With the correct codes input, the doors to the missile silo open, pointing a bomb at the sky. Sweat shines on their faces. For the missile to fly, both must turn their keys. But one of them balks. He picks up the phone to call their superiors.

That’s not the procedure, says his partner. “Screw the procedure,” the dissenter says. “I want somebody on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people.” 

Soon, the scene — which opens the 1983 techno-thriller “WarGames” — transitions to another set deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, a military outpost buried beneath thousands of feet of Colorado granite. It exists in real life and is dramatized in the movie. 

In “WarGames,” the main room inside Cheyenne Mountain hosts a wall of screens that show the red, green and blue outlines of continents and countries, and what’s happening in the skies above them. There is not, despite what the servicemen have been led to believe, a nuclear attack incoming: The alerts were part of a test sent out to missile commanders to see whether they would carry out orders. All in all, 22% failed to launch.

“Those men in the silos know what it means to turn the keys,” says an official inside Cheyenne Mountain. “And some of them are just not up to it.” But he has an idea for how to combat that “human response,” the impulse not to kill millions of people: “I think we ought to take the men out of the loop,” he says. 

From there, an artificially intelligent computer system enters the plotline and goes on to cause nearly two hours of potentially world-ending problems. 

Discourse about the plot of “WarGames” usually focuses on the scary idea that a computer nearly launches World War III by firing off nuclear weapons on its own. But the film illustrates another problem that has become more trenchant in the 40 years since it premiered: The computer displays fake data about what’s going on in the world. The human commanders believe it to be authentic and respond accordingly.

In the real world, countries — or rogue actors — could use fake data, inserted into genuine data streams, to confuse enemies and achieve their aims. How to deal with that possibility, along with other consequences of incorporating AI into the nuclear weapons sphere, could make the coming years on Earth more complicated.

The word “deepfake” didn’t exist when “WarGames” came out, but as real-life AI grows more powerful, it may become part of the chain of analysis and decision-making in the nuclear realm of tomorrow. The idea of synthesized, deceptive data is one AI issue that today’s atomic complex has to worry about.

You may have encountered the fruits of this technology in the form of Tom Cruise playing golf on TikTok, LinkedIn profiles for people who have never inhabited this world or, more seriously, a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declaring the war in his country to be over. These are deepfakes — pictures or videos of things that never happened, but which can look astonishingly real. It becomes even more vexing when AI is used to create images that attempt to depict things that are indeed happening. Adobe recently caused a stir by selling AI-generated stock photos of violence in Gaza and Israel. The proliferation of this kind of material (alongside plenty of less convincing stuff) leads to an ever-present worry any image presented as fact might actually have been fabricated or altered. 

It may not matter much whether Tom Cruise was really out on the green, but the ability to see or prove what’s happening in wartime — whether an airstrike took place at a particular location or whether troops or supplies are really amassing at a given spot — can actually affect the outcomes on the ground. 

Similar kinds of deepfake-creating technologies could be used to whip up realistic-looking data — audio, video or images — of the sort that military and intelligence sensors collect and that artificially intelligent systems are already starting to analyze. It’s a concern for Sharon Weiner, a professor of international relations at American University. “You can have someone trying to hack your system not to make it stop working, but to insert unreliable data,” she explained.

James Johnson, author of the book “AI and the Bomb,” writes that when autonomous systems are used to process and interpret imagery for military purposes, “synthetic and realistic-looking data” can make it difficult to determine, for instance, when an attack might be taking place. People could use AI to gin up data designed to deceive systems like Project Maven, a U.S. Department of Defense program that aims to autonomously process images and video and draw meaning from them about what’s happening in the world.

AI’s role in the nuclear world isn’t yet clear. In the U.S., the White House recently issued an executive order about trustworthy AI, mandating in part that government agencies address the nuclear risks that AI systems bring up. But problem scenarios like some of those conjured by “WarGames” aren’t out of the realm of possibility. 

In the film, a teenage hacker taps into the military’s system and starts up a game he finds called “Global Thermonuclear War.” The computer displays the game data on the screens inside Cheyenne Mountain, as if it were coming from the ground. In the Rocky Mountain war room, a siren soon blares: It looks like Soviet missiles are incoming. Luckily, an official runs into the main room in a panic. “We’re not being attacked,” he yells. “It’s a simulation!””

In the real world, someone might instead try to cloak an attack with deceptive images that portray peace and quiet.

Researchers have already shown that the general idea behind this is possible: Scientists published a paper in 2021 on “deepfake geography,” or simulated satellite images. In that milieu, officials have worried about images that might show infrastructure in the wrong location or terrain that’s not true to life, messing with military plans. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, for instance, made satellite images that included vegetation that wasn’t real and showed evidence of drought where the water levels were fine, all for the purposes of research. You could theoretically do the same for something like troop or missile-launcher movement.

AI that creates fake data is not the only problem: AI could also be on the receiving end, tasked with analysis. That kind of automated interpretation is already ongoing in the intelligence world, although it’s unclear specifically how it will be incorporated into the nuclear sphere. For instance, AI on mobile platforms like drones could help process data in real time and “alert commanders of potentially suspicious or threatening situations such as military drills and suspicious troop or mobile missile launcher movements,” writes Johnson. That processing power could also help detect manipulation because of the ability to compare different datasets. 

But creating those sorts of capabilities can help bad actors do their fooling. “They can take the same techniques these AI researchers created, invert them to optimize deception,” said Edward Geist, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. For Geist, deception is a “trivial statistical prediction task.” But recognizing and countering that deception is where the going gets tough. It involves a “very difficult problem of reasoning under uncertainty,” he told me. Amid the generally high-stakes feel of global dynamics, and especially in conflict, countries can never be exactly sure what’s going on, who’s doing what, and what the consequences of any action may be.

There is also the potential for fakery in the form of data that’s real: Satellites may accurately display what they see, but what they see has been expressly designed to fool the automated analysis tools.

As an example, Geist pointed to Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. When they are stationary, they’re covered in camo netting, making them hard to pick out in satellite images. When the missiles are on the move, special devices attached to the vehicles that carry them shoot lasers toward detection satellites, blinding them to the movement. At the same time, decoys are deployed — fake missiles dressed up as the real deal, to distract and thwart analysis. 

“The focus on using AI outstrips or outpaces the emphasis put on countermeasures,” said Weiner.

Given that both physical and AI-based deception could interfere with analysis, it may one day become hard for officials to trust any information — even the solid stuff. “The data that you’re seeing is perfectly fine. But you assume that your adversary would fake it,” said Weiner. “You then quickly get into the spiral where you can’t trust your own assessment of what you found. And so there’s no way out of that problem.” 

From there, it’s distrust all the way down. “The uncertainties about AI compound the uncertainties that are inherent in any crisis decision-making,” said Weiner. Similar situations have arisen in the media, where it can be difficult for readers to tell if a story about a given video — like an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza, for instance — is real or in the right context. Before long, even the real ones leave readers feeling dubious.

More than a century ago, Alfred von Schlieffen, a German war planner, envisioned the battlefield of the future: a person sitting at a desk with telephones splayed across it, ringing in information from afar. This idea of having a godlike overview of conflict — a fused vision of goings-on — predates both computers and AI, according to Geist.

Using computers to synthesize information in real-time goes back decades too. In the 1950s, for instance, the U.S. built the Continental Air Defense Command, which relied on massive machines (then known as computers) for awareness and response. But tests showed that a majority of Soviet bombers would have been able to slip through — often because they could fool the defense system with simple decoys. “It was the low-tech stuff that really stymied it,” said Geist. Some military and intelligence officials have concluded that next-level situational awareness will come with just a bit more technological advancement than they previously thought — although this has not historically proven to be the case. “This intuition that people have is like, ‘Oh, we’ll get all the sensors, we’ll buy a big enough computer and then we’ll know everything,’” he said. “This is never going to happen.”

This type of thinking seems to be percolating once again and might show up in attempts to integrate AI in the near future. But Geist’s research, which he details in his forthcoming book “Deterrence Under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare,” shows that the military will “be lucky to maintain the degree of situational awareness we have today” if they incorporate more AI into observation and analysis in the face of AI-enhanced deception. 

“One of the key aspects of intelligence is reasoning under uncertainty,” he said. “And a conflict is a particularly pernicious form of uncertainty.” An AI-based analysis, no matter how detailed, will only ever be an approximation — and in uncertain conditions there’s no approach that “is guaranteed to get an accurate enough result to be useful.” 

In the movie, with the proclamation that the Soviet missiles are merely simulated, the crisis is temporarily averted. But the wargaming computer, unbeknownst to the authorities, is continuing to play. As it keeps making moves, it displays related information about the conflict on the big screens inside Cheyenne Mountain as if it were real and missiles were headed to the States. 

It is only when the machine’s inventor shows up that the authorities begin to think that maybe this could all be fake. “Those blips are not real missiles,” he says. “They’re phantoms.”

To rebut fake data, the inventor points to something indisputably real: The attack on the screens doesn’t make sense. Such a full-scale wipeout would immediately prompt the U.S. to total retaliation — meaning that the Soviet Union would be almost ensuring its own annihilation. 

Using his own judgment, the general calls off the U.S.’s retaliation. As he does so, the missiles onscreen hit the 2D continents, colliding with the map in circular flashes. But outside, in the real world, all is quiet. It was all a game. “Jesus H. Christ,” says an airman at one base over the comms system. “We’re still here.”

Similar nonsensical alerts have appeared on real-life screens. Once, in the U.S., alerts of incoming missiles came through due to a faulty computer chip. The system that housed the chip sent erroneous missile alerts on multiple occasions. Authorities had reason to suspect the data was likely false. But in two instances, they began to proceed as if the alerts were real. “Even though everyone seemed to realize that it’s an error, they still followed the procedure without seriously questioning what they were getting,” said Pavel Podvig, senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher at Princeton University. 

In Russia, meanwhile, operators did exercise independent thought in a similar scenario, when an erroneous preliminary launch command was sent. “Only one division command post actually went through the procedure and did what they were supposed to do,” he said. “All the rest said, ‘This has got to be an error,’” because it would have been a surprise attack not preceded by increasing tension, as expected. It goes to show, Podvig said, “people may or may not use their judgment.” 

You can imagine in the near future, Podvig continued, nuclear operators might see an AI-generated assessment saying circumstances were dire. In such a situation, there is a need “to instill a certain kind of common sense” he said, and make sure that people don’t just take whatever appears on a screen as gospel. “The basic assumptions about scenarios are important too,” he added. “Like, do you assume that the U.S. or Russia can just launch missiles out of the blue?”

People, for now, will likely continue to exercise judgment about attacks and responses — keeping, as the jargon goes, a “human in the loop.”

The idea of asking AI to make decisions about whether a country will launch nuclear missiles isn’t an appealing option, according to Geist, though it does appear in movies a lot. “Humans jealously guard these prerogatives for themselves,” Geist said. 

“It doesn’t seem like there’s much demand for a Skynet,” he said, referencing another movie, “Terminator,” where an artificial general superintelligence launches a nuclear strike against humanity.

Podvig, an expert in Russian nuclear goings-on, doesn’t see much desire for autonomous nuclear operations in that country. 

“There is a culture of skepticism about all this fancy technological stuff that is sent to the military,” he said. “They like their things kind of simple.” 

Geist agreed. While he admitted that Russia is not totally transparent about its nuclear command and control, he doesn’t see much interest in handing the reins to AI.

China, of course, is generally very interested in AI, and specifically in pursuing artificial general intelligence, a type of AI which can learn to perform intellectual tasks as well as or even better than humans can.

William Hannas, lead analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, has used open-source scientific literature to trace developments and strategies in China’s AI arena. One big development is the founding of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, backed by the state and directed by former UCLA professor Song-Chun Zhu, who has received millions of dollars of funding from the Pentagon, including after his return to China. 

Hannas described how China has shown a national interest in “effecting a merger of human and artificial intelligence metaphorically, in the sense of increasing mutual dependence, and literally through brain-inspired AI algorithms and brain-computer interfaces.”

“A true physical merger of intelligence is when you’re actually lashed up with the computing resources to the point where it does really become indistinguishable,” he said. 

That’s relevant to defense discussions because, in China, there’s little separation between regular research and the military. “Technological power is military power,” he said. “The one becomes the other in a very, very short time.” Hannas, though, doesn’t know of any AI applications in China’s nuclear weapons design or delivery. Recently, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met and made plans to discuss AI safety and risk, which could lead to an agreement about AI’s use in military and nuclear matters. Also, in August, regulations on generative AI developed by China’s Cyberspace Administration went into effect, making China a first mover in the global race to regulate AI.

It’s likely that the two countries would use AI to help with their vast streams of early-warning data. And just as AI can help with interpretation, countries can also use it to skew that interpretation, to deceive and obfuscate. All three tasks are age-old military tactics — now simply upgraded for a digital, unstable age.

Science fiction convinced us that a Skynet was both a likely option and closer on the horizon than it actually is, said Geist. AI will likely be used in much more banal ways. But the ideas that dominate “WarGames” and “Terminator” have endured for a long time. 

“The reason people keep telling this story is it’s a great premise,” said Geist. “But it’s also the case,” he added, “that there’s effectively no one who thinks of this as a great idea.” 

It’s probably so resonant because people tend to have a black-and-white understanding of innovation. “There’s a lot of people very convinced that technology is either going to save us or doom us,” said Nina Miller, who formerly worked at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is currently a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The notion of an AI-induced doomsday scenario is alive and well in the popular imagination and also has made its mark in public-facing discussions about the AI industry. In May, dozens of tech CEOs signed an open letter declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority,” without saying much about what exactly that means. 

But even if AI does launch a nuclear weapon someday (or provide false information that leads to an atomic strike), humans still made the decisions that led us there. Humans created the AI systems and made choices about where to use them. 

And, besides, in the case of a hypothetical catastrophe, AI didn’t create the environment that led to a nuclear attack. “Surely the underlying political tension is the problem,” said Miller. And that is thanks to humans and their desire for dominance — or their motivation to deceive. 

Maybe the humans need to learn what the computer did at the end of “WarGames.” “The only winning move,” it concludes, “is not to play.”

The post When deepfakes go nuclear appeared first on Coda Story.

Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world’s biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today’s arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It’s almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive “political reeducation” program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don’t think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won’t be easy,” he said. “It’s not an unmitigated win-win.”

The post Why are climate skeptics speaking out about the Uyghur genocide? appeared first on Coda Story.

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

Lights, cameras, what action? In Nairobi, the question looms large for millions of Kenyans, whose every move is captured by the flash of a CCTV camera at intersections across the capital.

Though government promises of increased safety and better traffic control seem to play on a loop, crime levels here continue to rise. In the 1990s, Nairobi, with its abundant grasslands, forests and rivers, was known as the “Green City in the Sun.” Today, we more often call it “Nairobbery.”

I see it every time I venture into Nairobi’s Central Business District. Navigating downtown Nairobi on foot can feel like an extreme sport. I clutch my handbag, keep my phone tucked away and walk swiftly to dodge “boda boda” (motorbike) riders and hawkers whose claim on pedestrian walks is quasi-authoritarian. Every so often, I’ll hear a woman scream “mwizi!” and then see a thief dart down an alleyway. If not that, it will be a motorist hooting loudly at a traffic stop to alert another driver that their vehicle is being stripped of its parts, right then and there.

Every city street is dotted with cameras. They fire off a blinding flash each time a car drives past. But other than that, they seem to have little effect. I have yet to hear of or witness an incident in which thugs were about to rob someone, looked up, saw the CCTV cameras then stopped and walked away.

Nairobi launched its massive traffic surveillance system in 2014 as the country was grappling with a terrorism crisis. A series of major attacks by al-Shabab militants, including the September 2013 attack at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping complex in which 67 people were killed, left the city reeling and politicians under extreme pressure to implement solutions. A modern, digitized surveillance system became a national security priority. And the Chinese tech hardware giant Huawei was there to provide it. 

A joint contract between Huawei and Kenya’s leading telecom, Safaricom, brought us the Integrated Urban Surveillance System, and we became the site of Huawei’s first “Safe City” project in Africa. Hundreds of cameras were deployed across Nairobi’s Central Business District and major highways, all networked and sending data to Kenya’s National Police Headquarters. Nairobi today boasts nearly 2,000 CCTV cameras citywide.

On paper, the system promised the ultimate silver bullet: It put real-time surveillance tools into the hands of more than 9,000 police officers to support crime prevention, accelerated responses and recovery. Officials say police monitor the Kenyan capital at all times and quickly dispatch first responders in case of an emergency.

But do the cameras work? Nine years since they were installed, it is hard to see the benefits of these electronic eyes that follow us around the city day after day.

Early on, Huawei claimed that from 2014 to 2015, crime had decreased by 46% in areas supported by their technologies, but the company has since scrubbed its website of this report. Kenya’s National Police Service reported a smaller drop in crime rates in 2015 in Nairobi, and an increase in Mombasa, the other major city where Huawei’s cameras were deployed. But by 2017, Nairobi’s reported crime rates surpassed pre-installation levels.

According to a June 2023 report by Coda’s partners at the Edgelands Institute, an organization that studies the digitalization of urban security, there has been a steady rise in criminal activity in Nairobi for nearly a decade.

So why did Nairobi adopt this system in the first place? One straightforward answer: Kenya had a problem, and China offered a solution. The Kenyan authorities had to take action and Huawei had cameras to sell. So they made a deal.

Nairobi’s surveillance apparatus today has become part of the “Digital Silk Road” — China’s quest to wire the world. It is a central component of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious global infrastructure development strategy that has spread China’s economic and political influence across the world. 

This hasn’t been easy for China in the industrialized West, with companies like Huawei battling sanctions by the U.S. and legal obstacles both in the U.K. and European Union countries. But in Africa, the Chinese technology giant has a quasi-monopoly on telecommunications infrastructure and technology deployment. Components from the company make up around 70% of 4G networks across the continent.

Chinese companies also have had a hand in building or renovating nearly 200 government buildings across the continent. They have built secure intra-governmental telecommunications networks and gifted computers to at least 35 African governments, according to research by the Heritage Foundation.

Grace Bomu Mutung’u, a Kenyan scholar of IT policy in Kenya and Africa, currently working with the Open Society Foundations, sees this as part of a race to develop and dominate network infrastructure, and to use this position to gather and capitalize on data that flows through networks.

“The Chinese are way ahead of imperial companies because they are approaching it from a different angle,” she told me. She posits that for China, the Digital Silk Road is meant to set a foundation for an artificial intelligence-based economy that China can control and profit from. Mutung’u derided African governments for being so beholden to development that their leaders keep missing the forest for the trees. “We seem to be caught in this big race. We have yet to define for ourselves what we want from this new economy.”

The failure to define what Africa wants from the data-driven economy and an obsession with basic infrastructure development projects is taking the continent through what feels like another Berlin scramble, Mutung’u told me, referring to the period between the 19th and early 20th centuries that saw European powers increase their stake in Africa from around 10% to about 90%.

“Everybody wants to claim a part of Africa,” she said. “If it wasn’t the Chinese, there would be somebody else trying to take charge of resources.” Mutung’u was alluding to China’s strategy of financing African infrastructure projects in exchange for the continent’s natural resources.

Nairobi was the first city in Africa to deploy Huawei’s Safe City system. Since then, cities in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and a dozen other countries across the continent have followed suit. All this has drawn scrutiny from rights groups who see the company as a conduit in the exportation of China’s authoritarian surveillance practices. 

Indeed, Nairobi’s vast web of networked CCTV cameras offers little in the way of transparency or accountability, and experts like Mutung’u say the country doesn’t have sufficient data protection laws in place to prevent the abuse of data moving through surveillance systems. When the surveillance system was put in place in 2014, the country had no data protection laws. Kenya’s Personal Data Protection Act came into force in 2019, but the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has yet to fully implement and enforce the law.

In a critique of what he described at the time as a “massive new spying system,” human rights lawyer and digital rights expert Ephraim Kenyanito argued that the government and Safaricom would be “operating this powerful new surveillance network effectively without checks and balances.” A few years later, in 2017, Privacy International raised concerns about the risks of capturing and storing all this data without clear policies on how that data should be treated or protected.

There was good reason to worry. In January 2018, an investigation by the French newspaper Le Monde revealed that there had been a data breach at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa following a hacking incident. Every night for five years, between 2012 and 2017, data downloaded from AU servers was sent to servers located in China. The Le Monde investigation alleged the involvement of the Chinese government, which denied the accusation. In March 2023, another massive cyber attack at AU headquarters left employees without access to the internet and their work emails for weeks.

The most recent incident brought to the fore growing concerns among local experts and advocacy groups about the surveillance of African leaders as Chinese construction companies continue to win contracts to build sensitive African government offices, and Chinese tech companies continue to supply our telecommunication and surveillance infrastructure. But if these fears have had any effect on agreements between the powers that be, it is not evident.

As the cameras on the streets of Nairobi continue to flash, researchers continue to ponder how, if at all, digital technologies are being used in the approach to security, coexistence and surveillance in the capital city.

The Edgelands Institute report found little evidence linking the adoption of surveillance technology and a decrease in crime in Kenya. It did find that a driving factor in rising crime rates was unemployment. For people under 35, the unemployment rate has almost doubled since 2015 and now hovers at 13.5%.

In a 2022 survey by Kenya’s National Crime Research Centre, a majority of respondents identified community policing as the most effective method of crime reduction. Only 4.2% of respondents identified the use of technology such as CCTV cameras as an effective method.

And the system has meanwhile raised concerns among privacy-conscious members of society regarding potential infringement upon the right to privacy for Kenyans and the technical capabilities of these technologies, including AI facial recognition. The secrecy often surrounding this surveillance, the Edgelands Institute report notes, complicates trust between citizens and the state.

It may be some time yet before the lights and the cameras lead to action.

The post In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns appeared first on Coda Story.

The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It’s one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what’s happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they’re using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let’s deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you’re liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as “self-victimization” — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It’s just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don’t have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

The post The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

“I was very afraid,” Ashraf said. “My kids were crying.”

Since May 29, there had been unrest in Purola. The local chapter of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several other right wing Hindu nationalist groups, had staged a rally in which they demanded that local Muslims leave town before a major Hindu council meeting scheduled for June 15. On June 5, Ashraf’s clothing shop, like the shops of other Muslim traders, was covered with posters that warned “all Love Jihadis” should leave Purola or face dire consequences. They were signed by a Hindu supremacist group called the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land.

The rally in Purola was the culmination of anti-Muslim anger and agitation that had been building for a month. Earlier in May, two men, one Muslim and one Hindu, were reportedly seen leaving town with a teenage Hindu girl. Local Hindu leaders aided by the local media described it as a case of “love jihad,” a reference to the conspiracy theory popular among India’s Hindu nationalist right wing that Muslim men are seeking to marry and convert Hindu women to Islam. Public outrage began to boil over. The men were soon arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, but her uncle later stated that she had gone willingly with the men and that the charges were a fabrication.

It mattered little. Hindu organizations rallied to protest what they claimed was a spreading of love jihad in the region, whipping up the frenzy that had kept Ashraf’s family up at night, fearing for their safety.

What is happening in Uttarakhand offers a glimpse into the consequences of the systematic hate campaigns directed at Muslims in the nine years since Narendra Modi became prime minister. Hindu nationalists believe that the Hindu-first ideology of the government means they have the support necessary to make the dream of transforming India into a Hindu rather than secular nation a reality. Muslims make up about 14% of the Indian population, with another 5% of the Indian population represented by other religious minorities including Christians. In a majoritarian Hindu India, all of these minorities, well over 250 million people, would live as second-class citizens. But it is Muslims who have the most to fear.

Not long after the events in Purola, Modi would go on a highly publicized state visit to the United States. “Two great nations, two great friends and two great powers,” toasted President Joe Biden at the state dinner. The only discordant note was struck at a press conference — a rarity for Modi who has never answered a direct question at a press conference in India since he became prime minister in 2014. But in Washington, standing alongside Biden, Modi agreed to answer one question from a U.S. journalist. The Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui was picked. “What steps are you and your government willing to take,” she asked Modi, “to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?”

In his answer, Modi insisted that democracy was in the DNA of India, just as it was in the U.S. For daring to ask the question, Siddiqui was trolled for days, the victim of the sort of internet pile-on that has become a familiar tactic of the governing BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters. In the end, a White House spokesperson, John Kirby, denounced the harassment as “antithetical to the principles of democracy.”

Modi has received warm, enthusiastic welcomes everywhere from Sydney and Paris to Washington. In every country he visits, Modi talks up India as a beacon of democracy, plurality and religious tolerance. But as India prepares for elections in 2024, and Modi expects to return to office for a third consecutive five-year term, the country is teetering between its constitutional commitment to secular democracy and the BJP’s ideological commitment to its vision of India as a Hindu nation.   
In a sharply worded critique of Modi’s state visit to the U.S., author Arundhati Roy, writing in The New York Times, noted that the State Department and the White House “would have known plenty about the man for whom they were rolling out the red carpet.” They might, she wrote, “also have known that at the same time they were feting Mr. Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in northern India.”

