At the start of 2023, Germany’s far right descended on Dresden for its annual “March of Mourning.” Their show of force was a fist meant to punch a hole in Germany’s traditionally subdued “silent commemoration” of the anniversary of the firebombing of the city by the Allied forces in February 1945. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims,” Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University, explained to Alexander Wells, who wrote a piece on the subject for us.

In May, Coda Story teamed with the investigative outfit Lighthouse Reports to mine a year’s worth of Instagram and other social media posts of Russian oligarchs and their families. Their accounts, once monuments to unashamed excess, reflected the desperate tactics they used to resist the sledgehammer of Western sanctions, which cost oligarchs a combined $67 billion in the first year of the war alone.

In October, Coda Story took a close look at dissent in Russia. Katia Patin, Coda’s multimedia editor, reported on Memorial, the decentralized human rights organization that had been ordered “liquidated” by Russia’s judges but is still operating out in the open, giving sold-out walking tours of the country’s history of repression in Moscow.

And in December, Coda staff reporter Isobel Cockerel returned from Sweden’s Arctic wilderness to unfurl a wrenching story that explores the fault line between the existential defense of an Indigenous people and a vision of carbon-free mining, a technofix that could help save our warming planet.

These are four of Coda Story’s best stories of 2023. They all began life by asking the same urgent questions that all of our journalism asks: In what places are abuses of power manifesting? How are new forms of authoritarianism impacting people’s lived experiences? What is at stake and why does it matter?

1. Dresden doesn’t know how to mourn its past: A symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general is transformed into a rallying cry for Germany’s far right.

2. Putin’s Oligarchs: A year in the sanctioned lives of Russia’s richest men: In partnership with Lighthouse Reports, an analysis of 69 publicly accessible accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms of Russia’s wealthiest families under sanctions gleaned unique insights into their lives before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

3. Surviving Russia’s control: The downfall of Russia’s most important human rights group has been greatly exaggerated.

4. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages: In Sweden, everyone is aware the climate is in crisis. And everyone has very different ideas on how to fix it.

By contesting historical understanding, undermining empirical science, subverting known facts, deploying technologies to roll back liberties, and operating with impunity across sovereign borders, authoritarians are rapidly adding all manner of cudgels to their toolkit. In 2023, these four stories and others listed below pried open people’s lives in more than a dozen countries to reveal how the unrelenting intrusion of the continuous present (to use Gertrude Stein’s observation about "Mrs. Dalloway") makes impossible the enjoyment of going about their days.

• Around the world, an estimated 100,000 people work for third-party contractors that supply content moderation services for the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok. In Kenya, content moderators are fighting back against their disturbing conditions.
• A secretive network of wealthy wildlife preservationists are returning species back into Europe — without asking permission first. 
• The contested region between China and India is a fulcrum for the national aspirations and self-identity of both countries, as well as emblematic of the new ways strongmen governments are redefining international borders.
• A little known agency enables European Union member states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.
• Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of World War I and finds a warning for the United States.
• The surveillance cameras of Colombia’s police are no match for the hundreds of “eyes” employed by street gangs.
• An investigation into New Mexico’s child welfare agency finds an overreliance on software meant to safeguard children from harm.
• The medical establishment has a long history of ignoring patients with “unexplained” symptoms. Then came long Covid.
• How American-made surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras.
• A movement to empty Hindu pilgrimage sites of their Muslim residents gains momentum with help from the Indian government.

The post Year in review: Coda’s best stories of 2023 appeared first on Coda Story.

Stuart’s absurd round trip is an almost too perfect encapsulation of the U.K. government’s attitude toward the climate crisis. Once seen as a global leader on climate, the U.K. has lurched rightwards under its Conservative government, which has watered down climate targets, launched a “pro-motorist” campaign against cyclists, and passed draconian laws limiting the right to protest in response to direct action from climate activists.

What’s now known as climate populism is on the rise across Western democracies. In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose PVV party won the largest share of the vote in elections in November, made hostility to carbon emission targets a significant part of his platform. Populist parties in the Nordic countries have flirted with climate denialism. In the U.S., Republicans are lining up to attack President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, an enormous package of green stimuli that GOP presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley has called “a communist manifesto filled with tax hikes and green subsidies that benefit China and make America more dependent on Beijing.” On the more lunatic fringes, conspiracy theorists have tied climate measures to the racist “Great Replacement” theory. 

These populists are exploiting real tensions within the green transition away from fossil fuels. The shift to new models of production and consumption is reopening old conflicts around land, culture, identity and colonialism. Over the past year, Coda Story has worked to understand the compromises and complexities of addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental health, looking at how power, wealth and geopolitics are restructuring the global economy and changing our daily reality on the ground, worldwide.

1. For more than a century, Kiruna, in northern Sweden, has been the capital city of the country’s “land of the future.” Its iron mines fueled the Industrial Revolution, its plains and waterways play host to windfarms and hydroelectric dams. The discovery of rare earths, vital for the electric vehicle industry, have once again placed it on the economic frontier, promising to power Europe’s transition to green energy. But environmentalists and Indigenous groups told Coda’s Isobel Cockerell that the industry behind the green transition is trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way it was destroyed.

2. China dominates the global green tech industry. It makes more batteries, wind turbines and solar panels than any other country in the world. Right now, any green transition will necessarily rely on China, where forced labor and human rights violations targeting ethnic Uyghurs figure prominently in the supply chain. Coda contributor Nithin Coca captured these tensions in a recent piece exploring how these abuses have given conservative politicians a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy.

3. Rewilding is an effective, if controversial, tool for rebuilding ecosystems. In the U.K. and Germany, many efforts are tied to ultra-wealthy or hereditary landowners. This past summer, Coda’s Isobel Cockerell got to know a community of unregulated “beaver bombers” who are trying to reintroduce the species at the grassroots level.

4. Populist opposition to climate action in the U.S. often focuses on the idea of lost jobs, bureaucratic red tape and the dismantling of old industries. But in Colorado, the need for silver for high tech industries, including clean energy, is prompting the reopening of long-dormant mines. Contributing writer Sarah Scoles brought us an in-depth look at the anticipated resurgence of the industry, straight from one of Colorado’s oldest silver mines.

5. Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine was poised to be a key player in the global transition to green technology. But as Russia has seized territory in Ukraine’s east and south, the future of the country’s critical raw materials has been thrown into question. Amanda Coakley brought us the story from the ground in Ukraine this past spring.

6. Pollution isn’t confined to the Earth. The number of satellites around the planet has increased sevenfold since 2009, as demand for communications and imaging explodes worldwide. In another immersive feature for Coda, Sarah Scoles showed us how these dynamics have turned Earth’s orbit into a crowded, complex place where accidents are increasingly common, creating a new pollution issue — space trash caused by collision debris.

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Social media was once a place to hear and express opinions, to get and report the news, to decide what might or might not be true. All these things beckoned us to interact with each other and also to understand, and sometimes challenge, the underlying technology. When content got censored or harassment got unbearable, users spoke up and pressured the companies to respond. Even if it was all happening in a privately owned “quasi-public sphere,” users behaved as if they had some rights. And every once in a while, the companies gave that idea some credence.

Watching artificial intelligence’s biggest purveyors soar to prominence in the global political imagination this year, I’ve found myself wondering: What will happen to all that democratic energy around Big Tech? What will happen to the idea of digital rights?

Unlike some of the mammoth social platforms that dominated the industry for the past decade and a half, the shiny new things we see on our screens now, like ChatGPT, reveal very little about their inner workings. The biggest and most consequential types of AI at this moment are being built inside black boxes, and it isn’t predicated on any of the ideas about human connection that were used to underwrite the social media industry. There is no illusion of democracy here, no signs of cohesion among users pushing companies to change in any particular way. The reason is simple: We really don’t know what’s going on behind the screen. 

For tech elites and tech-inclined media, AI’s meteoric rise has made for great theater. But for most of us, much of what is going on is shrouded in mystery and obfuscation. Alongside it all, though, far less magical kinds of tech have continued to change the way we live, work and understand the world around us. This has been the core focus of our tech coverage at Coda this year. 

1. Some of our strongest tech stories helped show how the digitization of public systems and widespread real-time surveillance are changing urban life. Drawing on research from the Edgelands Institute, we paired writers in Medellín, Nairobi and Geneva with photographers from the Magnum network to build a rich narrative and visual tapestry that wrestled with the social and psychological effects of these systems, alongside their technical components. 

2. One of our top-performing features, from Bruno Fellow Anna-Cat Brigida, dove deep into how police surveillance systems in Honduras have bolstered a state determined to “protect its own power and preserve its status as Central America’s largest drug corridor.”

3. In 2023, we also took a hard look at the ever-expanding role of technology in migration. Coda’s Isobel Cockerell traveled to Kukes, Albania, where she reported on how digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram have played a pivotal part in driving thousands of young men to leave Albania for England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs.

4. Surveillance and digitization have become part and parcel of apparatuses of control on national borders. In May, Zach Campbell and Lorenzo D’Agostino introduced us to Fabrice Ngo, a Cameroonian car mechanic who nearly lost his life on a small boat heading for Italy from Tunisia, after Tunisian coast guard officials tracked the vessel and seized its motor. In an exclusive investigation for Coda, Zach and Lorenzo were able to link Ngo’s experience to the dealings of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, a Vienna-based agency that has received hundreds of millions of euros in contracts from the European Union to supply tools and tactics — including surveillance tech — to countries bordering the EU bloc in exchange for their cooperation in preventing people from migrating to Europe. With more than 2,500 migrants having died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year, the consequences of these agreements, and the technologies they deploy, couldn’t be more stark.

5. The dangers and shortcomings of tech are evident on the U.S.-Mexico border too. Former Coda reporter Erica Hellerstein told us the story of Kat, a woman who had fled gang violence in Honduras, only to find herself unable to seek asylum in the U.S. because of a faulty smartphone app. This spring feature took a long look at the Biden administration’s decision to outsource some of the most critical steps in the asylum-seeking process to the app, called CBP One. But that story also found a glimmer of hope on the horizon for 2024. In August, an immigrants’ rights coalition filed a class-action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its use of the app, setting the stage for a showdown over the digitization of immigration and the principles underlying the modern asylum system. 

6. This year, we also set our sights on understanding more deeply what kinds of labor go into the technologies that are changing our lives. In the fall, Erica introduced us to the world of social media content moderation in Nairobi’s “Silicon Savanna.” Moderators spoke of reviewing hundreds of posts each day, from videos of racist diatribes to beheadings and sexual abuse. On low wages and minimal benefits, these workers ensure that the worst stuff posted online never reaches our screens. But the toll this takes on their lives and mental health has brought the labor force to a breaking point. As Wabe, a moderator from Ethiopia, told Erica: “We have been ruined. We were the ones protecting the whole continent of Africa. That’s why we were treated like slaves.”

It sounds grim, but what drew us to this story was what Wabe and nearly 200 other moderators have decided to do about their situation. In March, they brought a lawsuit against Meta that took the company to task over poor working conditions, low pay and several cases of unfair dismissal. They’ve also voted to form a new trade union that they hope will force tech companies to change their ways. These developments could mark a turning point for the industry, and for the way we understand labor in the context of Big Tech. It sheds a not entirely flattering light on the massive human labor force that powers all of the technology we use, AI included. The work of people like Wabe to hold these platforms to account is helping all this to become more visible to the rest of us, something that we have to grapple with as more and more aspects of our lives become digitized. And that gives me some hope for the future.

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1. Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa's digital sweatshops

Nairobi-based photographer Natalia Jidovanu shadowed social media content moderators who are fighting back against Big Tech companies like Meta Kenyan courts. Rulings in these cases could jeopardize the outsourcing model upon which tech giants have built their global empire.

2. Russian performance art in the time of Putin

What does exile mean for artists who have fled Russia? Reporter Nadia Beard met a new generation of Russian painters, performers and musicians now working outside the country, and learned about how their work is different from previous generations of exiled Russian artists. The story features photography from Elene Shengelia in Tbilisi and Lorenzo Meloni of Magnum Photos in Paris.

3. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Frankie Mills captured the vast, mountainous landscape of the Swedish Arctic, where Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported on the clash of ideologies and motivations underlying Europe’s bid to transition to green energy.

4. Watching the streets of Medellín

"I’ve never been to a place where I felt so constantly under observation," said Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael after he travelled to Medellín to investigate the city’s complex ecosystem of police and drug trade surveillance. “I watched them all watching each other, and became a part of this circle of surveillance.”

5. The Albanian town that TikTok emptied

Louiza Vradi’s photos transported readers to Kukes, Albania, a city that has lost about half of its population since the fall of communism in 1991. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs. Together with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell, Vradi examined the driving forces behind recent waves of migration from Albania to western Europe.

6. In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns

Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa took readers to downtown Nairobi, where 2,000 Chinese-made Huawei surveillance cameras send real-time data to police. The cameras are there to prevent terrorism and crime, but is Nairobi’s surveillance net actually making people safer? As writer and poet Njeri Wangari found, so far the answer is no. 

7. India and China draw a line in the snow

What is it like to live on the front lines of a decades-old border dispute between China and India, as the two countries vie for the spotlight on the geopolitical stage? Working alongside Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta, photographer Ishan Tankha captured cultural and economic contrasts across India’s jagged Himalayan borderlands.

8. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. But Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language. Romanian photographer Andreea Campeanu accompanied reporter Amanda Coakley to western Ukraine where Romanian ethnic communities say their language and culture are suffering collateral damage in wartime.

9. How surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras

Photographer Seth Berry gave us a window into the world of Hery Flores, one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in the state’s complex surveillance web. Originally deployed as a weapon in the region’s ongoing drug war, police surveillance technology has been turned against opposition figures like Flores, all while the drug trade continues to thrive. The story by Anna-Catherine Brigida was shortlisted for the 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of contribution to civil rights.

10. How 19th-century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy

Rachel Woolf brought readers to southern Colorado’s historic mining heartland where the U.S. is hoping it can find the silver reserves that will be essential for the green transition. The resurgence of U.S. mining is happening in the shadows of decaying infrastructure of the past.

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Over the past year, Coda journalists have reported from over 13 countries on how history, identity and memory are being instrumentalized by politicians, tech companies and even angry parents. The resulting stories explored the ways in which the past is being used to serve present-day political agendas, influencing voters and drumming up popularity.

No doubt these trends will continue in 2024, a year that is slated to see major elections held in India, Russia and the U.S. Narratives around historic victimhood and belonging are already at the center of national campaigns and will be topics that our reporting team continues to watch closely.

