QUICK READS:

• Beavers have returned to London after 400 years according to the BBC — here is our story on the secret movement in Europe bringing beavers back from the brink.
• Olympic gold medallist Iman Khelif is suing JK Rowling and Elon Musk. Here is how the internet makes trans lives hypervisible and vulnerable.
• Indian women are protesting after news of yet another gruesome rape and murder in the country.

STAYING ON THE STORY:

What’s going on in Russia? 

“Died 1943, born 2024. Welcome back to the Battle of Kursk” reads one of the memes flooding the Ukrainian - Russian cyberspace as millions, including (we assume) Vladimir Putin watch in disbelief as the Ukrainian invasion of Russia enters its second week. The reference is to the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history and a major World War battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which cleared the way for the Soviet offensive and the eventual Allied victory in 1945. Ukraine’s supporters are holding their breath as they hope that the 2024 Battle of Kursk will also change the course of the war.
Zelensky, who says his troops have captured over 100 Russian soldiers has clarified that he has no intention of annexing the Russian territory but is instead trying to create a “buffer zone” in Russia to keep town in Northern Ukraine safe. 

Russians are scrambling to contain the attack on their own territory, but they are advancing on major towns in Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv could lose more territory according to Meduza. In the meantime Saint Petersburg’s Fontanka.ru reports that over one hundred internally displaced people have fled the action along the border. 

To make it all more surreal (because, why not?), Ukranian soldiers have been posting reviews for restaurants in the Kursk region on google. “I like everything. Delicious food, good service. Small parking lot. Couldn’t pack my tank,” read one. A full collection if your appetite permits here.

CODA RECOMMENDS:

What was Putin like as a kid? Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe speaks to RFE/RL at Zeg Storytelling Festival, Coda's annual flagship event in Tbilisi about Putin’s childhood and what goes into creating the image of a Russian “everyman”.

Not all heroes wear capes, this one favors tennis outfits: Naomi Osaka’s heartfelt letter about postpartum and recovering from giving birth is a must-read for tennis fans, mothers and anyone who needs to understand that the secret to resilience lies in acknowledging vulnerability.

Why do clowns and waxy skin terrify people? Why are we fascinated by things that creep us out? Why do inanimate approximations of human beings stir in us feelings of uncanny dread? Read this fascinating essay on fear and Freud.

The post Cold Allies appeared first on Coda Story.

WHAT’S GOING ON WITH YOUTUBE IN RUSSIA?

Amid panic over the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, one thing that's flying under the radar is the fact that the few anti-Putin Russians still left in the country are rapidly losing last bits of access to alternative news sources. The reason: Youtube is the latest platform under siege in Russia, as the country continues to isolate its internet from the rest of the world. Coda spoke with Sarkis Darbinyan, co-founder of Roskomsvoboda, the first Russian public organization operating in the field of digital rights protection and digital empowerment on the Kremlin’s latest strategy. Read our Q&A here.

C: Why is Russia slowing down YouTube and why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUICK READS:

• The world’s first major A.I. law is in force and here is what it means for U.S. tech giants.  
• Gen-Z protests brought down a government in Bangladesh. Here is how that unfolded. 
• Instagram is still blocked in Turkey after the platform allegedly prevented people from publishing messages of condolence for assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

CODA RECOMMENDS:

The Wall Street Journal notes in this excellent piece that authoritarian states around the world are arbitrarily imprisoning foreign citizens, using them as bargaining chips to achieve geo-political goals, following the prisoner-swap last week in which over a dozen people jailed by the Kremlin were released and exchanged for Russian citizens.

This will be Indian wrestler Vinesh Phogat’s final Olympics, according to the athlete. Phogat, who won and then lost an Olympic gold medal over a tumultuous 24 hours, has survived poverty, sexual harassment by a member of Prime Minister Modi’s ruling party and police brutality. Phogat is heartbroken as she was declared 100 grams over her weight category after winning her medal, but her awe-inspiring story is one for the record books of feminist history. 

The upcoming elections in Georgia this October will decide whether the country will continue down a path of Russian-style authoritarianism or not. Does the opposition stand a chance? Coda’s Nadia Beard reports on the Georgian Dream and a political nightmare for The New Yorker. 

ART AND POWER

How does an artist respond to a world in turmoil over racial violence? Living through a week of race riots in the UK, I thought about Philip Guston, whose paintings of the Ku Klux Klan turned the lens on the banality of the oppressor, from fixating on the suffering of the oppressed. Watch a short documentary on his work here.

And while on the subject of power, I leave you with a delicious and intrigue-filled painting this week, called Cheat with the Ace of Clubs. This work by Georges de La Tour (inspired by Caravaggio) is a reminder that power is never static and cannot be hoarded forever. A sinister game is afoot, where the wealthy player on the right is about to be hustled by the shabbily-dressed cheat and his hidden aces on the left. Are the women in on the game? Is the wine poisoned? The tension is electric and if I had to re-title this work for the Instagram-age, it would be called, "The eyes, Chico, they never lie”.  

The post Power Moves appeared first on Coda Story.

First up, things you should know this week: the US election race, two assassinations, geopolitics, and the internet.

JD Vance appeared to be Silicon Valley’s chosen blue-eyed boy just a few weeks ago, but a significant faction of tech investors who describe themselves as “pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-technological progress” are now rallying behind US Vice President Kamala Harris. Why is Silicon Valley determined to play kingmaker in the US elections? One big reason is Biden’s billionaire tax.

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian extremist group Hamas, and Fuad Shokr, a senior member of Hezbollah, were killed within hours of each other on July 31. The deaths have sparked fears of a wider crisis in the Middle East, where oil prices began to soar within hours of the news about the assassinations. Here is a look at how oil prices and conflict have been linked historically.

Sanctioned and shunned by the West over the full scale invasion in Ukraine, Russia has invested heavily into its relationship with the rest of the world, relying heavily on China, and going on a charm offensive in Africa and Asia. Some of this diplomacy has been detrimental to Ukraine and crucial in keeping Putin  in power. Read Insider’s deep dive on how the Kremlin's aggression is bringing more allies to Ukraine here.

What’s going on with YouTube in Russia? YouTube users in Russia have reported that loading speeds on the video platform have slowed down by 40%, amid concerns the platform may be shut down in Russia altogether, as a growing effort by the country to isolate its internet from the rest of the world. Alexander Khinshtein, who is part of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, shared on his Telegram channel that the slow down was a deliberate decision. “The degradation of YouTube is a forced step, aimed not against Russian users, but against the administration of a foreign resource, which still believes that it can violate and ignore our legislation with impunity”. In July, Roskomnadzor asked Google to unblock more than 200 YouTube channels that belonged to Russian journalists, media, public figures, artists, and government agencies which were banned in 2022.

Political bodies in art and at the Olympics:

Since it was painted in 1650, the The Threatened Swan by Dutch painter Jan Asseljin has been explained through two allegories, either the swan is a protective parent guarding her eggs from a ferocious dog, or the swan is a political allegory representing Johann de Witt, a politician in 17th century Holland, defending his Republic from enemies. Neither of these explains what is truly arresting about Asseljin’s work, which is the sheer force of a body in motion frozen in time, animated by something so primal it can only be understood, not spoken. [Scroll up if you missed the image or see it in its full glory here]

The spectacle of moving bodies animated by passion has captivated humans since at least 776 BC, when the first Olympics were held in ancient Greece and won by a cook named Coreobus. In 2024, the irony of a global event to promote peaceful competition is extreme. At the Olympics, feats of extraordinary athleticism remind us of what human bodies are capable of. But outside the arena, we are forced to confront how fragile those bodies are, how quickly they are reduced to politics, parts and rubble.

At the Paris Olympics, athletes and performers who embody euphoria, grace, speed and resilience must also confront the fact that their bodies are political. Barbara Butch, a queer performer who was part of the opening ceremony, has filed a complaint against the extreme cyberbullying they have faced since their performance was aired. Simone Biles, who made Olympic history, had to explain why her hair was out of place in the midst of a heatwave brought on by climate-change. Thanks to years of advocacy, for the first time in history Olympic and Paralympic athletes who are parents will finally be able to access a special nursery within the village.

Watch: Unconfined joy is the only way to describe this moment when the Olympic Refugee Team’s Cindy Ngamba won her way to the boxing quarter finals.

