“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.

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.

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This is what the Kremlin wants Russians to think happened when the battle-hardened mercenaries of the Wagner Group swept through Russia, unopposed, for over 600 miles before its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin called off the march to Moscow. 

As Wagner’s supposed coup attempt unfolded, Prigozhin became the undisputed star of the global news cycle. A former Kremlin caterer, Prigozhin, once an elusive figure, gained world renown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Wagner soldiers took on an increasingly prominent role on the frontlines, Prigozhin’s acerbic, angry rants about the incompetence of generals and legislators arguably represented the only sustained evidence that Russians were unhappy with how the war was going.  Given Prigozhin’s adept use of Telegram, it made sense that he would seize the initiative through his now infamous Telegram voice notes, effectively offering listeners a blow-by-blow account of his troops’ journey to Moscow.

But now that the uprising has seemingly fizzled out — with Prigozhin apparently having negotiated safe passage to Belarus — the Kremlin is scrambling to gain control of the narrative. According to Maria Borzunova, an independent Russian journalist who hosts a show debunking Russian state propaganda, Kremlin pundits on state TV have, so far, parroted four key narratives to explain the coup. 

First, the propagandists argued that the Russian military strike on the Wagner camp — which Prigozhin says precipitated his ill-fated march on Moscow — was staged. They also suggested that no one in Rostov-on-Don, the city Wagner briefly occupied, supported the mercenaries. This claim relies on a few shaky videos of Rostov residents confronting Wagner fighters. It also completely ignores widely circulated evidence of crowds in Rostov cheering Prigozhin’s private army. 

During the rebellion, and in the days since, state propaganda channels have also continued to remind viewers that Prigozhin’s actions played into the hands of Russia’s enemies, in particular Ukraine. But it is in the way pro-government talking heads describe the bewildering resolution to the standoff that is most instructive. 

According to the Kremlin’s version of events, the Russian people rallied behind Putin, displaying unity and resolve and undermining the enemy’s — likely foreign-funded — plot to bring Russia to her knees. “Their argument is that the civil war did not succeed because everyone rallied around the president,” said Borzunova. “However, this is not entirely true.” In fact, during the Wagner advance, a number of government officials recorded identical videos with the same text: “We support the president in this difficult situation.” Instructions for what they should write on social media were circulated to officials, Borzunova explained, and even then, some failed to publish the template text. 

On June 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an unannounced speech, his third in four days. Having already addressed the nation, he separately addressed the soldiers, who, he said, “have protected the constitutional order, the lives, security and freedom of our citizens, kept our homeland from descending into turmoil and stopped a civil war.” He handed out some medals and held a moment of silence for the pilots who were killed by Wagner mercenaries. 

No state channels carried this particular speech live, but Russian state media received a written set of guidelines for reporting on it. Independent media outlet Meduza managed to obtain these instructions. 

The document prompts reporters to refer to Wagner mercenaries as “rebels,” “traitors” and “false patriots,” whose actions could have plunged the country into chaos. It dubs the security forces “the real defenders of Russia” who worked to bring about a peaceful resolution. Putin, the guidelines remind journalists, is considered to be a “real leader” who prevented a “negative scenario of turmoil.” The explanation for Wagner’s sudden retreat is simple: The traitors realized that the Russian army “was not with them” and agreed to solve the conflict “without shedding blood.” 

The word “Prigozhin” is notably absent from the guidelines. Putin, too, has meticulously avoided mentioning Prigozhin in all his recent speeches — a tactic reminiscent of his well-documented refusal to utter the name of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Russian state propagandists have largely mimicked this rhetoric. “When virtually no one in society and in the government supported the rebellion, it became clear that the march on Moscow was meaningless,” said state TV presenter Dmitriy Kiselyov two days after the uprising. “Russia has once again passed the test of maturity, and the stronghold of unity has remained unshaken.” Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, dubbed the uprising a lesson that “has once again demonstrated that Russia is undefeatable when it is united.” 

As for Prigozhin, he has been branded a traitor, a label he is unlikely to ever shake. This was a complicated narrative shift for many Kremlin pundits to execute, Borzunova told me. Prigozhin had been loyal to Putin, and many in the government and state media shared the grievances he levied at the defense ministry before the uprising. 

Still, the propagandists, though shaken, have quickly fallen in line. The rebellion has been quashed, the brave Russian soldiers commended and the coup leader mercifully exiled. Of course, the picture of unity that the Kremlin propaganda is working hard to paint is a fantasy. “The fabric of the state is disintegrating,” wrote Andrei Koleniskov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Prigozhin’s actions were “an antecedent of civil unrest unfolding in real time.” 

And while speculation about the longevity of Putin’s regime continues around the world, the Kremlin propaganda machine keeps spinning its wheels, trying to narrate its way out of a crisis. The media guidelines that accompanied Putin’s recent speech emphasized the narrative that “the huge media machine of the rebels” attempted to destabilize the situation in the country. Evidently, it will take an equally powerful blitz of state propaganda to put Russia back on track. 

“Propaganda is doing everything to say that Wagner fighters are patriots, they were used,” said Borzunova. “Prigozhin is the main villain. Whether this works or not, we’ll see.”

The campaign to villainize Prigozhin is far from over. On June 28, Putin acknowledged, for the first time ever, that the Wagner Group had been financed out of Russia’s state budget for the past year, to the tune of $2 billion. “I do hope that, as part of this work, no one stole anything,” Putin said, in a clear signal that Prigozhin — still reeling from last week’s “armed mutiny” criminal charges, which were dropped — might be charged with financial crimes next. In fact, independent Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev reported on June 29 that the Kremlin has now decided to focus its information campaign on the “commercial” character of Prigozhin’s rebellion. “Allegedly, there was no political dimension to the rebellion at all,” Kolezev wrote. “It was all for money.”

If the Kremlin succeeds at convincing Russians that Prigozhin’s actions were a money-grabbing ploy, then the rebellion that, only days ago, seemed existential for the regime might actually strengthen Putin’s hand. 

When every viable alternative to Putin — from the pro-Western, liberally-minded Navalny, formally jailed for fraud, to the Kremlin loyalist who took Bakhmut — is only after the nation’s coffers, there really is no alternative. Or so the Kremlin would have Russians believe. 

CORRECTION [06/30/2023 11:19 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that Maria Borzunova hosts “Fake News.” Borzunova is the former host of “Fake News” and currently hosts her own show debunking Russian propaganda.

The post How the Kremlin plans to prop up Putin appeared first on Coda Story.

Yazidis gathered to demonstrate against the return of the refugees. Videos quickly circulated online claiming to show Yazidis throwing stones at a mosque, and the rumors soon turned into explosive accusations that Yazidis were burning the mosque.

The Sunni Endowment Office, the body that administers Sunni mosques in Iraq, confirmed that the reports were false and that no damage was inflicted on the mosque. It was too late. Muslim religious leaders in Iraq released dozens of videos referring to Yazidis as devil worshippers — a historical trope frequently leveled against Yazidis — and called for them to be murdered. Fear spread among the thousands of Yazidis still residing in refugee camps in Iraq that another wave of violence is on the horizon.

Much of the fomenting of violence against Yazidis occurred on Facebook, but hate speech also spread in WhatsApp groups. A member of one WhatsApp group, for example, said they would bring a machine gun to a refugee camp in Kurdistan and kill as many Yazidis as they could. The French Embassy in Iraq released a statement condemning the proliferation of hate speech.

In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked Sinjar, killing over a thousand Yazidis during the first day alone and enslaving thousands of Yazidi women. A coalition of state and non-state actors supported by the United States pushed the Islamic State out of the region, but some 3,000 Yazidi women and children are still missing.

Sinjar is officially under the control of the Iraqi government, but it is a disputed territory claimed by the authority in charge of the autonomous Kurdistan region. In 2020, the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi government signed an agreement to jointly manage Sinjar, but the area is effectively under the control of different militia groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (better known as the PKK), a Kurdish militant group, and an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, which has dozens of mainly Shia Muslim armed factions connected to both the Iraqi and the Iranian states.

Between June and December 2020, it was reported that 38,000 Yazidis returned to Sinjar. Around 200,000 Yazidis still reside in refugee camps in the Kurdistan region, unable to return to Sinjar because of a lack of security and financial resources. Human Rights Watch has documented how the Iraqi government failed to provide thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar compensation for the destruction to property caused by the Islamic State, which they are entitled to under Iraqi law.

Sinjar — which is about the size of Rhode Island in the U.S. — is rife with competing interests, said Bayar Mustafa, the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, putting Yazidis and other minority groups in Sinjar at heightened risk. The Iraqi government and its army are unable to guarantee security in Sinjar, and there is potential for a re-emergence of a movement similar to the Islamic State.

Islamic State was not just a military organization, but a social, religious and ideological movement, and there has been little effort to defeat the lingering influence of the terrorist organization, according to Mustafa.

Within the Kurdistan Region, Yazidis are under the protection of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has largely welcomed Yazidis and shielded them from mass killings. But the government has not done enough to tackle hate speech, said Hadi Pir, the co-founder of Yazda, an organization that advocates for Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria.

The fear that Yazidis may once again become the target of mass killings is compounded by the specter of chaos. “If a big political issue happens, for example the Iraqi government failed, or the Kurdistan Regional Government had some problems between the different groups in power, then again, there is a possibility Yazidis will be the target,” said Pir.

Yazidi activists say that efforts to educate the Iraqi public about Yazidis and past mass killings committed against them have largely failed. Meanwhile, international efforts to hold the perpetrators of the crimes accountable have been slow. Islamic State members have been prosecuted for terrorism, but the Iraqi justice system and international courts have been unwilling or unable to prosecute them for the crimes they committed against Yazidis. German courts have taken matters into their own hands, prosecuting one Islamic State member for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He killed  a five-year-old Yazidi girl, Reda, by tying her up in the sun as punishment for wetting her bed.

Attempts at transitional justice, the process whereby a society tries to come to terms with past acts of repression, are largely nonexistent in Iraq, and the current political system is failing to address these issues, said Zeynep Kaya, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sheffield. “I think people really underestimate the long-term consequences of sexual violence, of conflict, of displacement. These things continue to simmer in societies, and then they just don’t disappear easily,” said Kaya.

Many Yazidis face a choice of staying in camps in the Kurdistan region, where the Iraqi government has reportedly stopped providing aid, or returning to Sinjar where they face an insecure environment. Many now are considering leaving Iraq altogether.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

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

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

What is the way forward?

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

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After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East’s understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women’s rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization” of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country’s border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

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Disinformation in the Czech Republic has boosted vaccine skepticism and whittled away at public support for the government’s pro-Ukraine policies. Although the country has been targeted by Chinese and Russian disinformation, much of the information pollution that seeps into peoples’ homes is generated by around 39 Czech websites. The people behind these platforms seek a mix of advertising profits and societal influence, undermining legitimate news outlets and eroding trust between the electorate and the government in the process. 

Despite having a vibrant news landscape with audiences engaging with TV and print journalism, significant numbers of Czechs have been swayed by pro-Russian narratives. It’s a situation connected to both the history of the country, which was under communist rule until 1989, and to the success of disinformation campaigns targeting societal fears. The war in Ukraine and the uncertainty it has created across the region have exacerbated the spread of false narratives.

The situation has become so bad that countering disinformation and strengthening public media became important campaign promises for Prime Minister Petr Fiala in the 2021 election, but have resulted in largely failed policies.  

Disinformation experts point to several reasons for this outcome. Fiala leads a five-party coalition government, which can find little consensus on how best to counter disinformation. Moves to tackle false narratives have also been met with concerns about censorship and free speech, even from within Fiala’s own party, the Civic Democratic Party. When the government asked Czech internet services to block eight websites known to push out pro-Russia narratives following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it energized Fiala’s opponents who believed the move signaled an authoritarian bent.

More urgent issues, such as energy prices, have diverted government attention from efforts to counter disinformation. And a lack of consistent action by social media companies, which play a pivotal role in the spread of disinformation in the Czech Republic, has fueled apathy. In late March, the government of the Czech Republic, along with allies from across Central and Eastern Europe, sent a letter to tech firms urging them to do more to counter disinformation by rejecting revenue from sanctioned individuals and boosting accurate information through its algorithms. 

“Until the end of this winter, the Czech government was running in crisis mode” because of the neighboring war in Ukraine, said Jonas Syrovatka, a researcher at Masaryk University in the south of the Czech Republic. He added that there has been a “lack of political courage” to make substantive policy changes. 

The effects of disinformation on Czech society are hard to miss. Not only has information pollution affected vaccine uptake, it has also drawn people onto the streets in anti-government demonstrations. Spurred on by narratives that Fiala’s government is putting support for Ukraine ahead of the welfare of Czech citizens, over 70,000 people turned out to protest in September 2022. Scattered among the crowd were individuals who subscribed to pro-Russian narratives and called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Veronika Kratka Spalkov, a disinformation specialist at the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me the demonstrations aimed to “create a gap between Czech citizens and Ukrainian refugees” in particular.