But before we leave this year behind, take a look at our top stories from our history coverage in 2023:

1. Over the past year, reporter Erica Hellerstain closely followed educators in the U.S. as they found themselves caught up in the ongoing clash of ideologies over history, racism and LGBTQ rights. In Arizona, an “empower hotline” for parents to report “inappropriate” teaching dialed up pressure on already overstretched public school teachers. In Missouri, librarians feared prosecution under a new law criminalizing some books in school library circulation. New restrictions on college education in Florida copy-catted bans already in place in Hungary and Poland.

2. To try and justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials have turned to high school textbooks, revising the curriculum to teach students about why it was necessary to wage war on the neighboring country. Starting this fall, the government cut its selection of approved textbooks down to a single, rewritten volume for 11th graders, with a similar narrowing of state history curriculum into a unified textbook planned for next year across lower grades. The new textbooks quote President Vladimir Putin’s claim about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine and argue that the country should not exist. This level of direct political influence in Russian education hasn’t been seen since Russia was part of the Soviet Union.

3. In Australia, a decades-long, state-sponsored campaign is reinventing the history of the country's involvement in the First World War. As mulitculturalism has grown and calls to reckon with Australia's history of colonial violence have increased, the government has put large sums of money towards WWI memorialization programs as a way to assert a militarized vision of a strong Australia proud of its ties to imperial Britain.

4. In Turkey, guardians of historical memory clashed with Disney over a TV series about the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In August, officials opened an investigation into the streaming company for pulling out of the much-hyped series planned for the 100th anniversary of the founding of Turkey. The controversy underscored the challenges facing U.S. giants such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney when tapping into the global entertainment market.

5. The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. However, Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language, and some minority groups in the western part of the country have become collateral damage. Members of Ukraine’s historical Romanian-speaking community feel that despite their support of the Ukrainian state in its war against Russia, they are being edged out of public life. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

6. Germany’s ban on most protests in support of Palestinians has sparked a national crisis, raising questions about what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history. The crackdown has fueled a passionate discussion about how Germany’s culture of taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust is coming into conflict with basic democratic rights of assembly and expression.

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“Everything is now going underground,” said Alexander Belik, who works for the LGBTQ advocacy group Sphere. “It’s not clear whether this will affect all members of the LGBT community, whether your sexual orientation simply counts as membership in this ‘extremist organization.’” 

The November 30 ruling means that “the international LGBT public movement” will be added to a national list of banned groups, including the Islamic State group, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, since October 2022, Facebook owner Meta. Supporting an extremist group can be punished by up to 10 years in jail, but it’s unclear how the ruling might be enforced, since the LGBTQ movement isn’t a formal, recognized group. Belik, who uses they/them pronouns, believes that the ambiguity of the law, and its absurdity, is the end goal.

“The point here is to create total uncertainty in the LGBT community and to intimidate everyone,” they said. “It will definitely be used against activists, people who publicly say they defend the rights of the LGBT community. But, it could just as likely be used against any LGBT person living in Russia or their allies.”

When first filing the case to court earlier last month, the Ministry of Justice said that the international movement exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government has increasingly targeted LGBTQ communities for political ends. In 2012, the government stoked a moral panic to try to shift attention away from corruption scandals that had driven a wave of huge protests. When the protest group Pussy Riot staged its infamous Punk Prayer protest in a Moscow cathedral, the government was able to capitalize on a backlash from middle-class Russians and portray itself as a defender of religious and traditional values. The following year, the Russian Duma passed a law outlawing the promotion of “gay propaganda” to minors.

Lawmakers have focused on framing anti-LGBTQ measures as a way to protect the country against a “Western export” that poses a major threat to Russia’s falling birth rate. Since 2014, discussion of Russia’s war and occupation of Ukraine has often been intertwined with the anti-LGBTQ campaign. On state television, broadcasters have railed against the threat of “Gayropa” encroaching on the Russian world as Ukraine pushes for European integration. After the full-scale invasion began last year, the Russian government imposed a series of increasingly severe anti-LGBTQ measures. This summer, Russia banned all gender-affirming care for transgender people and in November 2022 prohibited any activities discussing or promoting LGBTQ relationships.

Last September, Putin carved out time from the televised ceremony where he annexed four Ukrainian territories to speak out against transgenderism and gay parenting. "Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mom' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane?” Putin said. “We have a different future, our own future."

That future has found favor abroad in countries such as India, Uganda and Turkey, where prominent anti-LGBTQ figures have been invited to speak at “family values” protests. Russia’s gay propaganda law has inspired lawmakers in Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania and elsewhere to propose similar measures.

At Coda, we’ve tracked the weaponization of homophobia in Russia since our publication launched with a pilot reporting project on LGBTQ disinformation campaigns across Eastern Europe. Here is a rundown of how we’ve been tracking this story:

1. The LGBTQ rights debate is testing Ukraine’s commitment to Europe. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has taken steps towards recognizing and protecting its LGBTQ population. Especially with the growing visibility of LGBTQ soldiers, legislative protections for LGBTQ people in Ukraine are now being cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

2. Russia’s new scapegoats. With the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, we trace the roots of the anti-gay movement and shows how President Vladimir Putin uses this agenda to quash political dissent, exert influence on neighboring nations and bash the West.

3. On the run in LA from Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign. While Russian authorities only charged a handful of people with the controversial LGBTQ propaganda law, the legislation proved to be a powerful censorship tool for removing online discussion of LGBTQ issues from Google and other platforms

4. Russian investigators single out gay fathers in latest crackdown on LGBTQ rights. Our reporter looks at how child trafficking laws have been weaponized to jail gay men who fathered children with surrogate mothers.

The post In Russia, the anti-LGBTQ campaign marches on appeared first on Coda Story.

The fallout from the war in Ukraine

This year, we have been tracking how propaganda around this war has been weaponized in Europe and around the world, particularly in Africa. In our weekly newsletter Disinfo Matters, we’ve stayed on the story of Russian wartime disinformation, such as the Kremlin’s use of social media to spread its narratives. We have also highlighted how Ukrainians have turned to photography and music, among other things, to mourn the Russian invasion, to express defiance and to point toward a brighter future. A major development has been the extensive, even unprecedented, use of technology like killer robots and drones in a war otherwise characterized by grinding, wearying ground battles in which heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces have managed to force Russia to retreat from some occupied territories. While the story of the Russian invasion has been one of boots on the ground, including Russia calling up its reserves, an extraordinary and dystopic subplot is how this war, as one of our writers noted, is “serving as a testing ground for cutting edge, but unproven, technology.” Sign up here for the newsletter we are launching in 2023 that will be entirely dedicated to covering the global fallout from the war in Ukraine.  

Rewriting history

2022 has been marked by governments and regimes around the world seeking to influence, inflect and even entirely rewrite their national histories. Some of this has taken the form of quite literally rewriting school textbooks to reflect political trends and ideologies. One of our Big Ideas dove deep into revisionist agendas in Poland, Spain, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland and Lithuania. In each of these places, uncomfortable questions are being asked about national identity. 

How, for instance, should Poland reflect on its wartime history? A right-wing government is using the country’s National Institute of Remembrance to spin a nationalist narrative about Polish heroism in the face of Nazi atrocities. It embraces and promotes a vision of Polish resistance, of ethnic Poles helping the country’s Jewish community, while refusing to countenance a serious conversation on Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes. Collaboration is also a taboo topic of conversation in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands occupied by the Nazis where they built concentration camps. Nazi crimes on British soil have been buried far into the recesses of the national memory but, some historians argue, it’s time to revive those memories. 

A simmering, resentful silence continues to hold in parts of Northern Ireland over the Troubles, decades after the Good Friday Agreement. Is it possible to simply draw a line under the violence without also finding a way for people to be told the truth, to grieve together and to move forward without burying the past? This is a question that echoes in Spain's Valley of the Fallen, where a national pact of forgetting has failed to erase the cataclysmic violence of the Spanish Civil War. People still want answers, even as others claim answers are no longer possible or too politicized. Meanwhile, the politicization of medieval symbols has created rifts between Lithuanians and Belarusians, as each nation clings to versions of its distant history as guides to present-day national identities.  

Cross-border repression 

Governments reaching across borders to harass and persecute their own citizens, whether digitally or physically, is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon that scholars label transnational repression. Some of the worst offenders include China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. We have written about the few Uyghur journalists and translators who are able to tell their stories about the harassment they have suffered in Xinjiang. Surveillance tactics and censorship have made it difficult for members of the Uyghur diaspora to speak out against the atrocities of the Chinese authorities both within and outside China’s borders. Just months ago, the FBI indicted men it said had been helping Chinese authorities to execute a campaign to force political dissidents living in the United States to return to China. So alarmed are some members of Congress that they have introduced a new bill to jail those convicted of helping authoritarian regimes to attack dissidents based in the U.S. for up to 10 years. While this would be a significant deterrent and a recognition of the threat certain regimes pose to their own citizens abroad, questions remain about enforcement and sincerity when the United States’ close political relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia come under pressure. This is a theme that Coda will devote much of its energy to reporting on as 2023 unfolds. 

Climate denial and pseudohealth

The ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis are contributing hugely to climate anxieties, as European countries desperate for alternative energy relationships ignore their commitments to combating climate change by signing deals to exploit natural gas resources in Africa. Shifts to sustainable forms of transportation in the U.K. have stirred up virulent online debates over environmental policies. Shortages of medicines at the center of TikTok trends, such as diabetes pills touted as miracle weight loss aids, are affecting patients who are struggling to access their regular medication. Meanwhile in India, the government’s ideological priorities mean that it is pushing Ayurvedic medicines that have been insufficiently tested as a “natural” homegrown alternative to Western science. In the United States, radical anti-trans actions have been a focus of Coda’s coverage, including bomb threats to children's hospitals. Legislation passed in states like Florida have underscored attempts to push harmful rhetoric on transgender issues, rather than paying attention to experts or, indeed, trans people. 

The age of nostalgia

Our latest Big Idea series takes on our “infatuation with a mythologized history.” The series ranges widely. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmer Rouge who ruled Cambodia at the time, are blamed for the genocide of nearly two million people. In California, grieving the losses wrought by climate change revives the term “solastalgia” — the desolation felt by those who see their homes ripped away before their eyes. In Hungary, a right-wing government rejects the Europeanization of Hungary in favor of tracing its roots to a glorious, imperial Turkic past. And in Kuwait, the globalization of the 1990s was a way of life, rather than a trendy academic term, until the Iraqis invaded and forced Kuwaitis and expats alike to wrestle with questions of identity and home. Nostalgia for an imagined past, a somehow superior past, has contributed significantly to what we might also describe as an age of anger, a period in which countries around the world have become increasingly fractious and divided. Nostalgia has distorted the way in which we look at ourselves — our history and our present. It is a theme that threads through and connects many of the issues we cover at Coda and will continue to cover over the next year.

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In fact, this year’s renewal of Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged from pre-existing twisted narratives. Espousing an alternative reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grounded his “special military operation” in false claims that Kyiv was orchestrating a genocide against Russian speakers in the country. He has unfurled a web of lies about the Ukrainian government having Nazi sympathies. Putin’s venomous dislike of the truth has now resulted in thousands of deaths in Ukraine and millions of people displaced.

Since late February, the disinformation frontlines in this war have evolved. At first the disinformation from Moscow was pushed out by state-backed media outlets and a worldwide web of influencers and allies. But as sanctions limited the reach of Russian state broadcasters, and social media platforms attempted to curtail information pollution about the war, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine worked to influence the Russian diaspora and shore up support from vulnerable domestic media globally. 

As the conflict dragged on, some organizations have profited from the ad revenue accrued from Russian lies. An investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Yandex, the Russian version of Google and a Nasdaq-listed organization, helped “sites pushing false Russian claims make thousands of dollars a day through on-site adverts.” 

As the war shows little sign of slowing down, and with 2023 on the horizon, here are some of the key disinformation moments from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia thought it could take Ukraine within a week. As tanks rolled across the border from Belarus and residents in Mariupol witnessed the brutal destruction of their city, a Belarusian-linked hacking group called Ghostwriter began to target the accounts of Ukrainian military and public figures. Like the tank assault on Kyiv, their campaign failed, and when it became clear to the Kremlin that the Ukrainians could successfully defend their country, the tone of the disinformation changed. The new messaging attempted to gaslight the world. Speaking on March 3 at a security council meeting in Moscow, Putin said that the “special military operation is going strictly according to schedule.” Since then, the same refrain has been used in spite of crushing Russian defeats both in the war and in the court of public opinion. But, as laid out by the Canadian government, “Russia wouldn’t need to mobilize another 300,000 citizens if its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine was going as planned.”

One of Moscow’s most incendiary lines of disinformation came early on in the war when the country’s Foreign Ministry claimed that special forces had found documents showing “evidence” of U.S.-financed military biological experiments in Ukraine. Playing off fears that the conflict would see casualties from the use of biological or chemical weapons, this disinformation flew around the world. It got the backing of Chinese officials, who had previously tried to distance themselves from the war. “This Russian military operation has uncovered the secret of the U.S. labs in Ukraine, and this is not something that can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner,” a Chinese spokesperson said at the time. In the United States, where the government was scolding Russia for its information war, QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on the disinformation to buttress their own narratives.

The mass murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha became evident to the world in early April. At least 458 people were killed in this town west of Kyiv, their bodies left scattered on roads, in shallow mass graves and in destroyed buildings. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, children were among those who were unlawfully killed. The horrors of Bucha not only showed the world the brutality of Russian troops but crushed Moscow’s claims of superior military prowess. The Kremlin’s rhetorical response was to falsely assert that the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces to provoke Russia. In the following weeks, Putin and his spokespeople would deny any responsibility for the same horrors that emerged in Irpin and Izium. To this day, Moscow claims its forces do not target civilians. 

The war in Ukraine has caused the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. According to the U.N. there are approximately 7.8 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe, while 4.8 million people have received temporary protection. But even as Europeans threw open their doors to those fleeing the Russian advance, pro-Russian websites and social media accounts were able to circumvent EU sanctions and effectively spread disinformation about the refugee population. Allegations that Ukrainian refugees were financially well off, that they were depleting resources for native populations and presented a security threat to host countries were widely shared. In the Czech Republic, Russian disinformation poured into the physical world when, in September, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to protest the Czech government, Russian sanctions and assistance given to refugees.