Listen: To this podcast called Matryoshka of Lies documenting Russia’s history of doublespeak, invasions, and political killings.

Read: About the first out gay Olympic Gold Medalist Matthew Mitcham on how athletes are supplementing their careers with money they make on OnlyFans.

Special thanks to Marina Bocharaova.

The post Body Politics appeared first on Coda Story.

One of Polish culture’s most fascinating figures, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz was a philosopher, painter, novelist, theorist, photographer and a dramatist. All of his works resist familiar figures and easy binaries, particularly Fantastical Composition [Vision with Masks] which seeks to invoke in the viewer a “metaphysical shudder”: the painting resembles nothing we have seen before, and still feels like a horror we know

This week, as Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed US Vice President Kamala Harris as nominee for the Democratic party, the US electoral race fell  into the kind of easy binary that Hollywood loves: cop vs convict. Harris is a former San Francisco district attorney, who earned herself a tough reputation as California’s attorney general. Former US president Trump, meanwhile, has just gone through a season of legal troubles. There is no doubt about the fact that Kamala, daughter of immigrants and the first Black and South Asian woman to be Vice President, is a welcome breath of fresh air in what was formerly a race between two elderly white men, both of whom have beenaccused of assaulting women. 

Unsurprisingly, the binary has spawned a universe of Kamala fans: Gen Z, who have never voted before, plan to show up at polling booths; the former prosecutor has been endorsed by celebrities like George Clooney, Beyoncé and Charli XCX, who; described her as a brat ; others on the internet have been called herand Momala; her supporters are calling themselves coconut-pilled and Tiktok is a teenage dream of Kamala fancams (52.5 million posts and counting).

But while Democratic party supporters are understandably relieved that Biden is out of the race, it is useful to remember that Harris has a complex record on many of the issues Americans care about. It remains to be seen whether Harris will diverge dramatically from Biden on foreign policy; she has called for police reform following the horrific murder of Sonya Massey but has also previously spoken against the use of police body cams; the Republican party is already coming down hard on what they claim was her role in the border crisis and on immigration policy.

A quick glance at how the rest of the world sees Harris shows that binaries dominate the discourse: Harris is either a woman undeserving of professional success or a WOC heroine: Russia’s overwhelmingly white, male propagandists are taking Harris’ nomination badly. Chinese state media questioned Harris’s professional credentials, while Chinese social media has gone after her personal life. In India, a temple in the village where Harris’s maternal grandparents are from, has offered special prayers for her success. Will the narratives ever let Harris be seen as who she is i.e. a strategic, canny politician, over what she represents — her gender and the color of her skin? Only time will tell.

What is the trouble with “both sides” and easy binaries anyway?: Tim Snyder tells it like it is: “Factual investigation would involve identifying other perspectives which the cult of Both Sides disregards.  It would necessitate separating the two aspects Both Sides from each other and confronting their words with the facts of the world.  To believers in the cult of Both Sides, it is a relief clothed in righteousness never to have to perform such labor.” Read his newsletter here.

Why did Kamala Harris, the daughter of two academics, decide to become a prosecutor?  Dan Morain, author of Harris’ unauthorized biography, Kamala’s Way reveals what he knows about the “guarded” Vice President and how she reveals herself slowly and surely: “Her mom moved her and Maya up to Montreal and took a job at McGill University. So Kamala is there as a high-school kid, and she’s doing what high-school kids do. She’s having fun; she’s in a dance troupe. One of her friends, a classmate named Wanda Kagan, confides that she’s been abused by her stepfather. And so the Harris clan brings Wanda into their home. Harris’s mom insists that she get counseling — they really bring her into the family.” 

Our friends at Daily Maverick report that South Africa has signed into law a broad climate change act that will set caps for large emitters and require every town and city to publish an adaptation plan. Here is why that matters.

When artists foresee the future isn’t a meme yet but it should be because just last week, I interviewed Jay Rechsteiner, a painter who made a work titled The Assassination of Donald Trump in 2016 (seven years before the attempt on Trump’s life). This week, political satirist Armando Iannucci’s sitcom from 2012, Veep, has gone viral for essentially predicting the rise of Harris. 

Over a hundred and fifty people have been killed and thousands injured in the wave of protests in Bangladesh triggered by a wave of reforms in the country’s job quota system. The situation was made worse by a week-long communication shutdown. Watch what is happening in the country here and here.

Keeping an eye on one’s opponent has taken on a new meaning at the Olympics where support staff for the Canadian women’s football team have been accused of spying on and recording the New Zealand football teams’ training session via drones.

The post No Easy Binaries appeared first on Coda Story.

Days after the attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s life, the Republican party has announced vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. In 2016, Vance called Trump “reprehensible”, said his defeat was inevitable and hoped it would lead to a serious reckoning within the Republican party (he has since expressed regret for voicing these opinions). In 2024, Vance is performing a delicate pas de deux: one where he is both the new blood the Republican party needs, and also a less elitist, more populist version of Trump. 

Vance’s comments on domestic and foreign policy are now the subject of endless scrutiny (as they should be). He has described the UK as “the world’s first Islamist nation to have nuclear weapons”, he is against the U.S. aid to Ukraine, and thinks Israel hasn’t received enough support from the Biden administration. He supports large scale deportations and building of a wall on the U.S.’s southern border. He also wants the police to be able to track women who cross state lines to have abortions.

But Vance’s real value for the Republican Party lies not in his earnest representation of white, working class Americans (as his book Hillbilly Elegy suggests) but in his deep ties to Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel. In recent weeks, tech leaders (many of whom once supported the Biden administration) have increasingly come out in support of Trump and the Republican party, describing Vance, a former venture capitalist, as “uniquely capable” and “a true American patriot”.

Russian behavioral norms are on the syllabus for migrant workers from Central Asia looking for work. Russia’s Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN) has developed a four-part lecture series which includes information on Russia’s migration and labor laws as well as how to interact with the opposite sex. This includes refraining from touching, pinching, hugging or grabbing unfamiliar women and men or making sounds like whistling or hissing at them. Also unacceptable: addressing anyone who is not a member of one’s immediate family as “brother” or “sister”, reports Kommersant.

Robert Fico survived an assassination attempt before Trump and much like Trump, blamed the opposition for stoking hateful sentiment amongst the population. What can Americans learn from what happened in Slovakia? Read Emily Tamkin’s sharp warning against this kind of distracting rhetoric here.

The cryptocurrency industry has spent more on the 2024 US elections than the entire energy sector put together, writes Molly White, whose new project Follow the Crypto will look at the ways in which cryptocurrency is bankrolling committees whose single-point agenda is installing crypto-friendly politicians. Read her analysis here.

A delicious review of a confusing book: “Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff. He will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him.” Gabriel Winant is searing in this essay on J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. 

A fresh take on a misunderstood subject: : “Before colonization, India was not a space of sexual rigidity but a transgressive and shifting space where people from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But I didn’t always know this. Growing up as a queer teenager in India, I thought sexual freedom and gender fluidity were contemporary constructs of the West. Like they were alien to the Indian subcontinent. I was so wrong. A look into the colonial archives show that we think this way because of “postcolonial amnesia.” Read Sindhu Rajasekaran’s piece on decolonizing sexuality here. 

A familiar story with an unexpected twist: Andrea Jaeger became a professional tennis player at age 14. By sixteen, she was the No. 2 ranked female tennis player in the world. But a spate of horrific incidents involving bullying and sexual harassment eventually led her to quit the sport for good — she is now a nun. "I keep getting the robes stuck in buses and escalators. Once I jumped in a cab and left half of it outside the door. The first week I wore it, at a huge global conference in New York City. A bird went to the bathroom on me. "I thought that was God's way of saying, 'Maybe it's OK to be a little muddy on the edges – you're the one who used to dive for balls on the tennis court.'”
Read her extraordinary story here.

The post New Blood, Old Ways appeared first on Coda Story.