Roy was referring to the right wing Hindu rallies in Uttarakhand. On May 29, a thousand people marched across Purola, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — a phrase once used as a greeting between observant Hindus that has in the recent past become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists. During the rally, the storefronts of Muslim-run shops were defaced and property was damaged. The police, walking alongside the mob, did nothing to stop the destruction. Several local BJP leaders and office-bearers participated in the march. A police official later told us that the rally had been permitted by the local administration and the town’s markets were officially shut down to allow for the demonstrations.

As the marchers advanced through the town’s narrow lanes, Ashraf said they intentionally passed by his home. His family, one of the oldest and most well-established Muslim families in Purola, has run a clothing shop in Purola for generations. Ashraf was born in the town and his father moved to Purola more than 40 years ago. 

“They came to my gate and hurled abuse,” he said. “Drive away the love jihadis,” the crowd screamed. “Drive away the Muslims.” 

Among the slogans was a particularly chilling one: “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye.” They wanted an Uttarakhand free of Muslims, they said in Hindi. A call, effectively, for ethnic cleansing. 

Ashraf’s three young children watched the demonstration from their window. “My 9-year-old,” he told us, “asked, ‘Papa, have you done something wrong?’”

Forty Muslim families fled Purola, a little under 10% of its population of 2,500 people. Ashraf’s was one of two families who decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where will I go?”

The campaign in Purola spread quickly to other parts of the state. On June 3, a large rally took place in Barkot, another small mountain town in Uttarakhand, about an hour’s drive from Purola. Thousands marched through the town’s streets and neighborhoods as a loudspeaker played Hindu nationalist songs. “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega” — Every House Will Fly the Hindu Flag, Lord Ram’s Kingdom Is Coming. 

Muslim shopkeepers in the town’s market, like the Hindu shopkeepers, had pulled their shutters down for the day, anticipating trouble at the rally. As the mob passed by the shops, they marked each Muslim-run shop with a large black X. The town’s Muslim residents estimate that at least 43 shops were singled out with black crosses. Videos taken at the rally, shared with us, showed the mob attacking the marked-up Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd. The police stood by and watched. 

One Muslim shopkeeper, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described arriving at his shop the next day and seeing the large black cross. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.”

We spoke to dozens of people who identify with and are members of Hindu nationalist parties, ranging from Modi’s BJP to fringe, far-right militant groups such as the Bajrang Dal, analogous in some ways to the Proud Boys. Again and again, we were told that just as “Muslims have Mecca and Christians have the Vatican,” Hindus need their own holy land. Uttarakhand, home to a number of important sites of pilgrimage, is, in this narrative, the natural home for such a project —if only, the state could rid itself of Muslims, or at the very least monitor and restrict their movement and forbid future settlement. Nearly 1.5 million Muslims currently live in Uttarakhand, about 14% of the state’s entire population, which exactly reflects the proportion nationally. 

Hindu nationalists told us how they are working to create and propagate this purely Hindu holy land. Their tactics include public rallies with open hate speech, village-level meetings and door-to-door campaigns. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are essential parts of their modus operandi. These were tools, they said, to “awaken” and “unite” Hindus. 

Their attempts to portray Muslims as outsiders in Uttarakhand dovetails with a larger national narrative that Hindus alone are the original and rightful inhabitants of India. The BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, argues that India is indisputably a “Hindu rashtra,” a Hindu nation, nevermind what the Indian constitution might say.

With a population of 11.5 million, Uttarakhand stretches across the green Himalayan foothills. It is a prime tourist destination known for its imposing mountains, cascading white rivers and stone-lined creeks. It is home to four key Hindu pilgrimage sites — the sources of two holy rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna; and Kedarnath and Badrinath, two temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu respectively. Together, these four sites, high up in rugged mountain terrain, form a religious travel circuit known as the Chota Char Dham. According to state government figures, over 4 million pilgrims visited these sites in 2022 alone. Downhill, Haridwar, a town on the banks of the Ganges, is of such spiritual significance that Hinduism’s many seers, sages and priests make it their home. For Hindus in north India, Uttarakhand is the center of 4,000 years of tradition.

The state of Uttarakhand is also one of India’s newest — formed in November 2000, carved out of Uttar Pradesh, a huge, densely populated north Indian state. Its creation was the result of a long socio-political movement demanding a separate hill state with greater autonomy and rights for its many Indigenous peoples, who form just under 3% of the state’s population and are divided into five major tribal groups. These groups are protected by the Indian constitution, and their culture and beliefs are distinct from mainstream Hindu practice. But over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to better represent its Indigenous population to one molded and marketed primarily as “Dev Bhoomi,” a sacred land for Hindus. 

Since becoming prime minister, Modi has made at least six trips to the state’s key pilgrimage sites, each time amidst much hype and publicity. In May 2019, in the final stages of the month-long general election, Modi spent a day being photographed meditating in a remote mountain cave, less than a mile from the Kedarnath shrine. Images were beamed around the country of Modi wrapped in a saffron shawl, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged atop a single wooden bed. The symbolism was not lost on Hindus — the mountains and caves of Uttarakhand are believed to be the abode of the powerful, ascetic Shiva, who is often depicted in deep meditation on a mountain peak. 

Like other Muslims in Purola, Zahid Malik, who is a BJP official, was also forced to leave his home. We met him in the plains, in the town of Vikasnagar, to where he had fled. He said Hindus had threatened to set his clothing shop on fire. “If I, the BJP’s district head, face this,” he told us, “imagine what was happening to Muslims without my connections. For Hindus, all of us are jihadis.” 

Malik emphasized that Muslims have lived for generations in the region and participated in the creation of Uttarakhand. “We have been here since before the state was made,” Malik told us. “We have protested. I myself have carried flags and my people have gone on hunger strikes demanding the creation of this state, and today we are being kicked out from here like you shoo away flies from milk.”

For Malik, the irony is that it is members of his own party who want people like him out of Uttarakhand. 

Ajendra Ajay is a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, an influential post in a state dominated by the pilgrimage economy. “In the mountain regions, locals are migrating out,” he told us, “but the population of a certain community is increasing.” He means Muslims, though he offered no numbers to back his claims. Nationally, while the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of other groups, including Hindus, it is also dropping fast. But the supposed threat of Muslims trying to effect demographic change in India through population growth is a standard Hindu nationalist trope. 

“Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land, its special religious and cultural character, should be maintained,” Ajay said. His solution to maintaining interreligious harmony is to draw stricter boundaries around “our religious sites” and to enforce “some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus into these areas.”

On our way to Purola, the thin road snaking around sharp mountain bends, we stopped at another hill town by the Yamuna river. Naugaon is a settlement of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom are rice and potato farmers. The town’s center has a small strip of shops that sell clothes, sweets and medicines. In another era, it might have been possible to imagine a tiny, remote spot like this being disconnected from the divisive politics of the cities. But social media and smartphones mean Naugaon is no longer immune. While technology has bridged some divides, it has exacerbated others.

News of the public rallies in Purola in which Hindu supremacists demanded that Muslims either leave or be driven out spread quickly. In Naugaon, a new WhatsApp group was created. The group’s name, translated from Hindi, was “Hinduism is our identity.” By the end of June, it had 849 members. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in the Naugaon market, was among the participants. “People are becoming more radicalized,” he said approvingly, as he scrolled through posts on the group.

People we met in Naugaon told us there had already been a campaign in 2018 to drive Muslims away from this tiny rural outpost. “We chased them out of town,” they told us.

Sumit Rawat, a farmer in Nuagaon, described what happened. According to him, a young Hindu girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker and was rescued by passersby who heard her cries for help. (We were not able to independently corroborate Rawat’s claims.) He told us that Hindus marched in protest at the attempted abduction. Their numbers were so great, said Rawat, that the rally stretched a mile down the market street. With little reporting of these incidents in the national press, people in cities are largely unaware of the rage that seethes in India’s rural towns and villages. “We want Muslims here to have no rights,” Rawat told us. “How can we trust any of them?”

In Dehradun, the Uttarakhand capital, we met Darshan Bharti, a self-styled Hindu “saint” and founder of the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land. He was dressed in saffron robes and a string of prayer beads. The room in which we sat had swords hung on the orange walls. His organization was behind the posters pasted on shops in Purola owned by Muslims, ordering them to leave town. 

On June 7, with the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Purola still in the news, Bharti posted a picture on his Facebook page with Kumar, the state’s police chief. Even as Bharti spoke of inciting and committing violence, he dropped the names of several politicians and administrators in both the state and national governments with whom he claimed to be on friendly terms. In the room in which we met, there was a photograph of him with the current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, among a handful of figures believed to wield considerable influence over Modi. 

Bharti also claims to have met Pushkar Singh Dhami, the Uttarakhand chief minister, the highest elected official in the state, on several occasions. He has posted at least two pictures of these meetings on his social media accounts. He described Dhami as his disciple, his man. “All our demands, like dealing with love jihad and land jihad, are being met by the Uttarakhand government,” Bharti said. Land jihad is a right wing conspiracy theory that claims Muslims are illegally encroaching on Hindu land to build Muslim places of worship.  

We met Ujjwal Pandit, a former vice president of the BJP’s youth wing and now a state government functionary, at a government housing complex on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It didn’t take long for him to claim that Muslims were part of a conspiracy to take over Uttarakhand through demographic force. In Uttarakhand, he said, guests were welcome but they had to know how to behave.
Pandit claimed, as have BJP leaders at state and national levels, that no Muslims had been forced to leave Purola, that those who left had fled on their own accord. As the red sun set behind us into the Ganges, he said quietly, “This is a holy land of saints. Sinners won’t survive here.”

The post The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land appeared first on Coda Story.

Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his “heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens.”

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin’s foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

This is the command center of Smart Aqkol, a pilot study in digitized urban infrastructure for Kazakhstan. When I visited, Andrey Kirpichnikov, the deputy director of Smart Aqkol, welcomed me inside. Donning a black Fila tracksuit and sneakers, the middle-aged Aqkol native scanned his face at a console that bore the logo for Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer. A turnstyle gave a green glow of approval and opened, allowing us to walk through. 

“All of our staff can access the building using their unique face IDs,” Kirpichnikov told me.

He led me into a room with a large monitor displaying a schematic of the village. The data inputs and connected elements that make up Smart Aqkol draw on everything from solar panels and gas meters to GPS trackers on public service vehicles and surveillance cameras, he explained. Analysts at the command center report their findings to the mayor’s office, highlighting data on energy use, school attendance rates and evidence for police investigations. 

“I see a huge future in what we’re doing here,” Kirpichnikov told me, gesturing at a heat map of the village on the big screen. “Our analytics keep improving and they are only going to get better as we expand the number of sensory inputs.”

“We’re trying to make life better, more efficient and safer,” he explained. “Who would be opposed to such a project?”

Smart Aqkol presents an experimental vision of Kazakhstan’s economic prospects and its technocratic leadership’s governing ambitions. In January 2019, when then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke at the project’s launch, he waxed about a future in which public officials could use networked municipal systems to run Kazakhstan “like a company.” The smart city model is appealing for leaders of the oil-rich nation, which has struggled to modernize its economy and shed its reputation for rampant government corruption. But analysts I spoke with say it also marks a turn toward Chinese-style public surveillance systems. Amid the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan’s engagement with China has deepened as a way to hedge against dependence on Russia, its former colonial patron.

Kazakhstan’s smart city initiatives aren’t starting from a digital zero. The country has made strides in digitizing public services, and now ranks second among countries of the former Soviet Union in the United Nations’ e-governance development index. (Estonia is number one.) The capital Astana also has established itself as a regional hub for fintech innovation. 

And it’s not only government officials who want these systems. “There is a lot of domestic demand, not just from the state but also from Kazakhstan’s middle class,” said Erica Marat, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University. There’s an allure about smart city systems, which in China and other Asian cities are thought to have improved living standards and reduced crime.

They also hold some promise of increasing transparency around the work of public officials. “The government hopes that digital platforms can overcome cases of petty corruption,” said Oyuna Baldakova, a technology researcher at King’s College London. This would be a welcome shift for Kazakhstan, which currently ranks 101st out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

But the pilot in Aqkol doesn’t quite align with these grander ambitions, at least not yet. Back at the command center, Kirpichnikov described how Aqkol saw a drop in violent crime and alcohol-related offenses after the system’s debut. But in a town of this size, where crime rates rarely exceed single digits, these kinds of shifts don’t say a whole lot. 

As if to better prove the point, the team showed me videos of crime dramatizations that they recorded using the Smart Aqkol surveillance camera system. In the first video, one man lifted another off the ground in what was meant to mimic a violent assault, but looked much more like the iconic scene where Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey overhead at the end of “Dirty Dancing.” Another featured a man brandishing a Kalashnikov in one hand, while using the other to hold his cellphone to his ear. In each case, brightly colored circles and arrows appeared on the screen, highlighting “evidence” of wrongdoing that the cameras captured, like the lift and the Kalashnikov.

Kirpichnikov then led me into Smart Aqkol’s “situation room,” where 14 analysts sat facing a giant LED screen while they tracked various signals around town. Contrary to the high-stakes energy that one might expect in a smart city situation room, the atmosphere here felt more like that of a local pub, with the analysts trading gossip about neighbors as they watched them walk by on monitors for street-level cameras.

Kirpichnikov explained that residents can connect their gas meters to their bank accounts and set up automatic gas payments. This aspect of Smart Aqkol has been a boon for the village. Residents I spoke with praised the new payment system — for decades, the only option was to stand in line to pay for their bills, an exercise that could easily take half a day’s time.

And there was more. To highlight the benefits of Smart Aqkol’s analytics work, Kirpichnikov told me about recent finding: “We were able to determine that school attendance is lower among children from poorly insulated households.” He pointed to a gradation of purple squares showing variance in heating levels across the village. “We could improve school grades, health and the living standards of residents just by updating our old heating systems,” he said.

Kirpichnikov might be right, but step away from the clean digital interface and any Aqkol resident could tell you that poor insulation is a serious problem in the apartment blocks where most people live, especially in winter when temperatures dip below freezing most nights. Broken windows covered with only a thin sheet of cellophane are a common sight. 

Walking around Aqkol, I was struck by the absence of paved roads and infrastructure beyond the village’s main street. Some street lamps work, but others don’t. And the public Wi-Fi that the village prides itself on offering only appeared to function near government buildings.

The village also has two so-called warm bus shelters — enclosed spaces with heat lamps to shelter waiting passengers during the harsh Kazakh winters. The stops are supposed to have Wi-Fi, charging ports for phones and single-channel TVs. When I passed by one of the shelters, I met an elderly Aqkol resident named Vera. “All of these things are gone,” she told me, waving her hand at evidence of vandalism. “Now all that’s left is the camera at the back.”

“I don’t know why we need all this nonsense here when we barely have roads and running water,” she added with a sigh. “Technology doesn’t make better people.”

Vera isn’t alone in her critique. Smart Aqkol has brought the village an elaborate overlay of digitization, but it’s plain to see that Aqkol still lags far behind modern Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty when it comes to basic infrastructure. A local resident named Lyubov Gnativa runs a YouTube channel where she talks about Aqkol’s lack of public services and officials’ failures to address these needs. The local government has filed police reports against Gnativa over the years, accusing her of misleading the public.

And a recent documentary made by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — titled “I Love My Town, But There’s Nothing Smart About It” — corroborates many of Gnativa’s observations and includes interviews with with dozens of locals drawing attention to water issues and the lack of insulation in many of the village’s homes.

But some residents say they are grateful for how the system has contributed to public safety. Surveillance cameras now monitor the village’s main thoroughfare from lampposts, as well as inside public schools, hospitals and municipal buildings.

“These cameras change the way people behave and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kirpichnikov. He told a story about a local woman who was recently harassed on a public bench, noting that this kind of interaction would often escalate in the past. “The woman pointed at the camera and the man looked up, got scared and began to walk away.”

A middle-aged schoolteacher named Irina told me she feels much safer since the project was implemented in 2019. “I have to walk through a public park at night and it can be intimidating because a lot of young men gather there,” she said. “After the cameras were installed they never troubled me again.”

The Smart Aqkol project was the result of a deal between Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s national telecommunications company; the Eurasian Resources Group, a state-backed mining company; and Tengri Lab, a tech startup based in Astana. But the hardware came through an agreement under China’s Digital Silk Road initiative, which seeks to wire the world in a way that tends to reflect China’s priorities when it comes to public infrastructure and social control. Smart Aqkol uses surveillance cameras made by Chinese firms Dahua and Hikvision, which in China have been used — and touted, even — for their ability to track “suspicious” people and groups. Both companies are sanctioned by the U.S. due to their involvement in surveilling and aiding in the repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in western China.

Critics are wary of these kinds of systems in Kazakhstan, where skepticism of China’s intentions in Central Asia has been growing. The country is home to a large Uyghur diaspora of more than 300,000 people, many of whom have deep ties to Xinjiang, where both ethnic Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs have been systematically targeted and placed in “re-education” camps. Protests across Kazakhstan in response to China’s mass internment campaign have forced the government to negotiate the release of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs from China, but state authorities have walked this line carefully, in an effort to continue expanding economic ties with Beijing.

Although Kazakhstan requires people to get state permission if they want to hold a protest — and permission is regularly denied — demonstrations nevertheless have become increasingly common in Kazakhstan since 2018. With Chinese-made surveillance tech in hand, it’s become easier than ever for Kazakh authorities to pinpoint unauthorized concentrations of people. Hikvision announced in December 2022 that its software is used by Chinese police to set up “alarms” that are triggered when cameras detect “unlawful gatherings” in public spaces. The company also has claimed that its cameras can detect ethnic minorities based on their unique facial features.

Marat of U.S. National Defense University noted the broader challenges posed by surveillance tech. “We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic how quickly such tech can be adapted to other purposes such as enforcing lockdowns and tracing people’s whereabouts.”

“Such technology could easily be used against protest leaders too,” she added.

In January 2022, instability triggered by rising energy prices resulted in the government issuing “shoot to kill” orders against protesters — more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing clashes. The human rights news and advocacy outlet Bitter Winter wrote at the time that China had sent a video analytics team to Kazakhstan to use cameras it had supplied to identify and arrest protesters. Anonymous sources in their report alleged that the facial profiles of slain protesters were later compared with the facial data of individuals who appeared in surveillance video footage of riots, in an effort to justify government killings of “terrorists.”

With security forming a central promise of the smart city model, broad public surveillance is all but guaranteed. The head of Tengri Lab, the company leading the development of Smart Aqkol, has said in past interviews that school security was a key motivation behind the company’s decision to spearhead the use of artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

“After the high-profile incident in Kerch, we added the ability to automatically detect weapons,” he said, referencing a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea that left more than 20 people dead in October 2018. In that same speech he made an additional claim: “All video cameras in the city automatically detect massive clusters of people,” a veiled reference to the potential for this technology to be used against protesters.

Soon, there will be more smart city systems across Kazakhstan. Smart Aqkol and Kazakhtelecom have signed memorandums of understanding with Almaty, home to almost 2 million people, and Karaganda, with half a million, to develop similar systems. “The mayor of Karaganda was impressed by our technology and capabilities, but he was mainly interested in the surveillance cameras,” Kirpichnikov told me.

As to the question of whether these systems share data with Chinese officials, “we simply don’t have a clear answer on who has the data and how it is used,” Marat told me. “We can’t say definitively whether China has access but we know its companies are extremely dependent on the Chinese state.”

When I reached out to Tengri Lab to ask whether there are concerns regarding the safety of private data connected to the project, the company declined to comment.

What does all this mean for Aqkol? The village is so small that the faces captured on camera are rarely those of strangers. The analysts told me they recognize most of the town’s 13,000 inhabitants between them. I asked whether this makes people uncomfortable, knowing their neighbors are watching them at all times.

Danir, a born-and-raised Aqkol analyst in the situation room, told me he doesn’t believe the platform will be abused. “All my friends and family know I am watching from this room and keeping them safe,” he said. “I don’t think anybody feels threatened — we are their friends, their neighbors.”

“People fear what they don’t understand and people complain about the cameras until they need them,” said Kirpichnikov. “There was a woman once who spoke publicly against the project but after we returned her lost handbag — after we spotted it on a camera — she started to see the benefits of what we are building here.”

After a few years with the system up and running, “it’s normal,” said Danir with a shrug. “Nobody has complained to me.”

For regular people, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. And that may be OK, at least for now. As Irina, the young school teacher whom I met on the village’s main thoroughfare, put it: “I don’t really know what a smart city is, but I like living here. They say we’re safer and my bills are lower than they used to be, and I’m happy.”

The post The smart city where everybody knows your name appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were meeting at offices owned by the Yesevi Alperenler Association, a nationalist Islamist organization run by Mican, who also leads a coalition of conservative Turkish nongovernmental organizations. Dressed in a blue suit and shirt, Mican fidgeted with his pen as we talked. The 41-year-old was affable, but was eager to get to his next task.

“There was a belly dancer in front of a mosque, there were naked statues where you can see their body details, and symbols of satanism,” Mican told me. He was describing the works featured in an exhibition at ArtIstanbul Feshane, a cultural center in Istanbul’s Eyup neighborhood. In Mican’s view, the show was disrespectful of Islam and Turkey, and an attempt at spreading LGBTQ “propaganda.” “The owners of the artwork and the organizer of the exhibition will be punished,” he said.

Titled “Starting from the Middle,” the exhibition featured a diverse set of works by 300 artists and was organized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, whose president is Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the CHP, the secular left-wing party that represents Turkey’s main opposition party. Pieces included photographs of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 against the government’s creeping authoritarianism; a video that explores a massacre of Alevi Kurds by the Turkish army in the 1930s; and a text accompanying an installation that talks about the artist’s struggles as an LGBTQ person in Turkey.

Although the show had support from CHP-aligned public officials, other elements in Istanbul’s city government saw it differently. Last month, prosecutors in Istanbul launched an investigation into the organizers of the exhibition, which ended of its own volition in late September, on allegations of “fomenting enmity and hatred among the public or insulting them” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code. The law has frequently been used to criminalize blasphemy or retaliate against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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But the case against the art show didn’t exactly start with Turkish authorities. A few days after the opening, a headline in the state-aligned newspaper Sabah read: “Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality supports LGBT perversion! Outraged exhibition in Feshane: It should be closed immediately.”

The next day, Mican led a group protest outside the exhibition with people chanting, “We don’t want perversion in our neighborhood.” ArtIstanbul Feshane is situated in the Eyup neighborhood of Istanbul, a symbolic area to Muslims in Turkey as it is home to the burial site of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad.

In early July, after they attended one of Mican’s speeches about the event, a group of men tried to break through a line of police officers in an effort to vandalize the space. Mican says he did not encourage the violence, but also said that if the exhibition had not been held in such a religious area, the reaction would have been more muted.

“The police struggled to hold the people when I was reading the statement, they had to get 10 times more security,” Mican said. “If they hadn’t done it in the Eyup neighborhood we wouldn’t see that much reaction, so many people wouldn’t even know about it. I didn’t encourage the people to do that, but the people were angry and they gave a reaction.”

And now prosecutors have launched their investigation, following a criminal complaint against the exhibition, filed by Mican’s organization. 

None of this came as a shock to the show’s curators or to the artists involved. “Every time we want to open an exhibition, especially in a conservative area, we open it with the fear of being attacked,” said Okyanus Cagri Camci, a transgender woman and interdisciplinary artist whose work was featured in the show.

For artists like Camci, the prosecution’s investigation is part of an increasingly familiar pattern, in which criticism from conservative groups and the state-aligned media are followed by legal repercussions. 

Figures like Mican appear to have increased their influence on prominent political leaders in Turkey, drawing them down a more conservative path than they walked in the past. Grappling with a steep economic downturn and public frustration with the government’s slow response to the devastating earthquakes that hit southeast Turkey in February, Erdogan and his allies have seized the opportunity to make the LGBTQ community a scapegoat, using similar language to a burgeoning global anti-LGBTQ rights movement.

This newer shade of Erdogan and his AKP party was on full display during presidential and parliamentary elections in May, when Erdogan ramped up attacks on the LGBTQ community to rally support among his right-wing and religiously conservative base. “The family institution of this nation is strong, there will be no LGBT people in this nation,” said Erdogan at a rally in April. Erdogan and his allies are also seeking to turn rhetoric into legislative changes, starting with an amendment to the constitution that would define marriage as solely between a man and woman. 

Suleyman Soylu, deputy leader of the AKP and a former interior minister, made the erroneous claim to a group of NGOs in April that the LGBTQ community “also includes the marriage of animals and humans.” He accused the community of being under the control of Europe and the U.S., who “want a single type of human model where they follow a single universal religion, are genderless, and no one is in the family structure.” The tone and messaging in these speeches echoed the language of a swelling global movement that claims Western liberals are staging an assault on traditional family structures by imposing homosexuality and transgenderism on societies across the world. This movement has anchors in Russia, Hungary and the U.S. and is gaining a foothold in countries around the world, including, it seems, in Turkey. Mican confirmed to me that his organization has connections with groups in Russia, Hungary and Serbia — another place where LGBTQ people are facing increased hostility.