A promising step by the Czech government in the battle against disinformation came in March 2022 with the creation of a position of media and disinformation commissioner. But from the outset, there was confusion about the role, which combined two portfolios — strategic communication and disinformation. Soon after becoming the first commissioner, Michal Klima led a small team that drafted an action plan to increase the effectiveness of proposed laws that would shut down government-identified disinformation websites when there was an immediate threat to national security. The plan also proposed increasing financial support for anti-disinformation nonprofits working in media education and cutting off the advertising that the government spends on websites that engage in disinformation.

The path to government advertising on disinformation is a complicated one: State-owned companies, such as the Czech post office, would buy so-called “programmatic advertising” packages from organizations such as Google while not knowing where the ads will appear. In the Czech Republic, disinformation sites can have a high volume of traffic Spalkov told me.

Shortly after Klima’s action plan was circulated, it was denounced by disinformation hawks and perceived by a distrustful electorate as a government attempt to censor the media and curtail free speech. Almost as soon as Klima was hired, the media and disinformation commissioner role was scrapped by the government and the disinformation portfolio was moved to the jurisdiction of the government’s national security advisor. 

Disinformation in the Czech Republic is complex and dynamic, according to Syrovatka, the researcher from Masaryk University. It usually originates on free-access websites whose anatomy is wholly composed of false information. It is then amplified across social media. Telegram has also become an important platform for disinformation circulation.

The Czech Republic is also host to a novel mechanism for the spread of disinformation: email chains. With around one-third of the Czech population receiving these threads straight into their inbox, they have been effective in creating hysteria around key issues such as vaccines and migration. This method of communication has become popular among older people and allowed Czech disinformation to bypass mainstream media and successfully appeal to a receptive audience. “We have a chain email problem, and I think we are the only country in the world with this problem,” Veronika Spalkova of the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me. “These emails target peoples’ emotions, and they play a role in important events in this country.” 

It’s not just email chains, text messages laden with disinformation have been successful in fueling hysteria. In early January, people in the Czech Republic began to receive messages that claimed to be from Petr Pavel, the presidential candidate. The content falsely said that they were being mobilized to fight in Ukraine, and it set off enough panic to warrant a response from the police.

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India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

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“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on into its second year, Ukraine’s news organizations have worked hard to showcase the brutality of Russian military forces and to keep the war on the international agenda. In the reporting of smaller media based in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians who have Russian sympathies or are apathetic about living under Moscow’s hand are still somewhat present. But they have all but disappeared from coverage by outlets that are considered mainstream.

Rakovitsa’s organization is working to show how people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing the war and to counter the relentless tide of pro-Russian disinformation. They do this by reporting straight facts in a style that is bone dry, in both Russian and Ukrainian.

Among Ukrainian media, their approach stands out. And it is exactly what some people are looking for. Since the invasion, News of Donbas and its sister YouTube channel have seen their audience numbers skyrocket. People living under occupation have engaged with the newsroom’s mix of news updates and short features. And Russians hungry for facts have driven traffic to the YouTube channel in particular. More than 70% of the channel’s 169,000 subscribers are logging on from Russia, although some portion of this figure is likely Ukrainians who were forcibly moved to Russia over the course of 2022.

In the past, the organization’s divergence from the norm has led to criticism or doubt from other media outlets. Before the war, much was made of News of Donbas’ decision to publish photographs of Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic. The site also ran a photo of the region’s unofficial flag, a move that some saw as legitimizing Pushilin’s initiative. But since the war began in 2022 Ukraine’s journalists have united around a common enemy.

“The journalists in this country started a marathon of coverage over a year ago,” Rakovitsa told me between swigs of her non-alcoholic beer. “24/7 we’re covering this story and in so many ways it has brought us together. At times, yes, there are people who still criticize us, but I understand that they are also suffering from this war.” Ukrainian journalists, she said, are living with “nerves with no skin,” covering a war that is challenging their very existence as a people.

The Institute first launched in 2009, with a goal of shining light on corruption and life in Donetsk. In 2014, the work expanded to a YouTube channel, which focused on the Maidan revolution and human rights violations that proliferated as fighting erupted between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian government. With the majority of its reporters from eastern Ukraine, the newsroom became adept at obtaining and explaining information about what was happening inside occupied territories.

Now funded by major Western donors like the Council of Europe and USAID, the non-profit has developed various arms, including a think tank, the annual Donbas Media Forum and Crimea Today, a separate news outlet that focuses on communities in the annexed peninsula. “Our audience there watches us, trusts us, knows we are pro-Ukrainian media,” said Rakovitsa. “We don’t say they are fools and blame them for Russia’s actions,” she said.

This, too, sets them apart from the norm. Further west, many believe that a lack of local resistance to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea helped set the stage for the 2022 invasion. 

Rakovitsa sees her organization’s work as integral to Ukraine’s future and thinks that discussions about what to do after the war need to start now, even as the battles rage on. People liberated from the occupied territories will have to be weaned off a robust diet of Russian propaganda, she told me.

Indeed, the Ukrainian information sphere has become highly charged, with people quick to judge one another and seemingly eager at times to define who has betrayed Ukraine and who has not. In the occupied territories, people are also experiencing wartime fervor, but for many, it is mediated instead by Russian propaganda. Rakovitsa expects that whenever the war ends, those who have only been fed the Russian side of the story will have a deeply distorted view of what has happened. She worries that this clash of narratives could result in a whole new round of conflict. 

“We need to ensure that there is no second war after the first one,” she said to me, a few times over.

In February 2022, the organization’s offices moved west following the invasion. In total, 50 staff members work under Rakovitsa. Most are now working remotely, due to the constant threat of shelling. And new obstacles arise each day. But the sense of mission is palpable and sustaining. 

“The people we are reporting to, they are our people,” Rakovitsa said to me, as we walked out of the hotel doors and onto the street. “We’re fighting for them.”

CORRECTION [04/28/2023 10:20 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that the offices of the Donetsk Institute of Information moved west amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The editorial offices moved west in February 2022.

The post The Ukrainian journalists on the front lines of Russian propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost two months later, Kocer is still being investigated and does not know if he will be sent to trial under a controversial law, the so-called disinformation law, which criminalizes the spreading of false or misleading information. If convicted, Kocer could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Critics say the disinformation law, passed in October 2022, is the latest example of the gradual dismantling of democratic freedoms in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for over two decades now.

As Turkey approaches its presidential election on May 14, the disinformation law, which was used to silence journalists in the aftermath of the earthquakes, casts a shadow over free speech in what some Turkish people see as the most important election in the Republic’s 100-year history.

On election day, the state will use the law to suppress the reporting of what is happening at polling stations and justify detentions and arrests, said Baris Altintas, the co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association, a non-profit organization which offers legal assistance to journalists in Turkey. The Turkish government might also initiate internet shutdowns, website blockings and bans on Twitter accounts, she told me. 

One of the most controversial changes under the disinformation law was an amendment to the Turkish criminal code called Article 217. It states that people can be imprisoned for up to three years for disseminating false information related to the country’s domestic and foreign security. The law specifies that the false information has to be related to the “internal and external security, public order and general health of the country” to be considered a crime.

What this means in practice is unclear — which may be the point.

“Such wording, within the Turkish context can refer to anything and everything and often concepts such as external security and/or national security as well as public order are taken lightly,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The law states that disinformation must be distributed in a way that disturbs public peace, with the motive of creating concern, fear and panic among the public. But, Akdeniz explains, it does not define anxiety, fear or panic, leaving its interpretation up to public prosecutors who consider whether to bring forward a case, as well as the criminal courts if an indictment is issued.

Turkey has low levels of judicial independence, with most judges appointed by the president and the parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s party, the AKP, and its coalition of allied parties.

Unpublished research by the Media and Law Studies Association shows that six journalists were detained under Article 217 for their work covering the aftermath of the earthquakes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only Iran, China and Myanmar currently jail more journalists than Turkey.

The earthquakes, which killed more than 45,000 people in Turkey alone and destroyed around 214,000 buildings, have put the AKP under immense pressure in the lead up to the elections. The party has been accused of undermining construction safeguards, thus worsening the impact of the earthquakes. It has also been criticized for overseeing a chaotic response to the disaster, fueling widespread anger against what many see as a corrupt government.

In response, the government has described its critics as “provocateurs” and shut down access to social media sites, including homegrown sites, on some service providers, all while people were using these platforms to search for survivors.

Two journalists arrested in February, Ali and Ibrahim Imat, were reportedly only released on Friday, having spent weeks awaiting trial for allegedly spreading fake news. The brothers had raised allegations that the Turkish authorities in Osmaniye were withholding tents from people made homeless by the earthquakes.

On at least two occasions, when reporting from the earthquake-affected region, Mir Ali Kocer said he was confronted by police officers in order to stop him from filming. One incident was caught on camera. This was something several journalists have reported experiencing.

When he was summoned to the police station, the policemen told Kocer he was being investigated for spreading disinformation for comments he had posted on social media. According to Kocer the posts that the police showed him included one in which he said he could smell dead bodies.

Kocer told me he was simply sharing information, obtained from survivors of the earthquakes or local officials and the police, which the government refused to share. He said his posts are usually supported with a photo, a video or an interview with someone. Kocer, who refers to the disinformation law as the “censorship law,” believes the police were just trying to intimidate him. But, he told me, he will continue to be a journalist even if he is forced to report from inside a prison.

Prior to the disinformation law, the state already had a wide range of legal tools available to target critical voices, including an anti-terrorism law that has forced dozens of journalists and dissidents to flee while many others have been imprisoned. 

Another law, forbidding people to insult the president, led to 33,973 prosecutions in 2021 alone. Schoolchildren and a former Miss Turkey, the 2006 winner of a national beauty pageant, have been prosecuted under the law. In 2016, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for posting images on Facebook comparing Erdogan to the Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

Often, the anti-terrorism law is used against journalists who make accusations against judges or police officials tasked with combating terrorism, says Ozgur Ogret, the Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In cases where this charge does not stick, the disinformation law gives the state another way to target the same journalists and imprison them for doing the thing that is, by definition, their job — spreading information.

In December 2022, Sinan Aygul became the first journalist to be arrested under the disinformation law, after he posted a tweet accusing police officers and soldiers of sexually abusing a child. He later retracted the story for inaccuracies.

Aygul could have been charged by the police for making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism, said Ogret. But instead the state decided to use the disinformation law.

The impact of the law extends beyond journalists. Hundreds of people had legal proceedings initiated against them and dozens were detained for spreading “provocative” posts on social media in the wake of the earthquakes. It is unclear at this stage how many of these people were held under Article 217, but it is likely that a lot of them were detained using the law, said Altintas, the director of the Media and Law Studies Association.

Article 217 poses a bigger threat to NGOs, academics and ordinary citizens than journalists, who are more seasoned in dealing with the state and have been targeted for years using a mixture of laws, Altintas told me. Now the disinformation law means anything anyone tweets or says can be used against them.

The disinformation law also imposes heavy sanctions, including six-month bans on advertising, on social media platforms that fail to comply with content removal requests from prosecutors or the courts. These same companies are also obliged to provide user data, when requested, in relation to specific crimes, including when people are accused of disseminating fake news.

The authorities can limit access to social media platforms by slowing down the speed of the service for non-compliance with these requests. The platforms have been put in a further bind as they are now required to set up subsidiaries in Turkey, making them more criminally, administratively and financially liable. “The disinformation law forces social media platforms to be complicit in the state’s censorship regime,” said Suay Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international human rights organization that promotes freedom of expression.

The opposition in Turkey, after years of elections riddled with fraud, have become highly organized in election monitoring, in which social media plays a vital role, allowing citizens to share information on irregularities, including ballot stuffing, violence and the deliberate miscounting of votes. The new disinformation law makes it easier for the government to remove content en masse or to clamp down on the social media sites themselves — a real possibility, says Bolougouris, as Erdogan, who is lagging behind the opposition in the polls, scrambles to find a way to secure his presidency.

“The implications of these amendments go beyond Turkey,” she told me. “Because if Turkey is able to implement these amendments without a strong pushback from platforms, for example, it will set a dangerous precedent and it will have implications for the open functioning of social media around the world.”

Turkish government officials have over the years been keen to draw parallels between Turkey’s internet laws and a law in Germany, referred to as NetzDG. The German law has been heavily criticized for requiring social media companies to comply with content takedown requests from German authorities. But Boulougouris disagrees with the comparison, saying that the operating environment in Turkey, with its weaker institutions and judiciary, is totally different from Germany.

As the election approaches, the opposition is looking more unified, with six parties backing one candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition have rallied around pledges to implement constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, crack down on corruption and give state media organizations back their independence and impartiality.

But Yaman Akdeniz, the law professor, cautions against being overly optimistic that these changes will be implemented if the opposition wins. Turkey has a long history of censorship, he told me, “don’t expect this to be a smooth process.”

The post As elections near, Turkey weaponizes the law to suppress speech appeared first on Coda Story.

The videos were fake, said the Tamil Nadu police. A controversy had been manufactured, said the Tamil Nadu government, by politicians from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “The spread of fake videos,” said the state’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, on March 10, “was initiated by BJP leaders from North India.” He accused these unnamed leaders of having an “ulterior motive,” of trying to create unrest just after he had “spoken about anti-BJP parties uniting.”

With the BJP, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, firm favorites to win a third consecutive national election in 2024, most analysts deem the formation of an ad hoc alliance of regional parties and the fast-fading Congress — which has governed India for the vast majority of its 75 years as an independent nation — as the opposition’s only hope.