THE TYRANNY OF WAR

It is difficult to recall the exact moment when collectively, our new normal became seeing images of wounded, decapitated and dead children on the news, alongside bombed out remains of buildings that were once homes, schools and hospitals. On July 8, a Kh-101 cruise missile, launched by Russia, struck the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv as part of a barrage of missile attacks across Ukrainian cities. The missile at the children’s hospital killed at least three children and injured 16 others. But the actual number of people killed and injured cannot be counted, because people are still trapped under the rubble of the bombed hospital–a horrifying forensic detail we now know all too well. We have read versions of this story of death over and over again in the past months. Nearly 2000 children have been killed or injured in Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine (again, the actual death toll of people killed is likely to be much higher). In Gaza, the Ministry of Health estimates that at least 38,000 people have already been killed since Israel launched its military offensive in October, an offensive in which children and hospitals have become repeated targets of war. In the coming months, Lancet estimates that the death toll in Gaza, exacerbated by disease and hunger, will eventually exceed 186,000 people. How does the cycle of war end?

As United States President Joe Biden hosts NATO leaders in Washington DC this week, some of these deaths will be more visible and others will be ignored. This trick of concealment and selective revelation does not exist solely in the domain of politicians, and the increasing relevance of surrealism to make sense of the world today feels right. Speaking about his painting The Son of Man, the Belgian painter, René Magritte described the nature of what we see and how it conceals what we cannot confront:

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a fairly intense feeling, a sort of struggle, I would say, between the hidden visible and the apparent visible."

Decisive elections in France and the UK have voted against the far-right. What does it all mean for the world, and specifically, elections in the US? Vox argues that there is no ideological throughline, and we are inclined to agree, while also keeping in mind this piece of hopeful optimism from Scottish satirist and writer Armando Iannucci: the Right is loud, not necessarily popular. Amplifying them makes the problem worse.  

Men from nearly 50 Indian families were duped into fighting Russia’s war under the pretext of jobs in Russia that would allow them to support their families back home. This week, even as Russia bombarded Ukraine, Indian Prime Minister Modi paid a visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin, embraced him and negotiated the release of all the Indians serving in Russia’s army. Putin, who described Modi as his “dear friend”, also bestowed the Indian PM with Russia’s highest civilian honor, the Order of St. Andrew. The visit has been a tactical tightrope for Modi, who hopes to remain BFFs with Putin while maintaining diplomatic ties with Biden and his allies who continue to pledge support for Ukraine.

You might need to take a deep breath as you consider the enormity of what humanity loses when countries go to war. Artist Taryn Simon considers the Art of Mourning in this interview. Take a look at her soundscape installation, Start Against the Lament. As a viewer moves through isolation, darkness, water, recorded laments of professional mourners reverberate in the enormous underground water reservoir in Copenhagen. 

You might gasp: as you read this origin story about disinformation, which began with Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” and eventually changed our relationship with how we consume (and believe) media forever. If you want to skip the analysis and go straight for the (remastered) experience of listening to Welles describe the end of the world, go here. 

Or sigh: as you read my personal illustrated newsletter, Now and Zen, where I write about staying peaceful in a chaotic world, attending Coda's Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi and falling back in love with journalism.

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The Avenue in the Rain is one of six works by the American impressionist painter Childe Hassam in the permanent art collection of the White House in Washington DC. It is also the image that feels most representative of where the US and the promise of democracy stand today, on the Fourth of July. As writer Diana Butler Bass writes, The Avenue in the Rain doesn’t rejoice in flag-waving. “The flag isn’t flying proud. It has been battered by a storm, it hangs soaked and limp…indeed, America is often stormy, rainy, blue. We see only the wavy reflection of democracy in the water pooling under our feet. Many days, the best we can do is huddle together under umbrellas to keep each other dry.”

There is much to dampen the mood: Americans affected by rising costs of inflation are likely to spend less money this Fourth of July compared to previous years. The disastrous Biden-Trump debate has made the project of American democracy seem bleaker than ever before. News channels in Russia and China are describing US Presidential hopefuls as comical and senile, while Israeli defence analyst Ron Ben-Yishiai claims parts of Israel are already celebrating a second Trump presidency. 

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s struggle for independence has suffered a major setback as China moves to criminally punish “separatists”. China’s new judicial guidelines, which seek to prosecute activists even in absentia, will see “ringleaders” inciting secession or “Taiwan independence” activists punished with life imprisonment and in some cases, receive the death penalty. 

Finally, because we cannot speak of freedom without hope: the Taliban continues to keep Afghan women out of governance, schools and peace talks but it cannot keep Afghan women from achieving their dreams. The 2024 Olympics in Paris will see dancers competing for Olympic medals for the first time in history, and among them is 21-year-old Manizha Talash, Afghanistan’s first woman break dancer. Talash began her dance training in breaking as a young girl in Kabul, where she was the only woman in a crew of 56 dancers. She was accustomed to receiving physical threats and warnings from conservative members of Afghan society from the moment she became famous, but Talash realized it was time to flee once the Taliban came to power: “I didn’t leave Afghanistan because of the fear of death. It was because breaking is my life…I’m doing something for my girls there, I want to walk the talk.”

Hot Take: If you couldn’t bear to watch the Biden-Trump debate but still want to know what went down, we recommend Ryan Broderick’s breakdown here. It’s shorter, more insightful and you’ll laugh without sobbing inwardly at the state of American politics. 

Double Take: This fourth of July is, of course, also crucial for people outside of America such as those living in the UK who will vote and decide whether this is the time for a Labour Party victory. We loved this old-school roving writer’s view of two elections in England and France, and the direction that both countries seem to be headed in. 

Takes the cake: When all else seems bleak, turn to the young for inspiration – nine-year-old British chess sensation Bodhana Sivanandan will become the youngest player to represent England in the 2024 Chess Olympiad. Her newest BFF? Only the greatest female chess player in history, Grand Master Judit Polgar. Sivanandan and Polgar met for a play date in Budapest recently, where the young prodigy received some special tips and tricks from the legend.

The post What is the cost of freedom? appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, we launched the first print issue of our series Complicating Colonialism at ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi. There were as many stories as there were storytellers, and the conversations on stage and at dinners ranged widely, from art as resistance, AI, food, to finding family across borders and losing them to war (we can’t wait to share some of those stories on our channel soon). At its heart, a story is a window into the world or a way out of the echo chamber one may find oneself trapped in. This is why journalism must read the label — pay attention to how stories are made, who consumes them and how, whose stories make it to the conveyor belt of the news industry and how they are packaged when sold.

Two recent examples from the news I’ve been reading come to mind: a study conducted by Oxford’s History of Science Museum will examine the links between milk and colonialism, something that has soured more conservative members of the UK press, and through news aggregation websites, found similar incredulous coverage in India. But milk, as one of the study’s lead scientists shared, is a fascinating lens for exploring colonial processes of acquiring land, understanding hygiene, motherhood and health. The dairy industry, as this chilling series from ProPublica reminds us, has long been fertile ground for stories of immigrant and animal abuse.

Before lactose intolerance there was plain old-fashioned intolerance, and much of it was directed at philosophers like Socrates who asked too many questions. This month, undergraduates and academic philosophers at SOAS put together a toolkit for decolonising their philosophy curriculum, and found that shaking things up is never easy, whether it’s in ancient Greece or present-day UK. This piece by India and Japan historian, Christopher Harding, adds useful perspective: “One of the challenges for the decolonization agenda is to avoid conflating a healthy inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge — historical, political, racial — with the pushing of a particular political agenda…much of the culture-war hand-wringing over decolonization stems from a sense that the other side is speaking or acting in bad faith.”

Treat yourself to writer Julia Watson’s piece on Georgian cuisine for this much-needed reminder that a two-minute microwave meal will actually cost you and the planet more than a quick piece of fruit or salad. This is why food will always have a place at the table of culture wars: “In the Soviet era, Georgia’s food was the favorite of loyal comrades across the Union. When Russians wanted to celebrate, they headed for Moscow's most popular restaurant, the Aragvi, for its Georgian menu that was a whole world not just a republic away from Russia’s plodding fare. Georgia’s local farms, predominantly organic, grow some of the world’s most succulent food. Even Persian mini cucumbers don't come close in flavor to those of Georgia, somehow nutty and sweet and tight in bite. Georgians rejoice in tomatoes incomparably more sumptuous than those of Italy. Meanwhile in the industrial world, Big Food Biz is mulling over how it can develop the sector of the processed food market dubbed, with zero irony, ‘Better-For-You-Snacks’. Thing is, as any Georgian - or Greek or Turk, or Middle Eastern or Spanish or Portuguese individual will tell you, to snack can’t be “better for you”. Unless they’re a fruit or raw vegetable, snacks, being eaten between meals, are not essential fare. They’re treats.” 