The hybrid war in Ukraine mirrors the Syrian experience. Rife with Russian disinformation, the Syrian civil war marked its 11th year in March. Meanwhile, on the African continent, the Wagner mercenary group is pushing disinformation through powerful social media influencers to shore up support for its war in Ukraine and involvement in local conflicts. The Kremlin’s disinformation machine in 2023 will not slow down.

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The rise of the killer robot

Forget fantasyland Westworld machine murderers. Real-life lethal robots are now fighting their way into warzones and police departments worldwide. 

Coda’s Ilya Gridneff explored the rollout of a new generation of autonomous machines on Ukraine’s battlefields. Naval drones and unmanned, machine gun-equipped ground vehicles are “poised to upend modern warfare,” Gridneff wrote. The emergence of these “killer robot” devices raises all sorts of terrifying questions about the ever-blurring boundary between machines and humans and the existential risk of ceding too much control from the latter to the former. 

They’ve made it to California, too. Lawmakers in San Francisco, one of several U.S. cities doubling down on police surveillance in response to concerns about crime, recently faced severe backlash after nearly approving a measure that would have let police use robots to kill. The neighboring city of Oakland also explored (and then scrapped) a plan to arm police robots with guns. 

America’s post-Roe abortion surveillance matrix

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing a constitutional right to abortion, privacy experts were quick to point out the dangers of the decision in the digital age. As we wrote after a draft opinion was leaked in May, people’s search histories, text messages, location data, social media activity, purchasing records and use of reproductive health phone apps could all be used as evidence in legal cases against those who seek the procedure in states where the procedure is outlawed. 

“As soon as abortion becomes criminalized, then any sort of digital trace that people leave online at any stage of their journey could be evidence that might be used against them,” Nikolas Guggenberger, now-former executive director of Yale’s Information Society Project, explained. And that’s nothing to say of the incredibly messy universe of questions it might raise for speech on social media platforms. Already, companies have been accused of suppressing content about abortion and abortion-inducing drugs.

The spy in your pocket

It’s impossible to talk about authoritarian tech trends without talking about spyware. There is a huge global appetite for this technology by governments of all stripes. We’ve covered the topic extensively in our Authoritarian Tech newsletter — subscribe if you haven’t yet! — and the updates are coming in so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. In California, WhatsApp and Apple have sued the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, and a group of journalists from the Salvadoran investigative newsroom El Faro are also taking NSO to court for building software that infected reporters’ phones and tracked their every move. 

For journalists targeted with spyware, the personal and professional harm can be severe and long-lasting. Over the summer, we covered the story of Togolese reporters who appeared on a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers that NSO clients targeted for surveillance. A year after the revelations, the threat of being infected with spyware continues to haunt them.

Engineering a perfect society – through mass surveillance

The scope of mass surveillance in China is so widespread that it’s difficult to truly wrap your mind around it. Coda reporter Liam Scott gave us a primer when he interviewed Wall Street Journal journalists Liza Lin and Josh Chin about their recent book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which describes the country’s descent into mass surveillance as a tool of authoritarian social control. 

The magnitude of surveillance in Xinjiang, where the government has been accused of carrying out a genocide against Uyghur Muslims, is “truly totalitarian,” reporter Chin explained, with the goal of completely “remolding” the individuals it targets. This includes a system of biometric data collection, facial recognition technology, so-called “Big Brother” programs and advanced artificial intelligence that authorities have imposed on the population to exert “total control.” Outside of Xinjiang, residents have faced extreme surveillance under Beijing’s draconian “zero Covid” policy, which reporter Isobel Cockerell has explored at length in her excellent Infodemic newsletter. 

The building blocks of the surveillance nightmare unleashed in Xinjiang and beyond, however, can be found in the U.S., home to companies that happily supplied their technologies to the Chinese government as it constructed its panopticon. These tech companies, Chin explained, “midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components.” China’s end goal with this tech, he believes, is to build a “perfectly engineered” society. If that’s not dystopian nightmare fodder, I’m not sure what is.

As we struggle to find a silver lining in all this, it may be time to take a step back and reconsider tried-and-true methods of communication. From protester signs in China to print-and-post samizdat networks in Belarus, our stories in 2022 also showed the enduring power of pen and paper. Enjoy your reading.

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China

China continued to be the most dangerous cross-border offender. As part of its highly sophisticated transnational repression campaign, the regime issued hundreds of lnterpol red notices — requests to police around the world to detain and send suspects back to China. In April, the Chinese government tried to force back four members of the Uyghur minority, who have been targeted heavily within and outside China, from Saudi Arabia. Among the four was a 13-year-old girl who, along with her mother, risks being sent to a detention center. Following an outcry from human rights groups, the deportation has been delayed. 

Under the banner of an anti-corruption program called Sky Net, the Chinese state has also ramped up efforts to repatriate Chinese nationals it accuses of corruption. The program has seen thousands targeted in the last few years, including the Chinese businessman Ma Chao, a member of the persecuted Falun Gong movement currently living in Cyprus. At the start of the year, members of his family in China were arrested to increase pressure on him to return. Just one month later, an Interpol notice was issued against his wife. 

Even within the U.S., traditionally seen as the ultimate safe haven for those escaping persecution abroad, China has ramped up its efforts to target dissidents. In October, the FBI charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. In response to this concerning trend, a group of Democratic congressmen have introduced a bill that seeks to codify transnational repression as a crime under U.S. law.

Turkey

Turkey is one of the biggest transnational repression actors. High-profile attempts to return Kurds back to Turkey were a regular occurrence in 2022. Turkey has been able to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine, demanding that Finland and Sweden commit to more proactively returning dissident Kurds to Turkey in exchange for Turkey’s support for their NATO membership bids. Turkey’s government has provided a list of dozens of people it wants repatriated. It continued to tap informal networks to attack and threaten journalists living abroad. Those targeted in Sweden include the Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmet Donmez, who, in March of this year, was attacked outside his home.

Iran

Over the years, the Iranian regime has used tactics such as assassinations, renditions and digital intimidation to target Iranian citizens in countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to Freedom House. During the past three months of cascading protests across Iran, there has been renewed global interest in the dangers facing Iranian activists living at home and abroad.

In October, masked men attacked anti-government protestors outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin, leaving several injured. The British police recently warned two British-Iranian journalists and their families that they faced an increased “credible” threat from Iranian state security forces. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy network, MI5, used his annual threat update to warn of Iran’s ambitions to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.” He said that there had been at least 10 such potential threats since January 2022.

Saudi Arabia

Since U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018 inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been under a measure of diplomatic pressure. That has not stopped him from expanding the Saudi government’s transnational repression efforts. In August, the same month that President Biden met with the prince, three people were sentenced in Saudi Arabia after being surveilled while abroad. One was a 34-year-old mother who had tweeted about the Kingdom while in the U.K. 

It was also in August that a former employee of Twitter was convicted in the U.S. for using his access to Twitter’s data to spy for the Saudi regime. Last week, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against bin Salman that sought to hold him accountable for Khashoggi’s murder. The judge said that, while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation to give the Saudi leader political immunity. Having cemented its position as one of the worst transnational aggressors of 2022, the Biden administration’s policy is likely to provide wiggle room for the Saudi regime in 2023.

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The post The year in cross-border repression campaigns appeared first on Coda Story.

Russian bio labs 

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the internet was set alight with a pro-Russia conspiracy theory that the U.S. was running secret bioweapons labs on Russia’s borders. The theory was used as part of Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, and was pushed by Russian state media before being picked up by online conspiracy theorists and QAnon adherents, as well as influencers like Alex Jones. Even British comedian and social commentator Russell Brand ran with the narrative, weighing in on the lie to his five-million-strong following. The myth that the U.S. is building bioweapons on Russia’s borders goes back years. Chinese officials and state media also promoted the conspiracy theory, using it as an opportunity to parrot its long-running claim that the U.S. was behind the Covid-19 pandemic.

The U.S. bioweapons narrative is nothing new. For years, the Kremlin has made extensive claims that the U.S.-owned Lugar Lab in Georgia — which monitors infectious diseases — was secretly running “germ warfare” operations, and has said it’s responsible for everything from Covid to the Zika virus to plagues of stink bugs. Thanks to this conspiracy theory, even biolabs in the U.S. itself are facing opposition and conspiracy claims. A new biolab in Kansas opened recently to study some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Though some concerns about the lab were legitimate, they were accompanied by a torrent of conspiracy theories, reminiscent of those in Ukraine, pushing the notion that the lab was really building bioweapons. 

Anti-vaxxers refuse to back down post-Covid 

At the outset of the year, Canadian truckers drove cross-country to participate in a standoff with the Canadian government, protesting Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates. Their action inspired motorists in France, Israel, Finland, Australia and the Netherlands to stage similar protests demanding an end to pandemic measures. Many of the “Freedom Convoy” social media groups were being run by fake accounts tied to content farms in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Romania. They were heavily endorsed by QAnon influencers, and QAnon logos were seen emblazoned on trucks during the protests, while other organizations among the truckers claimed that the pandemic had been orchestrated by Bill Gates with the intention of injecting 5G microchips into the population. 

As most of the world returned to some semblance of normality after two years of Covid restrictions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that anti-vaccine activists might quiet down. But a new and terrifying trend emerged, in which hardline anti-vaccine adherents the world over staged a “battle over blood” and began refusing blood transfusions from vaccinated donors. Perhaps the most extreme example of this strange and scary phenomenon was a case in New Zealand, in which two sets of parents refused donor blood for their seriously ill children. 

QAnon goes mainstream

The U.S. midterms saw record numbers of QAnon-linked candidates running for office. And  candidates, including Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Arizona State Representative Leo Biasiucci, who have all been linked with the conspiracy movement or spoken at QAnon conventions, managed to win seats. Two darlings of the digital disinformation scene — Christian nationalist and QAnon devotee Doug Mastriano and Covid skeptic and celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz both lost their bids. In the recesses of Telegram and other social media platforms, QAnoners celebrated Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and began returning to the platform in their droves. Musk himself began tweeting QAnon-aligned messaging and using QAnon tactics, like accusing his critics of pedophilia, to bolster the support from his conspiracist fans. 

The high tide of antisemitism 

After antisemitic incidents in 2021 reached an all-time high, 2022 was no better. The rapper Kanye West faced a growing backlash after he spiraled into a public embrace of antisemitism with an ever-escalating series of outbursts targeting Jewish people. On conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, he repeatedly praised Hitler and the Nazis, to the extent that Jones had to make a rare intervention by admitting “the Nazis did a lot of very bad things.” During his outburst, Kanye mentioned that 300 Zionists ran the world — borrowing directly a fringe conspiracy theory called “the Committee of 300” that is over a century old and was commonly used by the Nazis to justify their persecution of the Jews.

Reichsburger 

The late-breaking entrant award among the conspiracy theorists of 2022 goes to the Reichsburger movement behind the attempted coup in Germany at the beginning of December. The hard-right movement, accused of plotting against the German government, adheres to a grab bag of conspiracy theories. It’s not unlike QAnon, but it also has uniquely German ideas, namely that the country should return to having a Kaiser and go back to the Germany of the 1800s. As a result, adherents to this moment call themselves “sovereign citizens” and don’t recognize the current state of Germany or its laws. The movement came into its own during the pandemic, when Reichsburger followers protested against Covid laws, and in doing so, merged with QAnoners and anti-vaccine advocates.

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USA

By Rebekah Robinson

Curriculum standards and content have been subject to tense debate in the U.S. for decades. These standards vary from state to state, even down to the granular level from school district to school district.

Often these debates are pedagogical. In times of change or upheaval, though, the school curriculum reflects the divisions in society and in its politics and culture.

In July, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect, limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about gender and sexual orientation all the way up to the 12th grade. Additionally, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (ruled by a Florida judge last week to be unconstitutional) went into effect ahead of the new school year, blocking conversations around race deemed to be “critical race theory.”

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said, “This deeply disturbing legislation aims to censor educators and prevent them from valuing, affirming and supporting our students,” and that “politicians are manufacturing false narratives about young people — and then proposing unconstitutional, discriminatory and just plain harmful ‘solutions’ to nonexistent problems.”

Earlier this year, several thousand math textbooks were recalled in Florida. Not because of mathematical errors but because they had been flagged for containing material that could be considered “critical race theory.” The books were returned to the publisher to address the content contravening the restrictive legislation.

Parents also now have more control in some Florida counties to contest material they believe to be inappropriate for their children, enabling additional and arbitrary censorship of educational content. Books in Florida counties are being censored in libraries and now carry warning labels for LGBTQ content. Stories that feature characters of color are being flagged as “unsuitable for students.”

Florida’s legislative activism has catalyzed conservative lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia, among others, to also attempt to prohibit teaching “divisive topics.” The answer to alleged “cultural indoctrination,” these legislators appear to be arguing, is more indoctrination.

Hungary

By Katia Patin 

Amid the turmoil of Hungary’s Covid-19 crisis in September 2020, the government rolled out a new curriculum with a mandate for schools to stick close to the new centralized teaching recommendations. The biggest changes were made to literature and history instruction, with the updates aligning with the ruling party Fidesz’s rehabilitation of nationalist figures with anti-Semitic pasts. 

For example, assigned reading included the work of Hungarian writers such as Jozsef Nyiro and Albert Wass. In addition to his short stories and novels, Nyiro was known for being an admirer of Joseph Goebbels and in 1940 he joined parliament as a member of an ultra-right, anti-semitic party. Wass, a novelist and poet whose work was banned until the fall of communism in 1989, was a convicted war criminal. Both men have had statues and streets named after them in recent years and were introduced into curriculum at the expense of authors such as Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature.

In history textbooks, medieval wars got more page time with critics saying myth and legends were being presented as fact and history. There is now greater emphasis placed on victories won in the 10-14th centuries and the idea that Hungarians are the descendants of Turkic speaking people, rather than the previously established consensus of Finno-Ugric roots (shared by Finns, Estonians and some indigenous groups in Russia). These new changes highlighted that the established narrative of Hungary’s ancient past taught under communism was up for reinterpretation. 

Following the changes, protesters across social media used the slogan #noNAT to organize against the teaching of fascist writers with some teachers banding together to voice their opposition to having to revise their lessons.

India

By Shougat Dasgupta

Students in Indian schools are being provided with new, slimmed down textbooks for classes such as history, political science and sociology. It is, says the government, an exercise in "rationalization." The pandemic has meant that Indian schoolchildren, like many around the world, have fallen behind. So, the government wants to lighten the load.

This means — a national newspaper revealed — removing chapters from textbooks on the Gujarat riots of 2002 in which nearly a 1,000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands displaced over three days of violence. The state authorities, led at the time by current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stood by, seemingly twiddling its thumbs. 

