look like after the holidays)
• 72% of Americans use some form of social media, according to the Pew Research Center, a number that keeps climbing

These numbers come from (another) opinion piece from the Times: “There is No Tech Backlash”. When I searched to find the piece again to double check the figures, I stumbled on this column in The Verge telling us that not only is the tech backlash real, it’s also “accelerating.” The following article it in Google search had a different take: “The backlash to the tech backlash.”

Other great Coda stories

Russia is building a facial recognition system that, according to some, may even be bigger than China’s 200 million camera system.

In Lebanon, WhatsApp is a major tool for fear and intimidation targeting protestors. Emily Lewis looks at how unverifiable rumors spread on the messaging app are impacting Beirut’s unprecedented mass demonstrations.

Most of the coverage about China’s social credit system paints the system as Orwellian. Rui Zhong takes a deeper look at the rise of the schemes.

The post “I want to use the governor’s race to continue to talk about Facebook.” appeared first on Coda Story.

The country’s so-called “Facebook law” has already led to the arrest of Egyptian journalist Ahmed Gamal Ziada. Ziada was taken into custody on January 29 at Cairo Airport while returning from Tunisia to finish applying to join the for semi-governmental Journalist Syndicate, an organization which provides official accreditation and legal support to journalists.

Ziada was first arrested in 2013 and charged with spreading false news while filming police violence against protesters in Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was accused of a number of crimes, including joining a banned group and “engaging in violent protests” while he was working as a photojournalist for the online news network Yaqeen. He was acquitted and released 16 months later after being subjected to physical violence and torture during his detention.

After being detained on January 29, Ziada was charged with “spreading false news via social media” and placed in pretrial detention at the Giza Central Prison, Last month, he was granted release on bail, pending further investigation.

According to watchdogs and activists, the new law—which places all social media accounts with over 5,000 followers under the supervision of the country’s top media authority—is part of a broader campaign by the Egyptian government to monitor the web and social media and codify the repression the media, protest groups and dissenting voices.

According to journalists, activists who took part in protests in Tahrir Square in 2001, during what was dubbed the “Facebook revolution” to topple then president Hosni Mubarak are among those who are paying the highest price with the new laws. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed activists and ordinary civilians to organise and disseminate news about Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and denounce the violence used by Egyptian security forces against the protesters. Many have since left the country, while others are in jail.

The new law, passed by two-thirds of the Egyptian parliament last summer and ratified by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in early September, increases the Egyptian government’s already sweeping powers to monitor, censor and block social media websites and blogs. The law also empowers the government to criminalize any content that violates vaguely defined political, social or religious norms.

“During the Arab revolutions and now, social media remains a primary platform for the dissemination of information, ideas and debates that the regimes do not welcome and fear,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a prominent journalist, activist and blogger whose website covered Egypt's revolution, including strikes by workers.”On occasions it was also used as a means of organizing and connecting dissidents here and there.”

El-Hamalawy has nearly 300,000 Twitter followers; he left Egypt in 2015 and now lives in Berlin. “Of course, the new law affects me, since my followers on social media platforms exceed 5,000,” he said. “I can be subject to fines and prison sentences. I'm in a better position than others, however, since I already left the country three years ago. But the security services have already sent threats to my family. Moreover almost every dissident and journalist detained in the last few years has been accused of a set of charges, including ‘spreading fake news’. The charge was already used before the new law which now includes draconian punishments for it.”

The law also enables the Supreme Council of Media to file criminal complaints against digital media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs and individuals on the basis of vaguely worded offences such as "inciting people to violate laws" and "defamation against the individuals and state institutions". Equally significantly, the legislation treats private individuals and social media companies in the same way. For example, establishing an online video channel on a website requires individuals to form a company with at least $140,000 in capital.

Supporters of the Egyptian regime say the law was approved after consultation with judicial experts and journalists and that it represents another step towards safeguarding freedom of expression in the country.

But several human rights organizations have said the law provide the legal means for the government to jail critical voices. "The law is extremely problematic, because it empowers the executive authorities to determine what is free speech and what is not in a manner that is in gross violation of the Egyptian constitution and international law," said Hussein Baoumi, a researcher at Amnesty International Egypt. "The law governs the establishment of private media platforms and the behavior of private and public media, and regulates newspapers, news websites, TV channels and radio stations owned and run by the state."

Egyptian authorities have grown increasingly adept at jailing online activists in recent years. A 2015 law made it a crime to publish or promote any news about terrorist incidents contradicting official statements. In January 2016, three people were arrested on charges of using Facebook pages to spread false information political detainees and to incite criticism of national institutions. In 2016, Egypt also blocked Facebook’s "Free Basics" Internet service in 2016 after the company refused to give authorities access to user accounts.