If Modi remains by far India’s most popular politician, there is little love lost for him in Tamil Nadu. For years, whenever he visited the state, he would be greeted with signs that read, “Go back Modi.” But the BJP, which has never had an electoral presence at any level in Tamil Nadu, surprised observers last year by winning several seats in municipal elections in the state. It led the party’s state chief to declare his intent to turn the BJP into a third political force in a state that has been dominated by two parties since the 1960s, both of which emerged from an equal rights movement for oppressed castes. Despite the progress made last year, the BJP is currently in disarray in Tamil Nadu, with 13 party workers quitting dramatically just last week.

Meanwhile, Bihar is currently led by an anti-BJP coalition. In August 2022, the state’s chief minister walked out on an alliance with the BJP and formed a new government with other partners including the Congress. The fake videos of Bihari laborers being attacked in Tamil Nadu were spread by BJP supporters, politicians from both states said, to drive a wedge between parties in both states that were opposed to the BJP.

Sylendra Babu, the extravagantly mustached head of the Tamil Nadu police, told me that he had to form 46 special teams to coordinate with the Bihar police to combat the viral spread of videos and social media commentary about attacks on Bihari laborers. “It was a war-like situation,” Babu said. 

Arrayed against the police in both Tamil Nadu and Bihar were right-wing influencers with followings of up to 60 million people, local BJP politicians and even some media. The Hindi-language Dainik Bhaskar newspaper — the largest circulated daily in India and by some estimates the fourth largest in the world — reported that more than 15 Bihari laborers had been murdered in Tamil Nadu. The article was based on a single phone call with a laborer and the accompanying video showing clips of unrelated violence.

Following up on the report, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Bihari laborers were being attacked and killed for speaking Hindi in Tamil Nadu. To counter the misinformation, the Tamil Nadu police took to Twitter to threaten legal action against anyone it found to be deliberately making false posts. Babu himself posted a video on Twitter describing the claims that Bihari workers were being attacked in Tamil Nadu as “false and mischievous.” 

Bihar, linguistically and culturally, is part of India’s so-called “cow belt” — including the Hindi-speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in particular. Back in the 1980s, an Indian academic coined the pejorative acronym BIMARU to refer to these states, a pun on the Hindi word “bimar,” meaning ill or sick. These states lag behind the rest of the country, particularly the south, in terms of prosperity and education.

Tamil Nadu is a southern state. Like its neighbors, it outperforms the North when it comes to providing healthcare, education and jobs to its residents. But the Hindi-speaking northern states dominate national politics, a dominance that has become even more stark since the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, gobbling up votes in the region at an unprecedented scale.

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have always been fiercely vigilant that their languages be recognized as integral to the Indian union. Many in the South prefer to communicate in English as their pan-Indian link language rather than Hindi. But Modi, critics point out, has not disguised his ambition to make Hindi the country’s national language. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, while giving Hindi and English “official” language status. English, therefore, is equal to Hindi as a language of government communication. 

By trying to further privilege Hindi, Modi and his closest political ally, Home Minister Amit Shah, have been accused of inflaming tensions with the south. Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has himself written to Modi to demand that the latter stop his “continuous efforts to promote Hindi in the name of one nation.” Stalin described attempts to “impose” Hindi as “divisive in character” and warned against provoking another “language war.” Tamil Nadu has a long history of resisting the adoption of Hindi as the language of government.

While Hindi is by far the single most spoken language in India, there are hundreds of millions who do not speak it and who fear being at a disadvantage were learning Hindi to become compulsory. The rumors and fake videos tapped into the prejudices and resentments of both Hindi speakers and those in the south who speak entirely different languages and write with a different alphabet. The videos made national headlines because they appeared to expose yet another historical division still resonant in contemporary India.

S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told me that the politics of the BJP is inherently opposed to the federalism that has long characterized politics in Tamil Nadu. The BJP, she said, “is against autonomy, democratization of language, and plurality of culture and religion.” 

The fomenting of social media outrage over the last couple of weeks provides an insight into what campaigning might look like over the next year as the general election approaches. The journalist Arun Sinha, author of “Battle for Bihar,” an inside look at the state’s politics, told me that the level of organization shown over the last few weeks, as fake videos were spread about anti-migrant violence in Tamil Nadu, suggests that the BJP wants to establish itself as the voice of the large population of disenfranchised Bihari migrant workers.

Spreading rumors about anti-migrant feelings in states like Tamil Nadu and maligning the non-BJP coalition government of Bihar as unresponsive, he said, “is like killing two birds with one stone.” And, as ever, the BJP’s tight control of the social media narrative in India helps it to advance its electoral goals. The question is whether the opposition can, as it tried to do in Tamil Nadu, effectively marshal social media to stop the spread of disinformation.

The post Fake videos of mob violence deepen India’s North-South divide appeared first on Coda Story.

Now in her third year at Kozminski University, Wesolowska has a front row seat to observe what she describes as moral corruption seeping into Polish law facilities. Seasoned academics duel with opportunist colleagues willing to parrot the right-wing government’s line in order to collect low-hanging promotions. “There are two teams of professors,” she told me when we met in central Warsaw. “One that does things in the right way, and another more dangerous team. You learn how to accept that you can’t be outspoken because there is a possibility it could affect your exam results.”

This is a silent element of Poland’s descent into a rule-of-law crisis: the impact on law students and early-career professionals who, in trying to negotiate bewildering changes and political influencing, have been subject to academic whiplash and relentless government disinformation. The effect has been chilling. Many young Poles in the law field appear to have gone to ground.

Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 with the promise of improving the efficiency of the courts and ridding the country of the remnants of communism. It began to make its presence felt by seeking to influence the composition of the Constitutional Court, a powerful institution with the authority to assess the constitutionality of Polish laws. When five of the Court’s 15 judges were due to retire around the 2015 elections, Law and Justice tried to oust three candidates who had been legally chosen by the outgoing pro-EU Civic Platform party and push through five of their own judicial appointments instead. 

The new government had not only set out to dismiss elected judges but bypassed the Constitutional Court entirely while it was discussing the legality of the Civic Platform judicial candidates. In the end, the Court admitted only two Law and Justice judges, but the chain of events — and the government’s later decision to change the quorum in the Constitutional Court — brought hundreds of people out onto the streets of Warsaw in protest. The Law and Justice party and its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski took no notice.

With the Constitutional Court quickly falling under the influence of the government, Law and Justice turned to the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, a body responsible for protecting the independence of judges and courts. In 2017, the government pushed through reforms that gave them control over the process of electing new judges, a key function of the Council of the Judiciary. Around the same time, steps were taken to reduce the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, a move that the Court of Justice of the European Union later said violated EU law. A Disciplinary Chamber was established in 2017, which critics argued was a scheme to intimidate judges who refused to walk the party line. Confronted by this illiberal sea change, the European Union has tried to fight back by withholding funds from the bloc’s sixth largest economy. The results have been mixed. The Disciplinary Chamber was disbanded in July 2022 and replaced with the Chamber of Professional Responsibility. Nonetheless, key legal institutions in Poland are still operating at the whim of the government despite the outcry from Brussels.  

This turmoil has trickled down into the halls of Poland’s public and private universities. A clear example is the approach to teaching. Some professors have continued to teach the law within its political, social and economic context. Others have become hesitant. A few have decided to teach their classes in a vacuum and avoid the rule-of-law crisis and its implications altogether. 

It’s not only teaching in the classroom that has become an issue. According to Dr. Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka, an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, in central Poland, the role of academia itself is also up for debate. In the pages of academic journals, a few Polish intellectuals have declared that their role is simply to present the facts and not opinions. Their peers have shot back, arguing that during a constitutional crisis the academic community is duty bound to actively participate in discussions and not hide behind a veil of neutrality. “We cannot say to students anymore that the law is objective and nothing changes, that it’s politically neutral. We must change our way of teaching and what we teach,” Kustra-Rogatka told me.

There have also been moments when political influence on universities has been spectacularly blatant. In 2021, Kozminski University broke off its relationship with Judge Igor Tuleya, 12 months after the 52-year-old was stripped of his immunity and suspended by the Disciplinary Chamber for ruling against the Law and Justice party. The call to suspend Tuleya came from the vice president of a district court in Warsaw, Przemyslaw Radzik, a government ally who is reported to have said that the judge could “demoralize” students.

To get a clearer sense of these events I spoke to Dr. Agnieszka Grzelak, a professor of European law at Kozminski University. We met at Green Café Nero, not far from Poland’s Palace of Culture and Science, on a rainy Warsaw afternoon. Direct in her assessment of the rule-of-law situation in Poland, Grzelak told me that when news emerged of Judge Tuleya’s dismissal, it sent shock waves through Kozminski’s law facility. Almost immediately 18 colleagues came together to write an open letter to the rector, Grzegorz Mazurek, calling for the university to change tack. The “autonomy of the university” was at stake, they wrote. Hours after receiving the correspondence, Judge Tuleya’s agreement with Kozminski was restored, but in many regards the reputational damage was done. “There is a collapse of the rule of law in every aspect. Starting from legislation to the way the law is adopted, to the situation in the parliament, to the situation in the courts, everything you touch there is some problem,” Grzelak said.

Watching these events unfold are Poland’s law students. If the expectation was for the next generation of lawyers to seriously refute the ruling party’s manipulation of democracy, those hopes have been put to bed by their professors. In several discussions I had while researching this story the conclusion by some faculty was that law students have generally shrugged off the rule-of-law crisis. One reason was their communication patterns, with today’s youth living more insular lives governed by the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Another was a lack of enthusiasm for proper legal sourcing, with students opting to reference short online texts rather than harvest information from the context-rich pages of legal journals. 

Adam Bodnar, the dean of the law facility at the private SWPS University, told me that students “treat freedom like air” and often struggle to connect the rule-of-law crisis to the future of the country. Of course, there are students, like Katarzyna Wesolowska, who are driven to be a part of the solution. 

I also spoke with Adam Buwelski, an impressive 21-year-old at the University of Warsaw, who, on top of a rigorous schedule of classes, finds time to sit on the law students’ association. He reluctantly agreed with the assertion that his generation could do more to engage with Poland’s constitutional crisis. “There is an anger in us that is often hidden because we are living with this day in, day out,” he said. “There are scandals all the time and as a group we are used to it. We don’t have heated discussions about everything going on. That’s a very different position to our parents and professors who are discussing everything all the time. We’re calm but, yes, I don’t think that’s a good thing.” 

Certain issues do arouse the attention of supposedly apathetic students. When the Constitutional Court outlawed abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities in October 2020, students took part in the nationwide protests. The issue of LGTBQ+ rights has also sparked outrage as the Law and Justice party and its close ally, the Polish Catholic Church, work relentlessly to strip away the rights of this community. The University of Warsaw has also been embroiled in scandal which ignited students’ frustrations. In January 2023, a lecture by the former deputy commissioner for human rights, Dr. Hanna Machinska, was canceled by the rector weeks after the academic was dismissed from her job. After student protests and a public outcry, the lecture eventually took place, but it was a worrying repeat of a pattern established by the Judge Tuleya case, signaling that critics of the government might not be welcome at universities either.

But the disengagement of students is also grounded in very practical challenges. For individuals wishing to enter the judiciary, the moral corruption of the Council of the Judiciary has the ability to undermine their hard work. In order to be nominated for a role in the courts, trainee judges must be proposed by the Council to the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, a close ally of the Law and Justice party. The fear among students is that when the Law and Justice party is finally voted out, they will be seen as tainted judges despite their education and personal beliefs. “[When] starting a career as a judge or a prosecutor, legal jobs connected to the public system of education run by the Ministry of Justice, the students doubt if they should start it,” Grzelak, the professor in EU law, told me. “They ask: What if I graduate from training, will I become a judge or will I become a fake judge?”

On everyones’ minds in Poland at the moment are the 2023 parliamentary elections. Should Law and Justice continue in office for another four years, the party will continue to damage to democratic values and institutions in Poland. Up against opposition parties who have so far failed to ignite any real fervor across the country, Law and Justice candidates are leading in the polls. For Buwelski and his peers at the University of Warsaw, many are getting ready to vote for The Left, a small political alliance of leftist parties. In some law students’ eyes, the salient issues affecting Poland’s younger generation, such as rising house prices and inflation, are not addressed to suit the needs of their generation. Law and Justice, Buwelski says, caters to their base, and the opposition to anyone who doesn’t like the ruling party. No one takes much time to think about the youth and their future. 

But even if the election spells the end for Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his band of spoilers, Poland won’t be out of the woods. The damage being done to the rule of law has been so great that it will take more than one term in office to rectify it. For Katarzyna Wesolowska, the student in Kozminski University who will graduate in 2025, that means the road to fixing her country won’t be easy.

The post Poland’s rule of law crisis threatens the integrity of its universities appeared first on Coda Story.

His crime? To have been one among dozens of journalists from around the country to have made a beeline for Uttar Pradesh in 2020, to the district of Hathras where a 19-year-old Dalit woman had been gang raped. Dalits are on the lowest rung of the Indian caste ladder and were once referred to as “untouchables.” The young woman died two weeks after the rape in a hospital in Delhi. As protests gathered steam, police compounded the outrage felt around the country by attempting to hastily cremate the woman’s body in the middle of the night — forcibly, according to the family; “as per the family’s wishes,” according to the police.