It wasn’t always like this under Erdogan, who has been president of Turkey since 2014, and served as prime minister for more than a decade prior to that. Mican lamented that as recently as two years ago, Erdogan was unwilling to talk about LGBTQ issues in the same way as he is now.

Kubra Uzun, a singer and DJ who is non-binary, has observed the same evolution, albeit from a different vantage point. Life under Erdogan was not always as bad as it is now, they said. But Uzun told me that in recent years, they’ve felt increasingly unsafe. “If I’m not playing or if I’m not having anything outside to do, like if I’m not shopping, I don’t go out anymore,” they said. “I mostly stay at home and read and listen to music.”

When we met at their home in late September, there was a small group of friends sitting in their kitchen. One was a trans woman who Uzun was hosting after she fled her home city in part because she feared for her safety. The community refers to Uzun as a mother, but they do not like being called that. “I am non-binary and mothering feels binary to me,” they told me.

Lying on the sofa and puffing on a cigarette, Uzun recounted a “golden period” in Turkey in the early 2000s, when there were fewer restrictions. 

“It was like you were in London clubbing,” they said. “You can walk freely, you can wear whatever you want.” But those times are long gone.

Although the tides began to turn following an economic recession in 2009, it was after the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that people like Uzun saw a real shift. At that time, what began as a vocal rejection of plans to build a shopping mall in a public park in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square ultimately drew hundreds of thousands of Turkish people to take a public stand against what they saw as the AKP’s erosion of secularism in Turkey and the dismantling of key democratic institutions, namely press freedom. It became a seminal moment in deepening the divide between liberal secular Turks and Islamist conservative supporters of Erdogan. 

Three years later, Turkey witnessed a failed coup attempt that was carried out by military personnel, but which Erdogan has long insisted was orchestrated by the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. In the ensuing period, Erdogan launched a major clampdown on Turkish society, imprisoning thousands of critics of the government that he and his allies accused of being stooges of the West seeking to undermine Turkey. By 2020, nearly 100,000 people had been jailed pending trial for alleged links to the Gulen movement. From Kurds to followers of Gulen and now, increasingly, gay and trans people, Erdogan has framed a variety of groups as enemies of the state, allowing him to cast out critics while boosting his popularity among his political base. He has passed sweeping legislative and constitutional changes that curtail freedom of expression, cementing his hold on power.

Along the way, Mican and other leading conservative figures have pushed politicians to harden their stance on the issue. Prior to Istanbul’s Pride march in 2016, Mican told state officials he and his organization would intervene if the event went ahead. Mican was later fined for making threatening remarks, but the march was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office after they cited security concerns and the need to protect public order.

For the ninth consecutive year, the Istanbul pride march was banned in June, with the AKP governor of Istanbul saying it posed a threat to family institutions. Police clad in riot gear detained 113 people who marched despite the restrictions.

The more Erdogan focuses on homosexuality and transgenderism, the more other parties have started putting anti-LGBTQ policies into their agendas. Mican himself underlined this point in our conversation. The Vatan Party, a nationalist secular party that has supported Erdogan, in the past used protection from the threat of terrorism as a central tenet of its platform. Now it has shifted to the so-called threat of the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Even the CHP and other opposition parties thus far have remained quiet on discrimination against the LGBTQ community, particularly around the election period, said Suay Ergin-Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international organization that promotes freedom of expression. When I asked Uzun about whether they would have felt better if the CHP had won instead of Erdogan, they responded, “Same shit, different color.”

Uzun fears that Turkey is turning into Russia, where the state frequently equates homosexuality with pedophilia and has passed a series of anti-LGBTQ laws over the past decade. Erdogan further solidified his position on gay and trans rights on the global stage in 2021, when he pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty opposing violence against women, after religious conservative groups criticized the law, arguing that it was degrading family values and wrongly advocating for the rights of the LGBTQ community. The convention has come under attack from leaders in several Eastern European countries, who argue that the document’s definition of gender is a way to dismantle traditional distinctions between men and women and a way to “normalize” homosexuality.

Another state that has notably hit the brakes on accession to the convention is Hungary. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also tried to push through a ban on the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. The law is currently being challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state. 

Populist leaders have positioned the family as something sacrosanct and used the idea that it is being destroyed by Western liberals as a way into power, said Wendy Via, president of the U.S.-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Europe have framed LGBTQ rights as an agenda, personifying the concept as an enemy entity that is taking over. But Via argues the real entity that is taking over is a vast, well-resourced network of organizations with anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman agendas.

In Turkey, that network consists of dozens of conservative NGOs, who on September 17 held a large rally called the “Big Family Gathering” in the Eminonu area of Istanbul, for which Mican was one of the key organizers.

At the gathering, conservatively dressed mothers and their children held signs that read “Stop Pedophilia” and milled about while speaker after speaker decried Western imperialism before a crowd estimated by organizers to number in the thousands. Part way through the rally, Alexander Dugin, the far-right Russian political philosopher with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared on a large screen and gave the crowd a speech about the need to fight global liberalism. It is “the fight of all normal people,” he told the crowd, “to save the normal relations between sexes, to save the family, to save the dignity of the human being.”

At the end of the rally, sitting on a park bench as people bustled around us clearing away equipment, I spoke to two men in their 20s, Kayahan Cetin and Yunus Emre Ozgun. They lead Turkiye Genclik Birligi, a youth organization closely associated with the pro-Russia Vatan Party. Cetin spoke in Turkish and Ozgun helped interpret into English, sometimes chiming in himself.

The pair were proud to note their connections with Dugin and Putin’s United Russia party. Cetin and his group are associated with Vatan, but they also identify as Kemalists, a secular ideology that seeks to follow the principles of the Turkish Republic’s founder Kemal Ataturk. This means they may not always see eye to eye with the Islamist right who dominate the anti-LGBTQ movement in Turkey. But they share the common belief that LGBTQ rights present an existential threat to Turkish society and that they are an agenda being imposed by the West.

Cetin is trying to push legislation that would crack down on what they call “LGBTQ propaganda and institutions” and pointed to similar laws on the books in Russia, Hungary and China. Cetin says he has no problem with people’s individual “choice” to be gay, but wants parliament to place restrictions on organizations who are using their platforms to support LGBTQ rights through the media, including streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus. These kinds of cultural interventions are already underway — Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council in July fined Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Mubi among other streaming platforms, accusing them of depicting homosexual relationships that are “contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure.”

With local elections in March 2024, the LGBTQ community fears Erdogan’s attacks on them will be amplified further. The government is seeking to implement laws that will ban content seen to promote LGBTQ identities in schools, a blow to younger gay and transgender people already struggling in the current environment. Last month the national education minister, Yusuf Tekin, said that authorities must fight homosexuality and that a new optional course called “The Family in Turkish Society” had been added to the school curriculum.

Two days after our first meeting, I met Uzun again at a club in the heart of Istanbul’s tourist district. There was a power cut soon after I arrived. When the lights came back on again, Uzun was quick to get back on the dancefloor. The room filled with a red glow as queer Istanbulites danced freely, the jubilant scene in stark contrast to the seismic shifts occurring beyond the walls beaded in sweat.

At the end of the night I had to wait my turn to say goodbye to Uzun. I asked them one final question about why Istanbul’s queer scene seemed to be thriving despite all the restrictions and threats against it. Uzun shouted over the music, “Text me your question.” They texted me their response the next morning: “RESISTANCE.”

But this isn’t the whole story. It is hard to resist when you fear being attacked on any street corner. Uzun told me that over the course of the past year, more than 50 of their friends had left Turkey. And they may be next. If their visa application is accepted, Uzun will leave for London.

The post How the global anti-LGBTQ movement found a home in Turkey appeared first on Coda Story.

In a dramatic operation that began as the sun rose on Delhi on October 3, police raided the homes of journalists across the city. Police seized laptops and mobile phones, and interrogated reporters about stories they had written and any money they might have received from foreign bank accounts. The journalists targeted by the police work for NewsClick, a small but influential website founded in 2009 by Prabir Purkayastha, an engineer by training who is also a prominent advocate for left-wing causes and ideas. 

At the time of publication, Purkayastha and a senior NewsClick executive had been held in judicial custody for 10 days. The allegations they face are classified under India’s 2019 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, legislation that gives the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity. 

Purkayastha, a journalist of considerable standing, is effectively being likened to a terrorist.

The day after the raids on the more than 40 NewsClick employees and contributors, a meeting was called at the Press Club of India. Among the many writers and journalists in attendance was the internationally celebrated, Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy. A longtime critic of Indian government policies, regardless of the political party in power, Roy told me that India was in “an especially dangerous moment.” 

She argued that the Modi government was deliberately conflating terrorism and journalism, that they were cracking down on what they described as “intellectual terrorism and narrative terrorism.” It has to do, she told me, “with changing the very nature of the Indian constitution and the very understanding of checks and balances.” She said the targeting of NewsClick, which has about four million YouTube subscribers, was intended as a warning against digital publications.

The Indian government had targeted NewsClick before, investigating what it said were illegal sources of foreign funding from China. For these latest raids, the catalyst appears to have been, at least in part, an investigation published in The New York Times in August that connected NewsClick to Neville Roy Singham, an Indian-American tech billionaire who, the story alleges, has funded the spread of Chinese propaganda through a “tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies.”

In the lengthy article, The New York Times reporters made only brief mention of NewsClick, claiming that the site “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” They also quoted a phrase from a video that NewsClick published in 2019 about the 70th anniversary of the 1949 revolution which ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China: “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes.” But it appeared to be enough for the Delhi police to seize equipment from and intimidate even junior staff members, cartoonists and freelance contributors to the site. 

Angered by the unintended consequences of The New York Times report, a knot of protestors gathered outside its New York offices near Times Square a couple of days after the raids. Kavita Krishnan, an author and self-described Marxist feminist, wrote on the Indian news and commentary website Scroll that she had warned The New York Times reporters who had contacted her for comment on the Singham investigation that their glancing reference to NewsClick would give the Modi government ammunition to harass Indian journalists. 

The “NYT needs to hold its own practices up to scrutiny and ask itself if, in this case, they have allowed themselves to become a tool for authoritarian propaganda and criminalization of journalism in India,” she wrote. 

While The New York Times stood by its story, a Times spokesperson told Scroll that they “would find it deeply troubling and unacceptable if any government were to use our reporting as an excuse to silence journalists.”

On October 10, a Delhi court ordered that Purkayastha and NewsClick’s human resources head Amit Chakraborty be held in judicial custody for 10 days, even as their lawyers insisted that there was no evidence that NewsClick had “received any funding or instructions from China or Chinese entities.”

India’s difficult relationship with China is at a particularly low ebb, with tens of thousands of troops amassed along their disputed borders and diplomats and journalists on both sides frequently expelled. From a Western point of view, India is also being positioned as a strategically vital counterweight to Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific region. Though diplomatic tensions are high, India’s trade with China has — until a 0.9% drop in the first half of this year — flourished, reaching a record $136 billion last year. 

While the Indian government continues to court Chinese investment, it is suspicious of the Chinese smartphone industry — which controls about 70% of India’s smartphone market — and of any foreign stake in Indian media groups. The mainstream Indian media is increasingly controlled by corporate titans close to Modi. For instance, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, who control vast conglomerates that touch on everything from cooking oil and fashion to petroleum oil and infrastructure and who have at various points in the last year been two of the 10 richest men in the world, also own major news networks. 

By March this year, Adani completed his hostile takeover of NDTV, widely considered to have been India’s last major mainstream news network to consistently hold the Modi government to account. Independent journalists and organizations such as NewsClick that report critically on the government are now out of necessity building their own audiences on platforms such as YouTube. Cutting off these organizations’ access to funds, particularly from foreign sources, helps tighten the Modi government’s grip on India’s extensive if poorly funded media. 

Siddharth Varadarajan, a founder of the Indian news website The Wire, said that the actions taken against NewsClick are “an attack on an independent media organization at a time when many media organizations are singing the tune of the government.” It was not a surprise, he told me, that Delhi police were asking NewsClick journalists about their reporting on the farmers’ protests in India between August 2020 and December 2021. “While the government says it is investigating a crime on the level of terrorism, the main goal is to delegitimize and criminalize certain topics and lines of inquiry.”

The allegations against NewsClick’s Purkayastha and Chakraborty are classified under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, controversial legislation intended to give the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity. Under the provisions of the act, passed in 2019, the government has the power to designate individuals as terrorists before they are convicted by a court of law. It is a piece of legislation that, as United Nations special rapporteurs noted in a letter to the Indian government, undermines India’s signed commitments to uphold international human rights.

Legislative changes introduced by the Modi government include a new data protection law and a proposed Digital India Act, both of which give it untrammeled access to communications and private data. These laws also formalize its authority to demand information from multinational tech companies — India already leads the world in seeking to block verified journalists from posting content on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — and even shut down the internet, something that it has done for days and even months on end in states across the country during periods of unrest. 

India’s willingness to clamp down on freedom of information is reflected in its steep slide down the annual World Press Freedom Index. Currently ranked 161 out of 180 countries, India has slipped by 20 places since 2014 when Modi became prime minister. “The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy,’” observes Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the ranking. 

Atul Chaurasia, the managing editor at the Indian digital news platform Newslaundry, told me that “all independent and critical journalists feel genuine fear that tomorrow the government may go after them.” In the wake of the NewsClick raids, Chaurasia described the Indian government as the “father of hypocrisy,” an acerbic reference to the Modi government’s boasts about India’s democratic credentials when world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, arrived in Delhi in September for the G20 summit.

When Biden and Modi held a bilateral meeting in Delhi before the summit began, Reuters reported that “the U.S. press corps was sequestered in a van, out of eyesight of the two leaders — an unusual situation for the reporters and photographers who follow the U.S. President at home and around the world to witness and record his public appearances.” Modi himself, despite being the elected leader of a democracy for nearly 10 years, has never answered questions in a press conference in India. 

Instead, Modi addresses the nation once a month on a radio broadcast titled “Mann ki baat,” meaning “words from the heart.” And he very occasionally gives seemingly scripted interviews to friendly journalists and fawning movie stars. 

As for unfriendly journalists, Purkayastha is currently in judicial custody while a variety of Indian investigative agencies are on what Arundhati Roy called a “fishing expedition,” rooting through journalists’ phones and NewsClick’s finances and tax filings in search of evidence of wrongdoing. Varadarajan of the Wire told me that the message being sent to readers and viewers of NewsClick and other sites intent on holding the Modi government to account was clear: “Don’t trust their content and don’t even think about giving them money because they are raising money for anti-national activities.”

Since my conversation with Roy at the Press Club of India on October 4, it has been reported that she faces the possibility of arrest. 

Delhi’s lieutenant governor — an official appointed by the government and considered the constitutional, if unelected, head of the Indian capital — cleared the way for her to be prosecuted for stating in 2010 that in her opinion, Kashmir, the site of long-running territorial conflict between India and Pakistan, has “never been an integral part of India.” A police complaint was filed 13 years ago, but Indian regulations require state authorities to sign off on prosecutions involving crimes such as hate speech and sedition. Now they have.

Apar Gupta, a lawyer, writer and advocate for digital rights, describes the Modi government’s eagerness to use the law and law enforcement agencies against its critics as “creating a climate of threat and fear.” Young people especially, he told me, have to have “extremely high levels of motivation to follow their principles because practicing journalism now comes with the acute threat of prosecution, of censorship, of trolling, and of adverse reputational and social impacts.”

A young NewsClick reporter, requesting anonymity, told me that “with every knock at the door, I feel like they’ve finally come for me.” They described the paranoia that had gripped their parents: “My father now only contacts me on Signal because it’s end-to-end encrypted. I could never have imagined any of this.”

Following the NewsClick raids, Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American Hindu supremacist ideologue, appeared on a major Indian news network to openly call for the Modi government to target even more independent journalists. Malhotra singled out the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a website founded by P. Sainath, an award-winning journalist committed to foregrounding the perspectives of rural and marginalized people. 

On what grounds does Malhotra suggest that the Modi government go after Sainath and PARI? The site, Malhotra told the newscaster, who does not interrupt him, encourages young villagers, Dalits (a caste once referred to as “untouchable”), Muslims and other minorities to “tell their story of dissent and grievances against the nation state.” 

Criticism of the nation and its authorities, in other words, is akin to sowing division. Whether it’s an opinion given in 2010 or a reference to Chinese funding within an article from a newspaper loathed by supporters of Modi and his Hindu nationalist ideology, the Indian government will apparently use any excuse to silence its critics. 

The post Indian journalists are being treated like terrorists for doing their jobs appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens if the workers actually win?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops appeared first on Coda Story.

The “unhelpful invocation” of the term “sunburn,” she argues, makes “an unconscious mind feel vulnerable and fearful of the sun.” She welcomes this color, insinuating that you should too.

Decades of research have shown that sunburns are strong predictors of melanoma. Roughly 8,000 Americans are expected to die this year from the most serious type of skin cancer, melanoma, according to the American Cancer Society. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, and melanoma rates doubled between 1982 and 2011.

Still, Sell is not alone in the anti-sunscreen camp. Even Stanford University neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, host of the wildly successful podcast “Huberman Lab,” claims that some sunscreens have molecules that can be found in neurons 10 years after application. No evidence is offered. Elsewhere, he has said he’s “as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma.” Huberman’s podcasts are frequently ranked among the most popular in the U.S.; he has millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram and has been the subject of admiring magazine profiles.

Spreading misinformation and even conspiracy theories has become commonplace in wellness spaces across social media. In a politically charged atmosphere addicted to brokering in binaries, good science is too often sacrificed at the altar of partisan opinion.

Pushing back against medical advancements from as far back as the 19th century has become a rallying cry for a growing number of today’s conspiritualist contrarians. Fear mongering about vaccinations is not the only entry point to this strange world of conspiracy and misinformation, in which predominantly white, middle- or upper-middle-class wellness influencers propagate and sell ideas and products with little to no oversight. In this world, humans are godlike creatures immune to viruses and cancers, while those who fall victim to illness and therefore the twisted machinations of society are but collateral damage.

In May 2020, I launched the “Conspirituality” podcast with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker. Veteran yoga instructors deeply embedded in the wellness industry, we’ve long been skeptical about many health claims proffered by wellness influencers and the cult-like behaviors that appear in so-called spiritual communities. And we’ve always been attuned to the monetization of health misinformation. 

Conspirituality is a portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality,” coined in 2011 by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in an academic paper. They observed a strange synthesis between “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).” The pandemic provided fertile ground for conspirituality, moving it from the fringe to the mainstream.

Specifically, we launched the podcast after the release of the 2020 pseudo-documentary “Plandemic.” Filmmaker Mikki Willis, who had moderate success in the Los Angeles wellness and yoga scene a decade or so ago, found a much larger audience with right-leaning conspiracy theorists — so much so that he was joined by Alex Jones at the red carpet premiere in June this year of the third installment of the “Plandemic” series. Many other former liberals in the wellness space have taken a hard right turn, including comedian and aspiring yogi Russell Brand. Brand now regularly hosts conspiracy theorists in part of what these days appears to be a gambit to deflect against numerous sexual abuse allegations against him made public earlier this month. 

Not all conspiritualists are hard right, though their rhetoric predominantly leans that way. One of America’s most infamous anti-vaxxers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, is attempting to combat President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primaries from the left. Predictably, Kennedy’s health policy roundtable, held on June 27, featured other leading health misinformation spreaders. 

While the anti-vaccination movement began the moment Edward Jenner codified vaccine science, the modern upswell of anti-vax fervor dates back to disbarred physician Andrew Wakefield’s falsified research that purported to link vaccinations to autism in 1998. Hysteria around COVID-19 vaccines began months before a single one hit the market, in large part thanks to misinformation spread by “Plandemic.” And that trend shows no sign of slowing.

Health misinformation is likely as old as consciousness. The learning curve in understanding which plants heal and which kill took millennia without the benefit of controlled environments. While no science is perfect, to deny or disavow the progress we’ve made is absurd. The 19th century was an especially fruitful time, with vaccinations, antibiotics, germ theory and handwashing greatly advancing our biological knowledge.

Germ theory is a foundational tenet of modern science. For centuries, miasma theory was the favored explanation for the Black Plague, cholera and even chlamydia. These diseases were supposedly the result of “bad air,” which the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed originated from rotting organic material and standing water. 

In 1857, English physician John Snow submitted a paper tracing a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a pump in London’s Broad Street. Adoption of sanitary measures was slow and grudging. Civic authorities weren’t interested in the expense of rerouting pipelines.

A few years later, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered a pathology of puerperal fever, though it wasn’t until Robert Koch photographed the anthrax bacterium in 1877 that disease was undeniably linked to bacteria. Medicine was changed.

Contemporary contrarian wellness influencers also trace their antecedents back to the 19th century. While Pasteur won fame — pasteurization remains an important practice for killing microbes — some of his colleagues resisted his findings. French scientist Antoine Béchamp devised the pleomorphic theory of disease: It’s not that bacteria or viruses cause diseases; it’s just that they’re attracted to people already susceptible to those diseases. 

As Pasteur and Koch continued their research on microorganisms, Béchamp faded into obscurity. But his “terrain theory” lingered. It was the harbinger of the infamous “law of attraction,” the belief in the power of manifestation, of effectively imagining wealth, health and success into being. It’s the school of thought that, repackaged, made books like Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” (2006) a global bestseller. 

Extended to physical wellbeing, it means that if your mindset is “correct,” disease has no pathway into your body. This ideology is behind the many products and courses sold by wellness influencers. In 2017, pseudoscience clearing house GreenMedInfo published an article in which the writer described Pasteur as the “original scammer” who enabled “the pharmaceutical industry to dominate and tyrannically rule modern Western medicine.” If you can sell the public on a pathology of disease, the writer argued, you can sell a cure. 

He championed a return to nature as the real way to protect against disease: “Detoxing and seeking fresh whole foods and adding the proper supplements offer more disease protection from germs than all the vaccines in the world.”

Terrain theory has no greater proponent than Zach Bush, a physician who rightfully argues that the environment plays a role in health outcomes. But then he goes on to say that since there are billions of viruses, it must really be unhealthy tissues making the victim susceptible to disease — Antoine Béchamp’s exact argument. Bush claims that viruses are nature’s way of upgrading our genes, and any ailment must be due to a bodily imbalance.

This form of magical thinking is spread across his many web pages. Instead of conducting actual research on COVID-19 as an internist, Bush offered statements like this to his million-plus followers: “May this respiratory virus that now shares space and time with us teach us of the grave mistakes we have made in disconnecting from our nature and warring against the foundation of the microbiome. If we choose to learn from, rather than fear, this virus, it can reveal the source of our chronic disease epidemics that are the real threat to our species.”

In April, Bush told an Irish podcast that if he were to take a single course of antibiotics, his chances of “major depression over the next 12 months goes up by 24 percent.” Two courses, and he claimed that he would be 45% more likely to contract anxiety disorders and 52% more likely to suffer depression. The podcast’s hosts made a public apology, though Bush continues to be able to spread his misinformation. Inevitably, Bush sells a range of supplements “key to our overall health and wellbeing.” 

Watch what they say, then watch what they sell. If an influencer tells you Western medicine has failed you, be sure a product pitch is coming. Supplements are the main vehicle to monetization for wellness influencers since they don’t have to be clinically tested and little regulated, existing in a medical gray zone. Consumers mostly ignore the fine print on the back label because the promises on the front are so much more appealing.

Like Bush, influencers such as Jessica Peatross sell supplements and protocols to her well over 300,000 Instagram followers while consistently invoking Béchamp. “Terrain theory matters,” Peatross wrote in a March 2023 post. “When your body’s symphony isn’t in tune, or you are out of homeostasis, you are much more vulnerable to pathogenic invasion, cancer or autoimmunity.”

Last year, Peatross surrendered her medical license in California due to vaccine requirements. Now she sells subscription health plans. When signing up for her email list, you get a link to download her “Vaccine Protection & Detox Protocol.” 

All proponents of terrain theory put the onus of disease on the individual. They demand we each fend off the toxic effects of Big Pharma, Big Ag and all the other Bigs in existence through supplementation, meditation, breathwork, psychedelic rituals in Bali, or simply by thinking positively, thinking the “right way,” a learned skill for which they always have a course. 

Among the more notorious pushers of terrain theory doctrine was German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer, the inventor of Germanic New Medicine. In 1995, already discredited and stopped from practicing medicine in Germany, he diagnosed a 6-year-old girl as having “conflicts.” As a result, her parents refused to treat the 9-pound cancerous tumor in her abdomen. An Austrian court stripped them of custody, so that she could receive the chemotherapy that saved her life. 

Hamer, who died in 2017, believed medicine was controlled by Jewish doctors who used treatments like chemotherapy on non-Jewish patients. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pseudoscience claims and conspiracies are rooted in antisemitism. Hamer also promoted the idea of microchips in swine flu vaccines and denied the existence of AIDS.