The latest law was passed in the wake of a number of arrests linked to criticism of President Sisi’s government. Last July, a Lebanese tourist, Mona el-Mazbouh, was sentenced to eight years in jail for insulting Egyptians and their country after she posted a video on Facebook claiming she had been sexual harassed in Egypt. According to authorities, the charge was "deliberately broadcasting false rumors which aim to undermine society and attack religions."

The case followed the arrest of the former activist and actress Amal Fahty. She was sentenced to two years in prison for sharing a video on the Internet accusing the government of not defending women against sexual harassment.

According to human rights groups, Egypt has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of political prisoners who have been jailed. The country currently has more than 60,000 political prisoners—in comparison, at the end of Mubarak's rule, who served as president from 1981 to 2011, the number of political prisoners was between 5,000-10,000.

Zeinab Mohamed is an Egyptian activist followed by about 235,000 people on Twitter. Using the nickname Zeinobia, she also writes on her blog, Egyptian Chronicles and is one of the few activists still writing about Egyptian affairs on social media.

"The Egyptian government says that this law is a way to combat rumors and organize media to the end of that talk whereas the real goal is to control the last open space left for people to express their opinion freely,” she said. "It is clear that it represents an attempt by the Egyptian government to tame down social media as an alternative media and another way for censorship. For us now using social media is more dangerous than before."

Another example of Egypt’s crackdown on the Internet can be found in the so-called "cybercrime law”, signed on 18 August 2018, which empowers authorities to order the blocking of websites that publish content considered a threat to “national security” and the "national economy". Every citizen discovered visiting a banned site can be sentenced to one year in prison, while those who create a website that is subsequently banned are punishable with a two-year sentence. According to Reporters Without Borders, "this law just legalizes the Internet censorship that is already practiced in Egypt."

Since the Egyptian government declared a state of emergency in April 2017 following two deadly attacks on Christian Coptic churches which left 44 dead, authorities have assumed the power to monitor and control all forms of communication. Hundreds of websites have been blocked, including Mada Masr, the country’s leading independent media outlet and Al Jazeera. Egyptian authorities have also used tools like reset packages (RST) to disrupt sites by preventing communication with servers. The same technique was also used in Egypt last year to disable Signal, the encrypted instant messaging service.

"The Egyptian government was already able to contain well known activists, but until today Egyptian social media and web sites were still full of satire and full of posts that make a mockery of the government,” said Wael Iskandar, a prominent political blogger. “Some of these contents are posted by accounts whose identity is completely obscure. The purpose is to repress legally all the critics on social media and to do this the government needs a legal background. We can say that we are witnessing a strategy shift. The repression is not anymore against the dissidents but directly against any space of possible dissent."

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For many Russians reading about the story, it was a case of “welcome to our world.”

Data harvesting is a booming and highly competitive business here, with a host of companies offering ways of “scraping” up details on your likes, shares and comments for commercial gain, with barely any regulatory or legislative control.

There are now companies offering advertisers—and anyone else who can pay—the ability to target almost any group imaginable.

For instance, one Russian online giant, Mail.ru, allows companies to target offers at married men who have a child aged 1-3, or—according to its database—the 6.5 million Russians who are “introverted.” And just like the online leverage Facebook enjoys from owning services such as Instagram and WhatsApp, Mail.ru has similar power in Russia as the owner of the two biggest domestic social media networks—Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

You can hire one of the many Russian firms specializing in “parsing” — the automated collection of social media data by bots. These bots will scour accounts across several social media networks and collect every piece of publicly available online activity, from likes, shares and comments to location “check-ins”.

One such firm is Moscow-based “Social Data Hub.” It proudly lists the Russian government as a client and boasts that it has a copy of the activity on every Russian social media network going back for the past seven years.

But their online hoovering also includes all the traffic generated by Russian-based users of U.S. and other international online giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The company also covers sites such as the Tinder dating app, and the Airbnb accommodation service. What this means in practice, for example, is that some swipes on Tinder profiles could actually have been made by bots.

Codaru.com tried out the “parsing” capabilities of one of these companies, to find out just how much they know about Russians. And it’s surprisingly cheap. For one ruble (slightly more than one U.S. cent), you get a complete copy of someone’s online profile (including their name, home region, phone number and date of birth), with a minimum order of 1000 accounts.