"The approach I gather is in conformity with the theories of Hindutva," Romila Thapar, the nonagenarian professor emeritus, and arguably the world's preeminent expert on ancient India, wrote archly to me about the proposed revisions. These include eliminating, diluting, and changing the wording of sections to do with Mughal history, caste discrimination, democratic functions and even periods of authoritarian rule in India such as Indira Gandhi’s infamous “Emergency” in the 1970s.

When governments change in India, it  is not unusual that textbooks change. But since Narendra Modi came to power eight years ago, the changes to textbooks, dozens of public intellectuals like Thapar have asserted in an open letter, reflect a "Hindu first" worldview.

Modi leads the BJP, a political party that is ideologically committed to a Hindu India — like a number of affiliated cultural and political organizations known collectively as the Sangh Parivar — rather than the secular country India chose to become in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned.

As Thapar put it in her email to me, "since the political aim of the Sangh Parivar is to establish a Hindu Rashtra (nation) then the attempt will be to project history as a support for this political change." A history that must necessarily avoid India’s complexities, its many wafer-thin layers, each bleeding into the other.

It is, wrote historian S. Irfan Habib in June, "a historical fact that India has been a palimpsest." The BJP, though, appears to want to scrawl over and obscure centuries of text with a permanent marker.

Egypt

By Masho Lomashvili

Truth in Egypt has long been under attack. Deception and manipulation have been part of Egyptian politics long before the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, organized a coup d'état and seized power eight years ago.  

But the Arab Spring in 2011 offered hope of an end to authoritarian rule, and the real possibility of democracy. El-Sisi plunged Egypt back into the strongman era it had hoped to escape. He is in the process of completing the job by reducing the Arab Spring to a footnote in revised textbooks.

Will schoolchildren in Egypt no longer be made aware that Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the iconic heart of the protests that swept through North Africa and the Arab world?

Pupils in Egyptian schools once had a full chapter in their textbooks devoted to the events of the Arab Spring. Under el-Sisi, that chapter has become a deliberately misleading, confusing paragraph.

The “Modern Egyptian and Arab history” curriculum taught to secondary level students significantly underplays the Arab Spring. It was a people’s revolution, an outpouring of anger at decades of authoritarian rule in which corruption was rife and dissent was brutally crushed.

There is no mention in these textbooks of the nearly 1,000 protestors who died in 2011 as a result of police brutality. Anwar, now 31, remembers the events of 2011 very well. “It was the first time people felt their power,” he told me. “And Sisi wants them to forget this feeling.” 

According to Anwar, the Arab Spring had set an example that revolution was possible. “During Mubarak’s time,” he says, referring to the 30 years Egypt spent under the thumb of Hosni Mubarak culminating in the events of 2011, “when people talked about protests, it wasn't really seen as a threat to the government. It was because a successful revolt hadn't happened before.” Now, though, he adds, “the government knows that the people are capable of succeeding and they're scared that it might happen again.”

Serbia

By Frankie Vetch

In July 1995, Serbian paramilitaries and Bosnian Serbs from the Army of Republika Srpska marched into the town of Srebrenica and massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The event was the pinnacle of a bloody war that split apart the former Yugoslavia. 

In 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that what happened in Srebernica qualified as genocide. But, as recently as in 2020, textbooks in Serbia, while containing an acknowledgement that war crimes had happened in Srebrenica, stopped short of describing the massacres as genocide and questioned the accuracy of the death toll.

According to Marko Milosavljević, Programme Coordinator at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, “there is still a big policy of denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.” Years ago, he told me, “they used to say that Srebrenica didn’t happen at all. Now over the last decade, the authorities don’t say ‘nothing happened,’ they just deny the implications of the genocide.”

In 2017, Milorad Dodik, who was at the time the President of the Republic of Srpska, stated that no textbooks should ever teach students about the Srebrenica genocide, nor the siege of Sarajevo. Textbooks only briefly mention Srebrenica as a place where Bosnian Serbs conquered. The textbooks also only refer to Serbs and not Croats or Muslims as victims of ethnic cleansing.

Serbian textbooks have also failed to mention the state’s role in committing war crimes in the 1990s against Kosovans. Dodik, now the Serb member of the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which serves as the collective head of state), has repeatedly called for the Republic of Srpska to secede from the rest of the country. 

With tensions rising in the region, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with a new generation of ethnic-Serbs in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska being taught little to nothing about war crimes committed against Muslims and Kosovans in the 1990s, there is an ever-present danger of history repeating itself.

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At Coda, we’ve covered stories of law enforcement and other state agencies using surveillance technology that leaves people and their data vulnerable. Here are some examples of seemingly innocuous monitoring tools and techniques that can nevertheless put people’s privacy at risk, along with one example of how nature can fight back — and win.

1. Bluetooth headphones: Plenty of people use these  — we see them everywhere. But convenient as they are, they also have a tendency to expose our data. A few months ago, I spoke with Bjorn Martin Hegnes, an IT researcher at Norof University in Oslo, Norway. He built a kit for detecting Bluetooth signals and took a long bicycle ride around Oslo. Over the course of 12 days, he tapped into roughly 1.7 million Bluetooth signals and collected corresponding metadata from 129 headsets belonging to people in close proximity to him as he rode along. 

With this data in hand, he was able to identify the locations of headset owners, their everyday routes and sometimes even their names, since people often name their devices after themselves. He concluded that devices using static, non-changing MAC addresses — a type of device address that never changes — were easily detectable. 

“I showed in my project that when you have enough data points, you can find where the person goes to school, where he lives. You can get a lot of information from a person that has a static MAC address on their device,” he told me.

2. Smart coffee mugs and other household ‘things’: Everyday objects and electronic devices that are connected to the internet, part of the so-called “Internet of Things,” have become increasingly popular. But how smart are they really? Devices like smart fridges or connected coffee mugs don’t have the same security mechanisms as our computers or phones do, leaving users vulnerable to security breaches like hacking. While it’s hard to imagine what harms could come from a fridge hack, this kind of maneuver can lead to scarier outcomes than you might think.

“Someone who finds a vulnerability in your refrigerator and then uses it to get onto your network, they're not trying to spoil your food by changing the temperature in your refrigerator,” said security expert Window Snyder, who spoke on “How to fix the Internet,” a podcast hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They're using your refrigerator as a launch point to see if there are any other interesting devices on your network.” At that point, devices that do contain sensitive data about you are suddenly more vulnerable to compromise. 

3. Exercise apps: Strava, a popular GPS-powered app that maps your workout, also has a social network feature where people can follow each other, upload and share their exercises and leave “kudos” after a successful run. In 2017, when Strava released so-called “heat maps” that showed the activities of every single user who had ever uploaded their GPS points, military analysts were quick to express concern. The published map included workout routes of US military personnel, making it easy to identify military bases abroad. 

“Strava’s default settings mean your data is automatically broadcast to other users. Fail to hide yourself on FlyBys (which allows users to see other athletes’ full names, times and pictures) … or forget to activate Privacy Zones (which block out areas where workouts frequently begin and end) and you’re essentially slapping a big ‘come find me’ sticker on yourself, 24/7,” Katie O'Malley wrote for Elle in 2020, in a confessional essay on becoming a “Strava stalker” during Covid lockdown. 

4. Fake pill bottles: In 2013, New York City police tried to crack down on pharmacy robberies of prescription painkillers by attaching tracking devices to several pill bottles. They filled the bottles with placebo pills, labeled them with the names of popular opioids like OxyContin and then stocked them on pharmacy shelves. The idea was that if a person tried to steal a bottle, police would be able to track and identify the thief in short order. In at least a few cases, the scheme actually worked.

5. Australian magpies: We end with a story of nature outsmarting GPS trackers. Earlier this year, behavioral ecologist Dominique Potvin and her team of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia attached tiny tracking devices to the several Australian magpies (a common local bird), to monitor their flight patterns and other behavior. But the birds refused to comply. They started pecking at each others’ tracking devices, and ultimately succeeded at removing all of them. The researchers debated whether the magpies were trying to help one another break free of the restrictive technology, or if they were simply interested in the shiny objects. Ultimately, Potvin’s team decided the magpies were too smart to be tracked by GPS. They will not be using it on the birds again.

The post Watch your back — and your coffee mug. Innocent-seeming objects are tracking us everywhere appeared first on Coda Story.

TikTok restricted its services in Russia in early March, citing Russia’s "anti-fake news" law, but many users are circumventing the restrictions all the same. And plenty of the platform’s one billion monthly users worldwide continue to comment and report on the war, while others are using the tool to spread related disinformation through commentary, dance challenges, and lip-syncing trends.

Here are some of the widespread trends that social media researchers have uncovered on TikTok:

1. In early March, U.S.-based media watchdog Media Matters published a report by researcher Abbie Richards identifying 180 TikTok users who had posted nearly-identical videos showing a person kneeling while holding an English-language sign that condemns “Russophobia” and invokes “info wars.” Captions typically include the hashtags #RussianLivesMatter or #RLM.

Richards notes that the video captions also include strikingly similar typographical errors, indicating that they are part of a highly coordinated effort. Some gave themselves away: In what could only have been an error, some of the video captions included Russian-language instructions, such as “You can publish, description: Russian Lives Matter #RLM.”

2. Media Matters also spotted Russian influencers on TikTok making hand gestures to form the letter “Z” while doing a viral TikTok dance. Z has become a symbol of support for Russia’s military. In a more bizarre trend, young women posed for selfies by making the Z letter with their hands, proclaiming that this is how “real women” take selfies.

3. A report by VICE showed how Russian TikTok influencers have been recruited by an anonymous Telegram channel to post videos with pro-Kremlin messaging about the invasion, in exchange for payment. Operators of the Telegram channel instructed the TikTokers, some of whom have over a million followers, to justify the attack on Ukraine by defending their own people against the government in Kyiv. This aligns with Putin’s false narrative that the Ukrainian government has systematically targeted Russian-speaking people in the ongoing conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government in the eastern Donbas region (Putin has even referred to this as a genocide).  TikTok influencer Yarra_M observed how people in dozens of these videos appear to be using the exact same script as one another, with some simply reading it from their phones.

4. Marieke Kuypers, a Dutch user who describes herself as an “unofficial TikTok fact-checker,” recently noticed TikTok users amplifying Putin’s rhetoric of justifying Ukraine’s invasion by pointing to NATO’s role in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999. These actual events came in response to violence by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, following years of conflict over Kosovo’s attempts to secede from Serbia. But in the videos, TikTokers act out a dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, where Ukraine refuses to stop bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 (although this never actually happened) and then in 2022 the roles are reversed, with Ukraine pleading to stop the shelling and Russia refusing to do so.

5. In the days leading up to the invasion, when Russia recognized the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk (both located in the Donbas region) as independent republics, more than 1,000 Russian TikTokers started posting videos that used a mirror effect. Videos featured people fist-bumping their own reflections, pretending to be “two brothers,” Donbas and Russia, and lip-syncing to a Russian song, “Brother for Brother.” The hashtags read: “We don’t leave our own behind,” and “We’re together,” in line with the Kremlin’s misleading message that people in the Donbas need to be saved from the “Nazi” Ukrainian government and that Russia will come to their rescue. 

The videos were first spotted by reporters for the popular independent Russian news site TJournal, which is now blocked in Russia, among other media outlets featuring opinions that dissent from the Kremlin narrative. Soon other TikTokers started using the same trend and filter to mock influencers who had “sold” their videos for government propaganda.

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The post TikTok influencers are dancing, lip-syncing, and posing to promote Russia’s war in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

TAULT, a non-profit literary agency and translation house, works with dozens of prominent Ukrainian authors and translators to spread Ukrainian contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. When Russia invaded last month, TAULT launched a project to publish essays and dispatches translated from Ukrainian.

I asked Kate Tsurkan, a translator, editor and the associate director at TAULT, for her recommendations of first-person accounts written by Ukrainian writers to better understand the war. Here are the five books available as English translations that she recommended.

1. “Absolute Zero” by Artem Chekh. Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyn.

Kate Tsurkan: “He is a writer but he joined the army in 2015 and this book is based off of a post that he started writing on Facebook during the war, and he transformed it into a book afterwards.

There's a very funny episode where in his military barracks, they adopt a kitten who has cerebral palsy and they fight over who will cuddle with the cat until he starts pissing in all of their sleeping bags and causing havoc for them. But he also has horrible stories like one when a husband tells his wife the things that they see on the front lines and she dies from a heart attack. It's filled with very interesting standalone anecdotes that portray the banality and the grotesque horror of war and how it affects not only soldiers, but people who are trying to get updates from back home. Chekh actually went back. He enlisted. He is on the frontlines again right now, unfortunately.”

2. “Mondegreen” by Volodymyr Rafeenko. Translated by Mark Andryczyk.

“When we are talking about first-person perspectives or memoir, I think we have to expand our perception and understanding of that because a lot of writers use their personal experiences to explore the world through fiction, for example. Volodymyr Rafeenko is from Donetsk. He was an internally displaced person when the war started.

It's very autobiographical, or an autofiction, we could say, because this is a book about a man from Donetsk who gets displaced because of the war and ends up in Kyiv, much like Rafeenko himself. The text is very visceral. It's interwoven with not only his memories of Donetsk before the war, but of his ancestors who had to deal with Russian aggression. And it deals on a large level with language, because this is the first novel that Volodymyr Rafeenko wrote in Ukrainian. Prior to that, he wrote several novels in Russian. He starts to explore not only the isolation that one feels when you are forced to flee your home, but also the isolation one feels when you start to switch from one language to another. And along with that from one culture, one mentality, to another.” 

3. “Apricots of Donbas” by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina.

“I think poetry can also be very autobiographical, in a sense. Yakimchuk is from Luhansk, and she became very famous for this poetry collection. It was released by Lost Horse Press to great acclaim. Yakimchuk's poetry is very interesting because it deals with a very heavy topic about military combat, about death, war, violence, but she uses very feminine language, sometimes even rather childlike language, to offer this visceral look into war. She's absolutely one of the greatest poets, I think, in Ukraine today.”

4. “The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear” by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky.

“This is a poetry selection that Ilya Kaminsky, the famous poet, edited and the Khersonsky couple really explore the ideas of propaganda, of relations between Ukraine and Russia, of this historical roots of the conflict and how the trauma from decades, even centuries ago still influences relations between Ukraine and Russia today. This is also an example where the autobiographical makes its way into poetry.” 

5. “A New Orthography: Poems” by Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin.