The rape and murder and the perceived police indifference led to expressions of anger, horror and disgust across India. While many compared the case to a gang rape and murder in Delhi in 2012 that led to several legislative reforms, others pointed out that there is a long and gruesome history in India of upper caste violence against lower castes, much of which has gone unpunished.

An established journalist of several years’ experience, Kappan told me, just days after his release, that “like any Delhi-based journalist,” he too wanted to travel to Hathras to report on a story of national interest, a story that threatened to spill over into caste unrest. But the Uttar Pradesh government, led by a hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath — a star within the Bharatiya Janata Party firmament, outshone say some observers only by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — was wary of the political fallout after some right wing groups, including a former BJP legislator, expressed support for the alleged rapists.  

Kappan had traveled to Hathras with activists linked to the Popular Front of India (PFI), a politically radical Muslim group. He had written for the PFI’s Malayalam-language publication Thejas in the past. The PFI, which was banned in India last year, was accused by mainstream Indian media of pumping over $12 million into trying to foment riots in Hathras, claims that were later denied by authorities. At the time though, Kappan’s supposed PFI connections led him to being dubbed a “journarrist” on social media (a terrorist masked as a journalist).

Mohamed K.S. Danish, a Supreme Court lawyer and part of Kappan’s legal team, told me that he believes Kappan was “made a scapegoat” by the Uttar Pradesh government to tamp down growing dissent. The police charged Kappan with crimes under the most stringent sections of Indian law, including a draconian anti-terror law which enabled them to hold him for months before they even had to bring him before a judge. Kappan had become, his lawyer said, an easy target for state authorities that were sensitive to criticism and eager to assign blame.

Even before Kappan was arrested, the Uttar Pradesh authorities had taken an adversarial position against the media, barring the girl’s family from speaking to reporters and trying to prevent reporters from traveling to Hathras. It was part of a growing animus between Indian authorities, particularly in states governed by the BJP, and critical journalists. In 2021, just months after the Hathras rape, the website Article 14, which investigates and deeply reports failures of Indian justice, revealed evidence that the use of sedition charges to silence critics had markedly increased since Modi became prime minister in 2014.

Article 14 reported that 96% of sedition charges against 405 Indians in the decade leading up to 2021 had been filed after Modi became prime minister; 149 of those charged were accused of “making ‘critical’ and/or ‘derogatory’ remarks against Modi,” noted the website, while 144 people had been charged for remarks against Yogi Adityanath. Twenty-two cases of sedition were filed after the Hathras rape and murder was covered by the Indian media.

When I spoke to Kappan after his release from prison, he told me he had been beaten by the Uttar Pradesh police, that they had slapped him repeatedly and made absurd, irrelevant accusations. “They tried to force me to admit having links with Maoists and terrorists,” Kappan said. “They asked if I had ever visited Pakistan or if I used to eat beef.” (Indian Muslims are often accused of being “less” Indian than the majority Hindu population because they have no dietary taboo about beef, cows being sacred to some Hindus, and because they supposedly support Pakistan at cricket.)

He also said the police had denied him medication for his illnesses, including diabetes. Kappan caught covid twice while he was in prison and his wife told the Indian press that he was chained to his hospital bed and was not allowed to use the bathroom. Kappan told me he had to urinate into a plastic bottle for a week.

According to his lawyer, the police even tried to produce material Kappan had read about the Black Lives Matter movement as evidence of his intent to create communal unrest in Hathras. “When the prosecution read out this charge of inciting locals in Hathras through English pamphlets about a foreign protest in the Supreme Court, the whole court was laughing,” Kappan’s lawyer said. Blaming social unrest on foreign interference is a familiar trope in India, frequently extended to ridiculous lengths.

In February, 2021, a young climate activist was arrested and accused of sedition because she had circulated a “toolkit” tweeted by Greta Thunberg in support of ongoing farmers’ protests in India. The toolkit, the Delhi police said, as they arrested the activist from her home in Bangalore, was evidence of a conspiracy to “wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India.” Apart from Thunberg, conspirators also included the pop star Rihanna.

Eventually, in September, last year, after Kappan had already been imprisoned for nearly two years, the Supreme Court gave him bail. In its order, the bench noted that “every person has the right to free expression.” Referring to Kappan, the bench said he was trying through his reporting to “show that the victim needs justice,” that ordinary people can ask questions of those in power — “Is that a crime in the eyes of the law?”

Despite the court’s order and its apparent bemusement at Kappan’s incarceration, the authorities took months to release him from prison. He had to secure bail on what his lawyers described as frivolous charges of money-laundering and routine procedures were delayed as if only to prolong Kappan’s time in prison.

Rituparna Chatterjee, the India representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told me that Kappan’s case “is an example of government overreach and the violation of rights. He should never have been arrested in the first place.” She spoke too of the authorities’ “weaponizing of outdated colonial laws such as sedition to harass journalists.” 

In the most recent RSF World Press Freedom Index, India has slipped eight places to rank 150 out of the 180 countries on the list. Kappan’s arrest is an example of why India, despite Modi describing it as the “mother of democracy,” is developing an international reputation for its shrinking freedoms.

“Kappan’s arrest,” says Chatterjee, “was a chilling message from the Uttar Pradesh police to all reporters that there are matters they should not investigate and that it will cost them dear if they do.” RSF has said that 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.’”

It’s a position that is echoed by Kunal Majumder, the India representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “We have been observing,” he told me, “a sharp increase in the number of journalists who have been detained and arrested.”

According to CPJ data, he said, “six out of seven journalists imprisoned in India as of December 1, 2022, are being charged with or being investigated for offenses under the UAPA.” Majumdar is referring to India’s notorious anti-terror law, most recently amended in 2019 to allow the government to designate even individuals as terrorists before proven guilty in a court of law. In 2020, special rapporteurs of the United Nations noted that the amendments were “raising concerns in relation to their compatibility with India’s obligations under international human rights.” They were particularly troubled, they wrote, by “the designation of individuals as ‘terrorists’ in the context of ongoing discrimination directed at religious and other minorities, human rights defenders and political dissidents, against whom the law has been used.”

The prominent Indian politician Shashi Tharoor described the amendment, in a tweet lauding the release of Kappan, as a “menace to democracy.”

Kappan, and the men arrested alongside him, including the driver of their taxi to Hathras, may be out on bail now but their case remains pending. “It is a moment of happiness for us,” said Kappan’s lawyers, “but we have to fight the case for acquittal.” Kappan is just glad to be out. “I now realize the true meaning of freedom,” he told me, even though the court’s bail order confines him to Delhi for six weeks before he can return to Kerala. “I am happy to be back with family and to be able to meet with friends.”

As Kappan left jail, he told reporters that the justice he’d received was “half-baked,” that he had been framed, that nothing was found on him except his laptop and mobile phone. “I had two pens and a notebook too,” Kappan added. He was a working journalist on an assignment, he told me, and he had to spend two years in jail for just doing his job.

The post Amid eroding press freedoms, Indian journalist released from prison appeared first on Coda Story.

“It was a philosophical question but, according to textbook science, grass isn’t really green, it’s just the light reflected from it has a certain wavelength,” Vickers says. “I thought there’d be a consensus on it.”

Instead, Vickers’ question prompted fierce semantic debate. Some colleagues argued that grass has objective properties — color being one of them. Others contended that only light exists in a physical form: what a human perceives as green is merely certain molecules reflecting electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 520 and 570 nanometers.

The open-ended, theoretical question rendered the survey data nearly worthless. Rather than general agreement, all that emerged was lively scientific and philosophical discussion across academic inboxes. But the high response rate gave Vickers encouragement: his idea for an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus could really work. All he needed was to ask a more straightforward line of inquiry.

It was while writing his book on the relationship between science and truth, Identifying Future-Proof Science, that Vickers became convinced that there should be a more accessible way to establish general academic agreement on disputed topics. “The traditional theory, even for non-experts, is to decide what to believe based on the science itself,” he explains. “But the more I wrote, the more I thought, ‘That’s not how the real world works.’ You’d never say to someone worried about getting vaccinated, ‘Here, read this textbook on the science of vaccines’ — it’s summarizing decades of research; you’re asking someone who might not have the background knowledge to read, judge and understand it.”

Help for the time-stressed non-academic, says Vickers, will come in the form of a large-scale poll of global experts responding to popular scientific issues via a set of four options, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” at the extremes, and “weakly agree” to “weakly disagree” in the center. Results will be published in academic journals, with the eventual aim of a physical institute housing vast teams of researchers, data scientists and IT experts working towards the goal of greater societal consensus on subjects like climate change and pandemics.

Vickers’ hope is to also aid academia itself: there is a lack of hard data quantifying how many experts agree on the biggest topics of the day. “It’s actually difficult to find how many global scientists believe that Covid-19 is caused by a virus,” he says. “And the best attempt to quantify the scientific community’s opinion on whether climate change is driven by human activity has 2,780 respondents: a tiny fraction of the world’s scientists you could ask, and nearly all were from Western countries.”

Driving the initiative is the fight against misinformation. Expertise has long been weaponized as means of power and deception, particularly among marginalized and minority communities, says Nicole Grove, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. In some cases, it’s created a sense of mistrust, undermining the credibility of some institutions. “It wasn’t that long ago that doctors were recommending ‘healthy’ brands of cigarettes to their patients, where seemingly scientific research was used by tobacco companies as verifiable evidence that we now know was completely manufactured.”  

Experts say that there has perhaps never been more dispute than there is today on what makes a fact, a fact. “The internet is an amazing access point for knowledge, but it’s also changed the way people are able to produce what appears to be evidence to support any point of view,” adds Grove. “One can always find someone with credentials who will take on any position at any time. My sense is misinformation is more about bombardment than a lack of information.”

Social media has also created echo chambers that fan the flames of conspiracies, even in the face of incontrovertible proof. “Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when their psychological needs are frustrated,” says Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. “They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science in favor of more extreme political views and anti-science attitudes. And these theories seem to arise even when the scientific consensus is clear.”

Vickers acknowledges that his proposed consensus-finding institute won’t appeal to sections of the population that think the whole system is corrupt. But he believes his idea could benefit broader society, particularly on health issues. He cites a June 2022 study showing that Covid-19 vaccine uptake was significantly boosted in the Czech Republic once a skeptical public were shown that 90% of 9,650 doctors trusted in its safety. “The high consensus helped correct a misconception that only half of physicians were confident in the vaccine,” he says. “It ultimately led to higher vaccinations, meaning fewer deaths. It may sound dramatic, but the cost in a lack of consensus can be that stark.”

Beyond health crises though, there are questions over whether experts should be burdened with an altruistic role in educating the public on what they consider to be a scientific fact. “Scientists shouldn’t be loaded up with societal duties no one else has,” says James Ladyman, professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol. “The rise in misinformation is a matter for regulation and government — it has nothing to do with science.”

There are also concerns that a frictionless polling model could supersede the complex, nuanced pursuit of acquiring and discussing knowledge. “Science is a highly structured social organization in which consensus is achieved semi-formally through conferences, meetings and journal publications,” adds Ladyman. “It’s not a flat structure where people vote and everyone has equal say. When a scientific institution wants to take a position on a topic, it typically sets up a subcommittee that writes a report with details of their inquiry — it doesn’t poll all its members.”

While a hard figure may not exist, there is a consensus among the scientific community that smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of cancer and that human activity is the main driver of climate change. Determining a general agreement among more debated topics, such as whether biological sex is the main determinant of gender, may pose more of a challenge. 

“A shared commitment to telling the truth about nature, and to getting that truth out there, still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among even the most expert of scientists,” says Gregory Radick, professor of history and philosophy at the University of Leeds. “And much is lost when scientific knowledge gets boiled down to an answer to a simple ‘yes or no’ question.”

It means that facts can be disputed by experts. Ladyman says that a mass-survey model risks creating more noise in a system already blasting information round-the-clock. “In principle, finding out the scientific consensus on a topic could be good. But it presupposes that the information can’t be found out already. I find it unlikely that a significant number who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change would change their mind if they saw there was a huge scientific consensus about it — they probably wouldn’t care.”

However, Vickers believes that his Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus needs to happen, especially if it can help people make better informed health decisions. “In the 20th century, it was too easy for the tobacco industry to make it look like there were two sides to the story — a global poll would have shown there were perhaps only 2% of rogue scientists that existed,” he says. “The goal isn’t to tell the public the facts — it’s to accurately measure the opinion of the scientific community and then provide people with data that could be useful to them.”

Vickers’ epistemic agency is still in the funding stages. His team is currently debating who qualifies as a scientist, from the obvious choice of an academic affiliated to a relevant science department or institute, to the borderline cases of a former nurse now giving health lectures at universities. 

Then, there’s dividing the scientists up: a meteorologist and, say, a pediatrician may receive an equal vote on a climate change question; the consensus among each scientific discipline, however, could be shown separately. Finally, there’s the issue of ensuring a high enough response rate for strong enough data — the plan is for a personalized email to be sent within institutions, just like in the original question to Durham scientists, to get as many survey queries answered.

