Built over ten years, Lise’s small business making films that span sexualities and fuse sex and cinema, has gained a loyal community of performers and creative collaborators. They’ve weathered attempted changes, including bans on depictions of certain sexual acts, such as squirting, and initial proposals to introduce age checks in 2017. But new UK online safety rules mandated that all websites potentially containing adult content to confirm users’ ages from July, to avoid under-18s accessing digital smut and what the act deems “harmful” content for children. Platforms that don’t comply face hefty fines of up to £18 million, or 10% of their revenue. 

The UK has been at the vanguard of enforcing age verification policies, mandating that platforms check users’ ages through methods that include facial recognition software, government-issued IDs, and credit card information. The age verification checks are part of the broader implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which Elon Musk’s platform X claimed was “overreach” that had the effect of “stifling open discourse and individual liberties worldwide.”

More recently, Musk accused the Australian government of creating “a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” as it announced its law banning social media for children under the age of 16. In the United States, where 25 states currently have age verification policies, Big Tech is arguing that the restrictions violate free speech principles and create privacy and surveillance concerns.

But, even as politicians characterize age verification rules as a means of, in the words of the Australian prime minister, “taking back power from the Big Tech companies,” it’s not only Silicon Valley giants that are affected. Much of the media coverage and public debate around ‘age-gating’ has taken little notice of small companies and independent producers that are scrambling to keep up with regulatory demands while losing customers and incomes. 

“We’re not bad people, we just want to comply,” says Helena Whittingham, who represents porn producers across the UK, U.S., and Europe. With less reach, fewer resources and a smaller pool of punters to rely on for business, age ID has a disproportionate impact on independent platform owners and creators, she says. The costs feel particularly onerous. Platforms are free to choose their own age verification method, including photo ID, credit card checks or facial recognition. But many sites — unable to fund their own software — seek solutions from third parties that charge as much as £1 (about $1.3) per verification. For smaller platforms, this adds up, says Whittingham. “It really penalizes the indie porn houses… that want to do these things correctly.”

“The government,” says Lise, the independent producer, “really needs to answer for the fact that essentially what they’ve done is implemented an incredibly confusing and complicated, ineffective age verification service.” 

Ofcom, the UK's regulator for communications industries, says it has taken steps to assist service providers to comply, including publishing a “quick guide and a dedicated page which sets out what porn providers must do.” Currently, Ofcom adds, “we have opened formal investigations into 83 porn sites” that have been ignoring the rules. On December 4, the regulator announced that it was fining a single company running 18 adult websites “£1 million for not having robust age checks.”

Pornhub, the most visited porn site in the world, says its UK traffic has dropped by 77% since the age verification rules came into effect in July. Last month, in the U.S., Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to major tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, calling for age verification to be linked directly to devices. “We have found,” Aylo said, “site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

For smaller porn producers, age-gating is yet another financial and logistical strain on an already-pressurised environment, from bans on online advertising, a lack of mainstream payment processors facilitating adult sites, and tech platforms limiting sex-related content.

“We never get to work with best in class of anything, business partner-wise, and we never get to work with best value anything, because we're not in a position to negotiate,” says Cindy Gallop, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a “social sex platform” where couples upload clips as an alternative to hardcore porn. Given its paywall, the site has always required age verification. Still, “it’s appalling” Gallop says of rules that don’t distinguish between platforms publishing consensual and ethical sexual content, and those publishing potentially exploitative material. “Everyone gets lumped in, everyone’s reduced to the lowest common denominator.” 

Marcus Quillan, an independent filmmaker producing alternative porn under the name “Thousand Faces,” was already struggling to make his money back when he made all his public content non-explicit ahead of age verification. “Sales already didn't break even, with how expensive it is to set up and run a website, let alone the cost of film production,” he says. “The cost of age verification would have made it even worse.”

Quillan posts his paid-for content on third-party platform PinkLabel, a “white label” site that hosts adult content for independent creators. This way, he can potentially drive more traffic, with the site fronting the costs and burden of age ID, he says.

Small creators and independent platforms that don’t go through large tech platforms may “disappear,” says Dr Carolina Are, a social media research fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens. “That’s a problem because a lot of the smaller, more ethical porn companies do a lot in terms of education and even representation, and creating trends that counteract the more harmful and kind of stereotypical tropes of porn.” 

Evidence so far also indicates customers will go elsewhere or find ways to avoid producing their papers. As traffic to porn sites declined alongside the implementation of age checks, VPN usage shot up, according to Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report, published on December 10.

Viewers have also reported easily bypassing age checks with new email addresses and even video game characters. Despite its positive intent, the law is not “fit for purpose,” says Are. It promotes “unaccountable and not necessarily effective [systems] that are dangerous for privacy and freedom of speech.”The law is also affecting other corners of the adult industry, she adds. Websites used by sex workers to advertise their services anonymously also now require ID checks, potentially driving them into offline — often more risky — spaces. 

The inclusion of any platform that could host adult content in the rules also means mainstream social media sites and dating apps now have age gates. Users have flagged that pages that aren’t pornographic at all are now restricted, such as subreddits about war crimes, quitting smoking and sexual assault. In Australia, which became the first country to ban under-16s from social media altogether in December, campaigners have warned that the rules prevent young people from seeing sexuality and gender content that is educational and disconnects them from wider local and global conversations.

Abhilash Nair, an internet law and pornography regulation expert, says the UK’s age verification should not jeopardize children’s rights. “We’ve got to make sure age assurance doesn’t restrict children from accessing content they have a right to access,” he says. “That includes sex education, health and relationships education.” But, he maintains, legislation is needed to keep children away from porn. 

For now, those on the frontlines of sexual expression say the collateral damage done by age verification is significant. Lise, the independent UK porn producer says we “are at an exponential rate losing these independent niche sites, queer content, fetish content — stuff that’s less likely to be mainstream.” As the authorities crack down on sites failing to comply with complex, fast-changing regulations, she argues, “our depictions of sexuality are becoming increasingly minimized, limiting and homogeneous in a way that does a real disservice to the breadth of sexuality.”

But a spokesperson for the U.K.’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “Claims of widespread censorship are wrong and misleading. This is about creating a safer internet — not censoring it — where children can explore, learn and connect without fear of what’s behind the next swipe. The Online Safety Act’s focus is, and will always be, on protecting children from the most harmful content such as pornography —requiring proportionate, privacy-safe age checks, while also ensuring robust protections for free speech.”

As countries like the UK and Australia lead the way on age limits, such questions are largely ignored. Instead, what might prevent governments seeking to regulate technology or cause them to rethink is the increasingly aggressive posture of a White House that opposes such regulation. Donald Trump has signed an executive order to stop individual states seeking to regulate AI and set up a federal task force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws.” This month, the U.S. has also told the UK government it would not be immediately implementing the $40 billion “Technology Prosperity Deal” agreed during Trump’s visit in September. Among the stumbling blocks was the “frustration” expressed by American officials with Britain’s online safety rules.

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The post The global battle to age-gate the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

Coda: Russian authorities announced last week that YouTube's performance would be slowed down up to 70%. Today, it is almost inaccessible in Russia without a VPN, and uploading a short video can take hours. What's happening?

Darbinyan: YouTube is being slowed down across the country. This is done centrally through DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) equipment, via providers. If a provider knows that a user is connecting to a YouTube server, it starts reducing the traffic, the speed drops, and all 4K videos either start buffering or YouTube switches them to low resolution. This contradicts the authorities' claims that outdated Google servers, which haven't been updated for two years, are to blame. Server degradation doesn't happen overnight. Here, we see interference in the traffic by Roskomnadzor (The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Internet censor).

C: Why are they slowing down YouTube and why now?

D: This has developed gradually. There have been many concerns about YouTube, not political ones related to social protests, but rather technical issues. How to block it? And how to block it without affecting other Google services, which, of course, could turn most Android devices into bricks. It apparently took them some time to figure this out. 

Currently, the blockage is not complete. YouTube is still the number one video platform in Russia in terms of users. This means that if it were completely blocked, most Russians would access it through VPNs and cross-border channels. This could potentially bring down the entire internet, as the load on cross-border channels would immediately increase when users connect to servers located abroad instead of their provider's server. Roskomnadzor is currently measuring and observing how the YouTube slowdown affects the load on cross-border channels. If the load increases, the blockages may be relaxed, but if the loads are small, they might push for a 100% blockage.

C: Is the goal to reorient users to Russian networks, like RuTube and VKontakte (the most popular Russian network, controlled by the state)?