Take a bite out of journalist Yaroslav Trofimov’s book, Our Enemies Will Vanish, which begins on day 1 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and documents the first year of Ukraine’s resistance with painstaking and granular detail. But apart from Trofimov’s incredible war reporting, a skill he has honed over decades of covering conflict across the world for the Wall Street Journal, what makes this book special is the inclusion of many small acts of hope, like this moment: a supermarket in a Russian-occupied territory is transformed overnight once Ukraine regains control of it. The shelves are emptied of Russian food which is donated to a food bank, and restocked with food that the Ukrainian people haven’t been able to access in months. “Ukrainian food at Ukrainian prices, plus we accept Apple Pay.” 

Chew on this:Booker prize winner and now, winner of the PEN Pinter prize, writer Arundhati Roy is likely to be prosecuted by the Indian government in coming months, and this is as good a time as any to understand why. Roy spoke about the exploitation of India’s poor, the violent colonial legacy of the Indian state and the need for solidarity in 2010, much before Prime Minister Modi’s government ever came to power. “Think about justice and don’t pick and choose your injustices, don’t say that “I want justice but it’s ok if the next guy doesn’t have it, or the next woman doesn’t have it”. Because justice is the keystone to integrity and integrity is the key stone to real resistance.” You can read the full text of her speech here.

The post Decolonizing our minds might be the only detox we need appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

JOURNALISTS KETTLED AS NYPD STORMS COLUMBIA ENCAMPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when there's a million subscribers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

The post Shooting the messenger appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

With Navalny dead, the chilling title of Russia’s highest-profile political prisoner now belongs to Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza, a 42-year-old historian, journalist and opposition politician, is currently held in Siberia, in the same type of punitive solitary confinement cell that Navalny had occupied before he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic, where he died on February 16. 

Kara-Murza, who comes from a long line of Russian dissidents, was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for charges related to his criticism of President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. By then, he had already survived being poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. In February 2021, a Bellingcat investigation uncovered that Kara-Murza had been followed by the same unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service that allegedly poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020. Kara-Murza was also a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, another slain Russian opposition politician who was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. 

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eventual murder of Navalny, and Russia’s descent into a Stalinesque dictatorship were still only hypothetical scenarios when Kara-Murza and I sat down for an interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, five years ago. He was there for a conference. We talked about disinformation, his hopes for Russia and what makes him angry. (Spoiler: It was the complacency of the so-called “golden billion,” the people who live in democratic countries and take their freedoms for granted, while so much of the world is not free. 

The interview was supposed to become part of a larger Coda project that never got off the ground, thanks to Covid. In the years that followed, I assumed the interview had been lost amid Coda’s pandemic-era transition to a fully remote team, but recently we found the footage. We are publishing it now; the transcript below has been edited for clarity.

What keeps you awake at night?

The thought that Russia, my country, one of the most cultured and one of the most beautiful nations in the world has for two decades now been ruled by a corrupt and authoritarian kleptocracy that is stealing from its own people and that is violating the most basic rights and freedoms of its own people. That’s not a normal situation.

What do you think has been your country’s biggest mistake?

I will separate my country from the government of my country and I think the biggest mistake of the government of my country was the failure in the early 1990s to fully reckon with our communist and our Soviet past and to fully reckon with the mistakes and the crimes of that Soviet and that communist past. The Russian people were ready for it in the 1990s but the Russian government at that time was not up to the task.

I’ll say a word and if you can finish the sentence. Disinformation is…

Lying.

Give me an example of a fake news story that fooled you.

I think almost two decades of Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things that we hear so I’m not even able to think of one immediately.

Give me an example of a fake news story that has had a huge impact on the world.

Well, there was a story in 2014 on Channel 1 on Russian state television about Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a Russian child in the town of Sloviansk and it caused as you can imagine for any normal human beings, it would cause, it caused them an outpouring of anger and grief and resentment and then of course it turned out to be completely and utterly fake, just completely made-up. This is just one small example in a vast sea of propaganda and lying and disinformation put forward by the Putin regime. 

How do we stop democracy turning into plutocracy?

Well, as Winston Churchill said, democracy is a very flawed system but it’s the best one of everything that’s been created, so I think if a democracy functions properly and the institutions function, that in itself is the best guarantee against turning into plutocracy. Because when you have a government that is transparent and accountable to its own citizens, the citizens will not allow it to become a plutocracy.

Is technology helping dictators or democrats?

You know, the sun shines on both good people and on criminals, so I think in the same way, technology can be used for good and for bad and dictators have certainly been savvy very often with using modern technology and so should we be, and I can tell you that, you know, today in my country, in Russia, the internet and the social media are a major instrument that supports the civil society and the democratic movement and the pro-democracy movement, and I’ll give you just one example: Last year, in 2017, there was an investigative video put forward by the Anti-Corruption Foundation led by Alexei Navalny about the corrupt dealings of current Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and of course, if you watched Russian state television, you wouldn’t hear a single word about it and yet tens of millions of people watched that investigative video on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, and tens of thousands went on the streets all over Russia to protest against it. And I think that gives a powerful example of how important and how influential independent information space in modern technology can be.

What’s the biggest benefit of the Trump presidency?

I think it’s a very… I think the Trump presidency in many ways is a very useful reminder to those people who may have harbored some illusions that our job will be done for us by somebody else, that somebody else will come in from the outside and solve all our problems, that it’s not going to happen and it shouldn’t happen because it’s only for us, it’s only for the citizens of Russia to effect change in our country, to change the political situation in our country, to return democracy to our country. It’s not going to be done by Trump or Obama or Bush or Merkel or Macron or anybody else. This is only for us to do, it’s for us to sort out the situation in our own country, and I think the attitude of the current U.S. administration is a very good reminder of that.  

What’s one thing you would tell President Trump?

I will tell him what I will tell any Western leader if I were to meet them, is that, you know, if your country and your government and your system claims to adhere to the values of democracy and human rights and rule of law, then act on it and please stop enabling the crooks and the kleptocrats and the Kremlin by giving them safe havens in your countries for their looted wealth, for their bank accounts, for their real estate, for their families, which is what the West has been doing for many, many years. And that is why it is so important for those countries that have passed the Magnitsky laws, which are the laws imposing personal targeted sanctions on crooks and human rights abusers, to implement those laws to the full extent, and that includes the United States. And that’s why it’s so important for the countries that have not yet passed the Magnitsky laws to pass them and to implement them.

What is one thing you would say to Vladimir Putin?

I have nothing to say to that man. He knows full well what he’s doing. He’s an intelligent person and everything he’s been doing to our country for the last two decades, he’s been doing on purpose and I have nothing to say to this man.

What is Putin’s biggest nightmare? 

The answer is very clear: It’s the people on the streets. We saw how scared and how frightened they were in December of 2011 when we had tens of thousands people on the streets of Moscow protesting against the Putin regime. So for a few days the regime was caught completely surprised. For the first time in their time in power, they had lost the initiative and they were on the defensive and you could see the terror in their eyes and frankly, you know, if you look even at the faces of the policemen who came to the Sakharov Avenue protests on December 24, 2011, when we had something like 120,000 people on the streets of central Moscow protesting against the Putin regime, you can read the fear in the eyes of those police officers and you can read that the biggest thing they were afraid of is that they would be given the order to shoot and they didn’t want to shoot because these people are their friends, their neighbors, their relatives, and that is the thing that is the biggest nightmare for the Putin regime. Just as it has been a nightmare for so many authoritarian regimes all over the world, including here in Georgia.

What should the Western liberal democracies fear more: the government of China or the government of Russia?

You know, I think human rights are universal and the rule of law is universal and the principles of democracy are universal, so I don't want to sound as if I think different standards should be applied to different countries. No, human rights are for everybody, the citizens of China and the citizens of Russia. But I do think that it is important to remember that Russia is a member of the Council of Europe, that Russia is a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and everything that Vladimir Putin has been doing both in his domestic and his foreign policy over the last two decades is breaking and violating the most fundamental rules of those organizations, and so I think for that reason Western countries should be much more indignated about what Vladimir Putin’s regime has been doing.

What makes you angry about the world?

About how few people care about the violations of the rights of people in other countries. It’s, you know, the so-called golden billion, the people who live in successful democracies. They very often forget that the vast majority of the population of our globe live in countries that are not free, live in conditions that are not free and they lack the basic rights and freedoms that so many people in the West take for granted. I think it’s very important for the people in the West not to lose sight of that.   