“It's from several of Zhadan's recent collections, from several of his recent collections from Ukrainian. He's exploring not just soldiers' perspectives of the war, but that of grave diggers, priests. He has a really empathetic way of looking at the situation because he is from Luhansk himself.”

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The post How Ukrainian writers have experienced the war in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

From polling, data research or scientific analysis, here are some of the most important recent studies about disinformation.

1) Remember the fake news campaign that brought disinformation into the mainstream discussion? Yes, that one: Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This research from 2018 by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a leading computer network analysis firm, for the United States Senate was, at the time, the most comprehensive analysis of Russian meddling. The researchers analyzed millions of posts and reactions online and determined how the notorious troll farm, the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, tailored different messages to galvanize individual Trump supporters and discourage non-supporters from casting votes at all. The focus had been on Facebook and Twitter; these researchers unraveled how the Internet Research Agency used YouTube in their campaign and also uncovered their sloppiness, like cases of them paying for political ads with Russian rubles.

2) How were scientists in different disciplines discussing fake news before disinformation went literally everywhere? In 2018, as fake news became a catch-all buzz term, a group of 16 political scientists, psychologists, computer scientists, media experts, historians, and journalists led by Harvard professors David Lazer and Matthew Baum teamed up to publish a paper about the science of fake news, looking at how it works on an individual and societal level.

3) In 2020 EU DisinfoLab published Indian Chronicles, an exhaustive research project uncovering a 15-year long international pro-India and anti-Pakistan disinformation campaign run by the New Delhi-based Srivastava Group, mainly targeting the UN and EU. Fake and “resurrected” think tanks and NGOs lobbied the European Parliament, spoke at sessions, and convinced parliamentarians to write pro-India and anti-Pakistan op-eds for over 750 of their fake media outlets across 119 countries. Reportedly, ANI, South Asia’s leading news agency, played a major role in spreading content from these websites, giving them credibility. Srivastava Group was also the organizer of controversial trips to Kashmir in 2019, when a couple dozen far-right European Parliamentarians visited the Indian-controlled disputed regions in Kashmir.

4) In 2020 QAnon, a conspiracy theory about how a global child trafficking ring is ruling the world, conquered every other outlandish conspiracy theory and went global. It infiltrated politics, public health, yoga groups, the hip-hop scene and disrupted the personal lives of thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad. Huge numbers of disinformation stories in the past year had something to do with QAnon, and this poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core published last May made clear just how far QAnon has traveled. In the U.S. alone, 30 million people believe at least some QAnon tenets, ranking QAnon next to major religions.

5) Last spring, amid Covid-19 vaccine rollouts, an international non-profit research organization, The Center for Countering Digital Hate, investigated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for harmful, Covid-19 related disinformation. They uncovered the “Disinformation Dozen” —  the influencers who accounted for 65% of Covid-19 related misinformation online. The list includes notorious anti-vaccine campaigners like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alternative medicine practitioners like Christiane Northrup and the leading pseudoscientific influencer-physician Joseph Mercola. Mercola, who has been profiting from his misinformation, also made our list of top business owners profiting off bad science. “He will continue to express his professional opinions and defend his freedom of speech,” his representative told Coda when approached for a comment.

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Increasingly, many in Western countries are oblivious when this happens, compounding the isolation endured by people taken offline. Here are some internet blackouts you probably don’t know about:

1) In January, Kazakhstan made headlines because of its mass anti-government protests and the total internet blackout that followed. The Kazakh government has been in the habit of throttling the internet for a while though. For example, on May 9, 2019, the presidential election day, authorities cut off internet access coinciding with detentions of activists and journalists participating in the demonstrations at the time. In 2012, Kazakhstan's parliament amended a national security law allowing the government to shut down internet and mobile connections during riots or anti-terrorist operations.

2) In April 2019, London police shut down Wi-fi in London’s tube stations to halt the actions of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental activist group whose civil disobedience protests in the UK had caused disruptions on roads, bridges and railways and resulted in hundreds of protesters being detained. “In the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network, British Transport Police has taken the decision to restrict passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations,” a police spokesperson told The Verge in 2019.

3) One popular tool to combat exam cheating has become the shutting down of the internet. Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and India have been regularly cutting off the Internet during annual nationwide exams to prevent cheating and the leaking of test questions. Forcing large numbers of people into internet blackouts was not as productive as they wished, however, as questions still got leaked. Uzbekistan cut off internet and messaging services during several hours of exams as far back as early 2010s.

4) In 2020, India shut down the internet 109 times, according to a report by the digital rights organization Access Now. Indian authorities cut off internet access during protests, elections, and religious holidays, like for Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi celebrations in Madhya Pradesh state in 2019. Internet cut-offs during religious holidays are not exclusive to India. In 2018, authorities in Bali asked mobile operators to cut off the internet during Nyepi, a Hindu celebration of the New Year, characterized by observing different prohibitions. Gadgets are getting in the way of introspection, Hinduism Society head Gusti Ngurah Sudiana told the BBC.

5) Over 18 months, residents of a village called Aberhosan in Wales would mysteriously lose their internet connection every morning because of the Good Morning Britain morning TV show, or rather a couple who loved watching it. In September, 2020, after months of exhaustive investigations, a dedicated group of engineers discovered Alun and Elaine Rees accidentally cut off the internet in the whole village when they switched off their old TV to watch the show by hijacking the village-wide network. After the revelation, the accidental culprits decided to not use their old TV again.

The post Internet shutdowns gain popularity, and obscurity appeared first on Coda Story.

1) Want to play “Love me… Love me not?” but don’t have daisies to pull apart? For Android users, the Russian company Elsys might have a solution. Its “Love Detector” app allegedly has emotion recognition capability. Elsys provides what it calls VibraImage technology to predict a person’s emotions –and actions– based on vibrations in their head and neck. There’s not enough evidence to suggest the technology actually works but apparently it didn’t stop Russian authorities from using the emotion recognition during the 2014 Sochi Olympics to detect potential terrorists.

2) Your bed, but as a giant Fitbit, collecting your biometric data while you sleep, like temperature, heart rate, breathing, movements, or your sleep environment. Sleeping fitness companies like Ghostbed and Eight Sleep are making mattresses studded with sensors so smart that they can allegedly improve your sleep hygiene. If you prefer your mattress less sentient, devices like bedside radars made by the likes of Beddit can track your sleep movements. Recently Amazon also began planning to monitor slumber  –and collect your sleep data in the bargain.

3) Can you recognize your friend down the block by her walk? It’s no longer just your special power. Gait recognition technology, or GRT, monitors and analyzes the shape of a person’s body and their unique biomechanics. The technology can track and identify a person by analyzing step width, walking speed and rotation of the hip. The Chinese government  in 2018 started using the technology. According to the developer Watrix, it offers accuracy as high as 94%. Last year, Russia reportedly also started developing the system. Privacy International last year published a guide for protecting against gait recognition at protests.

4) About ten years ago Japanese mechanical engineers developed technology to recognize a person’s bottom by analyzing the way they sit. Scientists at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo inserted 360 sensors in a car seat and tested the technology with 98% accuracy.

5) Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan and Invoxia in France can track pets’ vitals, health and whereabouts with smart collars. “With the Smart Collar, the ability to collect at scale a large quantity of data over time, will open up incredible doors for research on correlations between vital signs and dog illnesses. This is how we discover new biomarkers, treatments and medicines,” said Invoxia CEO Amelie Caudron at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

6) A Shanghai-based Wanhe goat farm has been developing facial recognition technology for thousands of their extremely rare, white goats. The facial recognition technology monitors goats’ weight, overall health, vaccination, and pregnancy, with the goal of significantly lowering the workload for staff currently burdened with checking on the goats several times a day. According to the Global Times, the technology is also aimed at improving the breeding of the special white goats, who only exist on this one farm.

7) In 2019, Chinese scientists developed a facial recognition app that identifies specific individual bears in Sichuan. Technologists trained the algorithm with tens of thousands of videos and photos of pandas so it can identify individuals by the shape of ears or circles around the eyes. “You no longer need to worry about making the pandas angry by calling them by the wrong name,” The Washington Post quoted the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.

8) Scientists are trying to use facial recognition to detect distressed farm animals subject to factory farming, like pigs and cows. Researchers say large-scale farms have too few employees to detect stress in the animals. Some scientists are working to detect complex emotions in farm animals —like happiness. But many animal rights activists argue this area of research is a PR stunt to counter criticism of factory farming.

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Barack Obama had just won reelection in a hard-fought presidential race and the celebrity host of “The Apprentice” was stewing. Back then, Donald Trump was a mere reality TV star and a staunch proponent of the birther conspiracy, the baseless claim that Obama was born abroad, and therefore ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Those were also the days when Trump was still on Twitter, and he took to the bird app to voice his dismay with the U.S. electoral college system. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he declared, in a series of now belligerently familiar tweets. “We are not a democracy!”

Fast-forward a decade. That Twitter tantrum that generated a few eye-rolls from coastal media in 2012 now reads like foreshadowing to the kaleidoscope of election fraud myths that have metastasized since the 2020 election and proven ever more resilient. Some 60% of Republicans believe that the last presidential election was stolen. 

This “Big Lie” – the meritless claim that the election was hijacked by voter fraud and President Joe Biden was its illegitimate victor – has had tangible policy consequences, leading to the introduction of a slew of state house bills in the U.S. that would restrict voter access, and inspiring Trump acolytes in swing states to run for offices that oversee elections, a development one Democratic secretary of state characterized as a “five-alarm fire.”

The Big Lie reshaping America’s electoral landscape is also providing fertile ground for politicians abroad, who are adopting the rhetoric of widespread voter fraud over the inconvenient realities of legitimate electoral loss. From Brazil to Israel, accusations of rigged elections are gaining momentum, animating conspiracists, and undermining faith in the democratic process. Here are four examples:

Brazil

Trump fanboy and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro defended Trump’s allegations of voter fraud the day after the disastrous January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. “What was the problem that caused that whole crisis, basically? Lack of trust in the election,” he hypothesized. “There were people who voted three, four times. Dead people voted. It was a free-for-all.” It’s not just the U.S. electoral system Bolsonaro railed against. For months, the Brazilian president has been leveling fraud claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system and already questioning the legitimacy of the country’s upcoming 2022 presidential race – but only if he loses, naturally.

Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s electoral system come as polls consistently show him trailing the candidate most likely to run against him, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Recognizing the importance of the upcoming election, Trump allies – including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon – have thrown their weight behind Bolsonaro and are faithfully propping up his voter fraud allegations. According to the New York Times, Bannon argued Bolsonaro “will only lose if ‘the machines’ steal the election.” Bolsonaro, too, has preempted a loss to Lula by declaring fraud as the only possible explanation for his defeat, and has suggested he won’t concede the election if that happens. “I have three alternatives for my future,” Bolsonaro explained of his electoral prospects in August. “Being arrested, killed, or victory.” 

Israel

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded downright Trumpy in June as a coalition of opposition lawmakers were poised to remove him from office. “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in the history of the country,” he declared, arguing the coalition that later succeeded in ousting him was in league with the “deep state” and the journalists covering the news were “taking part in a propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” The rhetoric became so heated in the country’s online spaces in the lead-up to Netanyhau’s ouster that the directory of the country’s security agency, the Shin Bet, released an exceedingly rare statement warning of “ a serious rise and radicalization in violent and inciting discourse” that could lead to political violence, drawing comparisons to the warnings that preceded the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Although Netanyahu did eventually step aside for his replacement and the country was spared from the alarming prospect of an Israeli version of the QAnon Shaman, the former prime minister has yet to walk back his earlier allegations of election fraud.

Germany

Even Germany hasn’t been spared from the abyss of election conspiracies. As Coda reported in the fall, the Big Lie found an eager audience among a number of leaders within the country’s far-right movement, who have amplified Trump-inspired false claims about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the country’s 2021 parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, some of the conspiracies were well outside reality. While the country doesn’t use voting machines, one researcher found U.S-originated conspiracies about rigged voting machines circulating through the country’s right-wing social media outlets over the summer. “These alternative realities that are created in the United States, and are really popular there, have a huge impact on countries that the U.S. is allied with,” he explained. At a campaign event in eastern Germany, a politician with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party urged supporters to vote in person rather than by mail, citing the possibility of election fraud and warning them to “stay alert.” The election, a voter told Schultheis, “is going to be manipulated.”

Peru

Keiko Fujimori promotes the election fraud myth that just wouldn’t quit. In June, Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, lost the country’s presidential election to leftist rival Pedro Castillo, and then refused to concede the race, leveling unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and demanding tens of thousands of ballots be thrown out, leading to massive pro-Fujimori rallies in which supporters donned bullet-proof vests and prophesied about civil war. 

Though Washington and the European Union called the election fair and international observers found no evidence of fraud, the claims delayed the country’s election certification process by a nail-biting six weeks. Castillo was eventually declared the winner, but experts worry Fujimori’s Big Lie amplification has deeply damaged faith in the country’s democratic institutions and radicalized elements of the country’s right. Consider this disturbing New York Times dispatch a month after the election:

“In the crowd at one recent Fujimori rally, a group of young men wearing bulletproof vests and helmets marched with makeshift shields painted with the Cross of Burgundy, a symbol of the Spanish empire popular among those who celebrate their European heritage. One man flashed what looked like a Nazi salute.

Ms. Fujimori, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, part of a larger Peruvian-Japanese community, has allied herself closely with the country’s often European-descended elite, just as her father eventually did.

A number of her supporters have talked casually about their hope that the military will intervene.

“Just for a moment, until the military can say: ‘You know what? New elections,’” said Marco Antonio Centeno, 54, a school administrator. “The alternative is totalitarianism.”

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But what if revisionist feature films become a tool of government propaganda? Here are five films whose treatment of history made headlines for being celluloid agitprop.  

1. In 2018, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russian state-controlled international news network RT wrote a screenplay for a film that her husband directed and the culture ministry funded. “The Crimean Bridge: Made with Love!” is a romantic comedy set on the 11-mile-long road that connects Russia to the Crimea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014. The film depicts how beautiful life is in Russian controlled Crimea, takes a shot at lying American journalists, reveres Russia's victory in WWII and glosses over the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944. Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov attended the premiere in Moscow, praising the film that people on forums and in reviews called propaganda or trash. "Leaving the theater," Anton Dolin, a film critic at the independent publication Meduza wrote. "Just like after seeing a 3D film, you automatically start looking for the box in which to drop your rose-tinted glasses."