D: I think so. What we see is a change in Kremlin's strategy. Instead of a harsh blockade, like the one that awaited Instagram and Facebook, the task now is to worsen the quality of video to intensify user migration to Russian alternatives. This might work, as not everyone has access to VPN services, which have become significantly limited. Not everyone is ready to use them. If this continues for many months, it will certainly encourage users to gradually move to other platforms.

C: What are the consequences for bloggers moving to Russian YouTube alternatives?

D: The authorities will definitely moderate and censor the content. Some videos might be deleted entirely, or an entire channel might be taken down. By moving to Russian platforms, a blogger becomes entirely dependent on Roskomnadzor and its will, losing control over their content. This will be more severe than dealing with YouTube's moderation team.

C: Is there a scenario in which they won't have to move to these platforms?

D: It depends on the resistance from users and content creators. If they say they are not ready to part with YouTube and arm themselves with VPNs, all of Roskomnadzor's actions will be in vain. But this situation will allow some of the audience to be lured away.

C: Besides VPNs, are there other ways to bypass these blockages?

D: Well, VPNs are, of course, the most robust tool not only for restoring access to information but also for restoring speed. Therefore, a good VPN channel will solve the problem of waiting for a YouTube video to load. Other tools like Tor can also help. I would like to remind you that Roskomnadzor has worked hard over the past six months to significantly narrow the choice of tools available to Russians.

C: Do you think this is a step towards something bigger for Roskomnadzor, in terms of internet blocking and increasing the so-called sovereignty of the internet?

D: Roskomnadzor and Russian censorship have distinctive features that set them apart from other countries, such as China. While it is becoming more like the Chinese model, it is still very different from the models in Iran or Turkmenistan, where the censorship system is even more severe. The key difference is that all allocated IP addresses in the country are conditionally divided into three lists: white, allowed ones, which belong to national state-owned companies; second, gray IP addresses, used by foreigners and foreign companies; and everything else. Everything else goes into the blacklist. With such a model, VPNs do not work at all because almost all addresses, except for the allowed ones, are blocked. However, for such countries, there are tools like Psiphon, which is not quite a VPN but rather a combination of proxy servers and proprietary development, which, in my opinion, is the only one that works under such total censorship conditions.

C: Why hasn't Russia implemented this yet?

D: Because Russia still has ambitions to trade with the whole world. Russia still sees itself as part of the international economic community. It wants to trade with India, China, Latin America, and Africa, unlike Turkmenistan. Therefore, trade is impossible without the internet. Implementing such a model would significantly limit the possibilities of foreign economic activity for state-owned companies and Russian legal entities.

Sovereign internet is essentially a barrier between Russian cyberspace and the global one. It has gateways that are, in one way or another, controlled by Roskomnadzor. But it is not only about censorship; it is also about active import substitution: replacing services, protocols, and cryptography, which Russian authorities are striving for.

The post YouTube slows down in Russia amid News of Ukrainian offensive appeared first on Coda Story.

Navalny’s work with the Anti-Corruption Foundation reached millions using major platforms like YouTube and LiveJournal. But they built plenty of their own technology too. One of their most famous innovations was “Smart Voting,” a system that could estimate which opposition candidates were most likely to beat out the ruling party in a given election. The strategy wasn’t to support a specific opposition party or candidate — it was simply to unseat members of the ruling party, United Russia. In regional races in 2020, it was credited with causing United Russia to lose its majority in state legislatures in Novosibirsk, Tambov and Tomsk.

The Smart Voting system was pretty simple — just before casting a ballot, any voter could check the website or the app to decide where to throw their support. But on the eve of national parliamentary elections in September 2021, Smart Voting suddenly vanished from the app stores for both Google and Apple. 

After a Moscow court banned Navalny’s organization for being “extremist,” Russia’s internet regulator demanded that both Apple and Google remove Smart Voting from their app stores. The companies bowed to the Kremlin and complied. YouTube blocked select Navalny videos in Russia and Google, its parent company, even blocked some public Google Docs that the Navalny team published to promote names of alternative candidates in the election. 

We will never know whether or not Navalny's innovative use of technology to stand up to the dictator would have worked. But Silicon Valley's decision to side with Putin was an important part of why Navalny’s plan failed.  

Navalny’s team felt so abandoned by the companies at that moment that they compared it to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time, photos of U.S. planes taking flight and leaving desperate Afghans behind on the runways of the Kabul airport were dominating global media.

“It felt like we’re people running alongside a plane that’s taking off. And here we are, being left behind,” Ivan Zhdanov told my colleagues investigating the fallout of the Smart Voting story for “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” Coda’s podcast about the role of technology in the rise of global authoritarianism. 

“We rely on YouTube, on Google Docs, on all these other tools, to spread ideas of freedom, of democracy. But right now we are in a game that has no rules,” he said at the time.

Why did these Big Tech behemoths, which claimed to support baseline human rights, bow down to the Kremlin? Neither company ever spoke publicly about the decision. The companies told Navalny’s organization that they were acting on a legal order. But what legitimacy does a legal order have when it’s clearly been written to target the government’s top adversary? 

This is the shaky ground on which these companies operate. If they want to keep doing business in a given country, they have to follow or at least pay lip service to the laws of the land. In a case like this one, it meant undermining the interests of regular Russians and democracy itself.

And then, just months later, the tables turned again. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, companies across Silicon Valley put out statements declaring their support for Ukraine and their intentions to go after Russian state propaganda on their platforms. Both Meta and Twitter (now X) were banned in Russia, and companies like Apple and TikTok began blocking select services within the country. Tacit signs of support for the opposition also popped up. The Smart Voting app even reappeared in the App Store. Whatever rationale had led the company to remove the app suddenly evaporated.

This week, I caught up with Tanya Lokot and Marielle Wijermars, two internet policy scholars who specialize in the region, to ask their reflections on how things have evolved since that time, especially in the wake of Navalny’s death.

“It may be a bit too deterministic to say that his team’s dependence on tech platforms was ‘their downfall,’” they wrote in a joint response, noting that Navalny’s organization had “accounted for the restrictions and possible censorship and built alternative infrastructures to support their work.” They also talked about how building this kind of resilience has become more difficult since the start of the war. 

“It is getting harder and harder to find these alternatives, as more and more platforms are exiting Russia and users are relying on VPNs and other circumvention tools,” they wrote. Pressure from sanctions and an overall lack of technology is compounding the issue and isolating Russians further. And they noted that for Navalny’s organization, which now works mainly in exile, there are new challenges around getting information into the country. While the last few years have offered new lessons on the promise and perils of using technology to try to bring about change, Lokot and Wijermars made it clear that these are all mere battles in a much longer war.

Just yesterday, another tech company became the site of the latest battle — X briefly suspended the account of Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. The company cited “automated security protocols” as the reason for the error.
After years avoiding the spotlight, Navalnaya came out this week with a gut-wrenching speech in which she declared her intention to seize the torch and keep fighting “harder, more desperately and more fiercely than before.” But with its tools decimated and its ultimate netizen gone, the fight now may be more brutal and more dangerous than ever.

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

The post How Big Tech let down Navalny appeared first on Coda Story.

When authorities in Inner Mongolia announced in 2020 that the language would no longer be the language of instruction in schools, ethnic Mongolians — who make up about 18% of the population — feared the loss of their language, one of the last remaining markers of their distinctive identity. The news and then plans for protest flowed across WeChat, China’s largest messaging service. Parents were soon marching by the thousands in the streets of the local capital, demanding that the decision be reversed.

With the remarkable exception of the so-called Zero Covid protests of 2022, demonstrations of any size are incredibly rare in China, partially because online surveillance prevents large numbers of people from openly discussing sensitive issues in Mandarin, much less planning public marches. With automated surveillance technologies having a hard time with Mongolian though, protestors had the advantage of being able to coordinate with relative freedom. 

Most of the world's writing systems have been digitized using centralized standard code (known as Unicode), but the Mongolian script was encoded so sloppily that it is barely usable. Instead, people use a jumble of competing, often incompatible programs when they need to type in Mongolian. WeChat has a Mongolian keyboard, but it’s unwieldy and users often prefer to send each other screenshots of text instead. The constant exchange of images is inconvenient, but it has the unintended benefit of being much more complicated for authorities to monitor and censor.