What makes you hopeful?

When I look at the tens of thousands of young people who have been and continue to come out to the streets of cities and towns all across Russia to voice their protest against the endemic corruption and the authoritarianism of the Putin regime despite the pressure and the dangers and the threats and the beatings and the arrests. That really makes me hopeful about the future of my country and about the future of the world as well. 

What’s one film everyone should see?

It’s going to be a tough competition, but given everything that we’ve just been talking about, I’d say watch the “Trial at Nuremberg” [“Judgment at Nuremberg”]. It’s a film that made one of the most profound impacts on me, I can tell you that, and that phrase there at the end of the film, when the young prosecutor is talking to this elderly American judge about the situation, I’m not going to give a spoiler, you’ll know what I mean when you see the film, but what that elderly judge answers is that “Yes, what you’re saying is correct, is factually correct, but there is nothing on this earth that makes it right.” I think that’s a very important message to remember in our time as well.

One book everyone should read?

My favorite is “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, but I think I’m biased towards Russian literature.

When was the last time you felt really scared?

I suppose it was in the early hours of February 2 of 2017, the second time I was poisoned in Moscow, and I knew what it was because it had happened before so I knew the symptoms and I knew I only had a few hours left of being conscious before falling into a coma again and it was… The scariest thing was not being able to breathe. When you make this movement that every person makes every day, every minute, to take in the air and you feel as if the air is not coming in, you feel as if you’re suffocating, and that’s very painful but also a very frightening experience. 

What does the world look like in five years?

Hopefully with a Russia that has a government that respects the rights of its own people and that respects the rule of law and democracy at home and that behaves as a responsible citizen on the international stage.

This piece was originally published as the most recent edition of the weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter.

The post An unseen interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza: ‘Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things’ appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just yesterday, another tech company became the site of the latest battle — X briefly suspended the account of Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. The company cited “automated security protocols” as the reason for the error.

After years avoiding the spotlight, Navalnaya came out this week with a gut-wrenching speech in which she declared her intention to seize the torch and keep fighting “harder, more desperately and more fiercely than before.” But with its tools decimated and its ultimate netizen gone, the fight now may be more brutal and more dangerous than ever.

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

The campaign did this in plain violation of both Midjourney and OpenAI’s usage policies, which specifically prohibit customers from using their technology for political campaigns. 

Why didn’t the companies step in? For its part, OpenAI told Reuters that it’s investigating the issue. Midjourney did not comment. Either way, it’s hard not to see a parallel here with Dean Philipps, a longshot Democratic presidential candidate in the U.S. whose campaign used OpenAI’s technology to run a chatbot promoting his messages. Although the campaign was clearly violating company policy, it was only after The Washington Post reported on the bot that OpenAI pulled the plug on the developer who built it.

Both stories raise an important question, especially for OpenAI, the most influential player on the generative AI field at the moment: Apart from acting on media inquiries, what does OpenAI do to mitigate political abuses of its tools? A spokesperson who declined to be named told me that OpenAI uses “automated systems and human review to identify and address violations of our policies on our API.” When violations happen, the company may flag the incident for “human review” or suspend the user altogether. In big-picture terms, the response suggests that OpenAI is following the playbook of its Big Tech forefathers like Facebook and YouTube.

That’s worrisome, because even if the tech here is new, the problem of political actors abusing Big Tech tools isn’t. It may be too soon to know how Subianto will use or abuse technology once in power, but it’s worth looking back over the past decade on how politicians have weaponized social media platforms to promote their agendas and sometimes spread outright lies. When profit-hungry tech companies are determined to operate worldwide, they know their products are at risk of being abused. To date, none of the biggest tech companies have truly succeeded at getting ahead of serious abuses on a global scale. It doesn’t help that the worst real-world consequences of these dynamics often play out far, far away from Silicon Valley.

I chatted about this issue a few weeks back with Glenn Ellingson, an ex-Meta integrity engineer who now works with the Integrity Institute, a research group composed mostly of folks who previously held harm reduction roles at Big Tech companies. Ellingson talked about how it’s hard for companies to be “native” in every geographic context.

“Looking at down-ballot elections even in big countries like the United States, or elections that may be national in scope but in smaller nations or nations which your own staff is less culturally connected to, it gets harder and very expensive — maybe impractically expensive — to really be native in each of those contexts,” Ellingson told me. “This means that big global companies will probably catch the big stuff, but they probably won’t be as able to catch problems in all these diverse smaller contexts.”

We talked about places like Myanmar and Ethiopia, two “diverse” though certainly not small contexts in which Meta’s platforms were notoriously abused by military and political leaders perpetrating war crimes. As Ellingson noted, “ugly things” most often emerge “in geographies that don’t really get the attention until something really bad has happened.” And by then, it is too late.

GLOBAL NEWS

In India, AI is giving politicians a bump from beyond the grave. Although he passed away in 2018, recordings of the voice and likeness of Tamil Nadu politician M Karunanidhi have been used recently to create videos in which Karunanidhi has promoted prominent figures in Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the political party that he once led. Speaking with tech journalist Nilesh Christopher, the Mozilla Foundation’s Amber Sinha drew a clear distinction between uses like this and like the one in Indonesia. “The use of AI to create synthetic audio and video by a living person who has signed off on the content is one thing. It is quite another to resurrect a dead person and ascribe opinions to them,” she said.

Singapore’s LLM favors “official” histories. The government of Singapore recently launched a large language model — what powers generative AI tools like ChatGPT — that is built on major languages of Southeast Asia, including Bahasa Indonesia, Thai and Vietnamese. This is critical in a global market where English dominates the AI development landscape. But as Context’s Rina Chandran reported this week, there’s a problem with Singapore’s model: Similar to other state-led LLM initiatives, it tends to reflect “official” narratives about national history and political figures. Consider Indonesia’s Suharto. While LLMs built by Meta and OpenAI will tell you about the military dictator’s poor human rights record, the Singaporean model focuses “largely on his achievements.” Eesh.

Spyware’s everywhere. Pegasus, the pernicious mobile surveillance software made by NSO Group, was used to target a “very long” list of people in Poland during the country’s previous administration, under the right-wing Law and Justice Party. New Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called out his predecessors on the matter at a press briefing on Tuesday. This is not exactly news — spyware researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab had independently investigated and verified suspected infections back in 2021 — but it does confirm what the technical research had already shown, with the political oomph of a head of government to boot.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• If you’re looking for more reasons to worry about how Big Tech will affect upcoming elections around the world, check out this new report from Paul M. Barrett’s group at New York University.
• And if Valentine’s Day had you wondering why your dating app isn’t giving you better results, read media scholar Apryl Williams’ insightful piece on the racial biases embedded in algorithms for apps like Tinder, OkCupid and Hinge. “When we refuse to examine our own prejudices,” Williams writes, “we may miss the perfect match.”

The post When AI brings ‘ugly things’ to democracy appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

What we’re reading:

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

But the shutdown came as no surprise — Pakistan’s election season has seen a smattering of network outages, most of them close in time to online events promoting the campaigns of parliamentary candidates for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf or PTI, the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Although he was not on the ballot, the election was seen as a proxy contest for Khan, who has been in jail since May and was recently dealt a combined sentence of 24 years behind bars after he was convicted on charges of corruption and leaking state secrets. Social media has been a cornerstone of campaign strategy for PTI candidates, who have robust support among younger voters. 

In the lead-up to elections, anxiety that internet outages would occur led advocates to seek a court order prohibiting such a move — and this was granted two weeks back by the Sindh High Court. But after 30 people were killed on February 7, a day before the elections, in bombings targeting election offices in the Balochistan province, the Ministry of Interior demanded the network suspension, arguing that it would be necessary “to maintain the law and order situation.”

Candidates for PTI and other political parties were quick to cast doubt on the government’s justification for the shutdown. Jibran Nasir, an assembly candidate in Karachi and lawyer, lambasted the current caretaker government for the decision. 

“The power brokers are not only against our freedom of expression but also our right to information,” he wrote on X. “Anything which empowers the people is despised by the ruling class.”

There was also speculation that the shutdown was intended to obscure efforts to tamper with ballots. “Quite impressed at the audacity of still keeping mobile networks blocked even at 2am,” wrote Ammar Rashid, a campaign worker with the Awami Workers Party. “Looks like the 'security' threat behind the communication blockade will stay active as long as there are still election results to shape.”