Germanic New Medicine is based on the “five biological laws,” which claim that all severe disease is due to a shock event. If the victim doesn’t immediately solve their conflict, the disease progresses in the brain. Microbes actually enter the body to heal it, provided the victim addresses the psychological conflict that led to the proliferation of the disease state. The victim heals after confronting the conflict, which Hamer thought nature had intentionally placed there to teach some sort of lesson. Death only occurs when you don’t face the trauma of the shock event. So that’s on you.

Disease exists to teach a lesson. A sunburn is light nutrition. It’s no wonder that Melissa Sell is one of the most vocal revivalists of Hamer’s theories, which she has renamed “Germanic Healing Knowledge.” She uses social media to share thoughts like: “You are not ‘sick’. Your body is adapting to help you through a difficult situation. When you resolve that situation your body will go through a period of restoration and then return to homeostasis.” 

Sadly, this is par for the course. With my podcast colleagues, Matthew and Julian, our review of conspiritualists found that the notion of an “ideal” body or way of being is widespread. As we document in our book, modern yoga was in part influenced by the famed 19th- and early 20th-century German strongman Eugen Sandow, whose adopted first name is a truncation of “eugenics.” 

Yoga originated in India, yet Sandow’s techniques found an audience among Indians in the late 19th century. Feeling emasculated and humiliated by British colonialists, many Indians appreciated Sandow’s overt masculinity and mimicked his strength techniques in a set of yoga postures that are now widely used. Indians craved bodily strength as a metaphor for overcoming colonial rule. Sandow came at it from the other side. He used his physique to further an explicitly racist world view. There was a reason why the strong white race dominated the world, he seemed to be saying — just watch me flex my biceps.

Wellness influencers similarly obsess over a strong and purified body. They assign similar causes to all ailments, which usually include poor diet, a lack of exercise, modern medicine and an inability to escape toxic stress. Sometimes, however, the influencer assigns physical attributes to the perfected body, which is why anti-trans bigotry and fat-shaming run rampant in wellness spaces. The ideal body, which can only be accomplished by resisting the evil mechanisms of allopathic (Western) medicine, is the true goal of nature’s design. Strangely, a number of these same influencers take no issue with cosmetic surgeries, botox or steroids, yet scream at followers for using deodorant or applying sunscreen. 

So what is the “right” sort of existence that lets the victim recover and achieve homeostasis, a state of internal balance consistent with Hamer’s five biological laws? According to Sell, as she explained on X, formerly known as Twitter, “The way to feel better is to think better thoughts.” Naturally, she has a number of online courses available to help you think better thoughts, ranging in price from $111 to $2,700.

In 1810, German physician Samuel Hahnemann came up with the term “allopathy” as a strawman to his concept of homeopathy. Whereas homeopathy means “like cures like,” allopathy initially meant “opposite cures like.” In the allopathic system, for instance, you take an antidiarrheal to treat diarrhea; in homeopathy, you take a laxative. Well, the “essence” of a laxative. 

Allopathy has come to mean anything involving Western medicine, while homeopathy is considered a natural system for healing (even though ground-up pieces of the Berlin Wall are used in one homeopathic remedy, and I don’t recall concrete ever forming without human intervention).

Hahnemann left his role as a physician in 1784 due to barbaric practices like bloodletting. He supported his family by translating medical textbooks. Inspired by Scottish physician William Cullen’s book on malaria, he slathered cinchona — a quinine-containing bark — all over his body to induce malaria-like symptoms. Hahnemann likely developed an inflammatory reaction, though he credited them as “malaria-like symptoms.” He then believed himself to be inoculated against malaria. This experience became the basis of homeopathy.

Instead of ingesting (or slathering on) small quantities of an offending agent, Hahnemann removed the active ingredient altogether from his distillations. He believed that less substance equals higher potency, and kept following that trail: Most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient.

Take Oscillococcinum, one of France’s top-selling medicines, which rakes in $20 million in America every year. The process of potentization — homeopathy’s dilution protocol — begins with the heart and liver of the Muscovy duck. Technicians mix 1 part duck heart and liver with 100 parts sugar in water. Then the process is repeated 200 times, which means any trace of the duck is long gone. The late family physician Harriet Hall pointed out that you’d need a container 30 times the size of the earth just to find one duck molecule. Yet it’s marketed to reduce flu symptoms. 

When a spokesperson for Boiron, the manufacturer of Oscillococcinum, was asked if their product was safe, she replied: “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”

Despite an absence of active ingredients, homeopathic products are often mistaken for herbal remedies, according to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with the Office for Science and Society at McGill University. In his article, Jarry cites a Health Canada survey that shows only 5% of Canadians understand what homeopathy entails. Pharmacies and grocery stores confuse customers by shelving these products next to herbal remedies and other medicines.

When I asked Jarry about the danger of consumer confusion, he said, “Homeopathic products are based on sympathetic magic principles and are not supported by our understanding of biology, chemistry and physics. So when they’re sold alongside actual pharmaceutical drugs, it creates a false equivalence in the mind of the shopper. It bumps homeopathy up to the level of medicine and turns its products into pharmaceutical chameleons.”

Homeopathy suppliers want it both ways: They claim their products are superior to pharmaceuticals while pushing to have them shelved next to actual drugs to obscure their difference. The name of their 100-year-old trade group? The American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists.

Jarry has helped lead the charge for proper labeling of homeopathic products in Canada. Over the border, in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission began regulating homeopathic products in 2016, though these efforts seem to have had little impact. The global homeopathic market is expected to reach nearly $20 billion by 2030.

Jarry thinks regulatory agencies must work harder to make clear that homeopathy is not based on science. But everyone passes the buck. “The pharmacists who own drug stores in which homeopathy is sold,” Jarry told me, “say that it’s up to the chain they work for to tell them to stop selling these products.” Meanwhile, “the chains say the products are approved by Health Canada, whose representatives say it’s up to pharmacists to use clinical judgment when recommending them or not.”

While the risk of injury is low given that most homeopathic products contain no active ingredient, there’s another danger lurking beneath the surface — people choosing to use these products instead of seeking out interventions that can actually help them. 

Avoidance of “allopathic” medicine is common in wellness spaces, the belief being that natural cures are better than anything concocted in a laboratory. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to mental health.

We’ve included a chapter called “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong” in our book to acknowledge the fact that many people turn to natural remedies and wellness practices with good intentions. The American for-profit healthcare system can be a nightmare. We likely all have anecdotes of when the system failed us. Just as we all have likely benefited from Western medicine. It often depends on where your attention is most drawn. 

Like many wellness professionals, I lost a lot of income when the pandemic struck. All of the group fitness and yoga classes that I ran were gone overnight. My wife, who worked in hospitality at the time, lost her job. We were fortunate to have enough savings to get by, along with whatever income I pulled together as a freelance writer and by livestreaming donation yoga classes on YouTube. Our story isn’t unique, and it makes sense that wellness professionals turned to whatever revenue they could find. 

I wasn’t surprised to see so many supplements and online courses being marketed in the first months of the pandemic. But the sheer number of mental health interventions sold by wellness influencers was astounding — and concerning. Everyone seemed to have a hot take on mental health, and many leaned on the appeal to nature fallacy: You can heal depression with a supplement or a meditation practice or by cultivating the right mindset. 

“Holistic psychiatrist” Kelly Brogan, who is clinically trained but took a right turn even before the pandemic began, offers tapering protocols from antidepressants — even though none exist — to paying clients. True, pharmaceutical companies that know how to get patients onto their medications have never bothered to figure out how to get them off. But beware the influencer who writes, as Brogan does, “Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling. It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.”

Jonathan N. Stea is a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary. A prolific science communicator, he doesn’t mince words when I ask him about wellness influencers who claim that natural remedies are better than antidepressants. 

“I’m tired of wellness influencers unethically opining on topics they’re unqualified to understand,” he said. “Notwithstanding the appeal to nature fallacy with respect to the idea that there are ‘better natural remedies’ than evidence-based psychiatric medications, it’s irresponsible to make such claims in the absence of scientific evidence.”

The paradox of the wellness industry is that you supposedly thrive when you connect with nature, yet you also need endless products and services. Self-professed metaphysics teacher Luke Storey, for example, sells over 200 products that offer the “most cutting-edge natural healing” that jive with his love for “consciousness expanding technologies.” How much healing does one really need? How contracted is consciousness that it requires so much expansion? 

It’s one thing to enjoy spiritual tchotchkes, but telling people these accouterments are necessary for salvation is disingenuous.

The problem is that people don’t necessarily feel better with these protocols or products. The way the wellness grift is framed — the notion that your thoughts dictate your reality — results in the adherent feeling worse if the therapeutic doesn’t work. They believe it’s a moral failing because charismatic influencers place the burden on them: “You didn’t do x or y hard enough.” So back on the treadmill they go.

Tragically, Stea said some people suspend antidepressant usage to chase magical-sounding cures. “Abrupt cessation of these medications can result in awful withdrawal symptoms,” he told me. “The other risk is that forgoing medications for unsupported or pseudoscientific treatments carry their own potential for harm, either directly due to the treatment, or indirectly by possibly worsening an untreated mental disorder.”

People in pain are vulnerable. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation. At least accountability exists in regulated spaces. Pseudoscientific sermons on TikTok have no such oversight.

Ideally, science tests claims with the best available means at the time. If better tools emerge, findings are updated. Conspiritualists are regressing in this regard. Their romanticization of 19th-century pseudoscience is a ruse that helps them sell products and services. 

In many ways, we’re victims of our own success. The advancements of the 19th century in public health, hygiene and drugs are part of the reason most of us are here today. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, we’re all afloat in the hard-won progress of centuries of trial and error. 

We’re also not the same animals that gave birth to our line 100,000 years ago or even 1,000 years ago. For better and worse, we’ve drastically changed our relationship to our environment, just as we have drastically changed the environment. Glamorizing who we were neglects what we’ve become and how we got here. 

Michelle Wong, a science educator and cosmetic chemist based in Australia, told me that when the likes of Melissa Sell make their anti-sunscreen pitches, they rely on the appeal to nature fallacy. “There’s the idea that humans evolved with sun exposure,” she said, “so our skin should be able to handle it. But skin cancers usually develop after reproductive age (which is all that evolution helps us with). On top of that, migration and leisure, like beach holidays, means we get very different sun exposure compared to how we evolved.” As the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus once observed, what heals in small doses kills in large.

The sun, in other words, isn’t to be feared, but we would do well to respect its power. And to not overestimate our own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Toward the end of the meal, Osman got up and said to Virta, “Go ahead and finish up, I’ll go vape outside.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. 

When Virta came out of the restaurant a few minutes later, she saw Osman talking to two men. Initially, she thought they were talking about parking spots. Then one of them grabbed his arm and started dragging him into a car.

Virta tried to get to Osman but the car sped away, leaving her standing on the side of the road with his family.

Virta, who is originally from Finland, knew that Osman had been making YouTube videos about human rights violations in Egypt, but it was a part of his life she knew little about. Osman left Egypt in 2004 after becoming frustrated with the corruption he witnessed within the government while serving as an air force captain. He is now considered a deserter. Two years after leaving his home country, he set up a YouTube channel, @SherifOsmanClub, where he routinely criticized the Egyptian government. Today, the channel has more than 40,000 subscribers. 

A few weeks before traveling to Dubai, Osman had posted a video calling for Egyptians to capitalize on COP27, the United Nations climate conference due to be held that month in Sharm El-Sheikh, to protest the state’s dismal human rights record and the rising cost of living.

In the car, Osman’s mind was spinning. When they approached a turn on the highway that leads to the international airport he began to panic, fearful that he was on a one-way trip to his grave.

“I have seen very, very, very high-ranking Egyptians that have lived in Dubai and opened their mouths with a different narrative on Egypt, and they were actually put on a flight and shipped out to Egypt,” he said, referring to former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was deported from the UAE just days after he announced he was running for president in 2017.

Osman soon realized that he was being taken to the Dubai police headquarters.

He was escorted through the back entrance of the building. Osman waited for hours while officers moved frantically around the room, giving him no information. When he asked for clarity, they told him to wait and promised to bring him coffee.

“They actually made me coffee,” he told me, laughing. Osman’s sardonic sense of humor comes out in full force when he recounts the ordeal.

Osman was eventually taken from police headquarters to the Dubai Central Prison where he was made to wait while the authorities decided if he would be deported to Egypt. On November 15, Charles McClellan, an officer in the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, told Virta that Interpol had issued a red notice and extradition case number for Osman.

A few days later, Virta sent an email to Radha Stirling in Windsor, a town in southeast England, pleading for assistance. “Sherif’s deportation to Egypt is a death penalty without a fair trial!” Virta wrote.

Stirling, the CEO of an organization called Detained in Dubai, was no stranger to these kinds of cases. Knowing that the United Arab Emirates could extradite a U.S. citizen to Egypt in the dark of night, Stirling acted quickly. She contacted the American embassy to offer advice, tried to rally support from U.S. politicians and sought media coverage of the case.

And then something strange happened. McClellan told Stirling that he’d gotten new information: According to the UAE, Osman was detained on a “red notice” issued by a less well-known organization: the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Emirati official speaking to The Guardian confirmed the same.

When Osman learned it was not Interpol but rather the Arab Interior Ministers Council pursuing the case, his heart sank. “That’s when I was like, I’m fucked,” he told me.

A body made up of the interior ministries of all 22 Arab League states, the Arab Interior Ministers Council was established in the 1980s to strengthen cooperation between Arab states on internal security and combating crime. In recent years, it has played an increasingly visible role in extradition cases between Arab countries, particularly in cases that appear to be politically-motivated.

Experts I spoke with say that the shift has occurred as some of the Council’s member states, including the UAE and Egypt, have become notorious for abusing Interpol’s system. Although it is often portrayed in the media as an international police force with armed agents and the power to investigate crimes, Interpol is best understood as an electronic bulletin board where states can post “wanted” notices and other information about suspected criminals. Arab League states are increasingly posting red notices via Interpol in an effort to target political opponents, despite Interpol rules expressly prohibiting the practice.

Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks tensions surrounding Interpol may be driving increased cooperation within the Council, especially in politically-motivated cases. “My suspicion is that this Arab Ministers Council is basically a reaction to the fact that Interpol is maybe not quite as compliant or as lax as they used to be,” Bromund told me.

It was around 2018, shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born U.S. resident, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, that Abdelrahman Ayyash first heard of the Council. Ayyash is a case manager at the Freedom Initiative, which advocates for people wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ayyash told me that over the past year he has identified at least nine cases in which the Council was likely involved in the extradition or arrest of political dissidents, with some of them dating as far back as 2016. In one case, Kuwait extradited eight Egyptians to Cairo in 2019 following accusations that they were part of a terrorist cell with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayyash suspects their arrest and deportation stemmed from a notice from the Arab Interior Ministers Council.

In a case highlighted by other advocates from 2019, Morocco extradited activist Hassan al-Rabea to Saudi Arabia after he was arrested on a warrant that The New Arab reported was issued by the Council. Hassan’s brother Munir is wanted by the Saudi government due to his involvement in the country’s 2011 protest movement. Their older brother, Ali, is already in a Saudi prison, where he is facing the death penalty. Another of al-Rabea’s brothers, Ahmed, told me over the phone from Canada that he is now extremely careful about where he travels: “For me, like all my brothers, it is extremely scary to go to any Arab country,” he said.

Agreements enabling more extradition cooperation among Arab states and other nearby countries also are being adopted widely. In 2020, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain signed an agreement with Israel known as the Abraham Accords, which established official relations between the signatories. Since then, Morocco and the UAE in particular have increased their use of repressive technologies developed by Israeli companies when targeting dissidents abroad. Last year, 24% of Israel’s defense exports were to Arab Accords signatories. In 2021, Egypt signed an agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Sudan after years of tensions, including a border dispute. 

Members of the Arab Interior Ministers Council are signatories to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation and the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which prohibit extraditions if the crime is of a “political nature.”

Three U.N. special rapporteurs in June wrote a letter to the Arab League stating that red notices issued by the Council do not comply with member states’ commitments under international law, such as non-refoulement, non-discrimination, due diligence and fair trial.

A few weeks after Osman’s arrest, Virta returned to the U.S. for her job. She adjusted her schedule to work different hours, so she could be awake for part of the night working on his release.

Behind bars in Dubai, Osman was struggling to sleep. “The second I opened my eyes my head would go numb, the exact second my eyes opened, I realized I am in deep shit,” he told me. “I can count the days that I had a full night’s sleep on one hand and have left over fingers.”

Virta was certain the UAE was going to extradite him to Egypt. But then, late one night towards the end of December, she got a call.

“I have some good news,” Osman told her. He was going to be released.

Osman was taken to the airport five days later, but it was not until the plane door closed that he allowed himself to believe he was actually going home. When the door clicked shut, he passed out from exhaustion. Osman had spent 46 days in detention.

This past July, Osman filed a lawsuit at the U.S District Court in Washington, D.C. against Interpol and its major general Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, the UAE and its deputy prime minister, Egypt and its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a UAE prosecutor and four other unnamed individuals. The complaint accuses them of international terrorism for their “kidnapping, abduction, imprisonment, prosecution, and threatened extradition” of Osman.

The lawsuit accuses Interpol of colluding to shift the justification for Osman’s detention from an Interpol red notice to one issued by the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Interpol spokesperson said “there is no indication that a notice or diffusion ever existed in Interpol’s databases,” but Osman’s lawyers say otherwise.

Osman hopes that the case will push Interpol to agree to reforms, such as improving its system for reviewing cases in order to determine whether they are politically motivated. If his lawyers can prove that what the Arab Interior Ministers Council did was an act of terrorism, Osman expects this will make it much harder for Arab states to justify their participation in its functions. “Funding it would be very hard at that point,” he said, as it would effectively mean that the Arab league was funding a terrorist organization. One of Osman’s lawyers also is seeking an agreement from the UAE to stop accepting red notices for U.S. citizens by way of the Council.

Osman and Virta now live in a small city in Massachusetts, where they largely keep to themselves. “The speed limit is 35 miles and people don’t say hi to each other. It’s New England, so everybody’s an asshole,” said Osman. “There’s even a word for it: ‘Massholes.’”

He sees a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Osman says it is helping him understand what feels like a “new self.”

Osman is trying to launch a cannabis cultivation business, which missed out on some vital funding when investors heard about his arrest. He stayed quiet for six months after his release, but recently went back to posting about Egypt’s human rights record online. 

“I’m back again, talking and tearing down the president and his regime and military regime without mercy,” he said. “I got the news that they are worried in Egypt about my case.”

CORRECTION (09/29/2023): An earlier version of this article described Jamal Khashoggi as a U.S. citizen. It has been corrected to reflect that Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.

The post For Arab dissidents, the walls are closing in appeared first on Coda Story.

Desta and his colleagues did their best to treat them, but by the time many arrived at the hospital, it was too late. “We tried to save so many lives,” he recalled, “but in most cases we were not able to.”

These were Desta’s early years as a physician, when one-third of all maternal deaths in Ethiopia could be linked to unsafe abortions. Thousands of women died each year. Under pressure to reduce the maternal mortality rate, the Ethiopian parliament passed a groundbreaking law loosening abortion restrictions for a variety of health conditions in 2005. The policy brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of deaths from unsafe abortions, and the bleak and overwhelmed hospital units that Desta remembers so vividly eventually shut down. The closure of the wards was “a success,” he explained. “I am a living witness that abortion care saves lives.”

But lately, Desta, who is now the Ethiopia program director for the global reproductive health nonprofit Ipas, worries that the dark days of those wards could become a part of Ethiopia’s reality again. That’s because the country’s abortion law is on shaky ground, thanks to the efforts of an emboldened anti-abortion movement buoyed by a court ruling halfway around the world: The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2022 decision to limit abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Dobbs ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion — marked an anomaly in the trajectory of global abortion policy making over the last 30 years, which has trended sharply toward liberalization. 

Since the ruling, there has been a wave of abortion-related policy shifts around the world. In France, lawmakers used Dobbs as the basis for a legislative proposal that would enshrine abortion rights in the French constitution. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion earlier this month, despite the country’s deep Catholic roots. There is mounting support for policies to protect legal access to the procedure in Argentina and Colombia.

Anti-abortion groups, meanwhile, see Dobbs as a signal that it may not be so difficult to roll back the gains made by abortion advocates. “The opposition has tasted blood in the water,” Lori Adelman, the acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, told me. In India, anti-abortion activists took to the streets of Delhi in the months after Dobbs, calling on the Indian government to repeal its 1971 law legalizing abortion. In Italy, pro-choice gynecologists are facing a fresh wave of harassment by an emboldened anti-abortion movement riding a post-Roe high. 

But nowhere has the anti-abortion movement been more energized by Roe’s overturning than on the African continent. While abortion is restricted across much of the region, those countries that have expanded access are now seeing a backlash.

In Kenya, opponents are already drawing on Roe’s reversal to challenge abortion policy. According to the international reproductive rights advocacy organization Fos Feminista, which recently published a report about Dobbs’ global impact, anti-abortion groups highlighted Dobbs as a reason to appeal a 2022 constitutional court decision in Kenya expanding abortion access. The ruling, which came out before Roe was overturned, affirmed abortion as a fundamental right in Kenya’s constitution, citing international jurisprudence on abortion, including Roe v. Wade. But opposition groups latched onto Dobbs as a reason to challenge the judgment, arguing that the judge who decided the case relied on “bad law” from the U.S. The decision is now stayed, pending appeal. “The fact that it was entertained is really worrisome to many that are working on the ground in Kenya,” said Kemi Akinfaderin, a global advocacy officer with Fos Feminista.

In Nigeria, the governor of the state of Lagos suspended policy guidelines about abortion care for life-threatening health conditions less than a month after Roe was overturned. Abortion opponents seized upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that the governor should follow the ruling’s lead and revoke the provisions. In July 2022, he did. “The Dobbs decision has trickled down to Nigeria, and it’s very disappointing,” said Ijeoma Egwuatu, the communications director for the Nigeria-based reproductive health nonprofit, Generation Initiative for Women and Youth Network. 

For abortion opponents, the U.S. trajectory provides a possible model for reversing abortion gains.

“They are saying, ‘Dobbs is the wind we need behind our sails,’” Akinfaderin told me. “‘If we can do this in the U.S., we can do this anywhere else.’” For abortion advocates, it’s a glaring warning. “For the longest time, Roe has been seen as a gold standard,” Akinfaderin continued. “And so the fact that this can happen in the U.S. is a very clear indication to some in the feminist movement in Africa that it can happen here as well. These gains can be lost over time.”

Akinfaderin, who is based in Togo, believes that abortion opponents have strategically chosen where to focus their attention on the African continent. “They’re not making mistakes,” she explained. “They are targeting big countries, countries with political influence and countries with very strong religious communities.”

Enter Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa after Nigeria and the home to the headquarters of the African Union. The country has a distinctive history and cultural legacy. It is one of just two countries on the continent that successfully resisted colonization. (Liberia is the other.) Ethiopia is also home to a distinct Christian Orthodox tradition dating back to the 4th century. Orthodox Christians are the country’s largest and most influential religious group, making up more than 40% of the population. One-third of the population identifies as Muslim and nearly one-fifth as Protestant. Abortion remains controversial in the country — surveys show the majority of Ethiopians, including Orthodox Christians, oppose the procedure. 

The policy reforms in Ethiopia in 2005 legalized abortion in a variety of circumstances, including if a woman was a victim of rape or incest, if her life is in danger, if she has physical or mental disabilities or if she is a minor and is not ready to have a child. The changes had a dramatic impact. Today, deaths from unsafe abortions make up just 1% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia, compared to over 30% before the law went into effect. 

But Ethiopian reproductive health advocates worry that those advances are now in jeopardy. Over the last year, the country’s anti-abortion movement has coalesced around a concrete goal. “They are targeting the abortion law,” said Abebe Shibru, a longtime reproductive health advocate and the Ethiopia country director for the international health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices. “Now, anti-abortion groups are intensifying their movement and they are targeting policymakers, health providers — anyone who might have a strong stake in sexual reproductive health services.” Because of this momentum, Shibru continued, “this existing abortion law is very vulnerable.”

Much of this organizing has taken place behind the scenes, according to Shibru, as leading anti-abortion figures attempt to influence lawmakers, government officials and the general population. But a few public demonstrations from anti-abortion groups in recent months offer a glimpse into the movement’s goals and direction.

In July, thousands of people took to the streets in the town of Hawassa, Ethiopia, to speak out against abortion and LGBTQ rights. Nearly two dozen churches in the city opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage organized the demonstration, according to local media. Participants carried signs and chanted slogans about fetal rights and explained that the protest was organized to “save the youth” from the “dangers” of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Weeks before the protest, healthcare workers began catching glimpses of vans parked near abortion clinics in Addis Ababa. The cars, emblazoned with the slogan “Praying to end abortion in Ethiopia,” written in Amharic, were spotted repeatedly throughout the city in June, according to Desta, from Ipas. “Whenever a provider sees this car parked next to the clinic, or a woman sees this information when trying to access services from these clinics, they’re embarrassed, they are harassed,” he told me. It’s unclear who was behind this effort, but Desta believes it reflects a more confrontational strategy from the opposition post-Roe. 