2. “Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI” or “The Treachery of the September 30th Movement/Communist Party of Indonesia” is a 1984 Indonesian drama about a failed coup attempt in 1965 that saw six generals kidnapped and murdered, leading to the fall of the communism-leaning president Sukarno and installing the military general Suharto into power for 31 years. Suharto’s regime launched an anti-communist purge, killing up to a million alleged communists during his authoritarian regime. He made this film mandatory viewing for students. The debate over the film was revived in Indonesia in 2017 when President Joko Widodo suggested it should be remade for the millennial generation so that they understand the dangers of communism. 

3. The Chinese historical film “Cairo Declaration” made headlines in China ahead of its release in 2015. The film is about the consequential 1943 meeting in Egypt between the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek to discuss the war against Japan and that gave China great power status in the post-WWII world. But instead of Chiang Kai-shek the promotional posters of the film featured Mao Zedoung, who never attended the meeting. It sparked criticism from pro-government critics for disrespecting history and ridicule from Chinese internet users. People started making memes with different leaders like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-Un or Barack Obama inserted on the movie’s posters. 

4. “Panfilov's 28 Men” is a 2016 Russian film based on a WWII legend of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen: Red Army soldiers from Russia and Central Asia who, outnumbered by the Nazis, heroically sacrificed their lives to defend Moscow in the freezing November of 1941. The soldiers are lionized in Russia and there’s even a memorial near Moscow to honor the heroes. But athough historians over the years found numerous inconsistencies in the story, Russian officials have co-opted the legend, painting themselves as direct descendants of the regime that saved the world from the Nazis. In 2018 Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky reportedly called doubters of the legend “filthy scum.”

5. American Sniper is a 2014 biopic loosely based on the story of reportedly the deadliest American sniper in the Iraq war, Chris Kyle. The film follows Kyle as he enlists in the Navy, after seeing news about the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania linked to Egyptian Islamis group, affiliated with al-Qaida. The film, was a huge success and was nominated for six Academy Awards but received widespread criticism as distorting the history of the Iraq war and serving as war on terror propaganda, while portraying Iraqis as violent and uncivilized.

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Over the holidays I put together a playlist of my favorite anti-surveillance songs. Here are the top six.

1. German band Kraftwerk predicted ubiquitous surveillance before face recognition, social media or the Internet of Things. Kraftwerk's "Computerwelt" raised an alarm about data collection in 1981. The lyrics are straightforward:

“Interpol and Deutsche Bank
FBI and Scotland Yard
Flensburg and the BKA
they all have our data” 

2. In 1985, Glen Chomik and Mark Woodlake released a single called "Don’t let computers grow." The lyrics are prophetic: "We go from Silicon Valley to the Valley of Death." Thirty-seven years later, Silicon Valley monetizes billions from violent content and misinformation. 

Computers controlling the state, stop the machines, before it’s too late.
Standard protection will never do, your PC is watching you.
I know, I know, don’t let computers grow.

3. American hip hop duo Dead Prez in the '90’s — never reticent about tackling social issues — tried to shed light on police violence, militarization, and state surveillance through a track called "Police State". 

“Red, Black and Green instead of gang bandanas
F.b.i. Spyin' on us through the radio antennas
And them hidden cameras in the streetlight watchin' society
With no respect for the people's right to privacy”

4. “Mac 10 Handle" from Prodigy's 2007 album Return of the Mac is another song on the surveillance beat. The “On Star” mentioned in the lyrics is a driver assistance tool developed by General Motors that enabled police to access cars. 

“Be careful where you pull that trigger they got you on film
They got eyes in the sky, we under surveillance
That On Star on your car track everywhere you've been
Gotta watch what I say, they tappin' my cell phone
They wanna sneak and peak inside my home
I'm paranoid and it's not the weed”

5. In 2013, electropop music group Yacht and the stand-up comedian Marc Maron were so concerned about the National Security Agency spying on Americans, they donated 100% of their earnings from "Party at the NSA” downloads to the Internet Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.  

We don’t need no privacy.
What do you want that for?
Don’t you think it’ll spoil our fun
If you let that whistle blow?
P-P-P-Party at the NSA,
Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours a day!

6. Numerous rappers including 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G have dedicated bars to phone tapping. Rick Ross, one of my favorite rappers, went off in it in "Holy Ghost.” I am looking forward to future hip-hop tracks about current phone tapping superstar, Pegasus spyware. 

They wanna do it big? Pick a time tonight
Back to these bitches following my timeline
Back to these crackers following my timeline
Got the phone tapped, I think I'm being followed
Touch him with the Holy Ghost, can you hear me Father?

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1. The QAnon “Storm” that was threatened - but never came 

The year kicked off (was it really only 11 and a half months ago?) with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, spurred on by Qanon adherents who believed they were rallying against a deep state takeover.

The QAnon mindset dominated conspiracy groups in the dying days of Donald Trump’s presidency. And it infected people’s ideologies in the most unlikely corners of the world. In England’s land of myths, legends and ancient folklore, new conspiracy theories began to fuse with the place’s pagan traditions. QAnon became a favorite topic of conversation in the pastoral countryside’s pubs, tea-shops and castles.

Read: Castles, crystals and conspiracies: enter the spiritual home of British QAnon

QAnon, as conspiracy theories go, is a particularly damaging force to introduce into the home. People around the world lost their spouses, children, parents and siblings to Q, and the cult destroyed many people’s lives in 2021. 

Watch: QAnon destroyed my marriage 

2. The North American blizzard that sent social media alight 

In February, when a super snowstorm hit North America, conspiracist thinking affected how some people responded to it. On TikTok, a wave of videos swept the app claiming the blizzard was “government-created snow that was made by Joe Biden and the Democrats.” The basis for their claim was that when you held a lighter to a snowball, it turned black. Turns out this is actually a normal thing for snow to do - it’s a scientific process called sublimation, where rather than melting, snow immediately evaporates when a lighter is held to it. But it’s no use explaining that to a conspiracy theorist. 

Read: Texans post conspiracy TikTok videos claiming the snow is “government created”

3. The antivaxxers that discovered antisemitism - and vice versa

Anti-vaxxers were working overtime to theorize about the Coronavirus during 2020, but 2021 is when they really began to rally. Anti-vaccine rhetoric fused with toxic antisemitism in the aftermath of the insurrection claimed that the virus was a Zionist bioweapon masterminded by the figures like the Rothschild or George Soros, or Bill Gates - who they claimed was a secret “Jewish Aristocrat”. It showed how warped science was fusing with old school racism - and wouldn’t be the last time we saw that happen. 

Read: The fevered world of antisemitic vaccine conspiracies

4. The conspiracists who went suddenly analog 

As the U.K.’s spring Covid restrictions limped on, anti-lockdown movements began resorting to old-fashioned propaganda methods to spread their message. Londoners found conspiracy leaflets being pushed through their doors, advocating against the vaccine and in favor of the government dropping Covid rules altogether. In Telegram groups, anti-vaxxers posted PDF designs for their followers to print out and distribute. The idea was they were avoiding social media controls by simply printing their disinformation.  

Read: London is littered with conspiracy leaflets as Covid deniers dodge Facebook moderators

5. The Far-right anti-lockdown fanatics who tried to influence the German election campaigns 

In the run up to the German elections, which would usher in an end to Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure as chancellor, a fringe, far-right anti-lockdown group called the Querdenken movement began rallying against the state’s Covid policies. Querdenken draws on broader global conspiracies like QAnon and welcomes fringe far rightists and neo Nazis, proliferated on social media apps like Telegram in 2021, and was the driving force behind many of the country’s anti-lockdown demonstrations. As the Omicron variant rages through Europe, the movement is still very much alive: last week, police in eastern Germany raided six houses after a Querdenken-linked Telegram group hosted discussions of plans to assassinate a Saxony state government as part of a broader revolt against Covid policies. 

Read: Anti-lockdown group Querdenken pulls Germans to the far right

6. And finally, the anti-vaxxers who said “enough’s enough.”

It takes a lot for someone who believes conspiracy theories to change their mind. But as the pandemic and its deadly effects raged on, a very small, very brave minority of people decided enough was enough. They cast aside their long-held beliefs that vaccines were harmful. The pandemic was a huge wakeup call: they saw their relatives get sick, or die from the virus. They saw hospitals cave under pressure from Covid patients. They realized they had been deceived by millionaire anti-vaccine influencers. And they admitted something courageous: They had made a mistake. 

Read: The anti-vaxxers who came in from the cold

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But fortunately, investigative journalists went all out this year. From a deep dive into the dark side of pandemic tech in Singapore’s techno-utopia to an in-depth look at how schools are spending thousands on unreliable “aggression detectors” in the name of student safety, global reporters have been holding Big Tech accountable for its role in fueling authoritarianism worldwide. 

These are a few of the investigations that held our attention this year and continue to have an impact. 

1. If you still hear “Pegasus” and think fictional flying horse, where have you been? 

It’s hard to overestimate the sprawling reach of Pegasus spyware. The tool, made by the Israeli company NSO Group, has been found on phones belonging to dozens of journalists and activists around the world.

Pegasus turns a phone into the swiss army knife of surveillance tools. It can copy messages, record calls and secretly turn on the phone’s camera or microphone.

An international coalition of newsrooms, known as the Pegasus Project, found the technology was used in the successful or attempted hacking of 37 phones, including those belonging to investigative journalists in Azerbaijan, Mexico and India. 

Since then, the revelations have kept rolling in. Among those targeted are journalists and activists from some of the world’s most repressive countries, including nine activists from Bahrain, which is believed to have acquired Pegasus in 2017, and a photojournalist in Hungary who investigated the luxury lifestyle of the country’s rich and powerful.

The fallout from the international investigation steadily continues. The U.S. has blacklisted NSO Group and India’s supreme court ordered an independent inquiry. The French were the first to corroborate the Pegasus Project findings with an investigation by an independent government authority, which ultimately confirmed Pegasus had targeted French journalists’ phones.

2. Los Angeles police officers became brand ambassadors for Amazon Ring cameras

If you’ve ever filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with a police department about a specific surveillance tool, you’ll know that police receive a lot of marketing emails from tech companies. But what the LA Times uncovered goes way beyond a few “Hi, let me tell you about our product!” notes that go unanswered. 

Investigative reporter Johana Bhuyian uncovered a striking relationship between LA police officers and representatives from Ring, which makes doorbell cameras and other home surveillance tech.

Ring gave officers free devices or discount codes, and officers turned around and promoted the product to the public. Emails showed that Ring donated doorbell cameras to raffle off at a beach party put on by a police station in West LA. Ring even asked police to hand out promo codes and fliers to influential people in the community.

Ring also relied on police to encourage people in the community to use the Neighbors app. Police have used the platform to gain access to footage without having to get a warrant.

Shortly after the LA Times story broke, LAPD launched an internal investigation.  

I knew this sort of thing happened. I talked to one privacy advocate in California who told me about a community meeting in San Francisco where police promoted Ring to residents. But this investigation is a look under the hood at how exactly Ring courts police officers and then relies on them to endorse their product within the community. 

3. ShotSpotter comes under fire 

ShotSpotter, which claims to detect and locate gunshots, erroneously landed a man in jail for a murder he didn’t commit, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. 

ShotSpotter had been used in around 200 court cases by the time AP published the investigation in August. But journalists found that it doesn’t always work. ShotSpotter misses gunfire that it should have caught. It mistakes motorcycles, trash pickup and even church bells for gunshots. Police in Fall River, Massachusetts told the AP the tech worked less than 50% of the time. 

What is more, ShotSpotter's algorithm is not open to scrutiny from anyone outside the company. The company claims it’s proprietary. So prosecutors, judges and juries are making decisions based on this technology when they cannot know whether it is accurate.

4. Clearview AI goes global

Clearview AI, the infamous facial recognition, has a global footprint, according to an investigation by Buzzfeed News. As of February 2020, 88 law enforcement and government-affiliated agencies in 24 countries had used the tech.

The Federal Police of Brazil used Clearview between 501 and 1,000 times. So did police in Queensland, Australia and the National Crime Agency in the UK. In some cases, like in Thunder Bay, Canada, law enforcement employees were using the technology without their superiors’ knowledge. 

Since the Buzzfeed investigation was published in August, Clearview was fined $22.6 million by the UK privacy commissioner for violating data protection law. 

This is the second groundbreaking investigation into the controversial company from the Buzzfeed team this year. In April, the newsroom reported that Clearview AI’s  facial recognition was tested or used by more than 1,800 tax-payer funded agencies in the U.S. with little to no oversight or accountability.

“Prior to our reporting, there was no oversight,” Ryan Mac told me in regards to his team’s investigation into the use of Clearview in the U.S. “If we're having to inform police chiefs and sheriffs and government leaders that their officers or their employees are using a policing tool that illustrates there’s fundamentally no oversight.”

5. Border surveillance is driving migrants into even more danger 

Of course, we cover surveillance frequently at Coda Story, so no list of incredible investigations into its proliferation would be complete without a shoutout to my colleagues. One trend on our minds a lot this year — the ever-expanding matrix of surveillance along borders.

Coda senior reporter Erica Hellerstein went to the U.S.-Mexico border to map out the expansive corridor of surveillance tech that has deadly consequences. The list of tools is long: facial recognition at border crossings. Drones and blimps watching people crossing the desert from above. Underground sensors that detect movement. Infrared cameras, radar sensors, mobile surveillance towers. And it’s forcing migrants to take even more dangerous routes into the U.S.

"This technology is killing them," said Cesar Ortigoza searches for migrants who vanished while trying to cross through the desert. “It’s pushing them to find their own death.” 
Meanwhile, the same thing is playing out on the opposite side of the Atlantic. As Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported, the French and U.K. governments are pouring millions into the latest tech, all under the auspices of saving the lives of migrants trying to cross the perilous English Channel. But migrants aren’t deterred by the cameras or the drones. They’re still braving the frigid waters in small dinghies. And they’re still dying on the journey.

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1. Pakistan's centralized biometric ID scheme has been praised on a global stage. But as we highlighted in our series in November, it is excluding hundreds of thousands of people from essential services including state-subsidized medicines, food rations and even access to cell phones. Women, working-class people and ethnic, sexual and religious minorities are disproportionately affected. Alizeh Kohari, Coda Story’s inaugural Bruno fellow, tells the stories of people and their families who are already on the margins of society but are pushed even more to the side by the flawed digitized system that is increasingly being replicated across the world.

2. What would you do if the love of your life got wrapped up in the biggest conspiracy theory of the moment? Our short animated documentary, produced in partnership with Newsy, shows how QAnon is tearing families apart. Listen to three people from Colorado, Ohio and Utah as they take us through their love stories and explore how QAnon upended them.