All but 60 of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages are considered “low-resource” by artificial intelligence researchers. Mongolian belongs to the vast majority of languages barely represented on the internet whose speakers deal with many challenges resulting from the predominance of English on the global internet. As technology improves, automated processes across the internet — from search engines to social media sites — may start to work a lot better for under-resourced languages. This could do a lot of good, giving those language speakers access to all kinds of tools and markets, but it will likely also reduce the degree to which languages like Mongolian fly under the radar of censors. The tradeoff for languages that have historically hovered on the margins of the internet is between safety and convenience on one hand, and freedom from censorship and intrusive eavesdropping on the other.

Back in Inner Mongolia, when parents were posting on WeChat about their plans to protest, it became clear that the app’s algorithms couldn’t make sense of the jpegs of Mongolian cursive, said Soyonbo Borjgin, a local journalist who covered the protests. The images and the long voice messages that protesters would exchange were protected by the Chinese state’s ignorance — there were no AI resources available to monitor them, and overworked police translators had little chance of surveilling all possibly subversive communication. 

China’s efforts to stifle the Mongolian language within its borders have only intensified since the protests. Keen on the technological dimensions of the battle, Borjgin began looking into a machine learning system that was being developed at Inner Mongolia University. The system would allow computers to read images of the Mongolian script, after being fed and trained on digital reams of printed material that had been published when Mongolian still had Chinese state support. While reporting the story, Borjgin was told by the lead researcher that the project had received state money. Borjgin took this as a clear signal: The researchers were getting funding because what they were doing amounted to a state security project. The technology would likely be used to prevent future dissident organizing.

Until recently, AI has only worked well for the vanishingly small number of languages with large bodies of texts to train the technology on. Even national languages with hundreds of millions of speakers, like Bangla, have largely remained outside the priorities of tech companies. Last year, though, both Google and Meta announced projects to develop AI for under-resourced languages. But while newer AI models are able to generate some output in a wide set of languages, there’s not much evidence to suggest that it’s high quality. 

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, explained that once tech companies have established the capacity to process a new language, they have a tendency to congratulate themselves and then move on. A market dominated by “big” languages gives them little incentive to keep investing in improvements. Hellina Nigatu, a computer science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, added that low-resource languages face the risk of “constantly trying to catch up” — or even losing speakers — to English.

Researchers also warn that even as the accuracy of machine translation improves, language models miss out on important, culturally specific details that can have real-world consequences. Companies like Meta, which partially rely on AI to review social media posts for things like hate speech and violence, have run into problems when they try to use the technology for under-resourced languages. Because they’ve been trained on just the few texts available, their AI systems too often have an incomplete picture of what words mean and how they’re used.

Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist who specializes in digital censorship, said that one problem with using AI to moderate social media content in under-resourced languages is the “lack of understanding of cultural, historical, political nuances in the way the language is being used on these platforms.” In Azerbaijan, where violence against Armenians is regularly celebrated online, the word “Armenian” itself is often used as a slur to attack dissidents. Because the term is innocuous in most other contexts, it’s easy for AI and even non-specialist human moderators to overlook its use. She also noted that AI used by social media platforms often lumps the Azerbaijani language together with languages spoken in neighboring countries: Azerbaijanis frequently send her screenshots of automated replies in Russian or Turkish to the hate speech reports they’d submitted in Azerbaijani.

But Geybulla believes improving AI for monitoring hate speech and incitement in Azerbaijani will lock in an essentially defective system. “I’m totally against training the algorithm,” she told me. “Content moderation needs to be done by humans in all contexts.” In the hands of an authoritarian government, sophisticated AI for previously neglected languages can become a tool for censorship. 

According to Geybulla, Azerbaijani currently has such “an old school system of surveillance and authoritarianism that I wouldn't be surprised if they still rely on Soviet methods.” Given the government’s demonstrated willingness to jail people for what they say online and to engage in mass online astroturfing, she believes that improving automated flagging for the Azerbaijani language would only make the repression worse. Instead of strengthening these easily abusable technologies, she argues that companies should invest in human moderators. “If I can identify inauthentic accounts on Facebook, surely someone at Facebook can do that too, and faster than I do,” she said. 

Different languages require different approaches when building AI. Indigenous languages in the Americas, for instance, show forms of complexity that are hard to account for without either large amounts of data — which they currently do not have — or diligent expert supervision. 

One such expert is Michael Running Wolf, founder of the First Languages AI Reality initiative, who says developers underestimate the challenge of American languages. While working as a researcher on Amazon’s Alexa, he began to wonder what was keeping him from building speech recognition for Cheyenne, his mother’s language. Part of the problem, he realized, was computer scientists’ unwillingness to recognize that American languages might present challenges that their algorithms couldn’t understand. “All languages are seen through the lens of English,” he told me.

Running Wolf thinks Anglocentrism is mostly to blame for the neglect that Indigenous languages have faced in the tech world. “The AI field, like any other space, is occupied by people who are set in their ways and unintentionally have a very colonial perspective,” he told me. “It's not as if we haven't had the ability to create AI for Indigenous languages until today. It's just no one cares.” 

American languages were put in this position deliberately. Until well into the 20th century, the U.S. government’s policy position on Indigenous American languages was eradication. From 1860 to 1978, tens of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their parents and kept in boarding schools where speaking their mother tongues brought beatings or worse. Nearly all Indigenous American languages today are at immediate risk of extinction. Running Wolf hopes AI tools like machine translation will make Indigenous languages easier to learn to fluency, making up for the current lack of materials and teachers and reviving the languages as primary means of communication.

His project also relies on training young Indigenous people in machine learning — he’s already held a coding boot camp on the Lakota reservation. If his efforts succeed, he said, “we'll have Indigenous peoples who are the experts in natural language processing.” Running Wolf said he hopes this will help tribal nations to build up much-needed wealth within the booming tech industry.

The idea of his research allowing automated surveillance of Indigenous languages doesn’t scare Running Wolf so much, he told me. He compared their future online to their current status in the high school basketball games that take place across North and South Dakota. Indigenous teams use Lakota to call plays without their opponents understanding. “And guess what? The non-Indigenous teams are learning Lakota so that they know what the Lakota are doing,” Running Wolf explained. “I think that's actually a good thing.”

The problem of surveillance, he said, is “a problem of success.” He hopes for a future in which Indigenous computer scientists are “dealing with surveillance risk because the technology's so prevalent and so many people speak Chickasaw, so many people speak Lakota or Cree, or Ute — there's so many speakers that the NSA now needs to have the AI so that they can monitor us,” referring to the U.S. National Security Agency, infamous for its snooping on communications at home and abroad.

Not everyone wishes for that future. The Cheyenne Nation, for instance, wants little to do with outsiders, he told me, and isn’t currently interested in using the systems he’s building. “I don’t begrudge that perspective because that’s a perfectly healthy response to decades, generations of exploitation,” he said.

Like Running Wolf, Borjgin believes that in some cases, opening a language up to online surveillance is a sacrifice necessary to keep it alive in the digital era. “I somewhat don’t exist on the internet,” he said. Because their language has such a small online culture, he said, “there’s an identity crisis for Mongols who grew up in the city,” pushing them instead towards Mandarin. 

Despite the intense political repression that some of China’s other ethnic minorities face, Borjgin said, “one thing I envy about Tibetan and Uyghur is once I ask them something they will just google it with their own input system and they can find the result in one second.” Even though he knows that it will be used to stifle dissent, Borjgin still supports improving the digitization of the Mongol script: “If you don't have the advanced technology, if it only stays to the print books, then the language will be eradicated. I think the tradeoff is okay for me.”

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The post When AI doesn’t speak your language appeared first on Coda Story.

"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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Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

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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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Last month, lawmakers in Texas introduced a bill that targets websites, people and companies that facilitate the dissemination of abortion-related information online with fines and other penalties.

This is among a handful of bills that show how abortion battle lines are being drawn around peoples’ virtual lives, with opponents moving to censor information about the procedure and deploy digital surveillance tools in order to enforce state-level bans. The Texas statute shares some similarities with a now-withdrawn Iowa bill that would have required internet service providers to block websites that publish resources about accessing abortion care, as well as a proposed South Carolina measure that would prohibit websites from publishing abortion-related information.

The Texas bill would also round out what is already one of the most conservative abortion regimes in the country. The procedure is banned in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Anyone found running afoul of the law by providing abortion care can face up to life in prison. The state has also enlisted Texans in its campaign against abortion with a so-called “bounty” law passed in 2021 that encourages private citizens to sue anyone who helps a person get an abortion. Another law currently pending before the state legislature would further expand people’s abilities to file such lawsuits.