“Before the decision, they were not boldly coming out in the media and talking about abortion. But now, they are in the media, on TV  and on social media,” Desta said. “They are very vocal, very organized, and boldly speaking out about abortion in Ethiopia.”

According to Desta and other observers, one group leading the charge to repeal Ethiopia’s abortion law is Family Watch International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that claims to be working to “protect and promote the family as the fundamental unit of society.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The organization’s leader has compared same-sex marriage to drug addiction and argued that the “homosexual agenda is a worldwide attempt to justify behavior that is inherently destructive to both society and to the individual.” 

While headquartered in Arizona, the organization has long worked in Africa and maintains an active presence in Ethiopia with an office in Addis Ababa, according to interviews with several reproductive rights advocates working there. After Roe was overturned, Family Watch wrote on its website that the decision was a “historic victory for life and family.” The organization’s Africa chapter, it added, is “working to stop abortion being pushed abroad.” The group’s Africa director is Seyoum Antonios, a prominent Ethiopian physician who recently railed against “the LGBTQ, abortion, and child sexualization and transgender agenda of the European Union” in an August speech to the African Bar Association. 

As of now, Ethiopia’s law is still standing. The forces jeopardizing its survival may not ultimately succeed in toppling the policy, and the transnational anti-abortion coalition — though energized — still faces an uphill battle if it wants to reverse global trends in abortion policymaking.

But even without a change in the law, the opposition’s efforts already appear to be having tangible impacts on the country’s abortion landscape. Over the last year, Shibru and his colleagues have noticed that some healthcare workers in public clinics have ceased providing abortion services — a likely result of the amplified pressure campaign against them. Shibru told me that providers are facing harassment from “their friends, their families, and their communities.” He added, “​When you go into public facilities, we heard that this facility used to provide safe abortion, but not now. Because we used to get good support, but now no one is encouraging us.” 

Additionally, Shibru said that he and other reproductive health workers have documented an increase in the number of women seeking medical treatment for abortion-related complications over the last year. Fewer clinics offering services could cause women to seek out unsafe alternatives, Shibru explained, and medical care for procedures gone wrong. These scenarios, coupled with the abortion law’s shaky standing, fill Shibru with dread. 

“​​What does it mean if the law is reversed?” he asked. “We are going back 20 years. That means more maternal mortality. Hospitals will be occupied with abortion-related problems.The women in Ethiopia in danger.” Such a scenario, he continued, “will be a big moral crisis.”

The post Roe’s repeal has energized Africa’s anti-abortion movement appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.

More than 300 square miles of land along Greece’s border with Turkey have been devastated by the blaze, which is the worst wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Lightning strikes were suspected to be the cause, but the arrests of 160 people across Greece on charges of arson — 42 for deliberately starting fires and the rest for negligence leading to fires — have heightened local anger.

Speculation that foreigners ignited the fires was also linked to the charred remains of 18 suspected migrants, two of them children, found on August 22. The deceased, sheltering in the forest, appear to have been trapped as gale-force winds spread the blaze with devastating speed. One group was found huddled together, appearing to have clutched each other as the fire claimed their lives. Earlier this month, the Greek authorities said they had rescued a group of 25 migrants who were trapped in the Dadia Forest, where fires blazed for more than two weeks.

A few days after the video began circulating on social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stood in front of parliament to defend his government’s performance in the face of mounting cries of incompetence. 

“It is almost certain,” Mitsotakis claimed, “that the causes were man-made.” He added: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

Mitsotakis didn’t present any evidence to back up his certainty. Indeed, the only thing he conceded he didn’t know was if the fires were caused by negligence or if they were “deliberate.”

Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.  

For decades, migrants have crossed through the forests and the cold, fast-moving Evros River to get from Turkey to Greece. Sometimes, they find themselves in no-man’s land, trapped on islets that appear to be controlled by neither Greece nor Turkey. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that migrants, if they make it over to the Greek riverbank, are sometimes turned over by the authorities to “men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin,” who are tasked with forcing the migrants onto rubber dinghies and leaving them in the middle of the Evros River. From there, the migrants either take shelter on an islet or wade back to the Turkish side where they are also not welcome.

Political scientist Pavlous Roufos, who has written extensively about Greek social movements and the 2010 economic crisis, told me, “There’s a kind of dehumanization of the migrant situation happening in Greece at the moment.” Now a professor at the University of Kassel, in central Germany, Rouflos monitors both the physical violence migrants face and the disinformation being spread online about their responsibility for the wildfires in Evros. 

“What we are seeing online,” Roufos told me, “is just a fraction of what’s happening in these communities. You can multiply those videos by 20 or 30 to get the real picture.”

Local antipathy towards migrants in Evros shows, Roufos suggests, how little has changed since February 2020, when Turkey announced that it would open its western borders for migrants and asylum seekers looking to go to Europe. In what became known as the “Evros Crisis,” Greece responded by shutting its borders, suspending asylum laws and violently arresting and pushing refugees back over the border toward Turkey. Armed citizen groups, similar to those who rounded up migrants in Evros last month, stood shoulder to shoulder with Greek border guards to repel asylum seekers trying to enter Greece.

In September 2020, when fires tore through the Moria camp, a squalid housing unit for 13,000 refugees in a village in the northeastern Greek island of Lesvos, anti-immigrant groups helped police block people from getting to safety in neighboring towns. Six Afghans were convicted on arson charges, though human rights lawyers familiar with the case have argued that the refugees were framed and that their jailing was a matter of political expediency rather than justice.

During both events, there were huge surges of activity in online groups promoting extremist and anti-migrant narratives, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted harmful rhetoric around the incident: They pushed the narrative that refugees deliberately started the Moria fires and were, in some cases, burning their children to elicit sympathy. The accounts also pushed white supremacist campaigns like #TheGreatReplacement, which refers to a conspiracy theory that foreigners are seeking to culturally and demographically replace the white race. 

The researchers wrote that their work “makes clear that the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for mobilizing a transnational network of actors, including far-right extremists and elements of the political right, who often share common audiences and use similar tactics.”

After the German government promised to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers from Moria, German far right groups were also set off, with accounts linked to far right political parties, like the Alternative for Germany, spreading new rounds of hate and disinformation targeting migrants. 

The spread of these narratives has coincided with the rise of the far right in Europe, where populist movements are uniting across borders and merging with previous center-right factions over issues like migration, identity and Islamophobia. Similar to Austria and Italy, Greece is seeing a shift to the right. Three ultranational parties won 12% of the seats in parliament in recent elections, and the ruling conservative New Democracy party has been accused of pandering to extremist agendas to keep poll numbers up.

“The toxic narrative against migrants has been going on for a long time,” Lefteris Papagiannakis, the head of the Greek Refugee Council, told me. “The violence was to be expected as we have already seen it in Lesvos in 2019,” he added, referring to racist attacks against migrants housed on the Greek island. Attacks in the past have targeted not just migrants but also rights activists and NGOs assisting refugees. Lefteris says he and his colleagues are “worried, of course.”

But the wildfires and the damage they have caused have catalyzed a fresh wave of anti-migrant anger. By implying that migrants might be arsonists, Greek politicians, including the prime minister, appear to have the backs of the vigilantes.

The post While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants appeared first on Coda Story.

Lundy thought the ad could educate social media users about the risk factors for breast cancer, but it never saw the light of day. Instead, Instagram rejected it for violating its policies on nudity and sexual activity.

For more than a year, Lundy’s company, Complex Creatures, has struggled to find a home for its content on Instagram. The platform has rejected scores of the company’s advertisements and posts since its account went live in June 2022. Lundy co-founded Complex Creatures with her sister, a breast cancer survivor, to raise awareness about the disease and provide health and wellness products for women undergoing breast cancer treatment. But the content rejections came rolling in as soon as she started posting. It didn’t take long for Lundy to realize that Meta, owner of Instagram, was nixing her content because of its subject matter: the breast. 

“How do you desexualize the breast?” she asked. “It’s so much of what we’re trying to do.” But platforms like Instagram, Lundy said, “don’t want to let us.” In a call over Zoom, she shared some screenshots of her company’s censored content. One was a post about how massages can improve breast health, featuring a photo of a woman’s hands fully covering her breasts. “But they’re allowed to do this,” she sighed, pulling up an advertisement from a men’s health brand for an erectile dysfunction treatment containing an image of a hand clutching an eggplant with the caption: “Get hard.” The censorship, she added, “is an ongoing challenge. We’re talking about breast cancer and breast health.” Access to the right information about the disease and its risk factors, she explained, can be a matter of “life and death.”

The censorship that Lundy routinely confronts on Instagram is part of a deeper history at Meta, which has long faced criticism for censoring material about breasts on Facebook. But it’s not just breast-focused content that’s not getting through. Lundy belongs to a community of nonprofits and startups focused on women’s health that face routine — and often bewildering — censorship across Facebook and Instagram. 

I spoke with representatives from six organizations focused on women’s health care globally, and they told me that while Meta regularly approves advertisements for material that promotes men’s sexuality and sexual pleasure, it regularly blocks them from publishing advertisements and posts about a wide range of health and reproductive services aimed at women, including reproductive health, fertility treatments and breast care. Often, these posts are rejected on the grounds that they violate the company’s advertising policies on promoting sexual pleasure and adult content.

This kind of censorship comes at an existential moment for the U.S.-based reproductive rights community after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — the nearly 50-year-old ruling that legalized abortion across the U.S. — in 2022. As I reported in March 2023, abortion opponents have sought to clamp down on abortion speech online in the post-Roe era, introducing policies in Texas, Iowa, and South Carolina that would prohibit websites from publishing information about abortion. That’s on top of censorship that reproductive rights groups already face when they try to post content about accessing abortion care on platforms like Instagram and Facebook — even in countries where the procedure is legal. 

According to Emma Clark Gratton, a communications officer for the Australia chapter of the international reproductive health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices, the organization is routinely blocked from running ads about abortion services on Facebook, often for violating the company’s advertising policy on social issues, elections, and politics. Abortion is “totally legal” in Australia, Clark Gratton explained, but on Meta’s platforms, it is “still very restricted in terms of what we can post.” The organization’s clinical team in Australia, she added, can advertise for vasectomy services on Facebook, “but they definitely couldn’t do an ad promoting abortion services, which is literally what they do. They’re an abortion provider.”

Women First Digital, a group that provides information resources about abortion globally, has dealt extensively with restrictions on social media networks. Michell Mor, a digital strategy manager with the organization, put it to me this way: “Because big tech is from the United States, everything that happens there is replicated around the world.”

The impact of these restrictions reaches well beyond social media, says Carol Wersbe, chief of staff for the Center for Intimacy Justice, a nonprofit that has been tracking Meta’s rejections of health-related ads. 

“Advertising represents so much more than just a company getting an ad on Facebook,” Wersbe told me. “It’s visibility, access to information. If we can’t advertise for things like pelvic pain and endometriosis, how do we ever reduce the stigma from those topics?” 

In January 2022, the Center for Intimacy Justice published a survey of 60 women’s healthcare startups about their experiences with censorship on Facebook and Instagram. The participating companies offer products and services for a range of women’s healthcare needs, from fertility and pregnancy support to postpartum recovery, menstrual health, and menopause relief. All of the companies surveyed reported having their ads rejected by Instagram and Facebook, and half said their accounts were suspended after Meta removed their ads. According to the report, ads were frequently taken down after they were flagged for promoting “adult products and services,” which are not permitted under the company’s advertising policies.  

Some ads that didn’t make the cut featured products to relieve side effects of menopause; another included background about consent in school sexual education courses. During the same time period, the report points out, Meta approved ads for men’s sexual health products, including treatments for premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction pills promising to help consumers “get hard or your money back” and men’s lubricants to “level up your solo time.” The platform allowed these ads despite its own rules prohibiting ads from promoting products and services that “focus on sexual pleasure.”

Meta quietly updated its advertising guidelines after the report came out, stating that ads for family planning, contraception, menopause relief, and reproductive health care are allowed. Though the social media giant expanded the scope of permissible advertisements on paper, Wersbe says the status quo remains unchanged. “Across the board, we’re still seeing our partners experiencing rejections,” she explained. The censorship that she and others in the field are observing cuts across languages, markets, and continents. “Facebook’s ads policy is a global policy, so when it changes something it affects their whole user base,” explained Wersbe. “We’ve seen rejections in Arabic, Spanish, French, Swedish, Swahili. It’s really pervasive.”

In March 2023, the organization filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, urging the agency to investigate whether Meta is engaging in deceptive trade practices by rejecting ads from women’s health organizations that comply with its stated advertising policies, while allowing similar advertisements promoting men’s sexual health. The complaint alleges that the social media giant is unevenly applying its ads rules based on the gender of the target audience. These removals, it argues, constitute discriminatory censorship and perpetuate “inequality of access to health information and services for women and people of underrepresented genders.” 

In reporting this story, I contacted Meta with questions about the Center for Intimacy Justice’s report, the Federal Trade Commission complaint, and the rejection of Lundy’s advertisements. A spokesperson responded and shared the company’s published Community Standards, but declined to comment on the record.

Alexandra Lundqvist told me that alongside the outreach challenges that these issues create, ad rejections also make it harder for women-led health companies to get a leg up among investors. Lundqvist is a communications lead with The Case for Her, an investment firm that funds women’s sexual health organizations worldwide, including the Center for Intimacy Justice. “The general Silicon Valley big tech investor is not going to go to a women’s health company, especially when they can’t really advertise their work because they get blocked all the time. When these companies can’t advertise their work, they can’t scale, they can’t get funding,” Lundqvist explained. That exacerbates inequities that women and nonbinary entrepreneurs already face in securing investments from the male-dominated venture capital industry, creating a negative feedback loop for companies marketing products by and for women. “There is a big systems impact,” she added.

Lundy, who says her breast health company continues to experience widespread rejections despite Meta’s policy update, believes the censorship has a corrosive effect on consumers and creators alike. The content takedowns make it harder for entrepreneurs like herself to reach customers, make money, and attract investors. But they also prevent people from learning potentially life-saving information about breast cancer.

“There’s not a lot of information out there about breast health,” she said, describing her own lack of awareness about the disease prior to her sister’s diagnosis at age 37. “We had no family history,” she told me. “Her gynecologist missed it and she had never had a mammogram.” The experience, she continued, “really illuminated how much we didn’t know about our breasts.”

Lundy and her sister founded the company in part to address the information vacuum that left them both in the dark — to reach people before diagnosis and support those with the disease through treatment. But Meta makes that mission harder. “We want to normalize the breast,” she said, “but it’s almost like the algorithm and the people making the algorithms can’t think about a breast or a woman’s body in any way other than sexuality or arousal.” The censorship that Complex Creature routinely faces for posting material on Instagram about breast health, Lundy told me, “feels like the patriarchal system at work.”

The morning after our call, Lundy emailed me an update: a photo of two squashes meant to resemble breasts hanging side by side — the visual for an Instagram ad about her company’s summer sale. The post, she wrote, “was rejected last night. They’re gourds.”

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On August 21, officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau visited the campus as part of what was meant to be a routine procedure to renew Ashoka’s license to receive foreign funds. But the questions that the officers asked instead concerned an academic paper that had cast the country’s ruling party in a negative light. They also questioned the “intent” of the professor who had written the paper.

Even before the visit by officials, the professor had resigned from Ashoka. It is just the latest example of India’s shrinking space for research and criticism. 

Nandini Sundar, a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Delhi, told me that the Modi administration has censured and put pressure on academics it believes threaten its Hindu nationalist agenda. “Academic freedom in India is under attack,” she said, “and has been ever since 2014,” when Modi became prime minister. The Academic Freedom Index 2023, which assessed academic freedom in 179 countries, placed India in the bottom 30%. The report included India among 22 countries in which standards of academic freedom had fallen. 

The Index also traced the beginning of the decline in India’s academic freedom to 2009, when the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were not in power. But the report noted that “around 2013, all aspects of academic freedom began to decline strongly, reinforced with Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014.” It concluded that “India demonstrates the pernicious relationship between populist governments, autocratization, and constraints on academic freedom.”

Bolstered by India’s recent feats in space research – becoming on August 23 the first country to successfully land a craft in the southern polar region of the moon – Modi likes to describe his government as being devoted to science and innovation. But it has little time for the humanities, or the social sciences, or any research that does not fit its definition of “progress.” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi and prolific commentator on political and cultural affairs, told me that the “real challenge is self-censorship by academics due to legitimate fears of reprisal by university administrations and physical violence by right-wing groups.” 

He said academics rarely have the freedom to design their own curriculum, and research scholars are told to avoid certain subjects. “There has been an unprecedented ideological bias in new hirings,” he told me, meaning that the BJP has been eager to place friendly academics on faculties and in positions of power in universities across the country. Students at Indian universities have been some of the Modi administration’s most dogged and committed opponents, with even the United Nations noting the Indian government’s propensity for using violence and detention to intimidate student protestors.

On July 25, the paper in question, written by Sabyasachi Das, then an economics professor at Ashoka, was posted on the Social Science Research Network website which publishes “preprints,” that is, papers which await peer review and journal publication. Das had reportedly presented his findings at a talk in the United States. Titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” the paper claimed to document “irregular patterns in 2019 general election in India,” comprehensively won by the Modi-led BJP, and to “present evidence that is consistent with electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies.”

According to Das, the “manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.”

Once news of the still unpublished, yet-to-be reviewed paper emerged on social media, it caused a political furor. M.R Sharan, an Indian economics professor at the University of Maryland, explained on X (formerly known as Twitter) that although Das’ “astonishing” new paper showed that the BJP had perhaps gained a dozen seats through electoral manipulation, this was a negligible number in an election in which the BJP won 303 seats, 31 seats more than the number required to win an outright majority in parliament.

But the impact on the results of the election or lack thereof was beyond the point, argued prominent opposition figures such as Shashi Tharoor, once a candidate for the post of secretary- general at the U.N. Das’ conclusion, Tharoor said, “offers a hugely troubling analysis for all lovers of Indian democracy.” The “discrepancy in vote tallies,” he wrote on X, needed to be accounted for by the government or India’s Election Commission “since it can’t be wished away.”

The BJP responded to Das’ paper with fury. On X, Nishikant Dubey, a BJP member of parliament, demanded to know how Ashoka University could permit a professor, “in the name of half-baked research,” to “discredit India’s vibrant poll process?” 

Das also became a target of online trolling by Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters. Ashoka tried to distance itself from Das, claiming it had no responsibility for “social media activity or public activism by Ashoka faculty, students or staff in their individual capacity.” By the middle of August, Das had handed in his resignation. It was quickly accepted by the university administration.

On August 16, student journalists at the university’s newspaper reported that a public meeting was held in which “students, alumni and faculty expressed their escalating dismay regarding academic freedom at Ashoka.” 

In an open letter to administrators posted on X, the economics department wrote that the governing body’s interference was “likely to precipitate an exodus of faculty.” The letter also warned that if Das wasn’t given his job back and the administration continued to interfere with research, the faculty “will find themselves unable to carry forward their teaching obligations in the spirit of critical inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth that characterize our classrooms.”

But only a couple of days later, the fledgling protest fizzled out. The promised exodus or strike never happened. Only one professor resigned. Instead, the administration told students that the economics department had “reaffirmed its commitment to holding classes, a sentiment echoed by almost all other departments.”

The episode with Das isn’t the first time that the university has been embroiled in matters of academic freedom. The tacit acceptance of Das’ departure suggests that Ashoka, set up as a U.S.-style liberal university with private donors, continues to have  little stomach for confrontation with the government. 

In 2021, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor and former Ashoka vice chancellor, resigned from the university. Mehta, a public intellectual steadfast in his opposition to Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, was told that his presence at Ashoka was turning into a “political liability.”  His “public writing in support of a politics that tries to honor constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, [was] perceived to carry risks for the university,” he said. 

As far back as 2016, just two years after Ashoka University was founded, the Indian magazine Caravan revealed that the administration might have forced the resignation of staff members who had signed a petition protesting state violence in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. 

Few academics at Ashoka are now willing to speak to journalists about Das or the issues of academic freedom that have surfaced since  the BJP’s angry response to his paper. Economist Jayati Ghosh, another prominent critic of the Modi government, wrote on X that she was “truly shocked at the lack of solidarity displayed by senior faculty” at Ashoka. “They have so little to lose from defending basic academic freedom,” she added. “Silence enables injustice, and it spreads.”

A professor at Ashoka who asked to remain anonymous told me that there were “plenty of caveats in Das’ paper and it had yet to go through rigorous peer review but the outsized reaction shows that the paper hit home.” Another liberal intellectual, who also asked to speak anonymously, told me that the paper questions the “most fundamental aspect of India’s claim to being a democracy – free and fair elections.” By continuing to send a message that academic insubordination will not be tolerated, they added, “the BJP is warning universities to control areas of research.” 

Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka in 2021, was also a former president of the Center for Policy Research, a well-respected Delhi think tank. In July, The Hindu reported that the center’s tax-exempt status and license to raise foreign funds had been revoked. Nearly 75% of its funds were raised abroad. In the absence of an official reason for the decision, the media has speculated that what might have led to the crackdown were the frequently combative articles that CPR staffers publish about Modi administration policies and the independent research that the center undertakes, which  has often contradicted the official government line. 

The BJP appears determined to stamp out criticism of Modi. In January, when the BBC broadcast a documentary in the U.K. examining Modi’s actions as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots in the state, the Indian government banned it from being screened in India. When students tried to organize public screenings in defiance of the ban, they were allegedly detained by the police and suspended by their universities. 

Academic freedom and the need to ask questions, it appears, is less important to Indian universities than appeasing the government of the day.

The post In India, academic freedom is at stake in a row over research appeared first on Coda Story.

It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don’t share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

The post How space traffic in orbit could spell trouble on Earth appeared first on Coda Story.

“I once had an idea in the back of my mind to leave this place and go abroad,” Besmir Billa told me earlier this year as we sipped tea in the town of Kukes, not far from Albania’s Accursed Mountains. “Of course, like everybody else, I’ve thought about it.”

The mountains rose up all around us like a great black wall. Across the valley, we could see a half-constructed, rusty bridge, suspended in mid-air. Above it stood an abandoned, blackened building that served during Albania’s 45-year period of communist rule as a state-run summer camp for workers on holiday. 

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Kukes has lost roughly half of its population. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork. 

Fifteen years ago, people would come to Kukes from all over the region for market day, where they would sell animals and produce. The streets once rang with their voices. Those who’ve lived in Kukes for decades remember it well. Nowadays, it’s much quieter.

Billa, 32, chose not to leave. He found a job in his hometown and stayed with his family. But for a person his age, he’s unusual.

You can feel the emptiness everywhere you go, he told me. “Doctors all go abroad. The restaurants are always looking for bartenders or waiters. If you want a plumber, you can’t find one.” Billa’s car broke down recently. Luckily, he loves fixing things himself — because it’s difficult to find a mechanic.

All the while, there is a parallel reality playing out far from home, one that the people of Kukes see in glimpses on TikTok and Instagram. Their feeds show them a highly curated view of what their lives might look like if they left this place: good jobs, plenty of money, shopping at designer stores and riding around London in fast cars. 

In Kukes, by comparison, times are tough. Salaries are low, prices are rising every week and there are frequent power outages. Many families can barely afford to heat their homes or pay their rent. For young people growing up in the town, it’s difficult to persuade them that there’s a future here.

Three days before I met Billa, a gaggle of teenage boys chased a convoy of flashy cars down the street. A Ferrari, an Audi and a Mercedes had pulled into town, revving their engines and honking triumphantly. The videos were uploaded to TikTok, where they were viewed and reposted tens of thousands of times.

Behind the wheel were TikTok stars Dijonis Biba and Aleks Vishaj, on a victory lap around the remote region. They’re local heroes: They left Albania for the U.K. years ago, became influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, and now they’re back, equipped with cars, money and notoriety.

Vishaj, dubbed the “King of TikTok” by the British tabloids, was reportedly convicted of robbery in the U.K. and deported in 2021. Biba, a rapper, made headlines in the British right-wing press the same year for posting instructions to YouTube on how to enter the U.K. with false documents. Police then found him working in a secret cannabis house in Coventry. He was eventually sentenced to 15 months in prison. 

The pair now travel the world, uploading TikTok videos of their high-end lifestyle: jet skiing in Dubai, hanging out in high-rise hotels, driving their Ferrari with the needle touching 300 kilometers per hour (180 mph) through the tunnel outside Kukes. 

Billa’s nephews, who are seven and 11, were keen to meet him and get a selfie when they came to town, like every other kid in Kukes. 

“Young people are so affected by these models, and they’re addicted to social media. Emigrants come back for a holiday, just for a few days, and it’s really hard for us,” Billa said. 

Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them. They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. “They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,” he said.

Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real. “I’m very concerned about it. There’s this emphasis for kids and teenagers to get rich quickly by emigrating. It’s ruining society. It’s a source of misinformation because it’s not real life. It’s just an illusion, to get likes and attention.”