GLOBAL NEWS

Internet connections have also been down in Sudan since last Friday, amid the latest chapter in the country’s civil war, which erupted in the capital Khartoum in April. Sources inside Sudan’s two largest telecom operators told Reuters that the Rapid Support Forces  — the group formerly known as the Janjaweed militia, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s — are  behind the outage, but RSF has denied the accusation. Both RSF and the Sudanese army, which it is fighting against, have hit the internet kill switch before. But this time around, with the RSF having seized control of Khartoum where both telcos are located, it sure looks like the guilty party.

The blackout has left most people in the country unable to communicate, call for help, find out what’s happening or even get into their bank accounts. It has only compounded an already terrifying war in which an estimated 13,000 people have been killed and millions displaced from both the capital and the embattled Darfur region.

Senegalese officials have jumped on the internet blackout bandwagon too. Thousands took to the streets after Senegalese President President Macky Sall decided to postpone national elections by 10 months, a move that will extend his own tenure well beyond April, when he was meant to complete his final term in office. Sall’s government spent much of its political capital last year in efforts to thwart the campaign of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, who is currently behind bars after being convicted of “corrupting a minor.”

Iran’s supreme leader has finally been kicked off Facebook. The official Facebook and Instagram accounts for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were suspended this week, due to Khamenei’s messages promoting Hamas and the Houthis. Both appear on Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals List,” which includes thousands of groups and individuals whose names trigger Meta’s censorship mechanisms. Mahsa Alimardani, a PhD candidate at Oxford and expert on censorship in Iran, noted that Khamenei’s page had promoted “hate speech, incitement to violence and other offenses against his own people for years, with no recourse despite going against Meta’s own policies.” “It is a shame he wasn’t banned sooner,” she wrote. Khamenei still maintains active accounts on X.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• The U.S. military is beginning to bring artificial intelligence into its systems. In a recent simulation exercise of wartime scenarios, military researchers found themselves dealing with a disturbingly trigger-happy chatbot. Jeremy Hsu has the story for New Scientist.
• As the European home of most of the world’s biggest tech companies, Ireland plays host to a growing number of massive, energy-intensive data centers — 82 and counting. In this new essay for The Dial, Jessica Traynor takes readers on a journey to one center, exploring its economic and environmental costs along the way.

The post In Pakistan, Senegal and Sudan, networks are down — and it’s no accident appeared first on Coda Story.

Devices like this one are being built to help people with Lou Gehrig’s disease and quadriplegia communicate better. If Neuralink’s implant works, and that’s a big if — physicians have voiced concern that it will pose other health risks — it could really help improve people’s lives. But implants are a relatively small subset within a growing industry building neurotech products, most of which are for commercial use. In sectors like mining, trucking and construction, employers have begun using headset-like brainscan devices to help protect workers’ safety, but also to monitor (read: surveil) their productivity. These tools capture plenty of data from our brains. Should we worry about how companies might use that data?

Margot Hanley, an artificial intelligence ethics scholar at Cornell University’s Cornell Tech graduate school, says that we should. In an email exchange this week, she described to me the “unique richness of neural data” and explained how these kinds of devices could glean “sensitive or personal information, from thoughts, feelings and beliefs to health or medical information.” Although Musk may be dominating the headlines around neurotech right now, implants like the one Neuralink just piloted are already regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and data they collect is protected under HIPAA, the federal law that restricts the release of medical information. Hanley is much more concerned about non-invasive commercial devices, which are entirely unregulated in most countries including the U.S.

What kinds of things can we expect these companies to do with brain data? Like most big datasets these days, it will probably be used to make more AI. But it could also be used to market products. It could even be leveraged to convince people to vote a certain way.

“It’s not entirely far-fetched to think about neural data being collected, analyzed and integrated into political campaign testing, in the same way we have seen web activity and social media data used these past years,” wrote Hanley.

If we want to safeguard “our deepest, most private selves” from commercial exploitation, Hanley believes we badly need regulatory oversight and ethics guidelines to boot.

The U.S. is still a wild west on this front, but Chile and Brazil have already passed laws that set safeguards and barriers around the use of brain data. This was prescient. Chile’s law was put to the test last year by former Chilean senator Guido Girardi, who bought and used a brain scan device built by the U.S. firm Emotiv, and then took the company to court, arguing that it had taken his brain data without obtaining his informed consent. The case went up to Chile’s Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled against Emotiv and ordered the company to destroy Girardi’s data.

While most companies aren’t literally reading our minds yet, people’s biometric data worldwide is already getting slurped up by everyone from immigration authorities and period-tracking apps to Sam Altman’s WorldCoin “orb,” which authenticates your identity by scanning your iris. Adding brain data to this mix — especially when you think about all that it could reveal about us — makes the whole data grab sound even more like a sci-fi novel that I do not want to read.

GLOBAL NEWS

As Pakistanis head for the polls, will networks stay up and running? Access to mobile internet and broadband services has been cut off several times in the run-up to elections in Pakistan, set for February 8. The shutdowns, which primarily affected major social media sites, corresponded with online events hosted by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of embattled former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who this week was convicted on charges of corruption and leaking state secrets and may be spending the next quarter century behind bars. The government is now under a court order to keep the internet on through polling day. We’ll see if it holds.

Meta is still platforming Holocaust denialism. The company’s semi-autonomous Oversight Board has ruled that Instagram should permanently remove a post that featured Squidward, a character from the hit kids’ TV series “SpongeBob SquarePants,” casting doubt on the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust and suggesting that there were no functioning crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In-house researchers found that Meta had reviewed the post six times, after users flagged it for violating company rules, and that each time the company decided to leave it up, despite Meta’s explicit ban on Holocaust denial.

Social giants are back in the hot seat over kids’ safety. The CEOs of Meta, Snap, TikTok and X all testified at a hearing yesterday in which U.S. members of Congress lobbed a litany of accusations about the harms that platforms do to minors, from bullying and the promotion of eating disorders to the distribution of child abuse images. Attempts by legislators to tackle these issues — none of which can be entirely solved by the platforms — haven’t gotten far.
But in a peculiar twist yesterday, both X and Microsoft announced their support for the U.S. Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require parental controls on social media sites, but also empower state attorneys general to ban online material on the grounds that it harms kids. Dozens of legal experts have opposed the law, arguing that it could even allow censorship of information about LGBTQ issues. This is serious, especially at a moment when books on gender, sex and sexuality are disappearing from the shelves of public libraries across the U.S., thanks to laws driven by the so-called “family values” lobby. Lest there be any doubt on this, the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation has explicitly endorsed the bill in order to “keep trans content away from kids.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Ms. Swift goes to Washington? Deepfakes are not new, but the ease with which people can create them is greater than ever. Amid the outcry over the spread of AI-generated, non-consensual pornography featuring Taylor Swift, MIT Technology Review’s Melissa Heikkila has written a compelling plea in which she pushes the pop megastar to take this up with lawmakers. Let’s see if Taylor listens.
• Adrienne LaFrance says techno-authoritarianism is on the rise. As the author of a newsletter called Authoritarian Tech, I obviously agree. Her new piece for The Atlantic argues that tech CEOs “promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds.”

The post The tech industry’s quest to read our minds — and profit from them appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL NEWS

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

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

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

MAGA’s Swift mania

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

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered an unusual move by Meta: In early March of that year, Facebook and Instagram users were suddenly allowed to threaten violence against Russian soldiers or Russian President Vladimir Putin. For users in Eastern Europe, the company temporarily loosened longstanding prohibitions on violent speech, thereby openly aligning itself with the Ukrainian side.

In a blog post explaining the company’s rationale, Meta’s President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote: “The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable.”

The decision wasn’t surprising at the time. Western governments and publics were quick to line up in opposition to the war, and Facebook was already non grata in Russia, having been blocked inside the country. Although Russian officials later cited Meta’s rule change in its decision to label the company an “extremist” organization, outside Russia, the move had little consequence for Meta’s reputation.

But it left people working on these issues in other parts of the world wondering why Meta had Ukrainians’ backs, but not their own. Mona Shtaya, a Ramallah-based digital rights researcher who works with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, D.C., was one of them.