Tracking services also play a big role in following Russian internet users around. An estimated 80 per cent of all websites worldwide employ some kind of tracking software—tiny pieces of code embedded in the site — to monitor their visitors’ activities. The most common is Google Analytics, estimated to be present on around 50 per cent of all the websites in the world.

But Russian equivalents have a powerful hold on the domestic sphere. Yandex.Metrika, run by the country’s number 1 search engine, has a 52 per cent market share. Mail.ru’s tracking software is ranked second.

So if you search for a flight to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, say, an ad for a local hotel may pop up on your Vkontakte profile, because of the embedded tracker passing on details of your plans to other sites.

Ghostery, a browser extension that allows you to block data harvesting, reveals the true extent of online surveillance. As you read the London Observer’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica, no fewer than a dozen different trackers from three separate ad companies are watching your every click and scroll — and reporting back to their owners.

But Russians have learned recently that even if they log off social media, their online activity is still being constantly monitored— through public Wi-Fi spots.

Muscovites discovered last month that the Wi-Fi provider on the city’s huge public transport system—used by 12 million people a day—was collecting data from anyone using its routers. It could then be harvested by anyone savvy enough with the technology, according to a researcher who looked into it.

And it is taken as a given that Russia’s intelligence services have access to all online activity from any network. As one source in Russia’s data mining industry said, it’s “practically impossible” to evade mass-scale commercial surveillance.

The post Why the Facebook data harvesting scandal is nothing new for Russians appeared first on Coda Story.

Soon Benioff joined together with 70 other top executives of technology companies—including Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Cisco’s Gary Moore—to sign a statement opposing the legalization of LGBT discrimination. And Apple’s openly-gay CEO, Tim Cook, published an opinion column in the Washington Post to let people know “around the world” that “regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana…we will never tolerate discrimination.” Cook concluded: “Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, its time for all of us to be courageous.” Days later, Salesforce.com’s top executive in Indiana stood by the side of the legislature’s recalcitrant Republican leaders as they announced a new law clarifying that the state’s “religious freedom” act didn’t condone discrimination based on gender.

The quick, decisive victory in Indiana resonated worldwide, and the news inspired the hopes of Russian activists that America’s progressive techno-moguls would finally speak up against Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws. But the Silicon Valley leaders still haven’t summoned nearly enough courage for that much tougher fight.

An American sales executive traveling today to Moscow—where the state sanctions persecution and condones violence against LGBTQ people—could nonetheless patronize many of the same brands that serve him in San Francisco or Seattle or New York City, including the companies that forcefully opposed the Indiana law: He could stay at an Airbnb apartment rental in Moscow, which has emerged as one of the service’s top markets worldwide. (Airbnb has a Moscow office with several employees and owns a small Russian design firm.) The traveler could get chauffeured around town by Uber drivers, drink lattes from Starbucks, stream video on Netflix, and buy an iPhone or iPad or MacBook at a retail shop or order one directly from Apple’s Russian-language online store. (Apple has sold more than 1 million iPhones a year in Russia). He could search for sales leads and contacts and gauge customers’ attitudes in Russia using Salesforce.com’s ”social listening software.” If he was conducting business with the Russian government, he would surely encounter bureaucrats using PCs that ran on Microsoft Windows operating system and were networked by routers made by Cisco, which is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly masterminding a massive scheme of kickbacks and bribes to secure contracts with Russia’s government, military, and intelligence operations.

America’s progressive companies have remained conspicuously silent about Putin’s anti-gay laws while they’ve continued to pursue Russia’s marketplace. As influential as the Silicon Valley titans might seem in their home country, where local officials crave the investment and employment opportunities they can bring, they’re facing a precarious situation in Russia, where Putin has become increasingly antagonistic towards them over the past several years. His regime has cracked down on Internet companies in its efforts to suppress free speech and political opposition. Last year it began requiring that foreign companies operating in Russia keep their data on servers on Russia soil, where the government can access it. In response Google shuttered its research and development operation in Moscow, moving an estimated 50 to 100 engineers overseas. Microsoft relocated its Skype development team from Moscow to Prague, and Adobe pulled all its employees.

Google, which rivals Russia’s homegrown Yandex in the Internet search business there, appears to have flaunted Russia’s data server law or at least delayed taking action so far. (Google, as well as Facebook and Twitter, were granted vague extensions). But Uber and EBay are reportedly following the new regulations, and the Russian business daily Kommersant has reported that even Apple is complying, too. If this is true —Apple hasn’t commented publicly on the matter— then Putin’s regime could gain access to Russians’ personal troves of photographs and videos and text messages and find what they’ve been reading and listening to and watching. Such a capitulation would represent a perilous strike against the privacy of all of Apple’s Russian customers, and it would be especially dangerous for LGBTQ people there.