The new, internet-focused bill would prevent people in Texas from accessing abortion-related information online in a variety of ways. In addition to criminalizing the purchase and sale of abortion-inducing drugs via the internet, the bill would make it illegal to create, edit, publish, host or maintain a website that “assists or facilitates a person’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducing drug.” This would implicate not only the entities that run these kinds of sites — often non-profits that connect patients with clinicians — but would also extend to internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon, and possibly even to hosting services like Amazon or GoDaddy. Similar to the state’s anti-abortion “bounty” policy, the bill encourages Texans to sue any website that violates the proposed law — a provision that critics say is explicitly designed to suppress free speech by dangling the threat of litigation over people who publish abortion-related information online.

The Texas bill would compel internet service providers to block Texans’ access to websites that provide information about where, and how, to access abortion care, including through medication. The law could also affect social media platforms, where users can easily post such material, and even digital payment platforms, which some services use to collect payment for abortion medication.

Pressuring internet service providers to block websites may be a non-starter in the U.S. due to its First Amendment protections for free speech. But it is a time-honored tactic used by authoritarian governments from Azerbaijan to Venezuela, with a broader goal of getting people to stop publishing the information in question.

Hayley Tsukayama, an expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says “the law is systematically set up to silence people, to chill speech.” 

“It makes it a lot scarier for people to speak or to seek information” about abortion care, Tsukayama added. “When you’re talking about reproductive care, a lot of it is information that people, who are in a really vulnerable situation, are seeking.”

Tsukayama and staff at other digital rights groups monitoring state-level abortion and censorship policies say the Texas bill appears to be taking a new approach by focusing on telecommunications companies and seems to be the only law of its kind pending before a state legislature.

The Texas law also singles out six websites by name that internet providers would be required to ban under the law, including the site for Plan C, a campaign that provides information resources for people seeking medication abortions. Amy Merrill, the group’s digital director, said the bill marked the first time Plan C has been identified in anti-abortion legislation. Merrill told Coda that the organization consulted with legal experts about the proposal, which they believe is unconstitutional, and will continue to publish the information on their site as usual. 

“The way we see it is that any law that is attempting to prevent people from sharing public health information about abortion access is a clear violation of our First Amendment rights,” Merrill explained. “We refuse to be bullied by legislators who attempt to pass illegitimate laws and will continue to provide our research-based information on our website.”

The Texas bill’s decision to name Plan C and attempt to force internet providers to block its content comes as the site — and the topic of medication abortion more broadly — is experiencing historic levels of visibility in public life, according to Merrill.

“Things have become more enunciated and extreme in every direction,” she said. “The language of the laws has become more extreme. The level of activism and pushback has become heightened. And awareness of abortion pills has just skyrocketed.” When Plan C’s website went live in 2016, Merrill said there were just a handful of websites publishing resources about medication abortion. Fast-forward seven years and the number of websites coming online with information about abortion pills has increased exponentially, alongside explosive growth in Plan C’s website traffic. These factors may have influenced anti-abortion lawmakers’ efforts to take these websites offline. “The Genie is not going back in the bottle,” Merrill said. 

But even if this information remains public, the sites and companies that make it easy to find online may increasingly be subject to hostile state laws seeking to censor their information or take them offline. 

Globally, websites that offer information about obtaining abortion pills in countries with extremely restrictive abortion laws have long dealt with efforts to censor their work online. Women on Web, an international organization that sends abortion pills to people in countries where the procedure is illegal or highly restricted and operates a website with resources about medication abortion in more than two dozen languages, is no stranger to such efforts. Since 2019, the nonprofit’s website has been blocked by internet service providers in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey and Spain.

The group has come up with a simple workaround to circumvent censorship via website blockages. It publishes copycat websites with the same information as the blocked sites. If the government catches wind of the copycat site and blocks it, then Women on Web just creates a new one, like a whack-a-mole for digital abortion medication clearinghouses. Executive Director Venny Ala-Siurua says the labor is time-consuming but has allowed the organization to evade censorship attempts in these countries.

While this approach has helped Women on Web stay online in countries that have sought to shut them down, it’s unclear if U.S. counterparts like Plan C would ever need to employ such a strategy. Legal scholars and experts point out that both the South Carolina proposed law and the Texas bill are likely to face uphill battles in court because of the First Amendment. Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, says the Texas bill also is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny because of its especially broad mandate requiring internet service providers to implement website blockages — provisions that courts have struck down as unconstitutional in past legislative attempts.

Still, efforts to pass these kinds of laws could suppress constitutionally protected speech by making people, companies and organizations afraid to provide information online about abortion access.

“I think part of what’s concerning about these bills, even if they don’t ultimately pass, or they pass and get struck down, they’re a clear message from parts of the state government that they want to be able to go after anybody who is helping people get access to information about reproductive health care,” Llansó said. “And that pressure and implicit threat is part of what can create the chilling effect on online intermediaries from enabling access to that information.”

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But with authoritarianism seemingly on the rise across the world, did we get it wrong? Maybe tech is just making life easier for the tyrants.

In eight episodes, reported from around the world, journalist Natalia Antelava and the team from Coda Story focus on the stories of people caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship, and ask whether tech is doing more for dictators than it is for democracy.

Listen to Coda's collaboration with Audible on the original series Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us.

Episode 1: Escaping China’s Surveillance Net

A young man is detained by police in China’s Xinjiang region, and stumbles on an unlikely means of escape. He double-crosses his interrogators and runs as far as he can - all the way to the frozen Arctic. But will he ever really be free from China’s surveillance web? Even in his new home in northern Norway, the eyes of the Chinese state are never far away.

Episode 2: Tech and the Taliban

Smartphones and mainstream apps power a volunteer team racing against the clock to help Afghans leave the country before the Taliban takes over. For those left behind, those who opposed the Taliban, how do they stay safe? Because this Taliban regime is very different from the one that ruled 20 years ago. This one uses social media and biometric databases. 

Episode 3: Russia’s Leaky Databases

In 2021, Russia’s main opposition is using digital technology to challenge Putin’s government as never before. It’s building databases of supporters to help further the cause, just like political organizations the world over. But then, those supporters start getting visits from the police.

Episode 4: Thailand: The Genie Escapes

In Thailand there’s one subject that’s been taboo for decades: the Thai Royal Family. So how do the authorities react when the topic appears on social media, and the genie is out of the bottle? And what does that have to do with the disappearance of a social media activist in neighboring Cambodia?

Episode 5: Silencing India’s Critics

Police say they’ve uncovered a plot that implicates some of India’s most distinguished lawyers, intellectuals and activists in a conspiracy to bring down the government. Central to the case are letters they’ve found on a laptop belonging to one of the suspects. But how - and why - did the letters get onto that laptop? When US-based forensic investigators take a look they’re shocked at what they discover.  

Episode 6: Telegram vs The Dictator 

In 2020, the President of Belarus has his back to the wall. Hundreds of thousands of protestors are on the streets in demonstrations that are amplified and coordinated via a messaging app - Telegram. The regime shuts off the internet, but even that can’t stop the ‘Telegram revolution’. So what’s the next move for Europe’s last dictator?

Episode 7: The Data Trap

When US sheriff’s deputies keep turning up at his house, a father in Florida can’t figure out why they’re so interested in his teenage son. Before long, the whole family is caught up in the local sheriff’s ‘data driven policing’ program. 

Episode 8: The Border Industrial Complex

Migrants from all over the world gather in the French port of Calais. It’s the last stop on a perilous journey. Their destination, the U.K., is on the horizon. They’ve used their smartphones to navigate here, to stay in touch with families, and negotiate with smugglers. But now they’re up against millions of dollars worth of security and surveillance infrastructure, and they have a decision to make.

The post ‘Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,’ a new podcast series appeared first on Coda Story.

The I.T.U. was first convened in 1865 in Paris as the International Telegraph Union, tasked with harmonizing communication standards, and has evolved to regulating almost everything that is connected. These regulations have become momentous for the future of the internet around the world.

Conference attendees aren’t encouraged to rush through the discussion points. Meetings began on September 26, and are scheduled to run until October 14 — including through some weekend days. Extended negotiations mean attendees have little time for sideline conversations or availability to speak to the press.

Still, the three weeks could have seemed an awful lot longer for most had it not been for a crucial decision taken in the first few days of the conference. An election for who would be next secretary-general — and as such be responsible for the general direction the organization takes — was won by the American candidate, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who handily defeated the Russian candidate, Rashid Ismailov.