“When there was a political impetus to protect people in Ukraine, they protected them. You can’t do that in Palestine. I think they don’t have the will to do that in our case,” she said. “It is just devastating. Meta is controlling who gets the power and who gets to speak out against the occupier on their platform.”

Shtaya acknowledged that the war in Gaza is indeed “a different context.” While both scenarios feature heavy imbalances of power and resources, and a dominant occupying force, other details that really matter — the politics, culture, regional dynamics in play and geopolitical fallout they’ve triggered — are truly distinct from one another. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine isn’t the only place where Meta has made a context-specific exception like this. In 2021, amid protests in Iran over the country’s economic crisis, the chant “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Iran’s supreme leader, could routinely be heard on the streets and in videos posted on Instagram — until Meta took them down, citing its general prohibition on calls for violence. When users pushed back and explained the sentiment of the slogan (Iranian-Canadian scholar Mahsa Alimardani said it was like shouting “Fuck Trump”), the company reconsidered. As the protests peaked, posts or audio that contained “Death to Khamenei” in Farsi temporarily became permissible speech.

But in some ways, the virtual lives we lead on Meta's platforms are intended to transcend context. Instagram and Facebook are governed by a supposedly hallowed set of rules (i.e., the Community Standards) that “apply to everyone, all around the world, and to all types of content.” Regardless of where you are, what you believe or whose side you’re on, the rules are supposed to stay the same. But the company’s actions in select cases demonstrate that it can and will tip the scales of speech around an active conflict if the conditions are right. This becomes troubling not only when looking at situations of war or social unrest, but also with this being a significant year of elections. Where else might Meta feel comfortable giving a slight advantage to one political actor over another? Or what if it fails to intervene before violence strikes when it could really make a difference? Think of Meta’s reluctance to act against the planning of the insurrection on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, or its promotion of calls for the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The consequences of these moves can be life or death.

GLOBAL NEWS

Baby’s first election flub. While OpenAI is dipping its toes into the murky waters of military contracting — the company now has a cybersecurity contract with the U.S. Department of Defense — its effects on elections are also top of mind this week. After The Washington Post reported that OpenAI’s ChatGPT was being used to power a chatbot that supported longshot Democratic presidential candidate Dean Philipps, the company shut off the campaign’s ability to use its technology, citing violations of its election rules. Setting aside OpenAI’s special ties to Phillips’ campaign, the incident makes one wonder: How will OpenAI moderate political actors’ use (or abuse) of its tools as we head into a year of consequential elections worldwide?

I put the question to Integrity Institute fellow Alexis Crews, who previously worked on governance at Meta. “For plugins and applications, OpenAI should establish strict guidelines, especially regarding election and candidate-related content,” she wrote. “While the public rightly expects OpenAI to set up safeguards against harmful content, achieving this is challenging, particularly for small teams with limited resources.” I know OpenAI isn’t nearly as big as Meta or Google, but as it skates towards a $100 billion valuation, I wonder if it might put more resources towards mitigating harms to democracy.

Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Bill could “pave the way for a dictatorship,” according to opposition member of parliament Eran Wickremeratne. Yesterday, parliamentarians passed the bill, which criminalizes online harassment, data theft, “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” “threatening, alarming or distressing statements” and plenty else. It will require tech companies — including the biggest players, who have opposed the measure — to institute 24-hour turnaround times on content removal requests. And it will empower a five-member commission, appointed by the president, to issue censorship orders. Critics — and there are many — have argued that the commission will allow the president’s cronies to tilt online discourse in their favor, an especially troubling prospect with presidential elections set to be held later this year.

France orders Amazon to pay up over warehouse worker surveillance. Amazon’s French subsidiary is facing a $35 million fine after the national data protection authority investigated the systems used to monitor worker productivity in the company’s massive fulfillment centers. Citing the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the French regulator found that the systems capture and store too much data about workers at too frequent a rate, calling it “excessively intrusive.” While the case isn’t driven by labor rights concerns — an issue at Amazon that we’ve covered in the past — it still underscores the ways in which surveillance has become part of the labor experience in the tech sector. Amazon is threatening to challenge the order.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

• Two people who really know surveillance — acclaimed cryptographer and New York Times best-selling author Bruce Schneier and privacy law extraordinaire Albert Fox Cahn, who runs the NYC-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project — have some insights on how chatbots could promote social norms that might make us ruder or just plain boring. Read this fun collaboration in The Atlantic.
• At Coda, we’ve long covered the dark side of urban surveillance, from Medellín to Moscow. But here’s an unusual use of surveillance cameras: Artists in the Dutch city of Utrecht have turned 22 CCTV cameras into an installation that hangs above the water inside a tunnel used by the city’s many cyclists. The cameras light up with the ebb and flow of bicycle traffic and project a poem by British poet Sophia Walker that reflects on people’s fears and motivations related to the search for a place to call home. If, like me, you can’t make it to Utrecht, you can learn more about the project here.

The post Meta doesn’t allow violent speech — except when it does appeared first on Coda Story.

Meta, says Ashraf Zeitoon, should not be allowed to explain away these incidents as “glitches,” as they often do. Zeitoon was head of public policy for Middle East and North Africa at Meta (then Facebook) from 2014 to 2017, a role he describes as being Meta’s “ambassador to the Middle East.” He keeps in contact with folks at Meta today.

“This company is one of the world’s richest, it hires some of the best talent, best engineers,” he told me. “So for you then to tell me it’s a glitch, I don’t buy that.”

I called Zeitoon this week to get his insights on Meta’s approach to content about violent political conflicts in the Middle East. “There was a significant lack of awareness about the region, the complexity, the challenges,” he said. “The company deals with it as one homogeneous region when it’s not.” Between civil wars in Syria and Yemen and repressive regimes across the region, the work was never-ending. And that’s to say nothing of Israel and Palestine. The work got more complicated in 2016, he said, when the Israeli government began pressing Meta to hire a representative who they could interface with directly.

“So they [Meta] went and hired someone who’s very close to key circles within the Israeli government,” Zeitoon explained. But that role is only part of the picture. Zeitoon described a multi-pronged effort by Israeli officials “to influence decision-making within Meta towards Israeli content, and against content that goes against Israel or Israeli values.”

Meta (then Facebook) and Israel’s Ministry of Justice made a special agreement to “fight online incitement” back in 2016 — something that both entities publicly heralded at the time. Zeitoon pointed out that the ministry now maintains a unit dedicated to screening Facebook and Instagram and reporting rule violations to Meta (a subject of past public scrutiny). He also highlighted Act.IL, an app developed by ex-intelligence officers working with the government that encourages citizens — some 200,000 have signed up — to do the same. Meta has a sizable presence in Tel Aviv, where it has acquired major Israeli tech firms like Onavo and is helping to incubate a steady stream of newer startups.

Alongside Meta’s mishandling of speech about the conflict, Zeitoon worries this influence has hardened Meta’s attitude toward employees who criticize or question company decisions on the matter.

“With the beginning of the attacks on Gaza, a couple of people spoke to me and said, ‘We can’t share anything. We’re afraid because now there are systems whereby they’re trying to find any leakage whatsoever.’” This tracks with recent reporting by the Financial Times on a Meta staffer who said she was being “investigated” by the company for violating employee policy after she expressed concern that the company was censoring pro-Palestinian views.

“This fear culture never existed before,” Zeitoon said. He also identified a labor dimension to the issue. In-house content moderators for the Arabic language work primarily at the company’s headquarters in Dublin. Their jobs with Meta are a lifeline, a bridge to getting residency in a safe and relatively prosperous country.

“If you’re a Palestinian or a Syrian or Iraqi, are you willing to threaten your attempt to live in a safe country, in a process to get Irish nationality? You’re not gonna jeopardize your job with Meta, you’re not gonna leak news. [Meta] is exploiting that.”

Given Zeitoon’s former role inside the company, I asked Meta for comment on all this. A spokesperson, who declined to be named, offered this:

“This person hasn’t worked at Facebook in nearly seven years and has no direct knowledge of our decision-making process, nor the authority to speak about our policies or how we enforce them. Our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while at the same time keeping our platforms safe. We apply these policies equally around the world, and while we readily acknowledge we make errors that can be frustrating for people, any implication that the citizenship of our team members has an impact on the company’s content decisions and enforcement is offensive and simply inaccurate: Employees of different backgrounds from around the world, including Israelis and Palestinians, are represented in teams working across the company.”