3. In 2013, OrgCode, a consulting firm working on homelessness issues, designed an algorithm intended to help local social services to provide people experiencing homelessness with housing that would suit their needs. But as states across the U.S. started adopting similar systems, opaque algorithms became a tool for the local authorities to decide who gets housing and who does not. Coda reporter Caitlin Thompson traveled to San Francisco and investigated what life is like when a single number generated by an algorithm decides who is vulnerable enough to get home.

4. This summer, Erica Hellerstein went to Arizona to investigate how the U.S. government’s pivot to “smart” border surveillance to curb immigration is benefiting private companies with lucrative government contracts while putting migrants at even greater risk. The corridor of surveillance, equipped with monitoring towers, underground motion detectors and facial recognition cameras, is forcing migrants to take potentially lethal routes. 

5. In November, Isobel Cockerell reported on how surveillance is changing migration across the Atlantic Ocean. Cockerell went to Calais, a town at the narrowest point in the English Channel. As the closest French town to England, Calais is a stopping point for migrants seeking to reach the U.K. Governments on both sides of the Channel are spending millions on technology to stop dangerous migrant crossings that often result in death. But as Cockerell reports, it is not working.

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1. Coda Story’s senior reporter Erica Hellerstein points you to this episode by Radiolab from 2015 about aerial surveillance. “I recommend listening again, years after its release, to understand how our thinking about these kinds of technologies has evolved and stayed the same. Some questions are dated, but others really aren't at all.” The hosts track down a team who created a surveillance system helping their contractors, including the police, monitor specific places, people or even entire cities. But even if mass aerial surveillance could solve crimes or expose cartels, is it worth the privacy trade-off? 

2. Becky Lipscombe, Coda Story’s senior audio producer, recommends this episode from Love and Radio about a very specific kind of surveillance. “It's the story of someone watching – obsessively, voyeuristically – the couple across the street through their curtainless window, and her 'relationship' with these people she's never met. There's no hi-tech, but she does pick up a pair of binoculars!” I don’t own a pair of binoculars but by the end of the show my eyes were definitely covered with tears. 

3. If you’ve ever asked Alexa for dinner recommendations or called a provider’s customer service number, chances are your voice has been collected using voice recognition software that companies have been using for decades. For anyone interested in why our voices are collected, what happens to them and how it impacts us, this episode from our own Coda Currents podcast is an insightful listen. Caitlin Thompson chats with Joseph Turow, an author and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication about what he calls “seductive surveillance,” guised in convenience. He’s been writing about how the marketing industry tracks consumers for decades.

4. From experimenting with surveillance technology to reading faces and ears in the cars behind windshields to monitoring gamblers at the table, this episode of In Machines We Trust from MIT Technology Review covers how police in different U.S. cities use surveillance technology and who makes the decisions about accuracy and effectiveness. You’ll also find out what Woody Harrelson has to do with tracking down a beer thief in a New York City drug store.

5. In July, a consortium of newsrooms and rights organizations uncovered howGovernments have used Pegasus, spyware from the Israeli NSO Group, to hack the devices of journalists and opposition activists around the world. Marta Biino, who has just completed a Coda reporting fellowship, recommends listening to The Guardian’s Today in Focus episode about the Pegasus project: “I was particularly struck by an academic calling Matthew Hedges to tell him how he found his phone number included in the NSO data leak and how he was detained and tortured in the UAE. The production is amazing and I still vividly remember Hedges' powerful story.”

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1. Jennifer Lincoln, known to her over 2 million TikTok followers as @drjenniferlincoln, is a Portland, Oregon-based obstetrician-gynecologist. Lincoln’s short, humorous videos, based on scientific research, covers a wide range of subjects about health, mythbusting about period pains, treating vaginal infections with pseudoscientific cures or misinformation about sexually transmitted infections and safety of Covid-19 vaccines. She also uses her platform to discuss pressing issues like widespread inaccessibility of hygienic menstrual products, birth control, abortion or how to become an OB GYN whose practice is inclusive of people with different gender identities.

2. Alease Daniel, or @aleasetheembryologist on TikTok, is a Raleigh-based embryologist, who has introduced her more than 124,000 TikTok followers to her IVF lab. IVF is a method of assisted reproduction with sperm and eggs combined outside of the body in a laboratory dish. Millions of TikTok viewers have seen her work in the lab, talking through the procedures like prepping dishes for IVF to retrieving the eggs or counting sperm. She also uses her videos to debunk reproductive misconceptions. Daniel has told Wral that she’s posting videos because fertility treatment can leave people feeling out of control and having knowledge about the process provides a little bit of peace of mind.

3. Tanaya Narendra, @dr_cuterus on Instagram, is a gynecologist, who uses her social media account to post videos and illustrations about reproductive health, safe sex, body positivity or safety of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, that prevent some strains of virus causing cervical cancer. Her posts in English and Hindi are short, funny and educational, like this video titled “Dude, where’s my vagina?” explaining the anatomy of the uterus using an anatomical model.

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4. Ali Rodriguez, also known as The Latina Doc or @alirodmd on TikTok, is using her dancing TikTok videos to answer questions and clear misconceptions about reproductive health in English and Spanish. In October, she told VerywellHealth that being a Latina, she understands the stigma and secrecy surrounding reproductive health and contraception and her patients from the Latinx community often are exposed to misinformation or lack of information about it. 

5. Natalie Crawford, or @nataliecrawfordmd on TikTok, is a Texas-based obstetrician-gynecologist and fertility specialist. Since 2019 she’s been sharing fertility-related information on ovulation, reproductive health and diets. She’s also been posting informative videos about endometriosis, a long-term condition where tissue that normally lines the inside uterus grows outside of it, usually causing severe pain and sometimes other issues such as infertility. Endometriosis can be debilitating and can take years to diagnose and treat accordingly. Crawford also runs Instagram and YouTube accounts to share information more extensively than she can do in few-second TikTok videos.

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1. In 2001, Saudi Arabia’s leading clerical body issued a fatwa banning not just Pokémon cartoons, but the entire franchise, including cards and video games in which players collect little creatures who then become stronger and develop powers. The decree said that Pokémon was unacceptable to Islam, as the special powers possessed by the characters were blasphemous and their transformation over time taught children about evolution. It also disapproved of the symbols used in the game, stating they promoted religions such as Shinto and Christianity, along with Freemasonry and Zionism. The edict was revived in 2016, owing to the popularity of the Pokémon Go mobile app. 

2. Despite U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s widely publicized pride in the much-loved British children’s show, “Peppa Pig” has its detractors. In 2018 China banned the cartoon and hashtags referencing it because of its popularity within the country’s Shehuiren (slacker) subculture, which has been described by the state-affiliated Global Times as “the antithesis of the young generation the Communist Party tries to cultivate.” One episode of the show was also removed from Australian TV  in 2012. Featuring friendly spiders, it was deemed dangerous to children, since many species in the country are highly poisonous.

3. Launched in 2013, “Steven Universe” was the first show created by a woman, Rebecca Sugar, for the kids’ TV channel Cartoon Network. The animated adventure series’ central themes included family, friendship and relationships — including LGBTQ ones. That was enough to get it banned in Kenya. In 2017, the country’s Film Classification Board prohibited the broadcast of six cartoons, including Steven Universe, saying that they “intended to introduce children to deviant behavior.”

4. Winnie the Pooh has been a children’s favorite for almost a century and rose to even greater popularity, thanks to a series of 1960s Disney cartoons. In 2013, Chinese social media users began to create memes that compared President Xi Jinping to the honey-loving bear. In the one above, Xi, filmed giving a speech from a luxury car during a military parade is likened to the chubby cartoon character. Not only did the Chinese government ban Pooh cartoons, in 2018 it blocked the website of the U.S. TV channel HBO after comedian John Oliver made fun of its heavy-handed censorship.

5. After running for just a few days in 2019, the animated movie “Abominable” was abruptly pulled from Vietnamese theaters. The film — part of a Chinese partnership with the Hollywood studio Dreamworks — is about a young girl helping a Yeti to get back home to Mount Everest, but one scene met with popular uproar and swift action from Vietnamese authorities. It featured a map that showed disputed South China Sea territories as belonging to China. The Philippines and Malaysia also banned the movie for the same reason.

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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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The U.S.-funded news outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is just one recent example of how the law targets foreign-funded media. BBC Russia has reported that, in April, RFE/RL offered some of its staff the opportunity to leave the country, as it faces crippling fines. Russia has, so far, imposed penalties of nearly $1 million on the organization. The legislation could also lead to website closures and prison time for RFE/RL’s employees.'

Under the expanded legislation, individuals, not just organizations, can now be forced to register as foreign agents. Darya Apakhonchich, a Russian-language teacher from St. Petersburg, was one of the first individuals affected. Watch her story:

Darya's story is being repeated across the world as authoritarian leaders and anti-democratic regimes have adopted some of the same tactics.

Here, we look at five notable examples from around the world.

Nicaragua

By Erica Hellerstein

The closures came swiftly. In early February, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, a press freedom organization founded by and named for the former Nicaraguan president, announced that it was shutting down. A day earlier, the Nicaraguan chapter of the global writers’ association PEN International released a statement that it was indefinitely suspending its activities in the country.

The two announcements came three-and-a-half months after Nicaragua’s Congress passed a controversial law requiring any organization that receives international funding to register as a foreign agent with the Interior Ministry and provide the government with detailed monthly reports about its expenditure. It also prevents any individual registered as a foreign agent from running for public office. 

The law passed easily in Nicaragua’s Congress, in which President Daniel Ortega’s party, the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front, holds a majority. Ortega was previously president of Nicaragua in the 1980s, after the Sandinista revolution ousted the former dictator Anastasio Somoza. He has been in power again since 2007, during which time he has orchestrated a dramatic crackdown on dissidents, journalists and political opponents.

Nicaragua’s foreign agent legislation was part of a package of restrictive laws introduced in the fall of 2020, including a cybercrime bill criminalizing a wide range of digital expression. Since then, the nation’s government has moved to revoke the legal statuses of 24 nonprofit organizations for violating the regulations, including medical associations critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“These laws have created this bureaucratic machinery that has made it really hard for NGOs to renew their charters or to meet all the requirements," says Enrique Gasteazoro, general manager of the independent investigative newsroom Confidencial. “​​At the same time, it’s important to note that the recipe of repression that the Ortega government doles out is not lacking variety, so you do have people in jail, organizations that are being de-facto closed, but you have this other slow, bureaucratic initiative to continue closing civic space."

Both PEN Nicaragua and the Chamorro Foundation said they were ceasing operations in direct response to the legislation. The law also came under fire from the U.S. State Department, which said it is driving the country “toward dictatorship,” and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 

Critics say the law is part of a broader campaign by the Ortega administration to clamp down on civil society and political opposition, which is ratcheting up as the country heads into a presidential election in November. In 2018, the state response to anti-government protests over social security reforms left more than 320 people dead and thousands injured, “making it the worst wave of political violence in Latin America in three decades,” the New York Times reported. According to the United Nations, by 2020, more than 100,000 people had fled the country and sought asylum abroad.

Belarus

By Alexandra Tyan

In 2011, the government of Belarus, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, passed a series of amendments that established liability for local NGOs receiving foreign grants or donations if they did so in what it described as “violation of the Belarusian legislation,” and prohibited them from keeping funds in foreign banks. 

Any violation is potentially punishable with fines up to the amount of foreign funds received. 

That same year, an amendment to the criminal code, expanded the definition of treason to define any form of “assistance to a foreign state, foreign organization or their representatives in carrying out activities to the detriment of the national security of Belarus,” further increasing the possibility of NGOs and civil society groups being targeted by the authorities.

In the years since, Lukashenko has tightened his grip on civil society groups. New decrees in 2015 and 2020 introduced stricter requirements for the reporting of foreign donations and limited the permitted purposes of aid, prohibiting its use in development of the arts, scientific research and the prevention of human rights violations. Additionally, the nation’s Department for Humanitarian Affairs was given authority to oversee the use of foreign funding and allowed to give preferential treatment of state-approved projects.

And now, Belarus plans on taking these measures even further. In February, MP and chairman of the nation’s Liberal Democratic party Oleg Gaidukevich said that the government was working on a foreign agent law based on the Russian example. 

“No one can influence politics in a country, because any party, any politician, any organization that receives money for political activities works only in the interests of the country that gives the money.” he said in an interview. Gaidukevich then justified the plan by asserting that foreign funding is incompatible with democracy. 

According to experts, Lukashenko’s regime already has de facto power to limit the work of NGOs and civil society groups. “Everything is so bad that this law would not change so much. All of us are already foreign agents if our government decides it”, said Vadim Mojeiko, an analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think tank based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“For the Belarusian government, civil society is already one big foreign agent. That's why, if, formally, they call us foreign agents, it's not going to change the system.”

Poland

By Mary Steffenhagen

In Poland, a bill drafted in May seeks to require NGOs to disclose all of their sources of funding, raising concerns about the potential victimization of voices critical of the government.

The bill states that NGOs with a yearly income of over $250,000 should file information about their financing and activities to a public database. It is a revision of legislation proposed in 2020, which, at the time, drew direct comparisons to Russia's 2012 law and prompted international criticism. While the earlier draft was not passed into law, it would have required NGOs to detail the origin of their income if more than 10% of their funding came from foreign sources.

Filip Pazderski, a senior policy analyst at the independent Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs, sees the May 2021 bill as a backdoor way of discrediting NGOs in the eyes of the public.

“Precisely what is being said is that they're hostile to national values and traditions, what they do is not in line with Polish identity,” he said. “Meaning that they are working for foreign interests, not our Polish national interests that are represented by our government.”

The government of Poland has, for years, actively undermined the credibility of human rights and pro-democracy NGOs that receive foreign financial backing. It has squeezed funding to organizations that do not share its conservative values and raided the offices of independent civil society groups protesting the country's restrictive abortion laws.

However, Pazderski believes that Poland’s ruling nationalist coalition is wary of attracting criticism from the European Union. “I believe that our government now is quite reluctant to be seen as a bad guy in the EU,’” he said. “But, on the other hand, there are these possibilities of getting all the information about the activities of NGOs in one place that can be used against them.”

Egypt 

By Masho Lomashvili

Soon after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi seized power in 2014, Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on dissent. In the ensuing years, thousands of members of opposition groups, non-governmental organizations and activists have been jailed and tortured — some have even been executed. However, it took three years before it became nearly impossible for civil society organizations to operate. 