Ismailov was a former deputy head of Russia’s telecommunications ministry, and was in part defeated quite so significantly because of external geopolitical circumstances — turns out waging an unjust war against Ukraine is bad for your international reputation. But more than that, Ismailov, representing Russia, threatened to take the future of the internet down a different path to the open, liberalized one that we’ve gotten used to.

“Two things were at stake,” says Maria Farrell, an Irish tech policy expert. “One is the broad direction that the I.T.U. is going to take over the next decade — and there were two very different visions of what that would be. And the second was a sense check of global geopolitics, and what the numbers are between the two power groups.” 

On one side is the U.S. and Europe, and a drive for an open internet. And on the other, China and Russia’s pursuit of a closed-off internet that allows easy centralized control and censorship. 

By choosing to elect Bogdan-Martin, the I.T.U. membership dodged a bullet, and made a decision that many observers believe will help keep the internet fair and free for the next four years. “It marked a big opportunity,” says Mehwish Ansari, head of lobby group Article 19’s global digital team, who is attending the plenipotentiary.

“It’s a new Cold War: U.S.-Europe versus Russia-China, and their competing visions for how networks should function in terms of state control,” said Farrell. “This is one major, headline-grabbing skirmish in a long and very persistent underlying struggle for control of the internet,” she added. 

But it’s far from the last skirmish over what will become of our digital lives — and there are arguments that the secretary-general vote was far from the most important moment in the battle for the future of the internet.

For one thing, countries gave the U.S. candidate their support — but only for now. Farrell pointed out there’s a group of floating countries, including India, Brazil and South Africa, that can be convinced at times to vote with the western axis of international order, but need persuading. “Very often they will vote with Russia or China, depending on the issue they’re interested in,” she said.  

A growing list of countries and their leaders have dabbled in authoritarian crackdowns on free speech, including online. India scores 49 out of a possible 100 on Freedom House’s internet freedom index, Brazil scores 64, and South Africa 73. While none are anywhere near as censorious as Russia (30) or China (10), prior precedent suggests they aren’t exactly beacons of digital freedom.

That’s a concern because there are more significant votes still to come about the rollout of infrastructure underpinning the internet. The tendency of many countries to carry out speech crackdowns could portend future votes that align with the Russian and Chinese closed internet agenda. 

“The I.T.U. is a very important UN agency that impacts our day-to-day lives,” said Sebastian Bellagamba, vice president of external engagement at the Internet Society, who represented the non-profit at the Bucharest conference. Take Network 2030, a set of new internet protocol rules that has been debated by the I.T.U. over the last four years. “It’s a very linked set of ideas being pushed by Huawei, which is effectively an arm of the Chinese state,” said Farrell. China and its representatives want to introduce oversight of every data packet sent through the internet that would allow every IP address to be sourced back to a legally identifiable individual or company. 

It would be a boon for a controlling, centralized state like China to get that granular level of information on its users - and would move the internet away from an ad hoc network of peers to a very centralized, top-down model, said Farrell.

In her acceptance speech, Bogdan-Martin indicated that she wanted the I.T.U. to continue its comparatively hands-off approach to top-down control. That runs counter to Chinese plans. “There are always very well-funded and organized initiatives by China to use the I.T.U. to articulate and export its own incredibly state-centered view of the internet,” said Farrell.

“There's a lot of work being done at the ITU that is absolutely fundamental for how information and communications technology is designed, developed and deployed, and how telecommunication networks are designed, developed and deployed all around the world,” said Ansari at Article 19.

Concerns over Network 2030, the proposal to change internet protocol rules, which was repackaged in January 2020 by Huawei into a New IP proposal that would replace the existing internet protocol structure by 2030, are widely shared among open internet advocates. It’s a key battle that Bellagamba and the Internet Society believe is likely to dominate conversation at future I.T.U. plenipotentiary meetings. 

Like with the general secretary election, at stake is how much the internet will remain open and free. Under proposals presented by Huawei, the New IP plans would have included “intrinsic security” baked in—a phrase that leaves some outside China and its radius of control chilled. For China, knowing everything about users is “intrinsic security”. For others, it’s a mass invasion of privacy. A now-deleted page on the Huawei website gave justifications for the change to New IP including the need to meet the future of 6G networking, and technical improvements on shipping data around the globe at speed. “New IP does neither define governance models for the use of those technologies, nor lead to “more centralized, top-down control of the internet,” the company wrote, perhaps conscious of what critics were thinking. 

Among those critics is Bellagamba. “New IP, which instead of being a distributed, peer-to-peer protocol, would be a more top-down approach that is more centralized rather than distributed, and more able to be controlled centrally,” he says. In other words, the new standard would take away a data exchange that is spread out across the internet and put in its place a master control controlled by governments. “That’s an important battle to make sure it doesn’t come up again.”

It’s not just the plans for Network 2030 that are a potential flashpoint for future division, and a rallying flag for those looking to uphold freedoms on the internet. “We’re seeing the standardization of technologies in the I.T.U. without scrutiny of the human rights implications and without scrutiny of the user-centric implications of standardizing that technology,” says Ansari. 

Ansari’s warning applies not only to Chinese or Russian-backed plans: the firmament of big tech companies, overwhelmingly based in the U.S., have long been involved in gathering vast amounts of user data, triangulating it and packaging it up to sell on to companies for profit without much oversight. “The internet is not open at all, and that’s the reason for our presence here,” says Bellagamba. “In order for the internet to work, many actors need to be okay with the future of the internet — including the I.T.U., but it’s not the only one.”

The backdrop to each of these clashes is a broader battle over the future direction of life online. China has spent billions over decades developing its Great Firewall, which has largely stood firm despite the hope that the internet would foster democracy and political pluralism within the country. Russia is rapidly rolling out its own RuNet, a centralized, Balkanized version of the global internet over which the state can exert control, a closure that Russia has been accelerating dramatically since its re-invasion of Ukraine in February. 

Chinese and Russian versions of their internet are anathema to the open, decentralized internet that western countries profess to hold dear. The survival of entire political systems is tied to how the internet is allowed to be governed. And the tooth-and-nail fight for which approach will prevail will be won and lost at the I.T.U. 

In the breach is the future of the internet for the next billion internet users. “Why does this stuff matter?” asked Farrell. “It’s the fundamental question.” For people like herself who live in countries like the U.K., “Our lives are not going to be changed very much by this, or anything the I.T.U. does. But the people it does count for is the whole of the rest of the world — not Europe, not North America.”

Farrell asked me to imagine for a moment I’m the communications minister in a small-to-medium-sized African country. “Let’s say you’re Uganda,” she says. “You’ve just come to power; the president has told you the internet is a key driver of growth and middle-class jobs.” 

“And above all, we need to make sure we’re not just being a serf country for big U.S. firms that are extractive data firms,” she says. “It’s a neo-colonialist model. You’re looking at your telecoms companies within the country — likely one large incumbent, which was probably founded by a European telco in the first place, and a couple of smaller national incumbents. They come to you saying that a network upgrade is an expensive thing, and you need to bankroll its development.”

“At the same time, you’re looking at what’s going on in Syria or Tunisia, at the Arab Spring and you know you can be out of power very quickly. The internet is out of control,” she says. “It’s expensive and dangerous — and yet you have to have it.” 

But there’s a solution.

A Chinese business executive or politician comes calling, offering you a complete package that will solve all your problems. “They’ll give you everything from cheap loans to buy the equipment you need,” said Farrell. “They’ll train your engineers for you. They’ll ship their builders in for you. They’ll literally write the laws for you to keep a lid [on the internet.] They’ll take your civil servants and bring them back to China and train them in censorship. They’ll solve all your problems for you.”

Continued Farrell: “We have built an internet in such a way that it’s extractive and it’s expensive. It creates at least as many problems as it fixes. And right now, we’re not particularly open to thinking of that as a problem and how we can solve it for most of the people in the world.”

“This is just one iteration of a larger struggle,” she said. 

The post Stakes are momentous for the next battles for control of the global internet appeared first on Coda Story.

A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.

“As far as we can tell, no one has done web archiving at this scale in a war before,” says Quinn Dombrowski, a project administrator at Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and a technology specialist at Stanford University’s Library. “Our goal is not to create an archive that people will study somewhere safely in the West. Our goal is to repatriate this data back to the Ukrainains.”