And he knows that the TikTok videos that his nephews watch every day aren’t representative of what life is really like in the U.K. “They don’t tell the darker story,” he said.

In 2022, the number of people leaving Albania for the U.K. ticked up dramatically, as well as the number of those seeking asylum, at around 16,000, more than triple the previous year. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, one reason for the uptick in claims may be that Albanians who lack proper immigration status are more likely to be identified, leading them to claim asylum in order to delay being deported. But Albanians claiming asylum are also often victims of blood feuds — long-standing disputes between communities, often resulting in cycles of revenge — and viciously exploitative trafficking networks that threaten them and their families if they return to Albania.

By 2022, Albanian criminal gangs in Britain were in control of the country’s illegal marijuana-growing trade, taking over from Vietnamese gangs who had previously dominated the market. The U.K.’s lockdown — with its quiet streets and newly empty businesses and buildings — likely created the perfect conditions for setting up new cannabis farms all over the country. During lockdown, these gangs expanded production and needed an ever-growing labor force to tend the plants — growing them under high-wattage lamps, watering them and treating them with chemicals and fertilizers. So they started recruiting. 

Everyone in Kukes remembers it: The price of passage from Albania to the U.K. on a truck or small boat suddenly dropped when Covid-19 restrictions began to ease. Before the pandemic, smugglers typically charged 18,000 pounds (around $22,800) to take Albanians across the channel. But last year, posts started popping up on TikTok advertising knock-down prices to Britain starting at around 4,000 pounds (around $5,000). 

People in Kukes told me that even if they weren’t interested in being smuggled abroad, TikTok’s algorithm would feed them smuggling content — so while they were watching other unrelated videos, suddenly an anonymous post advertising cheap passage to the U.K. would appear on their “For You” feed.

TikTok became an important recruitment tool. Videos advertising “Black Friday sales” offered special discounts after Boris Johnson’s resignation, telling people to hurry before a new prime minister took office, or when the U.K. Home Office announced its policy to relocate migrants to Rwanda. People remember one post that even encouraged Albanians to come and pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II when she died in September last year. There was a sense of urgency to the posts, motivating people to move to the U.K. while they still could, lest the opportunity slip away. 

The videos didn’t go into detail about what lay just beneath the surface. Criminal gangs offered to pay for people’s passage to Britain, on the condition they worked for them when they arrived. They were then typically forced to work on cannabis farms to pay off the money they owed, according to anti-human trafficking advocacy groups and the families that I met in Kukes. 

“I imagined my first steps in England to be so different,” said David, 33, who first left Albania for Britain in 2014 after years of struggling to find a steady job. He could barely support his son, then a toddler, or his mother, who was having health problems and couldn’t afford her medicine. He successfully made the trip across the channel by stowing away in a truck from northern France. 

He still remembers the frightened face of the Polish driver who discovered him hiding in the wheel well of the truck, having already reached the outskirts of London. David made his way into the city and slept rough for several weeks. “I looked at everyone walking by, sometimes recognizing Albanians in the crowd and asking them to buy me bread. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.” 

He found himself half-hoping the police might catch him and send him home. “I was so desperate. But another part of me said to myself, ‘You went through all of these struggles, and now you’re going to give up?’”

David, who asked us to identify him with a pseudonym to protect his safety, found work in a car wash. He was paid 35 pounds (about $44) a day. “To me, it felt like a lot,” he said. “I concentrated on saving money every moment of the day, with every bite of food I took,” he told me, describing how he would live for three or four days on a tub of yogurt and a package of bread from the grocery chain Lidl, so that he could send money home to his family.

At the car wash, his boss told him to smile at the customers to earn tips. “That’s not something we’re used to in Albania,” he said. “I would give them the keys and try to smile, but it was like this fake, frozen, hard smile.”

Like David, many Albanians begin their lives in the U.K. by working in the shadow economy, often at car washes or construction sites where they’re paid in cash. While there, they can be targeted by criminal gangs with offers of more lucrative work in the drug trade. In recent years, gangs have funneled Albanian workers from the informal labor market into cannabis grow houses. 

David said he was careful to avoid the lure of gangsters. At the French border, someone recognized him as Albanian and approached, offering him a “lucky ticket” to England with free accommodation when he arrived. He knew what price he would have to pay — and ran. “You have to make deals with them and work for them,” he told me, “and then you get sucked into a criminal life forever.”

It’s a structure that traps people in a cycle of crime and debt: Once in the U.K., they have no documents and are at the mercy of their bosses, who threaten to report them to the police or turn them into the immigration authorities if they don’t do as they say. 

Gang leaders manipulate and intimidate their workers, said Anxhela Bruci, Albania coordinator at the anti-trafficking foundation Arise, who I met in Tirana, the Albanian capital. “They use deception, telling people, ‘You don’t have any documents, I’m going to report you to the police, I have evidence you have been working here.’ There’s that fear of going to prison and never seeing your family again.” 

Gangs, Bruci told me, will also make personal threats against the safety of their victims’ families. “They would say, ‘I’m going to kill your family. I’m going to kill your brother. I know where he lives.’ So you’re trapped, you’re not able to escape.”

She described how workers often aren’t allowed to leave the cannabis houses they’re working in, and are given no access to Wi-Fi or internet. Some are paid salaries of 600-800 pounds (about $760-$1,010) a month. Others, she added, are effectively bonded labor, working to pay back the money they owe for their passage to Britain. It’s a stark difference from the lavish lifestyles they were promised.

As for telling their friends and family back home about their situation, it’s all but impossible. “It becomes extremely dangerous to speak up,” said Bruci. Instead, once they do get online, they feel obliged to post a success story. “They want to be seen as brave. We still view the man as the savior of the family,” said Bruci, who is herself Albanian.

Bruci believes that some people posting on TikTok about their positive experience going to the U.K. could be “soldiers” for traffickers. “Some of them are also victims of modern slavery themselves and then they have to recruit people in order to get out of their own trafficking situation.”

As I was reporting this story, summer was just around the bend and open season for recruitment had begun. A quick search in Albanian on TikTok brought up a mass of new videos advertising crossings to the U.K. If you typed in “Angli” — Albanian for “England” — on TikTok the top three videos to appear all involved people making their way into the UK. One was a post advertising cheap crossings, and the other two were Albanians recording videos of their journeys across the channel. After we flagged this to TikTok, those particular posts were removed. New posts, however, still pop up every day.

With the British government laser-focused on small boat crossings, and drones buzzing over the beaches of northern France, traveling by truck was being promoted at a reduced price of 3,000 pounds (about $3,800). And a new luxury option was also on offer — speedboat crossings from Belgium to Britain that cost around 10,000 pounds (about $12,650) per person.

Kevin Morgan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety for Africa, Europe and the Middle East, said the company has a “zero tolerance approach to human smuggling and trafficking,” and permanently bans offending accounts. TikTok told me it had Albanian-speaking moderators working for the platform, but would not specify how many. 

In March, TikTok announced a new policy as part of this zero-tolerance approach. The company said it would automatically redirect users who searched for particular keywords and phrases to anti-trafficking sites. In June, the U.K.’s Border Force told the Times that they believed TikTok’s controls had helped lower the numbers of small boat crossings into Britain. Some videos used typos on purpose to get around TikTok’s controls. As recently as mid-August, a search on TikTok brought up a video with a menu of options to enter Britain — via truck, plane or dinghy.

In Kukes, residents follow British immigration policy with the same zeal as they do TikTok videos from Britain. They trade stories and anecdotes about their friends, brothers and husbands. Though their TikTok feeds rarely show the reality of life in London, some young people in Kukes know all is not as it seems.

“The conditions are very miserable, they don’t eat very well, they don’t wash their clothes, they don’t have much time to live their lives,” said Evis Zeneli, 26, as we scrolled through TikTok videos posted by her friends in the U.K., showing a constant stream of designer shopping trips to Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

It’s the same for a 19-year-old woman I met whose former classmate left last year. Going by his social media posts, life looks great — all fast cars and piles of British banknotes. But during private conversations, they talk about how difficult his life really is. The videos don’t show it, she told me, but he is working in a cannabis grow house. 

“He’s not feeling very happy. Because he doesn’t have papers, he’s obliged to work in this illegal way. But he says life is still better over there than it is here,” she said.

 “It’s like the boys have gone extinct,” she added. At her local park, which used to be a hangout spot for teenagers, she only sees old people now.

“There’s this huge silence,” agreed Albiona Thaçi, 33, whose husband traveled to the U.K. nine months ago in a small boat. When he left, she brought her two daughters to the seaside to try to take their mind off of the terrifying journey that their father had undertaken. Traveling across the English Channel in a fragile dinghy, he dropped his phone in the water, and they didn’t hear from him for days. “Everything went black,” Thaçi said. Eventually, her husband called from the U.K., having arrived safely. But she still doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. 

In her 12-apartment building, all the men have left. “Now we have this very communal feeling. Before, we used to knock on each others’ doors. Now, we just walk in and out.” But Thaçi’s friends have noticed that when they get together for coffee in the mornings, she’s often checked out of their conversation. “My heart, my mind, is in England,” she said. She plans to join her husband if he can get papers for her and their daughters. 

The absence of men hangs over everything. In the village of Shishtavec, in the mountains above Kukes, five women crowded around the television one afternoon when I visited. It was spring, but it still felt like winter. They were streaming a YouTube video of dozens of men from their village, all doing a traditional dance at a wedding — in London. 

“They’re doing the dance of men,” said Adelie Molla, 22. She had just come in from the cold, having collected water from the well up by the town mosque. The women told me that the weather had been mild this year. “The winter has gone to England,” laughed Molla’s mother Yaldeze, 53, whose son left for the U.K. seven months ago. Many people in their village have Bulgarian heritage, meaning they can apply for European passports and travel to Britain by plane, without needing to resort to small boats.

The whole family plans to eventually migrate to Britain and reunite. “For better or worse I have to follow my children,” said Yaldeze, who has lived in the village her whole life. She doesn’t speak a word of English. “I’m going to be like a bird in a cage.” 

Around the town, some buildings are falling into disrepair while others are half-finished, the empty window-frames covered in plastic sheeting. A few houses look brand new, but the windows are dark. Adelie explained that once people go to the U.K., they use the money they make there to build houses in their villages. The houses lie empty, except when the emigrants come to visit. And when they come back to visit their hometown, they drive so that they can show off cars with U.K. license plates — proof they’ve made it. 

 “This village is emptying out,” Molla said, describing the profound boredom that had overtaken her life. “Maybe after five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London.”

The oldest settlements of Kukes date back to the fourth century. In the 1960s, when Albania’s communist government decided to build a hydropower dam, the residents of Kukes all had to leave their homes and relocate further up the mountain to build a new city, while the ancient city was flooded beneath an enormous reservoir. And in the early 1970s, under Enver Hoxha’s paranoid communist regime, an urban planner was tasked with building an underground version of Kukes, where 10,000 people could live in bunkers for six months in the event of an invasion. A vast network of tunnels still lies beneath the city today. 

“Really, there are three Kukeses,” one local man told me: the Kukes where we were walking around, the subterranean Kukes beneath our feet, and the Kukes underwater. But even the Kukes of today is a shadow of its former self, a town buried in the memories of the few residents who remain.

David was deported from Britain in 2019 after police stopped him at a London train station. He tried to return to the U.K. in December 2022 by hiding in a truck but couldn’t get past the high-tech, high-security border in northern France. He is now back in Kukes, struggling to find work. 

He wanted me to know he was a patriotic person who, given the chance to have a good life, would live in Albania forever. But, he added, “You don’t understand how much I miss England. I talk in English, I sing in English, I cook English food, and I don’t want my soul to depart this earth without going one more time to England.”

He still watches social media reels of Albanians living in the U.K. “Some people get lucky and get rich. But when you see it on TikTok or Instagram, it might not even be real.” 

Besmir Billa, whose nephews worry him with their TikTok aspirations, has set himself a challenge. He showed me his own TikTok account, which he started last summer.

The grid is full of videos showcasing the beauty of Kukes: clips of his friends walking through velvety green mountains, picking flowers and petting wild horses. “I’m testing myself to see if TikTok can be used for a good thing,” he told me. 

“The idea I had is to express something valuable, not something silly. I think this is something people actually need,” he said. During the spring festival, a national holiday in Albania when the whole country pours onto the streets to celebrate the end of winter, he posted a video showing young people in the town giving flowers to older residents. 

At first, his nephews were “not impressed” by their uncle’s page. But then, the older boy clocked the total number of views on the spring festival video: 40,000 and counting. 

The post The Albanian town that TikTok emptied appeared first on Coda Story.

“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

The post Belarusian exiles are running out of hope appeared first on Coda Story.

In the course of a 90-minute address, laden with emotion, exhortation and self-congratulation, Modi dwelled in passing on the continuing violence in Manipur, a state in the northeast of India. The “nation stands with the people of Manipur,” he said. A resolution to the problems, he added, could only be achieved through peace, a goal toward which the federal and state governments were working.

If the sentiments seem boilerplate compared to Modi’s usual mode of rhetorical excess, it is because the Indian prime minister has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking about Manipur. The small state, bordering Myanmar, has been in tumult since May, with at least 200 people killed during riots, over 60,000 displaced and with houses, churches and whole villages set ablaze.

As the leaders of the world’s largest economies arrive in India on September 9 for the two-day G20 summit, the culmination of India’s presidency of the intergovernmental group, Modi is expecting to put on a show. Delhi, or at least its most prominent areas, is being given a hasty and glitzy makeover. But the gleam might be tarnished by deepening sectarian rifts Modi’s government cannot appear to get under control and might indeed have helped unleash.

Even the Indian army, sent in to quell the violence in Manipur, has struggled to cope. The fighting has taken place  between the largely Hindu Meitei people of the valley and the largely Christian Kuki tribes from the hills. It began over a high court order that granted Meitei people certain affirmative action rights, despite their existing political and financial muscle in Manipur. The complexity of the conflict is exacerbated by certain land laws intended to protect tribal lands in the hills,which the Meiteis say unfairly confine them to the valley. 

It is true that animosity between the Kuki tribes and the Meiteis in Manipur dates back over a decade, but the inability of the authorities to calm the current violence is due to the perceived biases of the Meitei-led state government of Manipur. Its chief minister, Biren Singh, a Meitei, has as recently as July 1 — nearly two months after the violence began splitting his state apart — been taunting Kukis on social media. “Are you from India or Myanmar,” he responded to a critic on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, before deleting his post. 

Meiteis allege that an influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar, mostly ethnic Kukis, are upsetting the demographic balance of Manipur and claim that the newcomers are cultivating poppy fields in the hills as part of a rampant drug trade.

During India’s recent parliamentary session, between July 20 and August 11, the opposition brought a motion of no confidence against the Modi government. It was, as expected, easily defeated. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a large majority and faced down a no-confidence motion in 2021 with similar ease.

Still, the motion provided an opportunity for the opposition  to criticize the government’s lack of response to violence in Manipur and to force both the prime minister and the home minister, Amit Shah, to address the issue. Shah, who continues to back Manipur’s chief minister Singh, parroted the line that Kukis, whose ranks were allegedly being bolstered by illegal immigrants from Myanmar, were largely responsible for the clashes. 

A mainstream Kuki group described Shah’s explanation as “extremely unfortunate as it is largely speculative with no valid proof or evidence.” It went on to say that Shah, by making his “abhorrent, nonsensical and disastrous” remarks, had chosen to “sacrifice the Kukis at the altar of Biren Singh.”

Meanwhile, on August 10, Modi responded in parliament to the no-confidence motion. He spoke for over two hours. It took more than 90 minutes for him to even broach the topic of Manipur, by which time the opposition had walked out in protest.

Modi blamed the Congress party, the main opposition faction, for having mismanaged the northeastern region of India since the country’s independence from the British Empire was won in 1947. The Congress has governed for about 50 of India’s 76 years as an independent country and has been caricatured by Modi as a party grown rotten on power and assumed privilege. 

Despite being prime minister for nearly a decade, Modi scarcely speaks without blaming the Congress and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, for holding India back from its rightful status as a global superpower. In May, while Manipur quite literally burned, Modi was on a triumphant global tour, including trips to Australia and the United States where much was made of India’s emerging power status.

“Blaming the Congress for everything that is happening in Manipur,” said Kham Khan Suan Hausing, a political science professor at Hyderabad University,  “is a bit far-fetched.” The “culpability and complicity of the BJP government,” he told us, “has to be called out.” Last week, Hausing was granted protection from arrest by India’s Supreme Court on charges that he had defamed the Meitei community in an interview with the Indian news website The Wire. 

According to Hausing, Shah has revealed his “gross incompetence and apparent lack of intelligence on the ground” by blaming the Kukis alone for the riots in Manipur. And Modi, he told us, “appears more interested in media management than in the structural causes of the violence.” These forthright views have made Hausing a target of what he calls a “smear campaign by vigilante trolls,” who have questioned his legal status as an Indian. It is a typical line of attack used against Kukis like him, Hausing says, who are derided as immigrants from Myanmar. “The smears smack of how ignorant and ill-informed public discourse is about citizenship.” 

Writing in the New York Times this month, the author Debasish Roy Chowdhury argues that “it’s a signature tactic of modern day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity and ostracizing others.” Any perceived slight against Modi is treated by his supporters, and often by Modi himself, as a slight against India. 

During his long speech decrying the no-confidence motion last week,  Modi said, in Hindi, that the motion had little to do with violence in Manipur but was instead an attempt to “defame India.” They “have no faith in the people of India,” Modi said of the opposition, “in the abilities of India. They have tried in vain to break the self-confidence of Indians with this no-confidence vote.” 

In his Independence Day address on August 15, Modi took a similarly proprietorial tone, referring to Indian voters as his family and offering personal guarantees of Indian success. It was, said the longtime Congress politician and leader Jairam Ramesh, a “crass election speech filled with distortions, lies, exaggerations and vague promises.” He added that Modi had made an annual address to the nation by its prime minister “all about himself and his image.”

Sharad Pawar, another longtime politician and major opposition figure, told the audience at a public rally on August 14 that the “Modi government has been a mute spectator to what has been happening in Manipur.” Modi was initially jolted out of that studied silence by a video that made global headlines last month of two Kuki women in Manipur being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a Meitei mob. Even then, he did not address the conflict directly, only condemning the assault as “shameful.”

The BJP then asked X to take the video down because it was fomenting further violence. In fact, the BJP-led government in Manipur has imposed a shutdown of mobile internet services in the state, which has been in effect since May 3. At the time of writing, services have still not been fully restored, causing untold economic damage with little evidence that the shutdown has served its purpose of lessening violence due to misinformation and rumor-mongering. 

If it seems surprising that the leader of a democracy can get away with saying so little about a sectarian war breaking out in a state, it is in keeping with Modi’s tried and tested strategy. Sectarian identity is increasingly contested in the BJP’s majoritarian, Hindu nationalist conception of India. While Modi talks about democracy and pluralism as formative parts of India’s identity on foreign visits, at home, nerves are fraying.

On July 31, even as the opposition was insisting that the prime minister address violence in Manipur before the parliament, sectarian riots were breaking out in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital Delhi. A procession organized by a notorious Hindu nationalist organization devolved into street fights as it passed through the district of Nuh. Just as outsiders, particularly illegal Kuki immigrants from Myanmar, were blamed by the BJP for fanning the flames in Manipur, Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were promptly blamed for the violence in Haryana.

Modi is fond of referring to “double engine” governments — his dream of BJP governments at both federal and state levels, working together to foster more development. Both Manipur and Haryana are run by BJP governments at the state level. The double engine seems to work, then, to reinforce the BJP’s political majoritarianism, its instinctive support for Hindus in any sectarian conflict. 

Peace and resolution in Manipur can only return, says Gaurav Gogoi, a Congress member of parliament, “when you can win people’s trust.” And that trust, he told us, speaking in Hindi, “can only be won when the BJP takes responsibility.” According to Gogoi, Manipur is still a tinderbox, despite Modi’s claims that peace is returning. He alleges that “6,000 weapons have been looted from police stations and not ordinary weapons but AK47s and bombs.” Gogoi, who led the no-confidence motion in parliament, told us that it is the BJP’s politics at both state and federal levels that has “split Manipur into two.” It is a pattern of division, he notes, that is evident in communal violence across India, including most recently in Haryana.

In his August 15 address to the nation, Modi said his time as prime minister had led to a “new trust, a new hope and a new attraction” toward India around the world. But if Modi is stoking hope abroad, there is evidence enough to say that he is stoking division at home.

The post Sectarian violence in Manipur is a mirror for Modi’s India appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

The post The Kremlin revises a textbook to dictate future understanding of Russian history appeared first on Coda Story.

The authorities had made a similar decision in June after a Senegalese court handed Sonko a two-year prison sentence in absentia, a decision his supporters believed was a politically motivated attempt to prevent Sonko from running for president in 2024. At least 16 people died when Sonko’s supporters and Senegalese police clashed on the streets of the capital Dakar. The subsequent July protests left at least two people dead.

Last week, Sonko was hospitalized after going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest.  

“We fear the government,” Mohammed Diouf, a Dakar school teacher told me. “The government does not want the world to know what is happening in our country.” He said the internet shutdown left him unable to communicate with other protesters. “There is brutal oppression, and many young demonstrators have been killed and injured. The security forces use live fire, that is the situation,” said Diouf, who opted to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal.

On August 2, the day before Diouf and I spoke, the Senegalese government announced an indefinite ban on TikTok, the app that young people have been using to document violent encounters between demonstrators and the security apparatus.

Fueling public anger is a widely held fear that Senegalese President Macky Sall, currently serving his second term in office, may try to run for president again in 2024. In 2016, a public referendum on presidential term limits reset the period a president can stay in power to a maximum of two five-year terms. Sall, who had, at the time, begun serving his second term, argued that the constitutional amendment “reset the clock to zero,” making him eligible to run again. 

In an address to the nation after the June protests, Sall vowed he would not run for a third term. But experts say he is to blame for the ambiguity that has fueled unrest.

“This problem has to be put at the feet of Macky Sall. For a long time, he made the potential of him running for a third time ambiguous,” said Ibrahim Anoba, an African affairs analyst and a fellow at the Center for African Prosperity. “You can imagine what the populace will feel,” Anoba told me. “More so, if the president becomes intolerant of opposition leaders.” 

Current political anxieties have been compounded by the economic downturn resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the food shortages triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Senegal’s poverty rate was 36.3% in 2022, according to the World Bank, and the economy has also been hampered by rising debt.. 

The future looked much brighter in 2014, when newly discovered oil reserves appeared to set the stage for Senegal to become a major oil producer. But this oil, too, is now a source of public anxiety: Senegalese citizens fear that Sall will cede these riches to European companies.

Protesters, galvanized by Sonko amid concerns that Sall might indeed pursue a third term,  worried that Sall, a geological engineer before he became president, wanted to preside over the anticipated oil boom. It tipped public discontent into violent unrest, particularly among the country’s youth, who decried massive corruption, the overbearing influence of France and the slowdown of the economy. 

“We are fighting that the country retains the sovereignty of its wealth and natural resources which the government wants to sell off to oil firms. And for that, we will go until the end because it is our future that is at stake,” Diouf, the Dakar school teacher, told me. It is to Sonko that voters like Diouf look to reform Senegal’s system.

Sonko’s PASTEF party started in 2014 as a fringe party composed of political newcomers. Sonko, a young former tax inspector had shot to national recognition when he became a whistleblower in 2016, exposing the use of offshore tax havens by foreign companies to avoid paying taxes in Senegal. He became a member of the national assembly in 2017 and ran for president in 2019, trailing third behind Sall and Idrissa Seck Rewmi.

His criticism of Sall and his larger-than-life internet presence have endeared Sonko to young voters. He rapidly became the main threat to the ruling party. And it is that threat, say Sonko’s supporters, that is driving the criminal charges Sonko now faces, including rape (for which he was acquitted), formenting insurrection, creating political unrest, terrorism and theft.

State measures to control protests led by Sonko supporters have been violent and draconian. The internet shutdowns also pose a threat to Senegal’s already floundering economy. In the first quarter of 2023, Senegal’s unemployment rate stood at 21.5%, and Net Blocks estimates that each day without access to mobile internet costs the country nearly $8 million.

Financial and cryptocurrency trades, as well as ride hailing and e-commerce businesses, are all seeing losses due to the network shutdowns. “With the restriction of the internet that is becoming recurrent these days, we no longer have the opportunity to sell or buy USDT,” said Mady Dia, referring to Tether, a cryptocurrency “stablecoin” pegged to the U.S. dollar. “That is an abysmal shortfall,” Dia, who works with a cryptocurrency exchange, told me.

Dia and Diouf both said they’d withdrawn money when the protests began, expecting that the banks would likely close and that financial services would be crippled were the authorities to impose an internet shutdown. 

The political situation, Dia said, and the internet shutdowns have left him contemplating options for leaving Senegal altogether. 