Justified by officials as protecting national security and guarding against interference from foreign-funded charities, a 2017 law enabled the nation’s government to surveil and control nearly every aspect of human rights monitoring, advocacy and reporting by NGOs in the country.

The legislation requires NGOs to seek permission to operate in Egypt from a “competent administrative entity” that determines whether the group’s work is in line with government objectives. Organizations are also required to detail their funding, activities and programs to the authorities. Non-compliance with the law can result in prosecution, including a maximum of five years’ imprisonment for NGO and civil society group workers and a fine of up to $55,000.

Activists decried the regulations as an attempt to block humanitarian work. The law’s passing also contributed to a 2017 decision by the Trump administration to freeze millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Egypt for nearly a year.

In 2019, following significant international and domestic pressure, Egypt’s parliament removed jail penalties from the law and replaced them with fines of up to $60,350.

According to Amr Magdi, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Egypt’s NGO legislation bears all the hallmarks of Russia’s foreign agent law. “On government-controlled press channels, you see constant admiration for Russian laws and their government system which has kept Putin in power indefinitely,” he said.

Hungary 

By Mariam Kiparoidze

In 2017 Hungary’s parliament, headed by the right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, passed a law that imposed strict regulations on non-governmental organizations receiving foreign funding.

According to the legislation, NGOs in receipt of more than $24,200 annually from foreign sources must register as "organizations supported from abroad," or risk closure.

The government has said that the law, titled LexNGO, is intended to increase transparency and fight money laundering and terrorism funding. However, it is widely condemned by domestic and international rights groups as a means to stifle civil society organizations and individuals critical of the government. Orban has accused foreign-funded NGOs — in particular those supported by the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros — of domestic interference.

Human rights observers say the law was passed to intimidate NGO workers. “I don't think that the original intent of the government was to initiate any legal procedures,” said Demeter Aron, program director at Amnesty International in Hungary. “Some people resigned, some donors were turned away. There was a lot of time and money wasted on legal battles in front of the Constitutional Court,” he added.

Aron also compares Hungary’s law to Russia’s “foreign agent” legislation in both intent and context. 

“I think both laws have the aim to stigmatize independent civil society organizations and basically create an environment where the people that these organizations serve would not dare to turn to them,” he said. “It's pretty much a copycat of the Russian version.”

Last summer, the European Court of Justice ruled that LexNGO failed to comply with EU laws and was in breach of fundamental rights, including on personal data protection and freedom of association. In February, the EU commission sent a letter of formal notice to the Hungarian government, giving it two months to change the law. While Hungary repealed LexNGO in April, the government quickly brought in similar legislation, allowing the monitoring and selective auditing of NGOs whose assets exceed $66,480, on the grounds that they are "capable of influencing public life.”

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Whether such decorations capture the attention of the international community or domestic audiences, they provide a powerful reputational boost, especially for figures who care about their public image. After all, not everyone can have the bluff assurance of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who once said, “Those who do not love me do not deserve to live.”

Still, they are not bulletproof. For instance in 2018, France made moves to strip the Legion of Honor, the country’s highest order of merit, from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Assad preemptively returned the award, saying that he would not wear a medal from a country that was “a slave to America.” 

Despite its many pitfalls, the practice is still alive and well today. Here, we take you through six examples, past and present.

Manuel Noriega 

By Erica Hellerstein

In 1987, Manuel Noriega was awarded the Legion of Honor by President François Mitterrand. It was a curious decision. The previous year, the New York Times published an expose linking the Panamanian military dictator to drug trafficking, money laundering, and the torture and beheading of a political opponent.

Reports suggest that Mitterrand honored Noriega as a matter of diplomacy. After all, Panama provided a route for France to fly nuclear materials to its South Pacific testing site after Washington blocked them from passing through U.S. territory. 

Two years later, Noriega found himself in a less enviable position. Although he had collaborated with the CIA for years in its fight against communism in Latin America, he was also working with Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cocaine cartel in Colombia. Noriega’s relationship with America eventually soured and U.S. troops invaded Panama in 1989, bringing him to Florida, where he was convicted of drug trafficking and money laundering. Before his death in 2017, Noriega spent his remaining days in prison in the U.S., France and Panama.

Noriega retained his Legion of Honor until 2010, when he was extradited to France on money laundering charges. Even as he sat on trial, the Legion of Honor made an appearance. In court, Noriega affixed a ribbon from the medal to his jacket, and his lawyers repeatedly referred to his receipt of the award, perhaps, in the hope that it would soften his image. He was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The verdict caused Noriega to lose the honor and provided a foundation for the French government to withdraw the distinction from recipients who are found to have committed crimes or other offenses. Since then, Harvey Weinstein, Lance Armstrong and the fashion designer John Galliano, who was caught on camera using antisemitic slurs in 2011, have all lost their medals. 

Why did it take so long for Noriega’s award to be rescinded? Perhaps for the same reason the U.S. forged its alliance with him: a marriage of convenience. As the New York Times explained, the Legion of Honor “is usually given for ‘outstanding merit’ in some field, but France has been known to honor foreign leaders simply because it suits the government’s purposes at the time.”

Nursultan Nazarbayev

By Alexandra Tyan

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan, who ruled the country for almost 30 years until 2019, has an enviable list of honors to his name. On his personal website, a whole page is dedicated to 65 awards and titles earned by “natural curiosity, constant striving for new knowledge and self-improvement.” 

Nazarbayev has been granted academic titles from universities and academies of sciences, medals and national awards from governments across the world. Among those listed is an honorary professorship from Cambridge University, apparently awarded to Nazarbayev in 2004. However, there is no mention of him receiving the award in available university records. Coda contacted the university several times but received no answer.

In 2000, Queen Elizabeth II gave Nazarbayev the Grand Cross of Saint Michael and Saint George, which is awarded to “men and women of high office, or who render extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country.” Other recipients include former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and the actor Angelina Jolie.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy awarded Nazarbayev the Legion of Honor in 2008. Since the honor’s establishment in 1802, the French government has used it to commend the outstanding work of military and civil figures — and to support French foreign policy through “diplomatic reciprocity”. Nazarbayev seems to be an example of the latter. He received his award on the same day as Kazakhstan and France signed a strategic partnership to cooperate in areas including security and law.

While Nazarbayev has been accused of ruling over a kleptocracy and has been linked to several corruption scandals, his name also appears on multiple institutions in Kazakhstan, including The Museum of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Nazarbayev Center. In 2019, the country’s capital changed its name from Astana to Nur-Sultan.
In 2014, Nazarbayev was the first recipient of the newly established Silk Road Peace Prize, presented to him by Li Zhaoxing, president of the Chinese Public Diplomacy Association in Shanghai. The two countries also signed several energy and investment agreements on the same diplomatic visit.

Nicolae Ceausescu

By Oleksandr Ignatenko

When Nicolae Ceausescu became General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965, he was viewed as a reformer. He purged the country’s infamously repressive secret service and made it more accountable. As Soviet tanks rolled through Prague in 1968, he publicly denounced the invasion, describing it as “a big mistake.'' 

To many Western and non-communist governments, his actions appeared brave and gave hope that the Iron Curtain could one day be opened. Accordingly, medals and decorations flooded in from nations including Austria, Denmark, Italy, Sweden and the U.K. Among them was the French Legion of Honor, which he was awarded in 1968 by President Charles de Gaulle. 

Ceausescu was never well liked in the Kremlin. One Soviet diplomat noted in a 1968 diary entry that he was “a rare piece of shit with a thespian bearing.” However, it was in his best interests that relations remained cordial with both Moscow and the West. Accordingly, he was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1979 by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who said it marked “a sign of brotherly sympathy from Soviet communists to Romanian communists.”  

Yet behind all the decorations and titles lay an autocratic leader who ran a brutal regime that used hunger as an instrument of control. Ceausescu’s attempts to swiftly industrialize Romania led to gross mismanagement of the national economy and widespread austerity. The Romanian writer Dorin Iancu described strict rationing throughout the 1980s as an attempt to “transform people into frightened animals whose only thought would be how to get food.” 

During his 35 years in power, Ceausescu turned Romania into his own personal fiefdom. He destroyed the historical center of Bucharest and rebuilt it in a more “socialist” way. Villages deemed to be economically underperforming were razed. A Romanian parliamentary report published in 2006 stated that up to two million people were detained, deported or displaced between 1945 and 1989.

Throughout the 1980s, thousands of people defected from Romania. Still, in 1988 Ceausescu was awarded the Olympic Order, following his decision to ignore a boycott of the Los Angeles games by the Soviet Union and a number of other Eastern bloc nations four years earlier. That honor did little to burnish his reputation at home. A year later, revolution had gripped Romania and overthrown Ceausescu’s government. In December 1989, he was tried on charges of genocide and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day, along with his wife Elena. 

Abiy Ahmed

By Mariam Kiparoidze

On December 9, 2019, Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister walked onto a stage in Oslo, Norway and, as a winner of the Nobel peace prize, gave a speech. “War is the epitome of hell for all involved,” he said, referring to the decades-long conflict between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea that he helped put an end to one year earlier. 

He concluded with the words, “I have miles to go on the road of peace.” Few at the time would have anticipated that about a year later, Ahmed would send the Ethiopian military to launch an armed attack in Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost region, in a conflict that would kill and displace thousands. 

Ahmed, a 44-year-old former intelligence officer, was elected prime minister of Africa’s second most populous country in 2018. He rose to power after years criticizing a previous authoritarian government dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and other ethnic and regionally focused parties. Early in his term, Ahmed introduced reforms, freed political prisoners, loosened state control of the media and helped broker peaceful ends to conflicts across Africa.

In an effort to decrease longstanding regional and ethnic tensions in Ethiopia, Ahmed increased the federal government’s power. He founded the ethnically inclusive Prosperity Party and removed TPLF officials from power. But the tense relationship with Tigrayan leaders reached a breaking point last fall, when Ahmed postponed parliamentary elections because of Covid-19. In defiance, officials in Tigray held an illegal election and declared victory. Ahmed cut federal funding to the region and, in November, launched an armed offensive against the well-armed Tigray regional government, accusing it of a deadly attack on a military base. 

Ahmed’s record had prompted mixed reactions even before the crisis in Tigray. Rights organizations and activists have said that ethnic tensions had worsened during his first year in power and that journalists were still arbitrarily censored and harassed.

Back in 2019, during the awards ceremony, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen said the committee believed a number of Ahmed’s efforts, including creating peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia, deserved recognition. “Our award is based on the will of Alfred Nobel, and we recognize your endeavors as being in the true spirit of that will,” he said. 

Ahmed’s reputation has been profoundly affected by the conflict in Tigray: last November, the committee, which rarely comments on the actions of Nobel laureates, said that it was “deeply concerned” by developments in Ethiopia. 

Bidzina Ivanishvili

By Masho Lomashvili

On January 1, President Emmanuel Macron awarded Bidzina Ivanishvili the Legion of Honor. Officially, Ivanishvili is the former Prime Minister of Georgia, but ask any Georgian and they will tell you that he is still the most powerful man in the country. He is a founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party and the richest person in the tiny Caucasian nation, with an estimated $5 billion fortune made from banking and the metal industry in Russia during the 1990s.

Although Ivanishvili left office in 2013, he maintains a powerful presence in Georgian politics. While Georgian Dream won parliamentary elections in October 2020, media outlets sympathetic to the party have consistently ignored allegations of widespread fraud, vote-buying and intimidation of opposition supporters. Last November, thousands of anti-government demonstrators rallied in Tbilisi to demand fresh elections in response to disputed results.

However, media channels in Georgia have been more than happy to compare Ivanishvili to Charles De Gaulle, Kemal Ataturk and Honoré de Balzac — all fellow recipients of the Legion of Honor. None made any mention of the more controversial winners, such as Bashar al-Assad or Vladimir Putin. A number of publications have also falsely stated that Ivanishvili was one of only a few dozen people to be given the award this year. The truth is that 1,229 were handed out.

One of the reasons cited by the French government for honoring Ivanishvili was his philanthropy, including his founding of an organization called the International Charitable Foundation, initiatives such as offering monthly stipends for struggling actors and funding the reconstruction of old churches. However, speaking on national TV, Georgia’s former minister of justice and Georgia Dream member Tea Tsulukiani stated that it was also in recognition of his contribution to the nation’s fight against the coronavirus. 

While Ivanishvili did donate $100 million to Georgia’s StopCov fund, the official response to the pandemic has proven inadequate. Around 10% of the country’s population has been infected and the national economy has shrunk by more than 6% in 2020. 

Despite Ivanishvili’s many missteps, Georgia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs David Zalkaliani confidently stated on national TV that the honor acknowledged his commitment to democracy in the country. “After entering politics, Ivanishvili has made notable contributions to democratic reforms and strengthening institutions,” he said.

Hun Sen

By Katia Patin

One of the world’s longest-serving leaders, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has earned international notoriety by using violence and accumulating personal wealth estimated at $1 billion during his time in office. At age 18, Sen joined Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the brutal Communist regime that caused the death of at least 1.7 million people. By 1979, at 26, he was serving as the world’s youngest foreign minister. In 2018, over 30 years into his reign as prime minister, the former five-star general vowed to rule for 10 more years.

Shunned in the West for his human rights record and criticism of the United Nations, Sen has focused on the East. Building close ties with China, strengthening his relationship with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sen has maintained a high level of visibility in the region. He has also amassed over a dozen honorary university degrees. Including Thailand’s Krirk University in 2019 and China’s Guangxi University in 2015, Sen has racked up doctorates in literature, philosophy and political communications.

In 2015, Limkokwning University in Malaysia awarded Sen an honorary doctorate for his role in advancing education in Cambodia. At the time, the country was ranked 116th out of 148 nations by the World Economic Forum on education. But, as the university’s president explained, “You have to start somewhere.” According to his website, Sen also received an honorary doctorate in politics from Southern California University in 1995 and in law from Iowa Wesleyan University in 1996 (not to be confused with University of Southern California or Wesleyan University in Connecticut).

Sen’s wife Bun Rany, president of the Cambodian Red Cross, has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees by six universities across the region, including from Seoul Women’s University.

In 2019, Sen was given the Leadership and Good Governance award from the Universal Peace Federation, in honor of his role in growing Cambodia’s economy. The foundation was set up by Sun Myung Moon, the founder of Korea’s controversial Unification Church, and has previously awarded leaders including former president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk in 2005 and former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 2008.

Sen has also shown a liking for titles at home. For over two decades, all national media outlets have been required to use his honorary title of “Lord Prime Minister and Supreme Military Commander” in their reporting. In 2016, in a Facebook post, he lifted the rule without explanation. 

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