It is true that Zeitoon has been out of the company for a while. But it has become incredibly difficult to get real insights from inside the company, whether they’re coming from top-level executives or employees closer to the digital front lines. When I started doing this work in 2013, I could have serious, thorny phone conversations about these issues with senior Facebook staffers who I think were genuinely trying to find the best path for users’ rights. But today, Meta has largely withdrawn from serious engagement with media and civil society, and staff willing to speak up are very few and far between. I think insights from people like Zeitoon are critical to understanding what happens behind closed doors at this incredibly powerful company.

Zeitoon emphasized that he is skeptical of allegations of the company having an unfair bias due to top executives’ personal ties to Israel. In his eyes, it is all about the money. 

“Zuckerberg is awfully focused on his legacy,” he said. “I think his only belief is capitalism, his legacy and the price of his stock.”

The internet has been in a near total blackout in Gaza for almost a week, following Israeli airstrikes that blew up key infrastructure in the strip. I checked in on this with Doug Madory, who studies global internet traffic data at network monitoring firm Kentik. He noted that since October 7, this is the seventh such outage in Gaza, where all telecommunications are run through Israel. “It is understood that some of the previous outages were deliberately executed by Israeli authorities to coincide with military operations in Gaza,” he wrote. That’s helpful context, but whether it’s due to an airstrike or a state order to shut down networks, Gaza is still very much offline. On the ground in a humanitarian crisis, this hampers the efforts of aid agencies to coordinate the delivery of what limited food and supplies are available to the people that need them. It also means that access to potentially life-saving information and emergency services are severely limited if not entirely cut off.

OpenAI appears to have opened the door to collaborating with the military. A ban on using OpenAI’s technologies for “military and warfare” vanished from the company’s usage policy last week. The old policy is here and refers explicitly to military applications as an example of “disallowed usage of our models.” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle (who I am still not related to) discussed the change with Heidy Khlaaf, a preeminent scholar on artificial intelligence who has collaborated with OpenAI researchers looking into this precise topic. She pointed to issues of bias, inaccuracy and “hallucinations” in the kinds of models that OpenAI uses and did not mince words about what this might mean in a conflict situation. “Their use within military warfare can only lead to imprecise and biased operations that are likely to exacerbate harm and civilian casualties,” Khlaaf said.

At the end of December, Wikimedia RU shuttered its operations. The independent nonprofit organization had helped develop and promote Wikipedia in Russia. The closure was announced after the group’s executive director was fired from his job at Moscow State University and warned that he was at risk of being declared a “foreign agent,” a designation with serious legal ramifications in Russia. Although Wikipedia is still accessible there, a move like this will likely have serious chilling effects for people in Russia who contribute to the online encyclopedia.

The post When Meta censors Palestinian content, is it really a glitch? appeared first on Coda Story.

We’re looking at big changes on the horizon in what promises to be a pivotal year for elections and democratic institutions. More than 2 billion people will vote in 65 countries around the world, and technology will be a critical factor in every aspect of these elections, from information sourcing to actual polling machines.

In Bangladesh, they’ve already been to the polls. On January 7, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina sailed to reelection with an extra boost from her cyber army. She claimed a record fifth term in office (fourth in a row) and her ruling Awami League secured a hefty majority in the country’s parliament. But there wasn’t much contest — the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party decided back in November to boycott the election, after thousands of party members and supporters were jailed on what they say are spurious criminal charges. In the end, a dismal 40% of eligible voters cast ballots, according to the country’s chief election commissioner.

In the months before the election, AI-generated misinformation and manipulation were rife, including a series of deepfakes targeting opposition candidates that went viral on Facebook. The Awami League’s “official think tank” is known for the thousands of people it employs to promote its messages on Facebook, which remains the go-to information platform for nearly a quarter of the country’s population of 170 million. In one such fake video, exiled opposition leader Tarique Rahman appeared to be urging party members to keep quiet about their concerns for Gazans under bombardment by Israel, lest it upset the United States. In Muslim-majority Bangladesh, most people identify closely with the Palestinian cause. An opposition party official told the Financial Times that he had attempted to get Facebook’s parent company Meta to remove some of these videos, but that “most of the time they don’t bother to reply.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said the Bangladesh election was “not free or fair.” And AI played a key role in ensuring that the ruling party could bully and bluster its way back to power.

After Bangladesh, it’s Taiwan’s turn to head to the polls. The election is this Saturday, and at stake could be the island’s future autonomy. William Lai, current vice president to Tsai Ing-wen, is favored to win and would represent a continuation of Taiwan’s delicate position of asserting its self-governance in the face of China’s claims to the territory. These claims have ramped up considerably in recent years, as have Beijing-driven foreign influence campaigns both in traditional media and online. In December, researchers at the network analysis firm Graphika identified a network of accounts across Facebook, YouTube and TikTok that were working together to promote the opposition KMT party, which is considered to be friendly to Beijing. The accounts also played up news stories that cast pro-independence incumbents as incompetent and corrupt. These kinds of narratives are a constant on social media, but their influence could prove pivotal on the eve of elections.

What does Meta have to say about all this misinformation and propaganda? Not enough. Despite being one of the most profitable tech companies in the world, the Silicon Valley behemoth made substantial cuts in 2023, laying off staff researchers who were sometimes able to intervene if they saw online activity that could undermine important election-related information or lead to widespread violence. As if inspired by the five-alarm dumpster fire formerly known as Twitter, Meta has been notably blasé about its decision to gut these teams. Publicly, the company has only laid out plans for how it will handle the 2024 election in the U.S. Apparently, the rest of the world is on its own.

And what about elections in the U.S.? In an election year, it’s hard not to look back at just how bad things can become when platforms as big and powerful as Facebook play host to movements like “Stop the Steal,” which was predicated on the false belief that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election. That particular campaign helped propel plans for the attack on the U.S. capitol on January 6, 2021, which left five people dead, more than a hundred police officers injured, and at least half of the country genuinely fearful for the survival of American democracy.

U.S. prosecutors have since brought criminal charges against more than 1,000 people who participated, and social media posts have provided key evidence of their intentions to cause harm. Social media posts from that time also have been leveraged in the litany of election subversion cases against Trump himself.

Throughout Trump’s time in office, the major social media companies gave him an enormous platform for his message, even when he was promoting dangerous ideas that fell afoul of their policies. But it took four years and a coup attempt for them to act — just hours after rioters descended on the U.S. capitol, Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other platforms decided to “de-platform” the Donald. But by that point, much of the damage had already been done.

First Amendment scholar evelyn douek broke it down brilliantly at the time: “This was a display of awesome power, not an acknowledgment of culpability,” she wrote in The Atlantic. “A tiny group of people in Silicon Valley are defining modern discourse, ostensibly establishing a Twilight Zone where the rules are something between democratic governance and journalism, but they’re doing it on the fly in ways that suit them. In two weeks, Trump will be out of power, but platforms won’t be. They should be forced to live up to the sentiments in their fig-leaf rationales.” If you’re looking for a laugh here, comedian Trevor Noah did a pretty good segment making a similar point.

Would things have been different if the companies had intervened sooner? We’ll never know. On Tuesday, as Trump walked out of an appeals court hearing, the former president told reporters that if the charges against him interfere with his candidacy in the 2024 presidential election, it will lead to “bedlam in the country.” Eesh. If Trump’s threat is any indication, we just may get to see round two in 2024.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Social media scholar Joan Donovan, who recently filed a whistleblower complaint over her suspicious dismissal from a top-tier research job at Harvard University (which I covered last month), has a new piece for The Conversation about January 6, digital disinformation and the concept of “networked incitement.”

• Speaking of disinformation, I recommend this new report from ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center that shows how verified accounts on X are getting plenty of traction spreading disinformation about the war in Gaza.

• And if you’re curious about The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI, and whether or not it has legs, read Mike Masnick’s breakdown of the suit and its shortcomings. He suggests it could wind up erecting copyright barriers that further entrench the power of the biggest AI companies. I worry he’s right.

The post In a year full of elections, does Big Tech have democracy’s back? appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

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. And 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.”

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.

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.

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. As Erica wrote in her follow-up, “Imagine telling the authors of the modern asylum system, which was created after the Holocaust, that this guarantee is only accessible to people who arrive at the border with a miniature computer in their pocket.”

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 Big Tech 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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