Only a few years ago Russia was courting America’s top technology companies rather than fighting them. In 2010 President Dmitry Medvedev visited the corporate headquarters of Apple and Google in Northern California. On his mission he talked up his plans for Russia’s ambitious effort to create its own version of Silicon Valley: the Skolkovo technology park development on the outskirts of Moscow. Medvedev succeeded in enticing leading American venture capital firms to commit to invest in this nascent technology “hub,” which was planned for 100,000 workers.

But the Silicon Valley-Moscow alliance began splintering in early 2014, when the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent American gay-rights advocacy organization, called on the official sponsors of the Winter Olympics in Sochi to protest Putin’s anti-gay laws. Sponsors such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola refrained from explicitly addressing the issue, but the activists’ agitation helped to elicit gestures of support from a couple of major technology companies: AT&T, a longtime sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Committee (though not of the Sochi winter games), issued a statement on its blog, and Google recast its homepage logo with illustrations of Olympic athletes superimposed on the colors of the rainbow flag.

But the real fissure came soon after the Olympics, when Russian forces annexed Crimea—and America’s technology companies complied with the U.S. government’s sanctions against the invader. Russia’s current “Internet czar,” German Klimenko, who is pushing for a steep hike in taxes on American technology companies, recently told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that this compliance marked a “point of no return” for Russia’s relationship with Silicon Valley firms. Putin’s antagonism to Silicon Valley has been costly to Russia’s economic aspirations. American venture capital investors have been pulling their funding, and tech startups have been fleeing the country.

In April 2014, Putin appeared on Russian television and claimed that the Internet had begun as a “CIA project” and remained a tool for the American intelligence agency. Months later, in October, when Apple’s Tim Cook came out as the first openly-gay chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company, the news provoked a backlash from the Russian establishment. Vitaly Milonov, a member of parliament who helped instigate the nation’s anti-gay laws, called on Russia to bar Tim Cook from ever entering the country: “What could he bring us? The Ebola virus, AIDS, gonorrhea? They all have unseemly ties over there. Ban him for life.” And a monument to the late Steve Jobs, which enshrined the entrepreneur’s image on 6-foot-high replica of an iPhone, was dismantled and removed from a college in St. Petersburg, where it had been erected by a consortium of Russian companies.

Apple and Cook himself never commented publicly about this harassment, and soon after the company pushed ahead and aired its first-ever commercials on Russian television. Since then Apple hasn’t responded to any of the ongoing Russian attacks against its gay-friendliness. The company ignored Russian government member Alexander Staravoitov’s accusation that it was spreading “gay propaganda” by offering U2’s album “Songs of Innocence” as a free download for customers who upgraded their operating systems. And Apple remained silent when the Russian media reported last September that the Russian police were investigating it for promulgating “gay” emoji depicting same-sex people holding hands and kissing.

Putin’s antagonism to Silicon Valley has been costly to Russia’s economic aspirations. American venture capital investors have been pulling their funding, and tech startups have been fleeing the country. And the Skolkovo tech hub outside Moscow has peaked at only around 25,000 workers, a fraction of Medvedev’s grand aspirations.

Because of Putin’s hostility to foreign technology companies, he may be losing one of the most promising opportunities to diversify Russian industry beyond its heavy reliance on natural resources. The economy has suffered greatly from the sharp declines in oil prices, but Putin’s regime hasn’t relented.

Silicon Valley companies are less likely to take the risk of agitating for gay rights in Russia when they no longer have employees on the ground there. Salesforce.com provided a statement to Coda Story that partially explains the seeming inconsistency between its activism at home and its absence on LGBT rights in Russia. “Last year we took a public stance in Indiana because our employees there brought the issue to our leadership,” said the statement. But while the company sells software for tapping the Russian market, it doesn’t actually maintain an office with employees in Russia who could demand action from headquarters in San Francisco. (Apple, Airbnb, and Starbucks, which do have employees in Russia, didn’t respond to requests for interviews).

Even though the Silicon Valley companies have been closing local offices and bringing home their engineers from Russia, they’re still competing relentlessly for market share in an emerging economy that already has 84 million Internet users. Unless they’re willing to risk losing access to Russia’s large and promising marketplace, the Silicon Valley moguls will ultimately have to play by Putin’s rules. And that means it’s unlikely that their crusade for gay rights will extend to Moscow or St. Petersburg. If anything, their acquiescence to Russia’s insistence on storing all data within Russia will do even more to imperil the persecuted LBGTQ population.

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