The war between Russia and Ukraine has opened the door to the wide scale destruction of their internets — for very different reasons. Ukraine's digital record faces annihilation from military invasion; Russia's internet destruction has been ordered from within. But people in both countries are now grappling with a shocking reality: their online records can disappear. The reality is now dawning that that their nation’s internet is fragile and impermanent

Websites are going offline in Ukraine for a number of reasons, from power outages, to local servers being destroyed by shelling, to hosting bills going unpaid. “When you get right down to it, it’s cables, it’s hardware, it’s things that exist in the physical world even though we think of the internet as a different sphere,” said Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s archiving initiative has set up a list of websites for volunteers to archive, prioritizing websites for organizations located in cities under siege or with active air raid warnings.

Their efforts point to one of the internet’s best kept secrets: the fragility of the internet.

Christopher Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science says he often encounters misconceptions about the internet’s durability. “What happens is people get shocked on both ends of the spectrum. Things that you thought would be persistent, go away. And things that feel like they should be ephemeral, stick around. Both of those things are true.” What lives on is determined by “power and resources,” he says, with a lot of what we think of as “junk” data, such as our browsing history and other user behavior information, actively maintained by governments or companies using it for revenue.

The archiving of websites and databases for the most part has not been incorporated into disaster or military preparedness. In the U.S., emergency digital archiving initiatives have sprung up after events like Ferguson in 2014, Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the election of President Donald Trump. After these events, volunteers captured websites, social media posts and federal databases before they were lost or they were taken down by government officials.

There is a growing awareness among the public for the importance of web archiving, according to Abigail Grotke, assistant head of the digital content management section at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Grotke joined the Library when it first began web archiving in the early 2000s. Today, the Library’s digital archive is one of the largest of any government body. By the end of 2021, over 100 web archive specialists have captured 21.7 billion digital documents or 2.827 petabytes.

The Library of Congress is in the process of switching their operations to a digital first approach. “In the past if something was available in both print and digital, we would prefer the print. But we’re switching focus now where digital is preferred,” said Angela Cannon, a reference specialist at the Library. Last summer the Library had to freeze its social media archiving work due to persistent barriers enacted by tech companies and the technological challenges in archiving content from private profiles and accounts.

“It’s been frustrating but it’s not just our problem,” said Grotke, pointing out that it’s something archivists around the world are trying to solve.

Cannon, the reference specialist at the Library, says this becomes especially important in regions around the world where public figures and politicians almost exclusively use social media for messaging.

“Increasingly politicians are not bothering with websites,” Cannon said. “If you’re not talking to traditional newspapers, and you’re not going on television, it is most definitely going to matter in the future. That’s a gap in our collecting, so how do we document that for our researchers?”

When Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began, Grotke and Cannon say their team’s first step was to increase the frequency of “crawls” for Ukrainian government sites and selected Russian sites.

While many governments, including Ukraine’s, have dedicated national digital archives, Russia is one of the few that does not. Instead, Russia has Ivan Begtin, a transparency advocate in Moscow who for over a decade has led a small team of archivists. Their work has new urgency as the Kremlin erases swatches of the Russian-language web.

“In the next month and a half many publications and cultural websites can disappear entirely,” said Begtin.

Since the war, dozens of independent Russian media sites have been blocked by the Kremlin for violating censorship laws banning the use of the word “war” in coverage of Ukraine. More quietly, hundreds of smaller publications, Russian cultural websites and online projects have gone offline as many western hosting services stopped accepting payments from Russia.

The list of websites archived by Begtin and his team of three in the past few weeks gives a snapshot of the current shattered state of freedom of expression in Russia. He prioritizes content that “forms our contemporary history, what people are going to use to write books and textbooks one day.”

The National Digital Archives, Begtin’s self-funded project, has captured content from independent news publications such as the Insider, Colta, Tjournal, Paper — all now blocked in Russia — along with websites like the “Forum of Kostroma Jedi,” a chapter of Star Wars enthusiasts that was recently listed as an “undesirable” organization by federal authorities; and dozens of historical memory projects from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group shuttered in December 2021 by court order.

The work is grueling and dangerous. “How much longer I can keep this up for, I’m not so sure,” said Begtin.

For years Russia’s internet existed as an unregulated bastion of free speech, pirated films, music and software. Its transformation into one of the most censored corners of the internet in the world has gone hand in hand with the transformation of Russian politics, said Begtin.

“This is a story of the erosion of your sense of freedom, the erosion of democracy, the erosion of people’s faith in themselves. Because many thinking people in Russia today speak in these words: there is nothing I can do to change what is happening.”

Begtin’s one-man crawl of the Russian web is a far cry from the wave of initiatives backing up Ukraine’s digital records. Dombrowski, the technology specialist at Stanford, says there is a much broader international conversation that has to happen around digital archiving, cultural heritage, and conflict.

“It’s inspiring when everyone comes together to do something to support this effort,” she said. “On the other hand, it represents a fundamental failure of infrastructure. It should never come to random people archiving Ukrainian websites on their laptops.”

Of all the work Dombrowski, who studied medieval East Slavic languages, managed to preserve in the past few weeks, one site was especially vivid: the website of a small museum in the Ukrainian city Novhorod-Siverskyi dedicated entirely to the medieval epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, famously translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov. The poem’s original manuscript was destroyed in 1812 when Moscow burned to the ground during the Napoleonic wars.

“I studied the poem in grad school and when I saw what this museum was about, my heart just stopped,” Dombrowski remembers. “Our automatic processes had failed so I manually went through each page on their website. There were 83 pages. I clicked on every image. I downloaded everything I could and saved the file. The thought of this beautiful museum being under attack, I immediately burst into tears.”

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The post The race to save everything as war threatens the internet in Ukraine and Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

Mir went directly to the paper’s website and typed the headline in its search field. A message saying “No results found” popped up on the page. He then looked for his own author page, but it, too, had disappeared. In 2014, Mir was hired as the editor of the Kashmir Reader and had held the position until 2018, so was puzzled to find four years’ worth of his written work missing from the website. 

Growing increasingly curious, he looked for the author pages of former colleagues, but could not find them, either. Then, searching for the bylines of people who continue to work for the paper, he discovered that, while their latest articles were available, nothing dated back further than October 2019. He began to wonder whether it was a glitch in the system, or something more sinister.

It turns out that Mir, 46, is just one of dozens of reporters in Kashmir whose work has disappeared from the websites of local newspapers. Many reporters and editors now tell stories of publications deliberately erasing their work or removing it from public display, following what they believe to be mounting pressure from the Indian government to limit coverage critical of its actions in the territory. 

Kashmir is a disputed Himalayan region nestled between India, Pakistan and China. While both India and Pakistan have claimed the territory in full since Partition in 1947, all three countries hold portions of it. The major part, however, is under Indian administration, as the union territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. A popular rebellion against New Delhi’s rule has been underway for the past 74 years, during which time India and Pakistan have fought three wars of ownership. Among the long-discussed options for Kashmir’s future, merging with Pakistan and independence are the two most popular choices with people who live there, both of which the Indian government continues to resist vehemently.

For visiting journalists, Kashmir, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and filled with scenic lakes, has long provided a story of loss, pain and dangerously escalating tensions between hawkish nuclear powers. Local reporters like Mir, however, have spent years documenting the struggles of daily life there, from ground zero and with unmatched depth. Their work forms a vital record of wide-ranging human rights violations linked to the Indian armed forces, including rape, torture and the killing and disappearance of hundreds of political activists and civilians — one that many believe the government is attempting to to expunge.

Rising Kashmir is one of the region’s most popular English-language dailies. Established in 2008, its office is located, along with most other Srinagar-based publications, in the crimson-painted government apartments of the city’s press enclave. 

According to Riz — a former editor, who asked to be referred to under a pseudonym, citing security concerns — one winter afternoon in 2019, an office manager at the paper demanded login details for its website and social media accounts from technical staff. The next day, the IT manager complained to Riz about the “unprofessional manner” in which the website had been tampered with. Riz was astonished to find that all of his previous articles had disappeared. 

That evening, as staff filled the newsroom for the next day's edition, Riz and a number of his colleagues took up the issue with the paper’s editor-in-chief, Hafiz Ayaz Gani. 

“He told us that we were updating from our old website to a new one, which would be more interactive and user-friendly,” Riz recalled. He and his colleagues were relieved to be told that all of the deleted pieces would be back online in a few days. 

The website was, indeed, updated. Boasting a fresh masthead design and font, its homepage had a whole new look. But, according to Sub, another Rising Kashmir staffer, “weeks passed, and then months, but the missing data did not get updated.”