“Many young people are ready to abandon their country if Sall remains in power in 2024,” he told me. In the past decade, thousands of young Senegalese have sought to move to Europe in search of better fortunes, often on small boats. These perilous journeys have claimed hundreds of lives. Last month, at least 15 people drowned after a boat carrying migrants and refugees capsized off the coast of Dakar.

In a West Africa beset by political instability – the most recent example being the coup in Niger – Senegal has been cited as a model of democracy. That reputation is starting to wear off. 

“This is really bad for the region itself,” said Anoba, the analyst at the Center for African Prosperity. “As you know, Macky Sall is one of the leading figures in West Africa, and right now [as] we are trying to quench the fires of coups that are changing the political terrain, this is the last thing we want.”

Threats against Senegalese media represent another sign of democratic backsliding in the country. In June, a television channel offering live coverage of the protests was suspended for 30 days. And Papa Ale Niang, a journalist with the prominent daily newspaper Dakarmatin, was charged on August 1, like Sonko, with “inciting insurrection.”

Internet shutdowns are also a sign of faltering democratic values. “Cutting off the internet is tantamount to denying the right to information, which is a constitutional principle, not to mention international laws,” said Emmanuel Diokh, the Senegal lead at Internet Sans Frontières, an international organization that defends access to the internet. 

Since 2017, internet shutdowns have become an increasingly common tactic of information and social control in Africa. Cameroon’s long-serving president, Paul Biya, imposed an internet ban in the English-speaking region of the country in 2017 that lasted three months. In 2019, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa also imposed an internet shutdown in response to protests. Governments in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea have also imposed strict internet regulations in the past five years.

All of these countries have used the same rationale: The actions were intended to curb hate speech or to avoid the breakdown of order. Sall has shown one thing to the Senegalese people — the internet is not safe from government control. Instead of curbing hate speech, shutting down the internet is a sign that he is prepared to use any means necessary to decimate the opposition before the elections in February. Still, protesters like Diouf say they will not relent.

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The series was set to air on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, October 29, when Ataturk became president. Instead, Disney said that the show will be released as two films: one to be shown on the Turkish free television network Fox, which Disney owns, and another to be released in theaters at a later date.

Turkish media and government officials blamed the Disney+ cancellation on Armenian lobby groups in the U.S., encouraging a popular backlash in Turkey against the company. Organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America have expressed concerns that the series would gloss over Ataturk’s purported role in the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers in 1915 — actions that are widely recognized as a genocide, including by U.S. President Joe Biden.

The clash between the guardians of Ataturk’s historical memory and Disney — which was founded 13 days before Ataturk became president in 1923 — underscores a complex challenge for U.S. entertainment giants. They have to figure out how to produce content for global markets while some governments look to enforce their own views of history. 

In Turkey, Ataturk stands as a singular figure uniting Turkey. His image adorns walls everywhere, from barbershops to offices to fancy hotels. Prominent Turkish artists, journalists and politicians announced they would cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Singer-songwriter Mustafa Sandal wrote to his one million Twitter followers: “I canceled it. Now it’s your turn! No Atatürk, no us!”

“I suspect that any film, even the most hagiographic film of Ataturk, would end up being dredged over the coals by the Turkish media simply because it could never be hagiographic enough,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University.

When the journalist Can Dundar made a documentary in 2008 depicting Ataturk as a heavy drinker with a fear of the dark, two university professors filed a formal complaint with an Istanbul court requesting an investigation into Dundar for “eroding Ataturk’s respectability.” Publicly insulting Ataturk in Turkey is a crime. Turkey’s top mobile telephone operator, Turkcell, canceled its sponsorship of the film.

Ebubekir Sahin, the chairman of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, a state agency in charge of regulating broadcasting that opened an investigation into Disney, wrote on Twitter that Ataturk is Turkey’s “most important social value.”

Ataturk is widely revered in Turkey, but not always for the same reasons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has sought to make Turkey a more religious and conservative society, has been selective about Ataturk’s legacy, downplaying his militant secularization of the country while praising his consolidation of the state and his fight against Western colonization in the Islamic world, according to Eissenstat.

There is a long history of U.S. media productions about Turkish history erupting into explosive debates, attacked by the Armenian diaspora or by Turks, according to Nicholas Danforth, a senior non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

In the 1930s, a film about the Armenian genocide was canceled after Turkey applied pressure on the U.S. State Department and MGM Studios, the maker of the movie. In 2002, the director of “Ararat,” a film about the Armenian genocide, was targeted with threats that Armenians in Turkey would be harmed as a reprisal for making his film.

The battle over cinematic portrayals of Turkey’s role in the Armenian genocide played out most prominently in 2016, when a film called “The Promise” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was only shown to a handful of attendees, but it received tens of thousands of one star ratings on IMDb, the film rating platform, followed by tens of thousands of ten star ratings, as Turkish nationalists and pro-Armenian groups flocked to the site to control the narrative.

No serious academics are willing to give genocide denial the time of day anymore, says Danforth. But, he said, there is frustration among historians about attempts to place all the blame at Ataturk’s feet. “There’s plenty to criticize about Ataturk, but for very specific historical reasons, making him a stand in for all the crimes of Turkish nationalism is misleading as well,” Danforth said.

This is not the first time Disney has been caught between a state and a diaspora over accusations of whitewashing a genocide. Its remake of Mulan in 2020 was subjected to a boycott because it was filmed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is committing what the U.S. Department of State and parliaments in the U.K. and Canadia recognize as a genocide against the Uyghur people. In the credits, the movie gives special thanks to multiple Chinese government entities in the region, including to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan where several re-education camps have been identified.

Warner Bros’ blockbuster film “Barbie” caused a stir because, in one scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a child-like drawing of a map of the world. Next to what is supposed to be China is a dashed line that the Vietnamese government says is a representation of the nine-dash line, a maritime boundary that China claims marks its ownership of the South China Sea. The film was banned in Vietnam as a result. Meanwhile, the same map also depicts England as bordering Asia.

The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has divided the executive ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies, upended marketing plans and rattled prop masters. In the 2019 trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket, even though they had appeared in the original 1980s film. Fans complained. The flags were reinstated. The movie was banned in China.

The Chinese government has been ramping up pressure on the American film industry since the late 1990s, according to Chris Fenton, a film executive and former president of DMG Entertainment, a global media company headquartered in Beijing. As China’s market leverage grows, the Chinese government has become more forceful in demanding compliance with its views.

The Pentagon has expressed alarm. In July 2023, it announced that it will not share bases, ships and equipment with productions that allow the Chinese state to censor content in a way that advances China’s national interests.

Yet despite a desire behind closed doors to push back, Fenton said there is no coordinated effort within the film industry to counter China’s efforts to control content. 

Conservatives in the U.S., frustrated by the Barbie movie map, which they see as legitimizing China’s position in the South China Sea, have attacked the film for undermining their values. Political commentator Ben Sharpiro began a scathing 40-minute review of the film by setting fire to Barbie dolls. In late June 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated the U.S. national news cycle when he accused Disney of putting “sexualized content” in its programming for children.

“The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children is preposterous and inaccurate,” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger responded, adding, “The last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.”

Disney+ was launched in Turkey last year as part of a global expansion into 42 new countries. Losing access to Turkey, with its population of over 85 million people, would be a blow to those plans. Disney+ has an estimated 50,000 subscribers in Turkey, compared to Netflix’s estimated 2.6 million, according to FlixPatrol.

Turkey is moving away from the West, disentangling itself from decades of alliance structures and huge defense contracts, according to Selim Koru, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“This is an American entertainment company pretending like these things are more or less as they were maybe 20 years ago,” he told me. “That a founding father of this deeply divided country is sort of an easy or manageable subject for a historical drama produced by a foreign company.”

The post Echoing its battles in Florida, Disney circles a Turkish maelstrom appeared first on Coda Story.

Since May, migrants on the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border who are hoping to apply for asylum have been required to make their asylum appointments through a mobile phone app operated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, known as CBP One. The new system has effectively oriented the first — and for many, the most urgent — stage of the asylum process around a digital tool that is, by many accounts, glitchy and unreliable.

On July 27, immigrants’ rights groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its use of the app, setting the stage for a legal showdown over the government’s decision to shift the first stage of the asylum application process into the realm of automation.

The plaintiffs include 10 migrants who sought asylum along the border but were turned away by U.S. immigration officials because they hadn’t made appointments using CBP One. Their suit alleges that the U.S. government’s use of CBP One has created steep, and in some cases insurmountable, technological obstacles that have prevented migrants from pursuing their right to asylum. As a result, they’re often left with little choice but to remain in Mexican border towns, where violence and crime targeting migrants is notoriously high. 

CBP One became the primary entry point into America’s asylum system after the Biden administration lifted Title 42, a Trump-era policy that barred most people from seeking asylum in the U.S. because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, in order to be eligible for protection, migrants must possess an up-to-date smartphone, internet access, mobile data and the ability to read and write in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole — the only three languages the app offers. These requirements, the lawsuit argues, disadvantage refugees who don’t have or can’t afford a smartphone and those who lack the requisite language skills. The suit also argues that the government has established new criteria for asylum applications that do not align with asylum laws that were vetted and approved long before the dawn of the smartphone. 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.

And that’s nothing to say of the technology’s myriad flaws. As I reported in June, the app is notoriously unreliable, with facial recognition software that misidentifies darker skin tones and has a tendency to crash, freeze and log users out while they are trying to schedule their asylum appointments. 

“If I could give negative stars I would,” a user seethed on CBP One’s App Store review page, where the app has just 2.6 stars. “My family are trying to flee violence in their country and this app and the photo section are all that’s standing in the way.”

Critics have been sounding the alarm about these problems since the Biden administration announced the policy. Amnesty International argued that the government’s use of the app violates international human rights law by placing unnecessary technical and practical barriers in the way of migrants seeking to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum.

Immigration attorney Nicole Ramos spoke with me about the technical and linguistic challenges that asylum seekers encounter when they attempt to schedule an appointment on the app. Ramos is the Border Rights Project director for the immigrant’s rights group Al Otro Lado, which provides legal support to asylum seekers on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

“There are days where the app is unable to be used due to system-wide glitches,” she said. “There are days and weeks where people keep getting an error message that says that they need to be closer to the border in order to make an appointment and they are literally standing at the port of entry.” 

Asylum seekers who don’t speak or read in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole are left to try to make sense of the error messages and the app’s directions on their own. The government does not provide translation support to people who do not speak a language supported by CBP One. 

“The government is putting all the onus for language access on the asylum seeker themselves and already overburdened nonprofit organizations,” Ramos said. She explained that Al Otro Lado hires interpreters to help applicants who don’t speak any of the languages that the app offers but noted that this responsibility should fall on the government, not organizations like hers. “They are externalizing their responsibility to afford language access to individuals trying to access our legal system.” 

The government’s policy grants exceptions for asylum seekers with “exceptionally compelling circumstances,” like acute medical emergencies or risk of death, and says that those individuals should be permitted to ask for border officials for asylum without a CBP One appointment. But in practice, the plaintiffs say, the app has effectively become the only pathway to access asylum, even for people who are eligible for the government’s exceptions. Ramos said Al Otro Lado has seen border officials turn away asylum seekers without appointments who were in the middle of medical emergencies, including a man in the middle of an epileptic seizure at the port of entry. “The Red Cross was called, police were there and they were aware of the situation and they still refused to process him,” she said. Ramos also shared the story of an asylum seeker who was killed in Mexico while waiting for a CBP One appointment. When the victim’s surviving family members approached border officials with the person’s death certificate in hand and asked to apply for asylum without using the app, they were instructed to schedule an appointment on CBP One. 

The lawsuit alleges that border officials are “almost uniformly requiring asylum seekers to have a CBP One appointment in order to be inspected and processed, regardless of whether they may be eligible for an exception.” It describes two separate instances in which immigration officials rejected asylum seekers’ requests for special consideration after they were kidnapped by criminal groups in Mexico and missed their scheduled appointments. One of the victims escaped but left behind all of his valuables, including his cell phone, according to the lawsuit. When he appeared at the port and asked for asylum, border officials “emphasized that he needed to sign up through the app and denied him any opportunity to explain the exigencies of his situation.”

The post Migrants take the US to court over its glitchy asylum app appeared first on Coda Story.

In recent years, scientists desperate to stop global warming have looked back at this natural event and wondered: Could people recreate similar effects to help reverse rapidly rising global temperatures? 

Enter stratospheric aerosol injection, the process of releasing tiny reflective particles of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that reflect sunlight back into space in order to cool off the planet. The concept mimics the natural activity of volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo. But it is driven by humans.

Proponents of stratospheric aerosol injection, including start-ups and researchers investigating and experimenting with the process, call it “sunscreen for the earth” and argue that we can create a layer of protection to shield us from the hot rays of the sun. It is one of a growing variety of Earth-cooling techniques that fall under the conceptual umbrella of “solar geoengineering.” Other proposed solar geoengineering techniques range from creating light-reflecting clouds to deploying giant mirrors in space. In 2020, Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, unveiled a “whiter than white” specialized paint, designed for rooftops and roads, that can bounce 95% of the sun’s rays back into deep space, cooling the buildings beneath it.

But a growing group of scientists and academics are afraid that solar geoengineering is an all-too-welcome distraction from our obligations to reduce carbon emissions and a flawed scientific concept to boot. They say processes like these could throw Earth into deeper chaos by cooling the world unevenly and wreaking havoc on our climate systems. Plus, solar geoengineering could lock us into long-term reliance on such techniques, creating new dependencies and potential consequences.

“There’s a sense of really deep desperation and urgency among scientists who are reading climate science and see how dire the situation is,” said Lili Fuhr, the director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Program. She explained that despair can lead scientists to scramble around for an idea — any idea — that might stop global heating quickly.

“I don’t think that desperation turns a bad idea into a good idea. The only good idea is that we need to get out of fossil fuels. Anything else doesn’t help us,” said Fuhr.

Despite the concerns that scientists like Fuhr share, solar geoengineering has some uniquely powerful advocates. Bill Gates has backed a Harvard University proposal to shoot light-reflecting aerosols into the sky above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, a project that was scrapped after local indigenous Saami people raised objections. In February, billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave a nod to the idea of creating more clouds above the ice caps to cool the poles by blocking sunlight. “Human interference has destroyed a previously stable system and human ingenuity, both local and international, will be needed to restore it,” he said in a speech at the 2023 Munich Security conference. And Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has provided $900,000 in funding for 15 solar geoengineering modeling projects.

These projects have the look of a quick, relatively cheap, technology-led solution to global heating that doesn’t involve restructuring society around sustainability and renewable energy. It would mean that society could, in theory, have its cake and eat it too: We could keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere while protecting the Earth from greenhouse gas effects.

But processes like this could require humans to continue shooting chemicals into the stratosphere for centuries. Fuhr explained that this could put us on a dangerous trajectory: We wouldn’t be able to stop or even slow down the deployment of these chemicals without facing a rapid, sudden — and potentially catastrophic — heating event. “There would be a shock effect that humans and ecosystems wouldn’t be able to adapt to,” she said. Scientists like Fuhr estimate that an event like this would cause the Earth to heat up so rapidly that we’d risk destroying life on the only planet we can safely live on.

If we want to avoid this, Fuhr said, we’d need “centuries of an international collaborative political regime, doing this in a benign way, for the benefit of all.” 

“I can’t think that anyone actually believes that is possible. We have regime changes all the time — look at the country I’m in right now,” she told me, speaking from Washington, D.C. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. government has shown increased interest in such initiatives. In June, the White House announced a federal plan to research the concept of solar geoengineering more deeply, with the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy leading an effort to set risk management standards and transparency guidelines for any publicly-funded solar geoengineering research in the U.S. The move could be the first step toward greater federal engagement with solar geoengineering research efforts.

The European Union has been more cautious: It has warned against using large-scale disruptive geoengineering technology without a proper assessment of the risks. In June, the bloc called for global talks on the subject and said that the risks of interfering with the climate were “unacceptable.” 

“Nobody should be conducting experiments alone with our shared planet,” said European Union climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, at a news conference. But the EU is also looking at setting rules and boundaries for outdoor geoengineering experiments, an indication that at least some officials are warming to the idea.

In 2021, a collective of scientists and industry professionals signed a “solar geoengineering non-use agreement,” demanding no public funding, no outdoor experiments, no patents, and no support in international institutions for the practice. In other words, they called for a complete shutdown of any experimentation or exploration of solar geoengineering. The scientists and academics said the idea was simply too dangerous and that it would be impossible to test the effects of solar geoengineering on the Earth’s climate without actually releasing the chemicals on a global scale.

“You’re literally talking about intervening with the atmosphere, which protects the only semblance of life that we know in an otherwise desolate universe. Like, I don’t even know what to say to these people. It’s extraordinary,” said Noah Herfort, the co-director of Climate Vanguard, a youth think tank that has been warning about the risks of geoengineering since 2022.

At some point, artificially spewing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to see its effects on the Earth stops being a test. We cannot fully predict the outcome without actually doing it, Fuhr explained. “And we just happen to have one planet,” she said.

The post ‘Sunscreen for the earth’ could curb climate change. It could also destroy us appeared first on Coda Story.

Across the water, shimmering in the heat, stand imposing steel and concrete structures — the brand new plants built by Sinomine, one of the several Chinese companies that have invested in Zimbabwe’s nascent lithium mining industry. Soon, Sinomine will be exporting the lithium from its Bikita mines to massive battery manufacturing factories in China. This neglected rural district is now one more pawn in China’s gambit to control the world’s supplies of rare earth elements and minerals.

The Mungezi River forms the border between Bikita and the equally poor neighboring district of Gutu. On a Friday afternoon in July, Nelson Chamisa, the young, charismatic leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition, is on the campaign trail.

“Our minerals are being exploited,” Chamisa says to the crowd at a rally. “You are getting nothing. The only thing you are getting are cracks in your houses from the dynamite blasts. Our people are still jobless, they still remain poor.” 

On August 23, 2023, Zimbabweans are scheduled to vote in a general election. Chamisa and the incumbent president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are — as they were in 2018 — in a standoff, with none of the other candidates expected to be in the running. Mnangagwa took over the presidency in Zimbabwe in 2017, when long-time president and strongman Robert Mugabe was deposed in a coup. A year later, Mnangagwa won a disputed election. During his time in office, Zimbabwe has lurched from one economic crisis to another.

But now Zimbabwe has been marked as a potential lithium hub. “Lithium batteries,” Elon Musk tweeted last year, “are the new oil.” China is, by a significant margin, the world’s largest manufacturer of these batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, laptops and mobile phones among other things. And as the pressure to transition away from fossil fuels grows, the demand for lithium has been outstripping supply, raising prices and setting off a scramble to discover alternative sources.

Chinese and Western companies have their eyes on mining minerals across Africa, including, for example, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cobalt reserves in the DRC are critical to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, leading to a rush to mine the metals often under inhuman conditions. When Pope Francis visited Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital, he said that the “poison of greed” was “choking Africa” and that the continent was “not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.” 

But with the value of the EV battery market projected to increase from about $56 billion in 2022 to an estimated $135 billion in 2027, Zimbabwe’s lithium deposits represent an enormous economic opportunity for a debt-ridden country that has been suffering from international economic isolation and U.S. sanctions for 20 years. 

Sanctioned by the United States, Mnangagwa has turned to China, Russia and Iran for support. In July 2023, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stopped in the Zimbabwean capital Harare as part of his three-country African tour. The crowd waved Zimbabwean and Iranian flags. Mnangagwa described Raisi as his brother. “When you see him, you see me,” said Mnangagwa. “When you see me, you see him.” 

And at the 2023 Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin reportedly gave Mnangagwa a helicopter. Putin also included Zimbabwe among a half dozen nations that Russia promised to supply with grain for free after refusing to extend the Black Sea grain deal that enabled exports of Ukrainian grain to Africa. Victims of American sanctions must cooperate, Mnangagwa said, “and this is the cooperation we are seeing.”

In Mnangagwa’s view, the West has had decades to mine and invest in Zimbabwean minerals and has done little. Sinomine and other Chinese companies, on the other hand, have moved quickly. The fruits of Chinese investment are evident across Zimbabwe. Last year, Mnangagwa delivered a State of the Nation address from a new $200 million parliamentary building entirely funded and constructed by China. Opponents of Chinese investment, Mnangagwa says, just want to hand Zimbabwe to the West. “They want our lithium,” Mnangagwa says of Western companies, “they want our minerals.”

Instead, it is Chinese companies, the Zimbabwean government argues, that offer Zimbabwe the best deal. For instance, Sinomine expects to create 1,000 jobs at its two Bikita plants and export up to $500 million of lithium concentrate every year. By comparison, the plants’ previous European owners did nothing for 50 years.  

Standing on the back of a pickup truck, Nelson Chamisa tells cheering supporters that these projections of Chinese success mean little unless locals benefit from the jobs and the profits. “Do you see any development from the lithium here?” Chamisa asked his supporters in Gutu. “Kana,” they roared back. Nothing.

According to the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency, international investors are flocking to the country for lithium. Of the 116 investment licenses issued to foreign investors in the first three months of 2023, 42 were given to companies seeking to buy into the lithium industry. “Without doubt, mining outstrips every other area,” Tafadzwa Chinhamo, the head of ZIDA told me. “Most of our licenses right now are for lithium mining, prospecting and processing.”

His list of applications for licenses tells the story of the race to mine Zimbabwean lithium. In the first half of 2023, he told me, ZIDA received 160 investor applications from China, up from 53 over the same period in 2022. By contrast, there were only five U.S. applications and 10 U.K. applications. The Chinese applications for the first quarter of 2023 pledged investments of $944 million, compared to $166 million proposed by U.S. investors.

Zimbabwe’s opposition claims that Chinese companies are being given free rein over the nation’s mineral resources and allowed to cut regulatory corners and scar the environment. The ruling party says the opposition are megaphones for the West.

This has not gone unnoticed in Washington, D.C.

At a March confirmation hearing for Pamela Tremont, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Zimbabwe, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was clear on what they expected her to do — go to Zimbabwe and counter China’s influence. Chinese and Russian interests, Tremont told the committee, “comprise about 90% of the foreign direct investment in Zimbabwe’s mineral sector.” Expressing doubt about the terms of the contracts, Tremont added that she “would certainly hope the Zimbabwean government is ensuring that the Zimbabwean people are getting fair compensation for the minerals taken from their country.”

Her comments riled the Chinese embassy in Harare. A spokesperson told The Herald, Zimbabwe’s state-owned daily newspaper, that “Zimbabwe should not be used as a wrestling ground for major-country rivalry.” China, the spokesperson said, was focused on bringing more development to Zimbabwe, while the U.S. was slapping “illegal” sanctions on Zimbabwe and meddling in its internal affairs.

But Chinese investment in Zimbabwe is not without controversy.

Goromonzi is a farming area just east of Harare, the capital. Standing on a red-soiled ridge, I saw maize fields stretching to the horizon on one side of the Nyaguwe River. On the other side, Shengxiang, a small Chinese company, has started mining for lithium. According to the local office of the Environmental Management Agency, the company is operating in the area illegally.

“We inspected the mine, found them in breach of regulations, fined them and ordered them to stop operations until they got an EIA [environmental impact assessment authorisation],” said Astas Mabwe, the officer in charge of the area. Still, Mabwe told me, the company kept mining.

A member of the ruling party told me anonymously: “Who is going to go out and fight an investor when the president is calling for more investment?”

The Chinese Chamber of Enterprises in Zimbabwe, which represents over 80 companies in the country, insists that companies like Shengxiang are in the minority. Allegations of illegal operations, Chinese authorities say, are part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

Last year, local newspapers published a series of articles that argued that Chinese companies in Zimbabwe had flouted a number of laws safeguarding the environment and labor rights. The reporting was attributed to the Information for Development Trust, a journalism program funded by the U.S. embassy in Harare.

Aja Stefanon, from the U.S. embassy’s economic affairs department, said last year that the program’s “work has ensured that the media plays its watchdog role in safeguarding shared goals in labor, human rights, and natural resources governance.”

Predictably, the Chinese embassy saw it differently. It told The Herald that the Information for Development Trust was “a puppet sponsored and manipulated by the U.S. Embassy to attack Chinese investment in Zimbabwe.” It “had long fabricated false information and published anti-China news,” the Chinese embassy said.  

Back in Bikita, Sinomine, under the conditions of its mining license, will spend an extra $2 million to supply uninterrupted power to local villages. This June, Sinomine started to drill 35 boreholes to provide water to these villages.
Until then, Molly Mandityira, a local village head said, eight villages shared a single borehole. “This,” she told me, “changes everything.” With people in rural areas generally voting in far greater numbers than people in urban areas, Mnangagwa might be counting on Chinese investment to win him the election

The post As Zimbabwe elections near, China is the dragon in the room appeared first on Coda Story.

It served her well when she worked in child protective services in Hobbs, a small oil town in southeastern New Mexico.

She looks at it this way: “If you give in to emotion, the job’s not going to get done. You don’t process emotion. You walk in on a scene, and the first thing you see isn’t a tragedy. The first thing you see is a checklist of things you need to do to resolve the issue.”