Consensus for an institute determining scientific consensus is, ironically, difficult. The next step is a pilot program in April, involving 18,000 scientists from 31 institutions across 12 different countries. The planned opening question should, at least, elicit strong assent: “Has science proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is caused by a virus?” “It’s not a particularly interesting question as most people accept that it’s been established, but we want to set a baseline for what solid scientific consensus looks like,” says Vickers. 

In an age where a rabbit hole of misinformation is only ever a few clicks away, Vickers’ hope is his idea will reach well-meaning people left confused by the online maelstrom. “Had a mass survey of global scientists existed when the pandemic began — questions on how Covid is transmitted, mask efficacy, vaccine safety — I think it would have helped the public,” he says. “There’s a mess of information out there.”

The post A philosophy professor proposes an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus appeared first on Coda Story.

Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren’t saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

The post A hard line Slovak nationalist plots his return to power appeared first on Coda Story.

The undiplomatic language from an experienced diplomat was striking because he was referring to a BBC documentary about events from decades ago in one of India’s 28 states, albeit events that leave a deep, abiding and likely indelible stain on the reputation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Part One of the documentary — “India: The Modi Question” — was broadcast in the U.K. on January 17, and Part Two was broadcast a week later. Neither part has been screened in India.

Invoking “emergency” powers, India has blocked even the sharing of links to clips from the documentary on social media. On January 21, before Part 2 had been screened in the U.K., Kanchan Gupta, a former journalist and the senior advisor to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, described the documentary in a tweet as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” as he announced the decision to block tweets and links “under India’s sovereign laws and rules.”

What so incensed the Indian establishment was the documentary’s revelations that a British government inquiry into communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 held Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible” for enabling three days of horrifying violence. The riots resulted in the deaths of a thousand people — nearly 800 of them Muslim, according to official figures. 

Modi was alleged to have told the police to stand down because Hindus needed to respond to the burning of a train by a Muslim mob (though the specifics of how the train caught fire continue to be disputed) that resulted in the deaths of 59 Hindu pilgrims and activists, including many women and children. They were returning from a religious ceremony in Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of the Hindu god Ram and site of a disputed mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists a decade earlier. The veteran and respected Indian journalist and commentator Saeed Naqvi wrote in his 2016 book, “Being the Other: The Muslim in India,” that for “Indian Muslims, their place in Indian society changed radically after the Babri Masjid demolition.”

It was then, he argues, that the “whole charade” of Indian secularism was exposed and that prejudice against Muslims became easier to express, a process that some might argue reached its apogee when Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.

Modi has been prime minister of India for almost nine years. He is very likely to be elected for a third consecutive five-year term in 2024. He might have been forgiven for thinking the Gujarat riots were behind him.

In the aftermath of the riots, Modi was an international pariah. He was denied a visa to the United States in 2005 on the grounds that he was guilty of “severe violations of religious freedom.” Only when Modi became prime minister in 2014 was he able to return to the U.S. because, as a head of state, he was immune from prosecution. Modi’s immunity was cited when U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision last November to grant immunity from prosecution to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

As the prime minister of India, Modi has received rapturous welcomes in stadiums and convention centers in both the U.S. and the U.K., where a member of the House of Lords admiringly referred to him, in the wake of the controversy over the BBC documentary, as “one of the most powerful persons on the planet.” It’s the kind of image Modi likes to project. He is, he frequently says, the leader of a new, more assertive India, an India that is on the cusp of superpowerdom and unignorable wealth.

Protecting this image of himself and India might explain why the government reacted so sharply to a documentary about events that occurred long before Modi became prime minister. It is an indication that by describing the documentary as anti-India (though it is about riots in Gujarat), the entire apparatus of the government appears to be dedicated to spreading the message that Modi is India and India is Modi.

Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of the Caravan magazine, told me the BBC documentary was “journalistically sound.” (The Caravan and Coda have embarked on a publishing partnership over the next nine months.) Bal appears as a commentator in long stretches of the documentary and said that the response of India’s Ministry of External Affairs was “particularly stupid.” He added that the irony of Bagchi’s criticism of the BBC’s supposedly “colonial mindset” is that it reveals “how in thrall the government remains to Western media” and how “hypersensitive it is to criticism from the English-language international press.” 

If these criticisms had appeared in the Caravan, Bal argues, the blowback would have been less anguished, less wounded. As if to underline his point, a significantly more polemical and damning Indian documentary pointedly called “Final Solution” is available for Indians to watch on YouTube. It was made in 2004 and was initially banned. It has never been screened on Indian television, but, unlike the BBC film, it’s accessible without a VPN.  

Writing in the Indian Express, Vivek Katju, a former diplomat, deplored the government’s “paroxysms of pique” but largely endorsed a widespread Indian view that the documentary was mean-spirited and gratuitous, that it had “not taken into account that the Indian judicial process has fully exonerated Modi.” 

In fact, the BBC documentary does place on record, several times, that India’s Supreme Court has found that Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat, does not bear responsibility for the riots and, as recently as last June, reiterated that the failures of individual officials does not rise to criminal conspiracy. But a lack of clinching evidence does not mean Modi bears no moral responsibility for what happened.

And what is an observer of Indian politics meant to conclude when Modi’s closest ally, Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, tells a crowd in November, in their shared home state of Gujarat, that perpetrators of violence “were taught a lesson in 2002”? During campaigning for local elections in Gujarat, held in early December, Shah told a rally in Gujarati that under the rule of the opposing political party, certain people were used to getting away with violence but that Modi established permanent peace in the state. 

After the riots, judges in Gujarat mostly closed cases and acquitted those accused of killing Muslims. It was only after India’s Supreme Court intervened in 2004, describing the Gujarat government led by Modi as “modern-day Neros” who looked the other way while Gujarat burned, that the police were ordered to investigate cases.

Modi has never expressed remorse for the riots that happened under his watch. In a revealing scene in the BBC documentary, he tells a BBC correspondent that the only mistake he made was in failing to handle the media. 

India currently holds the presidency of the G20. Modi hopes to use it to showcase India’s growing importance on the world stage. The G20 presidency, he told the Indian Parliament at the start of its winter session in December, was an opportunity for the world to know India as “the mother of democracy, with its diversity and courage.”

Instead, the world is garnering a different impression of India, one in which journalists and free expression are increasingly imperiled. Reporters Without Borders now ranks India 150 out of 180 countries in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, down eight places from the previous year. Several people who refused to be interviewed by the BBC for its documentary, despite contributing significant reporting and research, told me anonymously that they feared the response of a vindictive government. 

And some who did participate told me they no longer wanted to speak about the documentary because they were being threatened with violence on social media. As Rana Ayyub, a journalist who has felt, and continues to feel, the wrath of the Modi government and its supporters for her outspoken views, tweeted: “This is not a good look for India.” For a government so concerned with its international image, it has succeeded only in bringing more attention to a BBC documentary that uncovers little that is new, little that Indian journalists have not already reported.

The post Modi does not want India to watch this documentary appeared first on Coda Story.

DJ Switch flipped to her Instagram story to livestream the chaos — gore, live ammunition going off and victims lying in pools of blood — at a protest site in Lekki, a wealthy suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. At least 12 people were killed in that shooting according to Amnesty International, and DJ Switch now lives in Canada, having had to flee Nigeria for fear of reprisals from the government. 

That October, thousands of young Nigerians had been protesting over 13 days across the country against police brutality. The protests, aimed at a rogue police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, began after a video surfaced online of a police officer killing a young man in Delta, an oil-rich area of Nigeria. But what started as a protest against police brutality morphed into demands for better governance, which continued even after the government shut down the police unit.

Then came the atrocity at Lekki.

Nkemchor Guru, 20 years old at the time, watched the event unfold live in her Lagos residence. Now in her final year as a student at a Lagos university, she recalls the sound of gunshots. “I saw people writhing on the floor. The whole situation was just horrible,” Guru said. “It caused a very big pain and anger in me and I know that was the story for a lot of young Nigerians.”

The government has denied responsibility for the shooting and clamped down on activists calling for justice. But the mowing down of 12 protesters has upended Nigerian politics and the comfortable, business-as-usual environment for the two dominant parties, the All Progressives Party (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). A third force has emerged from the corners of social media, making the upcoming February 25 presidential election a three-horse race for the first time in modern Nigerian history.

Exhausted by the unprecedented level of insecurity, record inflation and unemployment rates and currency devaluation, among many other issues, young people in Nigeria are using social media to disrupt the system and support Peter Obi, a former governor and Nigeria’s insurgent Labour Party presidential candidate.

Unlike the two dominant parties, who have shared power between themselves since 1999, Obi and his Labour Party do not enjoy a political grassroots infrastructure and are instead being propelled forward in the race by angry social media users.  In 2021, the Nigerian youth now making up Obi’s base revolted when President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter for seven months after the company deleted the president’s genocidal post, catalyzing widespread anger among those who have relied on the platform to criticize the government’s policies and the state of the nation.

Buhari is term-limited out of participating in this year’s election. And several polls have called the election for Obi. “We desperately need a leader who is committed to changing things,” Guru said. 

Obi had been a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, serving two terms as a state governor in the country’s eastern region, and was once that party’s vice presidential candidate. He was an unlikely figure to challenge the politicians backed by the two dominant parties — Bola Tinubu, a two-term governor of Lagos and kingmaker in Nigerian politics, and Atiku Abubakar, a perennial presidential candidate.

Before moving to the Labour Party, a fringe party with no political reach, Obi had run in the Peoples Democratic Party primary. As the primary approached, it became clear that Obi would lose the race and lose the support of the party’s upper echelons, so he left the party and dropped out of the running. Without the political machinery available to the candidates of the big parties, a bid for the presidency of Africa’s most populated country and largest economy was viewed as quixotic at best.

But thousands of youth who had participated in the social justice protests were looking for a leader who would back their calls for a change in the government and mete out punishment for the October 20 killings.

Nigeria is currently reeling from record 22% inflation, an unemployment rate of 33% and insecurity that includes terrorism, deadly banditry, mass abductions and all manners of violence. This situation has made many Nigerians feel the country is at an existential tipping point and led to the death of thousands of people across the country since Buhari began his first presidential term in 2015.

At 61, Obi is the youngest of the major candidates. The youth movement propelling his candidacy calls itself “the Obidients.” It is a gathering threat to Nigeria’s political establishment — young voters make up the largest demographic voting bloc in this year’s elections at nearly 40% of the 93.4 million eligible voters. While especially pronounced in Nigeria, how younger voters respond to social media messaging is poised to play a pivotal role in other important elections around the world, in countries like Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh and Turkey.

“It is clear to everybody who will want to be very honest in their evaluation of the current Nigerian situation that Nigeria is headed in the wrong direction,” said Joseph Onuorah, a national administration member of Take Back Naija, one of the several youth coalitions working for the Obidient movement.

“We are mounting up debt at a rate that is simply unsustainable, the government does not seem to have a formula for what educational system they want to run, medical care is simply non-existent, insecurity pervades the entire country,” he added.

That the street-level protest movement would combine with social media to evolve into a major factor in presidential politics was all but inevitable, said Ifeomah Areh, a social media expert and communications consultant. This is despite the perception that Nigerian youth are apathetic in elections. 

“This model [of online mobilization] is new in some ways but also not that new. People are always looking for where they can come and rally together,” she said. “All over the world, young people are beginning to form communities that are standing against whatever inequality they perceive.”

“In 2015, young people did not endorse any candidate. But in this election, you will find young people are getting more partisan,” said Amara Nwankpa, director of the Public Policy Initiative at the Yar’ Adua Foundation, a think tank engaging citizens and policymakers on democracy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.

In the din of Nigeria’s rancorous retail politics, disinformation has also been prominent. With social media as a major battleground for debates, online disinformation has been spreading with little in the way of restraint. For example, Obi, who is a Christian, has been accused of ransacking Muslim communities when he was governor and has been portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, a secessionist organization in the country’s east.

Onuorah, the administrator of one Obidient organization, told me the movement has an army of internet-savvy youth whose work is to debunk the accusations. “Every disinformation you throw at the movement, there are people that are able to go into data and history and bring to nothing that particular disinformation,” he said.

“People assume that [the Obidient movement] is totally organic but it is not, it is an effective use of young people. If you look behind it, there is always a concerted effort,” Areh, the social media expert, said of the movement’s use of social media.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the Obidients can displace the two major parties and if social media advocacy will spur enough turnout among the youth demographic to be decisive.

Offline, however, hundreds of thousands are flocking to Peter Obi’s campaigns across Nigeria, catching the country by surprise. It is due to the work of young people like Guru, the university student, who work tirelessly online to sell their candidate and offline to bring more young people into the fold.

“Up till now, nobody has been held accountable, that is just the crazy part,” said Guru, who has now amassed tens of thousands of online followers in her constant campaigning for the Labour Party. “I hope Nigerians are able to choose right and look past tribalism, religion and everything that has held us back for years. I was 15 years of age when Buhari came to power and I felt like the past eight years of my life have been a waste.”

CORRECTION [01/19/2023]: This article previously said that Obi had lost the Peoples Democratic Party primary to Atiku Abubakar. Obi dropped out of the primary before it took place.

The post The rise of the Obidients appeared first on Coda Story.