“We reached out to technical staff,” Sub said. “The answer was worrying: ‘I can’t do anything. Ask the boss.’”

At least seven former and current employees at Rising Kashmir have confirmed that, upon raising the matter again, they were told by Gani to focus on bringing in “stories of youth and positivity,” not the hard news that “used to happen in the past.”

“Now the newspaper has no data before 2019,” Sub told me.

Gani became the editor-in-chief of Rising Kashmir after his predecessor, the veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, was assassinated by gunmen, along with his two bodyguards, outside the office in June 2018. India’s government blamed the killing on the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Kashmir has long been India’s greatest flashpoint: part of the wider nation, yet separate, and riven with fear and suspicion on both sides. To India’s government —  led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party — it is widely viewed as a restive, predominantly Muslim anomaly, at odds with the values and identity of a majority-Hindu nation. Meanwhile, many Kashmiris have for years believed that New Delhi wishes to bring the region to heel by changing its demographic character.

In August 2019, those fears became more real. India’s government imposed harsh restrictions on Jammu and Kashmir, unilaterally revoking the constitutional autonomy held by the region since 1954 and dividing it into two federally controlled territories. In addition to overturning a number of long-standing laws — including one prohibiting the sale of land to non-Kashmiris — hundreds of people were detained. Communication lines, including the internet and mobile networks, were also severed. 

The crackdown, which was meant to quell dissent, lasted for 17 months and became the longest-ever internet shutdown in a democratic nation. News organizations were paralyzed until the government set up a media centre in Srinagar, equipped with four computers (later increased to seven) and a working mobile phone. It was the only place for reporters with over a hundred international, national and local newspapers to access the internet. 

Along with those of prominent regional publications, such as Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Reader, the pre-2019 digital archives of many other Urdu and English-language papers also began to be either partially or completely erased. While editors and members of senior management I spoke to cited a variety of different reasons for the disappearance of content, many journalists find the timing suspicious.

During a telephone conversation in September, Ashiq Ahmed, who manages the Kashmir Reader’s website, told me that a large number of articles were lost from the publication’s archive in August 2019, because the organization could not pay its annual website fees without internet access. 

Speaking by telephone, Hafiz Ayaz Gani told me that pieces have gone missing from Rising Kashmir’s digital archive because the “website is under construction.” When asked about questions raised by his own reporters, he simply said, “I have no idea.” 

To Riz, the deletion of historic articles from newspaper websites is a clear attempt to control narratives inside Kashmir. “The idea is to write-off facts and truth about the situation in Kashmir,” he said. 

“The authorities in the region have often made attempts to silence the victims of violence and harassment,” he added. “Anything that challenges that is being erased.” 

It also appears to have started before August 2019. In September 2017, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested the photojournalist Kamran Yousuf, a regular contributor to local news outlets, including Greater Kashmir. 

While Greater Kashmir did carry news of his arrest, it did not say that Yousuf was a journalist, and certainly not one it was associated with. Some of his work, including stories on civilians killed by government forces, also mysteriously disappeared from the publication’s website. 

Yousuf was accused of “pelting stones'' at Indian security forces. An NIA charge sheet against him also stated that he had “neglected his moral duty of covering the government's developmental programs, such as skill-building workshops and blood donation drives.” International media watchdogs condemned Yousuf’s arrests and described the charges against him as bizarre. He was released on bail after spending six months in jail and is yet to be tried. 

In 2018, journalist Auqib Javeed, who writes for the daily Kashmir Observer and a number of other titles, was summoned by the NIA and asked about his stories — particularly an interview he had done with the separatist leader Asiya Andrabi for Kashmir Ink, a tabloid published by the Greater Kashmir group. Not only did Javeed’s articles disappear, the entire Kashmir Ink website was taken offline.

Then, in July 2019, Fayaz Kaloo, the owner and editor-in-chief of Greater Kashmir, was questioned about articles that had appeared in the newspaper three years earlier, following the 2016 killing by the Indian army of a popular and charismatic rebel commander, named Burhan Wani. 

Wani’s death led to an uprising that left over 100 civilians dead and thousands more injured. The world's attention temporarily shifted towards Kashmir after security forces deployed birdshot against hundreds of protesters. Many, most of them young men, were shot in the face, in what was later described as the world's first mass blinding. 

According to four staffers, it was shortly after the questioning of Kaloo that the publication’s website began to be altered, with large numbers of articles and digital editions of the paper disappearing from view.

“It started showing changes. Most of the tags, which help in searches, and many author pages went missing,” said Yas, an editor speaking under a pseudonym. “A number of articles were no longer available.” 

One senior journalist, who asked not to be named, said that Kaloo had described being threatened with legal action by NIA agents and told that Greater Kashmir’s past reporting would be used against him. 

Kaloo did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Speaking to me in Srinagar in September, a senior official at the Department of Information & Public Relations said that the attention paid to Kashmiri news organizations sharply increased after the 2016 protests.

“The department always does the monitoring of newspaper content, but we were told to do it more rigorously,” they said. “Anything written against the government would be recorded and sent to the higher authorities on a daily basis.” 

Some editors of publications from which online articles have disappeared insist that they played no part in deleting the content themselves. Instead, they say, their publications have fallen victim to hackers. 

“Our website was hacked multiple times in past years and, because of that, we would lose some of our previous data,” said Sajad Haider, editor of the Kashmir Observer.  

Haider went on to say that the attacks tend to take place when tensions rise in Kashmir and that he believes that “those in power” are behind them. 

“When there was an uprising in 2016, our website got hacked and when our technical team finally managed to recover it, after a few days, some of our recent coverage, critical of the government, was missing,” he said. 

Anuradha Bhasin, editor of Kashmir Times — one of the region’s oldest English-language newspapers — says that archive material now inaccessible on the paper’s website, including coverage of the 2016 uprising, vanished as a result of “technical issues.” Still, she does acknowledge the deletion of articles “from almost all newspapers in Kashmir.” 

“These archives are records of history,” Bhasin told me. “It is very frightening to see this kind of erasure.”  

Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) agrees. For the past two decades, the organization has relied heavily on the work of Kashmiri news outlets to document human rights violations in the region. In its 2018 annual report, more than 65% of citations came from the local media. Only a handful of those links work today.

“The issue of the missing newspaper archives is not only making our job difficult,” said a representative of JKCCS, sitting in a rundown office in the heart of Srinagar, it is also hindering "researchers and rights organizations who would rely on our work.” 

The organization sees a clear connection between Kashmir’s hundreds of missing people and the deletion of newspaper archives. “Enforced disappearances happen to erase evidence of crimes. Similarly, the newspaper reports are being disappeared to erase the memory of a particular time,” the representative added.

Since its founding in 2000, JKCCS has maintained an extensive hard-copy archive of journalism from the region. However, much of it is now gone. In October 2020, the organization’s office and the homes of some of its members were raided by the NIA, on the pretext that the group was using charitable funds raised in India and abroad to carry out “secessionist and separatist activities.”

Unable to find years worth of his written work online, Hilal Mir had consoled himself with the fact that he had managed to keep some of the articles stored on his laptop. In September, though, the police raided his home and those of three other journalists. Computers and mobile phones belonging to Mir and his family members were seized, along with books and paper copies of his published work. 

Now, that small record of his two-decade career has vanished too. 

“I feel as if I wasn't there, haven't lived and didn't work for all those years,” he said.

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The post Kashmir’s vanishing newspaper archives appeared first on Coda Story.

1.In October, the Istanbul-based Syrian journalist Majed Shamaa, used his TV show “Street Poll” to respond to a recent viral video of a Turkish man complaining that, while he couldn’t afford bananas, Syrian refugees were buying them by the kilogram. In a short sketch, Shamaa looked suspicious of his surroundings, bought a bag full of bananas, then ducked into an alleyway and furtively tucked into them. On October 30, police detained him for inciting hatred and insulting the Turkish people. He spent nine days in jail before being released.

2. In March, Idrak Mirzalizade, a Moscow-based Azerbaijani comedian, was a guest on the popular TV comedy show “Razgony.” During his slot, he made a joke about discrimination against non-Russians within the country and how difficult it is to rent an apartment if you have a foreign-sounding name. He went on to say that, after successfully renting one place, he found that the previous tenants, who were Russians, had left behind a mattress covered in excrement. After acres of pro-government media coverage stating that he had insulted the people of Russia, thousands of online threats and one physical attack, he was convicted of inciting hatred, jailed for 10 days and banned from Russia for life.