But when Woodward looks back on all the horrible things that she witnessed as a caseworker, the weight of the decisions she had to make is almost too much to bear.

“Each decision that you make changes your life. Every single, solitary decision that I made, I still carry it,” Woodward said when we met in the spring.

Woodward used to work for the state of New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department, supporting children who had been the victims of abuse or neglect. She was part of the CYFD staff teams that deliberated on whether to take kids away from their parents and put them into foster care.

Woodward is still haunted by the memories of one little girl in particular. Woodward had reason to believe that the girl, who was living in foster care with her grandfather, was being abused.

But something stood in the way: It was a safety assessment tool that the state requires caseworkers like Woodward to use. Formally known by its somewhat clunky brand name — “Structured Decision Making” — the tool is meant to help determine whether a child is in great enough danger to be removed from their home. 

Her concern was based on more than just a hunch. The girl’s mother had told Woodward that the grandfather was an abuser – he had raped her when she was young. Woodward took this information to her team and called for another office to send a caseworker to investigate. But that caseworker’s report, based on the tool, indicated that there was no reason for concern about the girl’s safety. Despite Woodward’s pleas, CYFD staff decided to keep the girl with her grandfather.

It became clear months later that Woodward was right — the little girl’s grandfather had been sexually abusing her all along. The girl was eventually taken away from her grandfather and placed in a different foster home.

The agency is adamant that the tool isn’t meant to supersede a caseworker’s judgment. “It’s not about giving the job of a caseworker to an electronic tool,” said Sarah Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau. “That’s 100% not what it’s intended to do.”

But in cases like this one, it felt to Woodward as if the tool had won out.

“You can no longer go on all of your training, all of your experience in the field. It’s a moot point because the tool said so,” Woodward told me.

“You’re going off of a scoring system now. And if the family doesn’t meet the score, you have to turn around and walk out.”

Across the U.S., child welfare agencies are looking to algorithms and risk assessment tools to help support the arduous labor of caseworkers in child protective services agencies. The hope is that these tools will help caseworkers make better and more equitable decisions that will ultimately improve outcomes for vulnerable children. But these agencies’ problems run deep. Oftentimes, there is no single tool or policy solution that can fix them.

Facing high rates of child abuse and neglect, the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department rolled out the Structured Decision Making safety scoring tool in 2020. The goal was to help the agency decide whether or not children are safe living with their parents and to assess the risk of future abuse if a child remains in their home. But in the face of severe staffing shortages and a push to remove kids from their families in only the most extreme cases, former CYFD staff and children’s attorneys in New Mexico say that the safety scoring tool has been replacing caseworker judgment and leaving some kids in harm’s way.

New Mexico had the 15th highest rate of child abuse or neglect in the 2021 fiscal year, a drop from the 8th highest in 2020. About a third of children who died from abuse, neglect or homicide between 2015 and 2021 had prior involvement with child welfare, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

One of them was named James Dunklee Cruz. There were countless warning signs that the little boy was at risk of harm. When he was just a few months old, caseworkers found ample evidence of neglect: The home where he lived with his mother was roach-infested and strewn with trash and dog feces. 

In October 2019, when Dunklee Cruz was four, he was brought to the hospital with multiple injuries, including a black eye, a bruised penis and an injured shoulder. He told a CYFD investigator that he had been abused by three people in his life. But somehow those allegations were declared unsubstantiated. The Strategic Decision Making tool classified Dunklee Cruz as “safe with a plan,” allowing him to stay with his mother.

Two months later, James Dunklee Cruz died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head and torso at the hands of Zerrick Marquez, one of the men he had named as his abuser two months before. Marquez pleaded guilty to killing Dunklee Cruz and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

CYFD conducted nine investigations into allegations of abuse and neglect during the boy’s short life. Caseworkers put what they call “safety plans” in place for Dunklee Cruz, but this wasn’t enough to keep him safe. These details appear in a publicly posted child fatality review summary report. The section of the document drawing on the child’s autopsy also describes a litany of injuries, including “healing jaw fractures and healing subdural hemorrhage indicating significant blunt head trauma that occurred earlier than the acute injuries” — in other words, injuries that didn’t kill him but proved that Dunklee Cruz was at risk of serious harm before his final days.

A wrongful death lawsuit is also working its way through the court. A complaint filed in December 2022 in a federal district court in New Mexico accuses CYFD of failing in their duty to protect the boy and states that Dunklee Cruz’s mother repeatedly violated the safety plans CYFD put in place. The complaint also specifically points to the Structured Decision Making tool. 

It reads: “Over the span of his four years of life, CYFD investigators repeatedly failed to rely on accurate and well-documented facts when it utilized the agency’s Safety Risk Assessment Tool, causing its repeated contacts with James to result in flawed and underestimated risk assessment and flawed decision-making resulting in James’ death.”

When I asked about the boy’s case, CYFD offered this response: “The death of James Dunklee Cruz is tragic. The loss of any child is felt deeply and grieved by our caseworkers and staff. Regarding the function of the tool in this case, he was identified as safe with a plan. This means that the safety assessment tool identified at least one danger indicator and that in order for the child to stay in the custody of the parent, a plan was required. Our caseworkers worked with James’ mother to find a safe place for her to live and alternative childcare for James to mitigate against the threats that were identified by the caseworker.”

What happened to James Dunklee Cruz reflects the most significant problem that former CYFD workers raised when they talked to me about the Structured Decision Making safety tool: It doesn’t always convey how much danger kids are truly facing.

The tool’s launch coincided with a change in the agency’s approach to decision-making about when to remove a child from their family’s home. This was a part of a nationwide shift with the passage of the federal Family First Preservation Services Act, a policy that was designed to keep children “safely with their families to avoid the trauma that results when children are placed in out-of-home care.”

The safety tool doesn’t tell caseworkers what to do. It is meant to facilitate a conversation between the worker and their supervisor about whether to declare the child “safe,” “safe with plan” or “unsafe.” The tool sets the tone for what, ideally, should be an extensive, in-depth dialogue between people from across the agency. But due to staffing shortages, it doesn’t always play out this way. The tool “doesn’t take into account that there’s not enough workers, there’s not enough supervisors,” said Matt Esquibel, a regional manager at CYFD.

Some former caseworkers have told me that, in this context, the assessment takes on an outsized role in determining a child’s fate.

“It’s not meant to streamline or fast-track decisions, but it helps focus the conversations, which is helpful to supervisors and to workers,” said Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau.

Former CYFD workers told me that the risk and safety assessments did not always match what they observed about the level of danger a child was facing, particularly when it came to substance abuse, domestic violence or repeated involvement with child protective services.

“We saw issues with the safety tool immediately,” said one former CYFD worker who had knowledge of the tool and reviewed investigations in which it was used. She requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. 

The former CYFD worker said she would see cases in which she thought a child should have been removed from the home but the safety tool didn’t reflect that.

“I’m reading a report that comes and I’m reading their notes that they’ve entered. And then I’m looking at their safety assessment, [and it] does not match what I’m reading,” she said.

Workers are only allowed to check off a danger on the safety tool if they can observe or otherwise prove it. But investigators don’t always have time to do multiple home visits or to gather more information, said Esquibel. They may not be able to gather all the details right away, and children may not initially disclose abuse. There is an “override” for the risk assessment that requires supervisor approval. If the worker thinks that the risk score is too low, they can bump the score up one level. CYFD’s Meadows emphasized that workers should use their judgment and critical thinking, work with supervisors and override the tool if necessary.

“I think the workers and supervisors do the best that they can when they’re out there,” Esquibel said. “But your assessment is only as good as what information you’re gathering or who’s available at the time.” 

Ultimately, the former CYFD staff member who requested anonymity thinks the assessments are not capturing the seriousness of some cases and that the consequences for kids are real.

“I think it’s leading to dangerous situations for children,” she said. “I think the agency is leaving the children in situations based on that tool when they should be removing them.”

Meadows said that shouldn’t happen. “If a worker feels strongly that a child is unsafe and they don’t want to walk away from that child in that home, they shouldn’t. Safety tool be damned,” she said.

Even though she’s moved on from CYFD, this all still weighs heavily on Ivy Woodward, who has worked with children for most of her career. Before working in child welfare, Woodward, who is Native American and Hispanic, taught elementary school on the Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona and in southwestern New Mexico. In 2017, CYFD brought her on as a permanency planning supervisor. This meant she worked on cases where the agency had credible evidence that a child was being abused or neglected at home. The work spoke to core elements of Woodward’s personality. 

“I’m a protector,” Woodward told me. “You can do a lot to me and get away with it. But if I see somebody doing something to someone else, that triggers my inner anger.” 

She calls it like she sees it and pushes back when she disagrees. “I don’t know what is broken in my head, but I question everything,” Woodward said.

When Woodward left CYFD in the summer of 2020, she and a colleague filed a lawsuit alleging that they faced retaliation after raising concerns about a case in which a child was severely injured after she and her siblings were returned to their parents. The agency settled the lawsuit for more than $300,000 without acknowledging liability.

Woodward has a fast, forceful way of speaking, a reflection of her often overly-caffeinated state. But when she talks about the kids she worked with at CYFD and the horrible things she heard or saw on the job, her voice gets a little higher. Her emotions begin to flow.

“You do have to be able to turn off the emotions and make those cold, hard decisions when the time comes to make them,” she said. “But until that time comes, you have to see people, not casework.”

Woodward now lives across the border in a tiny county in West Texas with her husband and two daughters. She works as the chief of juvenile probation and coordinates emergency management for the county.

In some ways, Woodward was an outlier among other CYFD staff. Many start working with the agency soon after college and have little or no experience in child welfare. The agency struggles to stay fully staffed — this spring, nearly a quarter of positions were unfilled. A July 2022 review by an outside consultancy found that CYFD employees felt overwhelmed by the work they were being asked to do. Staff said they would rush from one emergency to the next and had little ability to make progress on other cases.

This is not unique to New Mexico. A caseworker I spoke with in Indiana described feeling like he was stretched so thin that he would race from one emergency to the next without ever having time to put out the fires. He felt like he was just identifying a fire and then moving on to the next one.

The issues of understaffing and high turnover rates were top of mind for many CYFD workers. High turnover isn’t just bad for morale. It directly affects the ability of those who remain on staff to do their work. When one person leaves, those who stay have to absorb their caseload. It is daunting. The review described a “culture of fear” in which staff were afraid that if something bad were to happen with a case, they would be punished or “scapegoated.”

And the forced intimacy of the work can be grating and even traumatic. Caseworkers must regularly intervene in painful moments of struggle and conflict within families, and they are sometimes met with resistance. As agents of the state, they are caught between a bureaucracy that requires them to treat each situation as consistently and objectively as possible and real life-and-death conflicts in which people’s actions are largely driven by emotion.

For strained child welfare agencies, algorithms and risk assessment tools are an attractive solution to the vexing challenge of maintaining consistent decision-making practices.

Some states have experimented with predictive analytics, with limited success. Illinois used an algorithm to estimate the likelihood that a child would die or be seriously injured as a result of abuse or neglect. Social workers were flooded with cases erroneously determined to be urgent, while children that the algorithm deemed low-risk were dying. The state soon stopped using the tool after the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declared it ineffective. 

A child welfare algorithm in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is currently facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. Using arrest records, Medicaid data and documented struggles with substance abuse, the algorithm generates a score from 1 to 20 that determines whether to open a neglect investigation. Reporting by the AP found that the algorithm disproportionately flagged Black children for neglect investigations. There was also evidence that the algorithm did the same for parents with disabilities.

Torn between pushback against opaque algorithms and the desire to use technology to streamline decision-making, some states are turning to scoring tools that are less opaque and less automated. New Mexico’s Structured Decision Making tool, created by the nonprofit Evident Change, is one of them. Oregon, New Hampshire and California also use assessment tools built by Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making offers a checklist that is meant to help the investigator understand “the risk of imminent and serious harm,” according to a CYFD progress and impact report. Children are ranked safe, safe with plan, which involves in-home services, or unsafe, which is grounds for removal. There’s also an actuarial risk scoring tool, which is meant to assess “the likelihood of any future maltreatment” and additional CYFD involvement in the next 18 to 24 months, if the child remains with the family.

The safety scoring tool asks about abuse or neglect, including physical or sexual abuse, failure to meet the child’s basic needs, unsafe living conditions, emotional harm or unexplained injuries. Both assessments are intended to guide caseworkers to think about risk factors, vulnerabilities and the impact on the child.

“What Structured Decision Making tries to do is to help workers and supervisors make accurate, consistent and equitable decisions at these high-stakes moments,” said Phil Decter, the director of child welfare at Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making is also “intended to reduce bias, whether that’s related to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, making sure that we’re not conflating poverty with neglect,” said CYFD’s Meadows.

But in New Mexico, as the Dunklee Cruz case and insights from caseworkers make clear, the tool does not always work as intended. And the tool can’t solve some of CYFD’s biggest problems. The agency doesn’t have the workers to meet the needs of the population. Emblematic of a national trend, CYFD is chronically understaffed. Workers juggle heavy caseloads and often have precious little time to dedicate to each child’s case.

The safety tool isn’t meant to fix that. CYFD says hiring is a priority. “Structured Decision Making is not intended to replace human beings in terms of lightening their caseload,” Meadows said. “The role of it is to create consistency, making sure that we’re looking at every angle of the case, every potential impact to a child.”

But for caseworkers racing from one emergency to the next, the tool begins to play a different role. It sometimes becomes a shortcut, they told me — a stand-in for real human decision-making, in a system already weighed down by the rigid requirements of the state.

Reed Ridens remembers everything about the day the state took him away from his father almost seven years ago. It was a typical January afternoon at school. About an hour before classes ended, Ridens, who was 15 at the time, was pulled out of orchestra practice and brought to a conference room. Waiting for him were two of his teachers, the school social worker, representatives from CYFD, a police officer and his dad. 

“I’m just looking around like, what is going on?” Ridens recalled. 

For nearly an hour, the adults in the room went back and forth about whether Ridens’ dad could take care of him. There were concerns, they said, about neglect and his father’s alcoholism. 

“The entire time, I was just sitting there, crying, like, ‘Hey, please don’t take me out of my home,’” Ridens said.  

His protests were futile. Ridens stayed in the foster care system until he was 18, moving between 15 different placements. It left him with a deep-seated trauma, compounded by his father’s death four years ago.

“I felt like the state was taking me out of my household and then not doing any better for me than my father did. And in fact, actually putting me in worse-off situations,” he said. 

“I don’t really feel like they saw me as a person,” he told me when we met in Albuquerque.

“I feel like they didn’t see me as more than a list of checkmarks. I feel like they didn’t see my dad as anything more than a monster.”

Today, kids in a position like Ridens’ are not only dealing with adults trying to decide what’s best for them. Their fate is also shaped by tools like Structured Decision Making.

How did New Mexico get here? In part, the objective was to prevent the wrong kids from entering foster care, said Beth Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“Foster care really should be the absolute last resort in extreme circumstances where needs cannot be met in the home and where a child cannot be safe at home,” she told me.

The state paid the nonprofit organization Evident Change $1.3 million to develop a risk and safety assessment tool, according to a state legislative finance committee report. The nonprofit creates similar tools for criminal justice, education and adult protective services. 

After a pilot in some counties in 2019, including in the country where James Dunklee Cruz lived, Structured Decision Making was rolled out statewide in January 2020.

The tool works best in situations where there is plenty of time and staff capacity to dedicate to this kind of deliberation. But CYFD’s investigations unit was short almost 25% of its workforce as of May 2023, according to the state’s public statistics dashboard, and maintains a steep turnover rate.

“If a child welfare organization is not being resourced well, if it’s understaffed or if caseloads are high, it’s going to be hard for optimal work to happen in any situation,” said Decter, who previously worked in child welfare in Massachusetts. “Good decision-making takes time.”

A report presented to a CYFD steering committee found that, according to focus groups made of CYFD workers, Structured Decision Making is “not being used as it was designed to be utilized. They go out and do their investigation and then come back in and click whatever needs to be clicked to show it has been done.” 

A former investigator in Hobbs told me that the Structured Decision Making tool just added more work to her plate. 

“It didn’t take a whole lot of time, but it was just another tedious step that you’re going through when you’ve already made up your mind,” she said.

As a result, she said, some people rushed through checking boxes on the safety tool. 

“I watched people go click, click, click, click, click, and just move on,” she said. It wasn’t the deciding factor. But she did feel like it could be “manipulated” to justify a certain decision.

CYFD says this isn’t how it’s supposed to be used. “Safety assessment is not a quick activity,” said Meadows. “Workers should take their time with it, really do their best to engage the family to get as much information as possible so that the safety assessment is accurate.”

Ivy Woodward, the former supervisor in Hobbs, had concerns about the safety scoring tool from the very beginning. In particular, she worried about how it dealt with a caregiver’s substance use, which is not listed as one of the danger indicators that must be checked in order for the agency to remove a child. In a sharp pivot from New Mexico’s previous assessment, substance use is treated as a “complicating factor” rather than a deciding one.

The risk tool adds points if the parent struggles with substance abuse. However, the tool doesn’t weigh substances differently. Meth gets the same number of points as marijuana, for example. 

In the Structured Decision Making training, Woodward and some of the other experienced caseworkers challenged this, fearing that it would put children at risk. The discussion got so heated that the head of the agency came to intervene. Woodward said she was effectively shut down. It was clear that the agency would be using the tool, whether she liked it or not.

Other CYFD workers and child welfare attorneys also raised concerns about how the safety and risk assessments handle drug abuse, a factor affecting almost one-third of children who were victims of maltreatment in 2020, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

While investigators are supposed to consider substance use in their decision about removing a child, it’s not supposed to be the sole reason for removal. This is part of a recent change in the agency’s approach to substance use. Caseworkers are now told to focus not solely on substance use, but rather on the impact substance use has on the caregiver’s ability to care for their children, said Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“It’s only if the substance use interferes with parenting that it becomes abuse or neglect,” Gillia said. “So I think what the tool is trying to do is force a look at what parenting behavior is impacted by the substance use.” 

Phil Decter at Evident Change says the safety tool also helps when it comes to an inexperienced workforce. It has detailed instructions that help workers decide whether to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for a danger indicator. It points staff without a background in child welfare in the direction of things to look for, he said. 

But out in the field, Woodward sees problems with this. The decisions are so monumental — literally life or death. For Woodward, the tool is not a substitute for a seasoned supervisor guiding less experienced staff through decisions.

“It becomes a crutch for a lack of confidence,” said Woodward. “I don’t think that being armed with a piece of paper and a laptop is an adequate replacement for someone who’s been in the trenches for 20 years and can tell them this is what you do.”

And the tool doesn’t capture the unspoken cues that an investigator may notice, like a child who can’t make eye contact with a family member or won’t answer open-ended questions, Woodward said. 

The safety tool has an “other” option where investigators can write in safety concerns not addressed by the nine danger indicators. But that should be used “rarely and infrequently,” said Decter. “That’s by design. The other danger indicators should be sufficient.”

The success of the tool depends on how it’s used, and this is where Woodward hit roadblocks in Hobbs. She said her supervisors would tell her she was paying attention to things that the safety tool said weren’t an issue, rather than focusing on what she was called upon to investigate. Woodward felt like she was being instructed to ignore history, context and other dangers that she knew were significant from past experience. 

Information about those more subtle cues may be presented to a judge if CYFD files a petition to remove a child. But if the tool indicates that the child doesn’t need to be removed, the case likely won’t reach that stage.

Former CYFD staff like Gillia emphasized that the agency wants to keep kids living with their families unless they are clearly at risk of imminent and grave harm. The agency settled a lawsuit in 2020 that accused the state of failing to take adequate care of foster children in CYFD custody.

But former caseworkers I spoke with worried that the tool was being used as a way to all but ensure that kids would remain in the home, even in cases where it might leave them at risk. The worry, for people like Ivy Woodward, was that the tool was being used to justify decisions that had already been made.

Evident Change emphasizes that “tools don’t make decisions, people make decisions.” But former CYFD workers told me they worried that this particular tool has an outsized impact on the agency’s final decision.

CYFD commissioned a report from an outside group, Collaborative Safety, to look at what went wrong in five specific cases from 2021 in which children died. In the report, released in July 2022, staff involved in those cases said that sometimes the Structured Decision Making tool would say the child is “safe,” even if the worker felt there were “significant concerns with the family.”

“This places staff in the position where they perceive they cannot act on those concerns as it would go against what the tool’s output is,” wrote the report’s authors.

“Investigators were just using the tool as the end-all-be-all to a decision and an assessment. That’s not correct. We don’t want it to substitute their good judgment,” former CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil told members of the New Mexico House Appropriations and Finance Committee in February 2023. In response to the Collaborative Safety report, CYFD announced they would overhaul their training protocols and pledged to “make sure that every member of staff uniformly knows how to use the tool, including through enhanced training to investigators and supervisors statewide.”

The former CYFD worker I spoke to who requested anonymity saw this reflected in the investigations she reviewed. “I don’t even know how many cases I reviewed where it’s like, you should have removed that kid immediately. And they didn’t because of the safety tool,” she said. “We would always say, use your common sense. This is a guide.” But some workers and managers still put too much emphasis on the tool.

Esquibel said the tool played a major role in facilitating decision-making. “The weight is 100% on your safety assessment because that’s really the snapshot of what happened the day that that worker was there,” he said.

CYFD’s Meadows put it differently: “It’s not just a snapshot in time,” she said. “Safety assessments are not a one-off, one and done thing. Safety is assessed on an ongoing basis when we have an open case because sometimes it does take effort and time to learn more about a family or child situation.”

Woodward doesn’t think the tool should carry so much weight. Instead, it should be “something in your toolbox that you utilize to help you through the process,” she said. “I don’t think they should be used as the ultimate decision maker.”

When Vanna was first removed from her parents at age five, the adults in her life told her that her parents were going on vacation. 

She remembers a woman pulling up to their house and talking to her parents. Her mother was crying, her father was trying to calm her down. The strange woman went up to her younger brother, who was four at the time, and said, “How would you like to go somewhere else?”

“I looked at her, I said, ‘You’re not taking my brother,” said Vanna. 

Vanna, who is now 21 and using a nickname to preserve her privacy, has been fiercely protective of her little brother since they were small. 

As the woman stood talking to her parents, Vanna tried to get him out of his car seat. “And I tried to run with him, and she started running after us. And she said, ‘I’m not trying to take your brother. I’m trying to take you both. You’re going to this lady. Your parents are going on vacation.” 

She didn’t realize until later that she wasn’t returning home. Vanna spent 13 years in foster care until she aged out at 18. She estimates she lived in more than 50 placements. 

In foster care, Vanna felt like she was treated like a case number. Someone else made decisions about every aspect of her life. Someone else had power over her.

“I got numb. I became this robot. You want me to be a puppet, guys? I’ll be a puppet. Pull my strings and do whatever you want because that’s how you treat me,” she said. 

Vanna would tell the adults around her what she wanted, but she didn’t feel like they listened.

“They would always say, ‘Honey, we wouldn’t make any decision if it wasn’t going to be safe for you or if we weren’t keeping your best interests in mind,’” she said. “How do you know what my best interest is?”

The safety assessment that’s currently in place rolled out statewide the year Vanna aged out of the system. But when she looks back at her own experience, systems like this still worry her. She thinks the assessments used to make decisions need to be more personalized, otherwise they do more harm than good. 

“How do you put everyone in the same box, the same population? You put them under the same microscope, but they’re not the same. They’ve had individual situations,” she said.

If the assessments are too generalized, kids won’t end up getting the help they need, Vanna said. Just as the assessments used to evaluate their needs are flattened and standardized, the care kids get is too.

For people like Vanna, many aspects of the child welfare system were dehumanizing. Ernie Holland, who worked at CYFD for 25 years, thinks that by relying on assessment tools like Strategic Decision Making, the agency could make these effects even worse. When he left, he ran the Guidance Center, a nonprofit that offers mental health and other community-based services in Hobbs. 

Even as a young child protective services investigator, the weight of the decisions he was making never escaped him. He shares Ivy Woodward’s belief that “each decision you make changes your life.”

“Unless you’ve gone around the block three or four times to screw up your courage to knock on somebody’s door and ask them why they sodomized their infant, you don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “I’ve been there, done that, and I know what it’s like. And I know you’re risking some of yourself doing that work.”

That pressure never goes away. Holland still remembers a family whose case he managed nearly 50 years ago. He’s still not sure he made the right decision. 

As the agency relies more on standardized assessments, he worries humanity gets removed from the equation. 

For Holland, there’s a big difference between being able to say, “I made the decision based on this tool” and “I made the decision.”

“If you can hide behind an assessment tool,” Holland told me, “it’s not personal anymore. If you get it to where it’s not a personal decision, the kid loses. If you’re making life and death decisions, you damn well better own ‘em.”

This project was supported by the Global Reporting Centre and The Citizens through the Tiny Foundation Fellowships for Investigative Journalism.

The post Inside New Mexico’s struggle to protect kids from abuse appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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