In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court’s vote-counting “algorithm” — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta’s content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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The fallout from the war in Ukraine

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

Rewriting history

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

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

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

Cross-border repression 

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

Climate denial and pseudohealth

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

The age of nostalgia

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

The post The year in five major themes from Coda appeared first on Coda Story.

Antisemitic incidents — assault, harassment and vandalism — in the U.S. climbed to an unprecedented level in 2021 and look set to rise again in 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The number of incidents has averaged more than seven per day.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, said, in a recent interview to Michelle Boorstein and Isaac Armsdorf in the Washington Post, that “empirically, something is different. The level of public animosity towards Jews is higher than it’s been in recent memory.” 

Rothschild tries to figure out exactly why antisemitism has become different. A journalist, book writer and a frequent presence on cable news networks, Rothschild specializes in conspiracy movements, disinformation, antisemitism and QAnon. He believes the present moment is an interregnum between two conspiracy movement cycles.

We sat down — virtually — to discuss the attempted coup in Germany, aristocratic conspiracy theories, the centuries-long hate campaign directed at the Rothschild family (he’s writing a book on the European banking family, but there is no relation) and what’s next for QAnon. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

It does sometimes feel like we’re in a never-ending tailspin, what with the Musk takeover, the U.S. midterms, the Germany coup and the Ye news. But I guess for you, as a conspiracy theory expert, the past month must have been extra crazy. Or was it just another month at the office?

There’s never a day where not much happens. During the runoff in Georgia, there was just cycle after cycle of these really ridiculous candidates, saying these disqualifying things over and over that built to a crescendo. A lot of people were really afraid about how it would turn out. But some of the worst conspiracy theorists and election-denier candidates did lose in the end. 

I think for the past few years we’ve become used to prepping for the most unlikely, outlandish scenario. But that didn’t quite happen this time. 

We looked down the precipice and we took a step back. Who knows if it will last. We’re in a time where we’re not completely rid of the last cycle of insanity yet. The next one hasn’t really hit yet. For now, things seem a little bit calmer. 

People mistakenly think Kanye West’s outbursts contain something new. What’s your impression of where he might be getting these narratives?

Well, it’s a really good question. The stuff he’s spouting, none of it is new. This idea of “Jews are too powerful and too wealthy” is as old as time.

One of the things he talks about is how there are 300 Zionists who run the world. That’s a really specific reference to the conspiracy theory of the Committee of 300 — that there are 300 Jews who run the world. It’s not a number he picked out of thin air. Someone put that in front of him. 

It’s really important to understand that there is an antisemitic industry and it never completely goes away. Is there anything that’s more popular than antisemitism? Right now, the answer is no. 

I personally feel we’re in a kind of holding pattern until we graduate to the next level of crazy. 

Right. We’re in this weird time between conspiracy movements. The ideas around the “stolen election” are really sort of petering out. They tried to get it going with the midterms, but it didn’t really take. QAnon’s branding, the iconography and the catchphrases are receding. So it’s a good time for public antisemitism to make a resurgence.

We’ve been seeing it called “the high tide of antisemitism.” Do you agree?

I would say certainly it hasn’t been this bad since before the Second World War. We’re now at a point where there isn’t an obvious enemy right now — there might be in the future — so it’s easy to focus on “Jewish power.”

I’m interested in what you said about QAnon receding. Can you explain what you mean?

All the decoding, “Q-drops” and hashtag stuff is receding because ideas about the deep state, Covid being a hoax and the pedophile cabals are being talked about at a very mainstream level. The ideas behind QAnon no longer need to be hidden behind riddles. There’s just no need for QAnon. 

What do you think of the German coup attempt?

I knew about the Reichsburger movement because they were linked to QAnon. It’s kind of a grab bag of conspiracy beliefs. There’s a bit of Q, there’s some sovereign citizen, “the laws don’t apply to us” stuff. But it’s also very German. They are monarchists, wanting to restore the Kaiser and go back to the German Confederation of 1871.

What gave you the idea to write a book about the Rothschilds?

I’d like to put “no relation” on the cover. The influence of Rothschild conspiracy theories is really still being felt. Look at Alex Jones, who has pushed Rothschild conspiracy theories for decades. He was inspired when he was a kid by a book called “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.” And that book was inspired by books that came out in the 1950s about Jewish influence on the Federal Reserve, which in turn was inspired by the work of people like Ezra Pound. So it’s just one cycle after another. And of course tropes about Jews and money go back thousands of years. 

I’m always curious about people who follow conspiracy theories for a living — day to day. What’s it like for you, particularly as you’re Jewish?

I do find myself having to close the laptop and go outside or take a walk or water the plants or something. I live in Los Angeles, and there have been a lot of anti-Jewish incidents recently, with people hanging banners over the freeway saying “Kanye was right.” It’s a reminder that there’s always going to be a part of the public who looks at Jewish people with suspicion and paranoia and conspiracy. Jew hating never completely goes away. It’s stuck around for century after century after century because people get something out of it.

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“We are united by the rejection of the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that the former colonial powers are imposing on the world,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the audience via video message. “Russia greatly appreciates the fact that despite unprecedented and crude pressure, our African friends, like the overwhelming majority of the international community, have not joined the anti-Russia sanctions but continue developing dialogue and cooperation with us.”

Lavrov was warming the small crowd up for the event’s headline attendee Kemi Seba, who took to the stage for 20 minutes to condemn the West and wax lyrical about the benefits of Russian influence across the African continent.

Seba is part of a growing network of self-styled pan-African influencers who enjoy a close relationship with the Kremlin in return for spreading Russian disinformation. Ranging from disseminating anti-French rhetoric to extolling the virtues of sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries, these diligent mouthpieces have also justified Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Just hours after the Russian invasion on February 24, Seba took to Facebook to argue that Moscow was “trying to reconquer Russian lands.” Another well known influencer, the Swiss-Cameroonian Nathalie Yamb, commented that Ukraine is “full of neo-Nazis” and suggested that Kyiv is responsible for causing the conflict. The ferocity and reach of this disinformation has become so widespread that in early November the U.S. State Department issued an extraordinary statement that lambasted both Seba and Yamb and drew strong correlations between them and Prigozhin. “Understanding and exposing the role of disinformation in the Kremlin’s Africa strategy,” the State Department told us in response to written questions, “is a key step toward limiting its potential impact on the continent.”

French–Beninese Seba has amassed 1.1 million followers on Facebook and almost a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube. The former head of the Russian-backed Afrique Media, the 40 year-old has crafted a reputation for spreading visceral anti-French rhetoric and claiming the West is on a mission to “destroy Vladimir Putin, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” He is also the head of the organization Urgence Panafricaniste and the clout behind the relaunched media outlet Afrique Résurrection. 

Seba’s closest confidant is Yamb, whom he has described as “my blood.” Powered by 233,000 subscribers on YouTube, the 53-year-old has styled herself as “La Dame de Sochi” after attending Putin’s Russia-Africa Summit in 2019. Her repeated verbal attacks on Franco-African relations led to the French Minister of the Interior banning her from French territory in January for “incitement to hatred and violence.”

“Some of these influencers have gained quite a following recently, but the way to think about them is that they are just part of a broader disinformation system that Russia is deploying in Africa through Wagner,” said Mark Duerksen, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense. “[They are monetizing their work] through YouTube ad revenue, speaking engagements at universities in Russia, or paid attendance at conferences in Russia. They fashion themselves as pseudo intellectuals adopting tropes from a deep history of Pan-Africanism to their purposes,” Duerksen said.

Pan-Africanism, in its modern form, was established in the early 20th century in response to the enduring legacy of European slavery and imperialism. Supported by intellectuals such as the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, in its broadest form, seeks to unify all people of African heritage against racism and colonialism. Today, Russia has latched onto some elements of this anti-colonial feeling to generate support for the war in Ukraine. Using historical narratives that focus on Soviet Russia’s engagement with African nations and Cold War support for resistance groups in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Moscow has successfully argued that, unlike its 21st century rivals in the West, it doesn’t have a colonialist past or attitude.

It is an argument that has popular resonance across much of Africa. According to the Zimbabwean writer and editor Percy Zvomuya, “in the minds of some people in southern Africa, Russia, not Ukraine, is the direct successor of the USSR, the state that supported us during our own struggles against colonialism and apartheid.” And, he said, “that Ukraine receives much of its weaponry and diplomatic support from Britain and America makes it easy for Russia to say ‘but, look, these are the people who oppressed you yesterday.’”

The West’s manner in dealing with Africa continues to grate. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, complained in August about “patronizing bullying” by European countries over the war in Ukraine. Both she and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took aim at the United States over a bill overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, titled “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa.” They said the bill would punish the economic aspirations of Africans for doing essential business with Russia. The bill, reports suggest, is highly unlikely to become law but the language rankled. Pandor described it as “offensive” and disrespectful of African sovereignty.

In reality, though, it’s not clear that the Kremlin is any more respectful of African sovereignty. In many areas that have a high concentration of Russian disinformation, the Wagner Group is operating in the background. Reported to have been founded around 2014, Wagner is a Kremlin-backed private military organization that helps undemocratic leaders hold onto power in return for access to natural resources or strategic locations. A key factor in ensuring their (and the Kremlin’s) foothold in a country is a vast sea of disinformation that spews from social media influencers and Russia-backed organizations such as the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation, which supports many small African media outlets.

This network of positive coverage has allowed Wagner to destabilize entire regions of the African continent. In the western Sahel region, Mali’s ruling junta has moved from traditional assistance from France to support from Russia. In December 2021, Wagner mercenaries arrived in the country. Under the guise of tackling the landlocked nation’s warring militant groups, Wagner’s presence has resulted in alleged human rights abuses and shored up support for the country’s leadership.

“The [Russian] disinformation campaign in the region began long before the war in Ukraine. It really started when the Malian government had tensions with France and made an agreement with the Wagner Group,” Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, told us. “We know one of Wagner’s objectives is natural resources and Mali is rich in gold, but there is no evidence yet that that’s what they’re looking for.”

At the three-day US-Africa Leaders summit, which concluded on December 15, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo alleged that Burkina Faso, one of the largest gold producers on the continent, had paid the Wagner Group with a mine to come into the country to contain insurgent violence. There have been two coups in Burkina Faso this year alone, the latest on September 30. Earlier this month, the recently appointed prime minister flew to Moscow on a Malian jet; his visit was reportedly “private.”  

Back online the depth of Russian influence over social media users does not just extend to top-tier influencers who have well-established links to Moscow. Other individuals are also jumping in on the game, especially on the issue of the war in Ukraine. Pointing to hypocrisy in Western criticisms of the Russian invasion, “whataboutism” has become a typical rhetorical strategy for those eager to parrot a pro-Russia line.

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and arguably the country’s tweeter-in-chief, said on February 28 that “the majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.” Kampala has been drifting towards Moscow as the East African nation becomes increasingly authoritarian. In Nigeria, the burgeoning influencer Joseph C. Okechukwu has taken to Twitter almost daily to update his 38,000 followers on the war in Ukraine where he regularly alludes to Ukrainian soliders having Nazi sympathies. The Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi has railed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while praising Russia for supplying weapons to Mali. 

Some analysts argue, however, that the collective bark of these influencers is worse than their bite. Two reports by the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, suggest that although Russia has targeted the African continent’s information sphere to shore up support for its war in Ukraine, Russian disinformation does not “gain the same traction or attention on Twitter” as narratives closer to the hearts of African audiences. 

“The same messages are being spread on Facebook and Youtube, but what we learned from our research on Twitter is that the disinformation about the war, even disinformation about grain, is not getting as much engagement as established grievances,” said Mary Blankenship, the author of the report alongside Aloysius Uche Ordu. “What I also found interesting was that it’s official channels that have the most effect, such as a tweet from the Russian Embassy, rather than accounts with a significant following.” 

It is unlikely that Moscow’s interest in the African continent will end anytime soon. Since 2020, Russia has been Africa’s biggest supplier of arms. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has been driving Russian foreign policy to engage more with African states, to piggyback on Chinese investments and to diminish Western dominance over the continent. However, even with Wagner’s malign influence, it is unclear if the Kremlin’s concentrated appeal to African anti-colonial sentiments, and pledges of support outside human rights frameworks, is actually yielding a return on both geopolitical and financial levels. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is also not known if Russian influence across the continent will create a Russian power base that will “expand its influence in the years to come.”

Towards the end of his speech at the “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” youth forum in October, Lavrov made sure to reference the second edition of the Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum due to take place in St. Petersburg next summer and to promote “peace, security and development.” There is little doubt that sitting in the audience will be Prigozhin’s influencers dutifully taking notes for their audiences back home.

A quotation from Mark Duerksen has been changed post-publication to reflect his intended meaning.

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The broad-based, lucrative online campaign targeting Harry and Meghan with conspiracy theories and mass trolling is “by far the worst, worse than anything I’ve experienced doing this,” Bouzy told me.

According to a Bot Sentinel report released earlier this year, online campaigns targeting the royal couple have become a cottage industry for a handful of online influencers. Bouzy calls them “single purpose hate accounts.” Their platforms are devoted solely to posting about the couple and, according to the report, have become “a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise” where “racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators.” 

The report describes the conspiracy theories they promote as “reminiscent of QAnon.” 