3. Also in Russia, comedian Denis Chuzhoi became the subject of a police investigation following a stand-up tour in October, in which he referenced an online rumor that President Vladimir Putin has lifts built into his shoes, in order to look taller. “For me that explains everything,” he said. “My wife wears shoes with high heels. In the evening, she’ll come home, throw her shoes off and say, 'Denis, we need to fuck up America and kill all the gays.’”

4. Over the border in Kazakhstan, 25-year-old activist Temirlan Ensebek found policemen searching his apartment in April. His laptop and mobile phones were confiscated. He was then taken in for questioning about “deliberately spreading false information.” The reason? For a few weeks, he had run a satirical Instagram page titled Qaznews24. One post, stating that the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Kazakhstan proposed "to assign Nursultan Nazarbayev the status of a god in the national constitution," mocked the personality cult surrounding the autocratic former president. 

5. In January, Indian comic Munawar Faruqui was detained by police in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, for a joke he didn’t even make. Faruqui, who is Muslim, was accused of insulting Hinduism during his shows by the son of a member of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Though there was no evidence to back up the accusation, Faruqui spent over a month in jail. After being freed, he has come under frequent attack from Hindu nationalists and has had to cancel a number of national performances, following threats of violence.

Masho Lomashvili contributed to research.

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Witness, a global organization dedicated to training and assisting activists to use video in the defense of human rights, was founded in the wake of the Rodney King case. Now, the group is teaming up with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), which supports the creation of open-source software and protocols for decentralized data storage. 

We sat down with Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, to talk about ways to build a digital record of human rights violations that is resilient to internet shutdowns, deepfakes and the erasure of content that all too often results from overzealous platform moderation policies. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Coda Story: Technology has evolved significantly since the Rodney King camcorder footage. Often, we think that this rapid progress has made it easier to document the world around us and provided smarter, better and faster tools for journalists and activists. I’m curious what new challenges there have been. 

Sam Gregory: The past 30 years have taught us that technology changes, but human rights issues don’t. The underlying questions about how you enable more people to document abuses in ways that are safe, ethical and effective remain the same. 

About a decade ago, we noticed that we were helping people create trustworthy content that protected the truth, but an increasing amount of falsehoods, lies and manipulations of video also started to emerge. We saw that particularly in the Syrian conflict where footage of atrocities was weaponized to fit specific and often conflicting narratives. Footage is easy to record, but it's also easy to ignore and easy for it to lead to harm. 

As it becomes easier for more and more people to post video online, including that of rights abuses, has verifying such material become harder? 

About a decade ago, we started to see new challenges to the integrity of video. For instance, people would question the stories that clips were telling and say, “That wasn't filmed in that place, it was filmed in this place.” So, we partnered with an organization called The Guardian Project to start building tools like ProofMode, which adds rich metadata to videos and photographs and cryptographically signs that piece of media to increase verifiability, show if an image has been changed and provide a chain of custody. 

The human rights community was really early in this because we saw the need. It’s vital that we show evidence of war crimes or police violence and show when and where it’s happening. We have been doing that by giving signals of trustworthiness for specific pieces of media, based on what you can see in the image and the additional data attached to it. The idea behind authenticity infrastructure is to provide tools that allow people to choose better opt-in data to attach to their media, which will help the viewer understand where it came from and how it was made. 

Many cameras and phones will add location data or dates to the metadata by default. But  do these identifiers potentially pose a risk to people filming and distributing it? How do you authenticate a video while protecting privacy and anonymity for people in vulnerable situations? 

We could see right from the start that if you can better understand the provenance of videos and images, that's great for the person trying to verify them, but that it also raises potential privacy risks for the person who shot them. We saw the potential for governments to weaponize these technologies. Many citizen journalists who work with us can't add all that extra data, and you don't want them to be excluded just because they haven’t used a specific technology. It's important that these tools be opt-in, that they aim to offer signals of trustworthiness, rather than absolute confirmation of truth, and that you don't force people to use them when they don't want to or can't. 

We need to have a way for images and video to still be trusted, even if you do things like blur out a face to protect a person’s privacy. People also need to be able to make choices about how much information they disclose, such as the location it was shot in. Journalists and human rights defenders live in a real-world context where that data poses real risks. 

How has the rise of deepfakes created new challenges for people documenting human rights abuses?  

Deepfakes make it easier to dismiss footage of critical events. The “Infopocalypse, the world is collapsing, you can't believe anything you see,” rhetoric that we’ve all heard in recent years has been deeply harmful. Deepfakes have gotten easier to make. However, they're still not prevalent in the really sophisticated way that I think many people believe they are. 

There’s what we call the “liar's dividend,” which is the ability to easily dismiss something true as a deepfake. We've seen this in some high-profile cases recently. Witness was involved in a case in Myanmar, involving the former chief minister of Yangon. A video was released by the military government in March this year, in which he appears to accuse Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader before the February 2021 coup, of corruption. In the video, he looks very static, his mouth looks out of sync and he sounds unlike his normal self. People saw this and were like, “It’s a deepfake.” 

They put it through an online deepfake detector, which came back saying 95% likely a deepfake. The news spread really quickly after that. The narrative was that Myanmar’s military was able to manipulate the lips of this political prisoner to make him say stuff he would never say. But, it turns out that the footage wasn’t a deepfake at all. It was most likely a forced confession. Are the underlying claims true? We don’t know, there’s no legitimate rule of law in Myanmar at the moment, and the video was released by the military government. The problem was that the narrative spread so quickly on Twitter that this was a deepfake created by the government, and there was no expertise to counter that. 

We’re seeing this happen towards video evidence globally. Increasingly, people are just saying, “You can’t believe anything.” We need to be investing in equity of access to tools that authenticate videos and debunk fakes, so they are available broadly.

Let’s talk about the decentralized web. It’s basically the opposite of the internet infrastructure we have now, which is largely dependent on large platforms and service providers. With the support from FFDW, Witness is exploring how it can be used to build an online digital record of human rights abuses. Tell us about that. 

The decentralized web can potentially support a similarly decentralized approach to controlling and managing content; a more robust way to preserve the integrity of that content over time and to verify it. And it can provide a way for human rights communities around the world to set governance rules specific to them.  

We're increasingly seeing the challenges of the centralized web in terms of government-enforced internet shutdowns in repressive states, takedown requests and the forced removal of content. Also, when you put content on YouTube, you’re putting it in a very vulnerable spot anyway. A couple of years ago, the Syrian human rights group Mnemonic saw hundreds of thousands of videos of the Syrian conflict disappear overnight, because of a change in YouTube’s moderation algorithm. Now, you have a real dependence on commercial platforms, for which human rights issues are not a primary business concern. Their moderation decisions really affect the ability of human rights defenders to leverage and control the footage they shoot.

The decentralized web better allows for that. It’s decentralized, it’s robust, it's verifiable, it's less subject to decisions made by social media giants. So, we’re trying to make sure that people in that community are paying attention to the needs of people who are not in Silicon Valley and are thinking about these global issues and grappling with some of the tensions we see. For example, having immutable records is a powerful way to resist censorship and prove the origins of media, but sometimes people do need to delete media that drives hate or violence or compromises privacy. 

With the support of FFDW, we’re exploring how the decentralized web can power our work in supporting activists globally, preserving videos of human rights abuses and sharing best practices for archiving evidence.

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Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

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Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

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Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

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This is the story of Alexandr Byvshev, a poet and a schoolteacher from Russia’s Oryol region who was sentenced to 300 hours of labor for posting a poem about Ukraine that criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

In January, a second new criminal case was started against Byvshev for another poem about Ukraine.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.

This is a story of young mother from Russia’s Kurgan region who was sentenced to six months in prison for sharing a video on the Russian social media platform Vkontake.

The case of Evgeniya Chudnovets has sparked debate across Russia about how Russians should behave on social media.

UPDATE: On March 6, 2016 the Kurgan regional court announced that Evgeniya will be released from prison, one month before the end of her sentencing. The decision came after Russia’s supreme court asked Kurgan to reexamine its verdict. Read more on this development here.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.

In Episode One Coda speaks with Elena Chingina, the mother of 22-year-old Ruslan Sokolovsky who is currently waiting for his trial date in a Yekaterinburg prison.

On August 11, 2016 Ruslan uploaded a video of himself playing Pokemon Go in a church. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested at home and charged with offending the religious feelings of believers. His trial begins in mid-January.

Coda’s mini-documentary series tells the stories of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

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