One popular theory holds that Meghan was never pregnant, her pregnancy bump faked. The followers of this theory call themselves “Meghan Truthers.” The most extreme proponents of the conspiracy maintain that her children Archie and Lilibet aren’t real at all. 

One of the most prominent anti-Meghan and Harry accounts promoting the “moonbump” theory was run by Sadie Quinlan, a Welsh pensioner who heavily promoted the false narrative that Meghan was never pregnant. Her account, called Yankee Wally, accumulated almost 19 million views and earned around $44,000 a year, according to Bot Sentinel’s findings. YouTube banned the account in March, citing violations of its policy against content designed to harass, bully or threaten. 

“I truly believe that Meghan Markle was NEVER pregnant. I believe she is barren,” Quinlan told Buzzfeed in March. “As a British taxpayer I am not happy paying for a FRAUDULENT pair of children.” 

According to Bot Sentinel, Quinlan inadvertently revealed she had been buying up fake Twitter accounts in bulk to promote her cause. She also posted videos on YouTube showing viewers how to make negative reviews about Meghan’s book rise to the top of Amazon’s book review list. 

Bouzy’s research identified Yankee Wally as one of at least 25 accounts devoted to posting round-the-clock anti-Meghan content on YouTube, with almost 500 million combined views and an estimated $3.5 million in YouTube earnings. 

A YouTube spokesperson responded to a Coda inquiry, but offered no comment for publication.

Bot Sentinel identified a core group of “predominantly Caucasian women” who have been able to successfully run a coordinated fake news campaign that gained massive influence, using YouTube to monetize their work and using Twitter to manipulate conversations on that platform, too.

In recent weeks, Bouzy has seen heightened levels of inauthentic activity designed to target the couple. In the comments section beneath the Netflix trailer on YouTube, thousands of almost identical sarcastic comments have been posted.

“I love the part where they say they are drawing a line under Megxit after an interview with Oprah, a podcast, a Netflix series and a book. Brings a tear to my left eye,” wrote one commenter. “I love the part where Harry talks about bravely escaping his castle and servants. This obvious discrimination is triggering a tear from my left eye,” wrote another. 

The structure, repeated thousands of times, begins with “I love the part” and ends with “it brings a tear to my left eye.” Many of the accounts are devoted solely to commenting on the trailer, with little or no other activity. 

This is a “copypasta” spamming technique where “accounts take a string of text and repeat it over and over again,” Bouzy said. And then organically, real people begin following suit. The resulting comments are a mixture of fake accounts and real people copying an inauthentic campaign. 

Attacks on Meghan and Harry have intensified since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, while people have been continuing to post videos explaining how to amplify negative content about the couple by using VPNs and swarming websites associated with Meghan. “It’s quite astonishing,” said Bouzy. 

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But people from countries such as Iraq and Cameroon who are trying to come across another border with Poland have received a starkly different response. Further north along the EU member state’s border with Belarus, their pleas for help are being ignored. 

Initially angered by EU sanctions following Belarus’s rigged presidential election in August 2020, strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko lured people from around the world to his country on the false promise that they can get easy access to a safer future in western Europe. Hoping that an increase in asylum seekers will sow discord across the EU, Belarusian authorities have ferried men, women and children to the border with Poland and forced them to cross since mid-2021.

Poland’s response has been heavy-handed. As the number of attempted crossings swelled last fall, human rights groups documented unlawful cases of pushbacks by Polish border guards, a practice that continues to this day. The border area was also militarized, and an exclusion zone established.

European Union leaders in Brussels have been positive on Poland’s actions, as the issue of how to respond to migration is largely considered the business of individual member states. When Warsaw announced in January that it had started construction on a metal wall along the Belarusian border to keep people out, European allies issued no objections.

Despite the 18-foot-high and 116-mile-long barrier, people have not been deterred from seeking protection in the EU. But it has worsened conditions for asylum seekers who risk life-threatening injuries and death trying to scale it.

Now with surveillance technology being installed along the wall, and Poland fearful that Russia and Belarus will usher many more people to its borders, Aleksandra Łoboda, a member of the humanitarian organization Grupa Granica, warns against border militarization.

With temperatures falling, we spoke about the current situation on this part of the Polish border. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Aleksandra, what is the situation on the Poland-Belarus border right now?

Since the wall was raised, the Polish government’s narrative is that it has been a deterrent and the scale of the humanitarian crisis has reduced. We follow the situation very closely and we know that’s not true. What the wall has done is diminish the health of people who are trying to cross the border. We have been treating a lot of leg injuries from falls, a lot of cuts from the razor wire that lines the top of the wall. There are more and more cases of hypothermia. The situation is tough.  

We don’t have an estimate on how many people are crossing, but we do know how many people are asking us for help (we only provide humanitarian aid to people who are on the Polish side). So, every week it’s between 100-200 people. Last week, there were 149 requests for assistance. Also, take into consideration we are not the only initiative providing humanitarian aid, so the real number of people is even higher.

Over the last 14 months, 27 people are confirmed to have died on the Polish-Belarus border. We believe around 190 people are missing. We will never know how many people died on the border because so much of the evidence gathering has been left to grass roots organizations.

This month the initial installation phase of high-tech surveillance equipment along the wall was inspected by Polish authorities. How could this infringe on the rights of asylum seekers?

It’s a further attempt to militarize the border. This should not be the response to the humanitarian crisis. No wall can stop migrants crossing the border if they are seeking international protection. 

Building a wall and adding surveillance could contribute to even higher abuse of peoples’ rights, the rights to asylum, right to freedom from torture. If you want to get to the root of migration, you cannot just erect a barrier and hope the issue will disappear. 

When I was reporting near the Poland-Belarus border last year, there was a lot of disinformation swirling around about the people on the Belarus border. Has that continued?

The government is actively spreading disinformation and claiming that people who are crossing the Poland-Belarus border are economic migrants who do not need international protection. We have documented people who have been asking us for help and most of them come from countries affected by war and conflict, so this is one kind of disinformation.

Another is the line that the people who are trying to cross the border with Belarus pose a threat to national security. We have helped approximately 13,500 people from the border area, but the Polish community has accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, and it hasn’t posed a threat to national security. We have seen it is possible for Polish society to accept people from other countries, to accept a larger number of people who are fleeing wars and conflict. So, I think the government has proved that its own line is propaganda, disinformation. 

The EU has supported the Polish government’s actions on the Poland-Belarus border. How do you feel about that?

There is more than one humanitarian crisis on European borders. The EU needs to take a common approach, which should not focus on the militarization of borders but should examine how to implement the right to asylum, the right to international protection. As a bloc it needs to change its current policy in terms of migration. 

Looking ahead, the Polish government says it will build a temporary security wall with Kaliningrad to prevent migrants crossing over from the Russian enclave. How much is this on your radar?

We are closely monitoring the situation on the Poland-Kaliningrad border and for now, as far as I know, there have not been a lot of people trying to cross. We will monitor the situation and see what happens. Judging by the Poland-Belarus border there may be a real threat to peoples’ rights so we must keep an eye on it. 

Aside from migrants, a lot of Polish people don’t want Russians to seek asylum in Europe because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Our message is that everyone has the same right, anyone who flees persecution from war and conflict can seek protection regardless of their nationality.

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Argentina’s gloriously gifted footballers in their famous sky blue and white stripes pumped the ball desperately into Saudi Arabia’s penalty area, hoping to tie the score. It was an astonishing upset against a soccer superpower. And for one moment, in the 12 years of arguments and bitter criticism since Qatar won the right to hold the FIFA 2022 World Cup, talk about the tournament was about soccer. 

It was how the organizers of this World Cup must have dreamed it would play out. A full and raucous stadium. Compelling action on the grass. Pan-Arab euphoria. An underdog victory that would clinch the argument that FIFA was right in 2010 to award the World Cup to a tiny petrostate with no meaningful football history, no suitable stadiums and not enough hotel rooms, and with labor practices so exploitative and grim that to discuss them you have to reach for terms like “human trafficking” and “slavery.” 

The most vocal opponents of Qatar 2022 are human rights organizations that have documented the Emirate’s brutal repression of LGBTQ people, deadly exploitation of migrant workers and use of slaves. 

Qatar has erected a communications strategy to fight back against the mountains of evidence that it engages in precisely these practices by invoking the values its critics claim to value most: anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Last month, Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told a meeting of Qatari legislators that the country had been subjected to an “unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced.” It has been rife with “fabrication and double standards,” he added, and has “reached a level of ferocity” that has raised suspicions about the “real reasons and motives behind this campaign.” 

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, in an unhinged hour-long address to the media, went further. “I think,” he said, “for what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years, around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” Infantino also accused Qatar’s, and FIFA’s, critics of “pure racism.” 

Qatar’s public relations strategists and state-sponsored publications have aggressively promoted the idea that criticism of Qatar amounts to Islamophobia and racism against the Arab world. Writing in the Middle East Eye, Feras Abu Helal pointed out a British government press release celebrating nearly $2 billion in contracts secured by British firms to help with everything “from building new stadiums to cutting the grass and providing pitch-side security guards.” British expats, and Westerners generally, Abu Helal added, “are among the biggest beneficiaries of the unfair and unjust wage distribution in Gulf states, including Qatar.”

The global media spotlight was part of the reason Qatar wanted to host the World Cup. Football is a key component of the sportswashing efforts of Gulf countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Their investments in a handful of European clubs, with the full backing of European governments and football associations, have helped distort the game so profoundly that these superclubs no longer want the hassle of competing with the lesser lights in their countries as they have for over a century, yearning instead to reap billions from supranational quasi-exhibition games held in elephantine stadiums from Almaty to Zhengzhou.

It’s not media attention that bothers Qatar, it’s losing control of the narrative.

Qatar has spent an astonishing amount of money to host the World Cup. First to ensure it was awarded the tournament and then to build the infrastructure necessary to host it — including a metro service, expanded airport and, to the north of the capital Doha, a brand new city in the desert that will eventually be home to 200,000 people. The organizers have spent an estimated $300 billion since 2010 to show Qatar off to the world. According to the discredited and corrupt former president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, Qatar even bought fighter jets from France so that French football officials would feel pressure to vote for Qatar’s World Cup bid.

In exchange for its huge financial outlay, Qatar had expectations. Instead came the onslaught of criticism. A young Qatari woman we spoke to said that “specifically Westerners, like Americans and British people, have been milking the shit out of human rights violations.” She was expressing the deep resentment many in Qatar feel at criticism they believe is “fueled by racism and hatred.”

“The West has a way of critiquing the Arab world and the Middle East whenever they have the opportunity, like there’s a target on our back,” a young Lebanese man who has lived in Qatar all his life told us.

Outside of Europe, many share the belief that Qatar is being singled out as much because of Eurocentrism and Orientalism as concern for labor rights. Gary Lineker, the former England striker and top scorer in the 1986 World Cup, opened the BBC’s coverage of Qatar 2022 by describing it as “the most controversial World Cup in history.”

The World Cup has been held in Mussolini’s Italy, Videla’s Argentina and, last time around, in Putin’s Russia. 

In India, the Telegraph newspaper’s editorial board responded with a sternly-worded rebuke to Western critics: “Qatar must be held accountable. But by holding it to standards no previous host has been held to, the West is revealing more about its biases than about authorities in Doha.” On the Al Jazeera website, Tafi Mhaka, a Johannesburg-based columnist, wrote that “most Africans will stand with Qatar as it hosts the World Cup.” Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari state. 

And U.S. anchor Ayman Mohyeldin on the left-wing network MSNBC criticized the “bombastic accusations” and “hyperbolic headlines,” writing that “people have rightfully grown increasingly frustrated by Western moral arrogance and self-righteousness.”

Happy to bask in paid-for praise from the likes of David Beckham, Qatari authorities become belligerent when asked uncomfortable questions. “Culture” and “custom” are wielded as weapons with which to silence dissent, as if to criticize homophobia or the treatment of women is the same as criticizing Arab or Muslim values, to criticize the authorities is to criticize the people and to criticize the lack of labor rights is to hypocritically ignore all rights violations in all other countries.

“Personally,” says Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University who has written extensively on labor issues in the Gulf, “I don’t know anyone who’s worked on these issues who isn’t also critical of labor and human rights violations in the U.S.” Ross is barred from entering the UAE, where NYU has a campus, because of his work on the treatment of migrant labor.

The uncomfortable fact for the Qatari authorities is that the country’s ability to host the World Cup at all is owed to the work of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers, largely from South Asia. These workers, as has been exhaustively documented, have been treated as indentured slaves. They’re lied to, their passports are taken from them, they live in squalid conditions, they’re underpaid and underfed, and they work in unsafe conditions both in terms of extreme weather and inadequate safety gear and protocols.

In response, Qatar has pointed to reforms it has made in consultation with the International Labor Organization since 2018, eight years after it was awarded the World Cup. Among its reforms was the institution last year of a minimum wage for workers of about $275 a month, or less than $3,500 a year in a country where the estimated per capita GDP is about $82,000. Quibbling over the exact numbers of worker deaths or “misleading” statistics seems like a tactic of distraction when you consider how awful conditions are in general.

Nonetheless, Amnesty International is attempting to persuade the Qatar government to pay up to $440 million in compensation to workers’ families. Freedom United, which describes itself as “the world’s largest community dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern slavery,” commissioned a film by the Belgian-based Fledge as a call to action to back the movement to provide monetary compensation to families.

Diederik Jeangout, who made the minute-long film, told me that it “shows that every time a footballer falls during the tournament is an invitation to us to commemorate the workers who fell during the construction of the tournament’s infrastructure.” The players’ faces in the film are pixelated to draw attention to the anonymity of the workers who died, to the absence of any record.

The Amnesty campaign, social media assets like Jeangout’s film and other messaging infuriate the Qatari authorities. The country’s labor minister has dismissed World Cup human rights campaigns. Describing “every death as a tragedy,” the minister went on to ask reporters: “Where are the victims, do you have the names of the victims, how can you get these numbers?” He told the AFP news agency that Qatar’s critics “know very well about the reforms that have been made, but they don’t acknowledge it because they have racist motivations.”

But labor reforms and regulations, argues NYU professor Ross, “are only good insofar as they are implemented.” There has to be a monitoring system, he told us, “because a lot of these declarations are lip service and rhetoric.” 

The deployment of racism as a counter to Western criticism of Qatar’s labor practices is “breathtakingly cynical,” Mukul Kesavan, a writer and columnist in New Delhi, said, “when you consider the racism so endemic to Qatar’s labor practices.” But Kesavan also argues that the “outrage of Western commentators shows a complete lack of self-awareness.” Part of the reason Gulf states including Qatar “are so despised,” he said, is because “they unmask the ease with which currency and respectability can be bought in the West.” 

As Ross bluntly puts it: “They’re very, very rich and people want their money.” 

Western critics who “feel the need to periodically pay obeisance to their better selves,” Kesavan told us, “ought to acknowledge that they are part of a sporting ecology that courts this money.”He describes the nation-states of the Gulf as “imposters of modernity.” With the World Cup, like the gleaming cityscapes designed by name-brand architects, the overseas campuses of prestigious American universities and the restaurants opened by celebrity chefs, “the Gulf is holding a mirror to the developed West and it doesn’t like what it sees.”

Many who deplore the bias of Western coverage of the Qatar World Cup ask if the plight of laborers, not to mention domestic workers, will be of any interest to the West once the tournament is over. Will the rights of women and gay people in Qatar and the region matter any more? 

But the same question can be turned back onto Qatar. Will the World Cup only be remembered for that November 22 game in the sunshine at the Lusail stadium — around which a whole city of new buildings is being attached like barnacles on a whale — when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina and most every Arab, maybe even most every Muslim, felt a surge of pride? Or will the criticism, racist or not, prompt some self-reflection?

Right now, though, it seems everyone’s checking off their talking points but no one’s doing much listening. 

The post Qatar rebrands criticism from the West as a clash of civilizations appeared first on Coda Story.

“I’m a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he wrote. In case any readers had questions about West’s anti-Jewish hostility, he clarified: “I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda. 

The tweet capped off a banner week of antisemitism for West. A few days prior, he joined Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for an interview in which he rattled off several antisemitic tropes, and took to Instagram to suggest Puff Daddy is being controlled by Jews. 

West’s comments — broadcast to 31 million people on Twitter alone, roughly double the global Jewish population — drew off of age-old antisemitic conspiracies about shadowy Jewish power and capture of elite institutions. Unlike Father Coughlin, the American antisemitic radio host of the 1930s, West has the power of social media, not just airwaves, to broadcast his strain of anti-Jewish bigotry. But at the heart of both of their prejudices lies an enduring conspiracy about Jewish dominance and control.

This idea sits at the heart of almost all modern conspiracy thinking, according to Megan Black, an expert on antisemitism at the Western States Center, an Oregon-based organization that tracks extremism. I talked to her about the throughlines between Kanye’s antisemitism and white nationalist ideology, and why conspiratorial thinking almost always seizes upon Jews. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your colleagues at the Western States Center have written about how antisemitism forms the “theoretical core” of American white nationalism. Can you explain how you see Kanye’s expression of antisemitic ideology fitting into this framework, if at all?

Antisemitism provides a core animating logic for white nationalist ideology. 

What conspiracy theories and especially antisemitism do is they give people something to hold onto to make sense of what’s going on in the world. So they can look at the problems in our society and rely on this age-old trope of blaming the Jews: ‘This is who’s influencing you. This is who is pulling the strings and they are the problem.’ It provides a villain. And the Jews have been deployed in this way for centuries. So it’s a very convenient narrative that’s already baked into our psyches and even to a certain extent, baked into our understanding of the world. 

But the other thing that antisemitism does in these spaces is it helps make sense of things that in white supremacist logic otherwise wouldn’t make sense. White supremacy depends on the idea that white people are superior. That they are in and of themselves inherently better than other people. And so when you live in a multiracial society where you have people who are not white managing to overcome the traumas of slavery and Jim Crow, achieve the civil rights successes that they achieved in the 1960s up until today, get elected into office and step into positions of leadership — all of that defies the logic of white supremacy. 

And so you have to find a way to explain to people why white supremacy doesn’t always win out. And the thing that they go to is: ‘The only reason that Black people or immigrants or brown people are succeeding in this way is that they are backed by Jewish people. These people who can pretend to be white, who can pretend to be of us, but they’re not of us. They’re actually diametrically opposed to us. They are the reason that Black people have managed to do as well as they have. They are the ones that are undermining our white superiority, our white supremacy.’

That’s why you have people going in and shooting up the Tree of Life Synagogue. They’re targeting Jews because they see Jews as enabling the people they find inferior to them and can’t abide the idea of living underneath or even in relationship with. This is why we see antisemitism as so core to the white nationalist logic. Because it really holds together all of the other racism that is so key to their hate.

Understanding all this, how can we make sense of Kanye’s comments? Is his rhetoric reinforcing the same white nationalist logic? That might seem counterintuitive to some people.

Kanye drank the Kool-Aid. You can be Black, brown, white, gay, straight, any identity, and still hold white supremacist views because what you’re buying into is not the hope that your skin color will change. You’re buying into the idea that this system of power can benefit you and that you, therefore, want to perpetuate it. Kanye sees value in this power structure because he thinks he can benefit from it. So he is willing to make racist remarks and make antisemitic remarks all in the hope of perpetuating this power structure that he sees as benefiting himself.

Ok. But of course, Kanye’s identity as a Black man has been a big part of this conversation. What do you make of his rhetoric when comparing it to the antisemitism that has been expressed in Black nationalist spaces? I’m thinking of figures like Louis Farrakhan, who has blamed Jews for slavery and Jim Crow, among other things. Is there anything new or novel about what Kanye is saying?

I definitely wouldn’t call it new. I wouldn’t say that Kanye is treading new paths in the Black nationalist movement. I don’t want to comment a lot on what this is about for Kanye because it’s really hard to figure out. But what he’s doing tracks much more with the logic that we see, I think, in white nationalist circles and in increasingly authoritarian circles and QAnon spaces. 

This kind of antisemitic conspiracy thinking has been around for centuries. It’s very easy to pick up. It’s been seeded in our society for a long time, and it’s a convenient way of thinking. So it’s not surprising to me that Kanye picked this up and has made something of it. We see this in every fringe and extremist space, regardless of color. 

One of the things we talk about a lot at Western States Center is that almost all modern conspiracy thinking is patterned on antisemitism. It’s almost inherently antisemitic in that it often requires some kind of secretive global cabal of people who are pulling the strings on unsuspecting Black and brown people or some other disenfranchised group and seeking to overturn a dominant power structure that’s almost always some version of white Christianity. That’s essentially all conspiracy theories — at their heart they’re almost always about Jews.

This reminds me of a piece I wrote for Coda at the beginning of the pandemic about anti-vaccine rhetoric and antisemitism. I was seeing on fringe anti-vaccine spaces online that people were talking about the vaccine as part of a shadowy cabal trying to impose a “New World Order.” It’s one of those things where you kind of have to understand the language to even know it’s a signal. So for a person who doesn’t have to spend their time in these online cesspools — lucky for them! — they might not hear this specific terminology and understand what it’s signaling.

Eventually, it will show itself. Like QAnon. At first, it took a while for the overt antisemitism to emerge. But like clockwork, it came along. Eventually, people connected the dots, and all of a sudden it was about the Jews. 

An idea that I find compelling about antisemitism is that it can resurface and become dangerous when Jews are actually most assimilated in a society, which is not necessarily true of other forms of prejudice. You can see the rhetorical dangers of Jewish assimilation because it perversely reinforces this trope about secret control and power: ‘Look at how great the Jews are doing, look at their influence in politics, media and culture.’ How do you see the assimilation of American Jews as contributing or related to this current wave of antisemitism?

When I do this work specifically around trying to connect the dots on antisemitism and racism and anti-Black racism, it’s always important to talk about the ways in which these two forms of racialized othering and oppression show up differently. Because anti-Blackness shows up as this kind of ever-persistent form of racial oppression that never goes away and is always playing out in almost every kind of dynamic. And I think it’s important for the way in which white supremacy functions and for the way in which antisemitism has been manufactured in this space that antisemitism is allowed to kind of slip down under the surface for a while and it gets resurfaced when it’s convenient. 

It’s convenient for white Jews to be allowed to assimilate because there’s a lot of benefit that comes from that. Historically, that benefit has been: ‘We can use Jews to provide money lending,’ because Christian communities didn’t believe in usury. And so they were like, ‘We’ll just deploy these Jewish communities to do this for us. And then when they make enough money off of us, we will run them out of town and slaughter their families if they resist and then take their wealth,’ which is what happened for most of medieval history with the expulsions of Jews from various parts of Europe. It was always this moment of: ‘We’ve had this community here. They’ve been very useful and beneficial to us. But now there’s something we’re upset about — maybe the plague — and we don’t understand where the plague is coming from so we’re going to blame it on the Jews and we’re going to run them out of town.’ 

So the way that antisemitism has played out historically, and I think continues to play out here in the United States, is that it’s really useful sometimes to have Jews feel really comfortable, and then it’s really useful sometimes to run them out of town and take all their resources.

It’s the macabre line of thinking many Jews are familiar with: Always have your passport renewed and your bags packed.

One thing this makes me think about is the role the U.S. plays in the American Jewish imagination. America in a way has served as an exception to the long history of violence that Jews have experienced in so many other countries, especially in Europe. So many American Jews, including myself, are here because their ancestors were fleeing persecution and found a safe haven here. That’s influenced how some Jewish Americans see the world and their place in it.

Liberal democracy: that is what distinguishes America as a sanctuary for Jews over most other places. Which is what makes the threat of white nationalism so anxiety-inducing. The very thing that is providing that protective umbrella is now being eroded in front of our faces.

One thing that strikes me about the conversation we’re having is that it is fairly high level, just in terms of having to explain all these things to someone who sees a post on Instagram and isn’t aware of this long history of antisemitic thinking and the conspiracy at the heart of all conspiracies. How you begin to disrupt the antisemitism that can spread so quickly online and add the necessary historical context? The antisemitic conspiratorial worldview is addictive for some people, especially in moments of confusion and crisis.

Our way of getting the word out about this is through as many leadership development programs as we can throw together and put out in the world. The idea is that we engage folks in a cohort because it is so complex and it’s so big and it’s hard to figure out where to start. So we bring people together, students and artists and civic leaders and organizational heads and people for whom these issues are now or will be relevant at some point in the future. And we do kind of a deep dive. And the place where we find the most helpful to start often is a kind of a historical retrospective. We go back to 1492 and look at the fact that Columbus launched Western imperialism, westward expansion, colonialism in the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade, all of these things followed that date.

But that same year is the same year that Jews and Muslims were branded as impure of blood and were expelled from Spain under this idea of a biological difference. It was the first time we saw this notion of biological difference really being used to systematically oppress a group of people in Western history. And so we start there and we ask people to start to trace the development of this kind of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry and bias. And the emergence of this kind of racism. We find that it’s going back and asking folks to just reframe their understanding of history and expand it a little bit to include more narratives than just the American one. But as you’re saying, it’s really big and that’s really hard.

One thing that this Kanye situation is his comments are helping us connect the dots for people. We talked earlier about this language of globalists and this secretive cabal and how people can look at that and not quite know what they’re talking about unless you’re really in the know. 

But when someone comes along and connects all the dots for you the way that Kanye has, it makes my job a little bit easier. And so that is one thing that I see as moving the needle in terms of our work to combat antisemitism. We’re able to call it for what it is.

The post ‘Kanye drank the Kool Aid’: Connecting the dots between antisemitism and white nationalism appeared first on Coda Story.

He recalls a particular protest on the first Friday of October 2011, in Maarat al-Numan, a city in rural Idlib, his hometown. He joined swaths of protesters marching towards the city’s state buildings. Above them, Syrian military helicopters followed. The protesters, al-Mahlool insists, were peaceful. But right as they reached the row of state buildings, the helicopters above began to fire, obliterating the buildings in a cloud of smoke. 

The next morning, the Assad regime blamed the protesters for the destruction. Headlines, he said, in compliant newspapers declared that the protesters had lost control and burned the buildings down. “It was then I learned this is what I had to do,” he said. “I had to tell the truth.”

Now a journalist and researcher, al-Mahlool lives and works in a country that is among the most dangerous in the world for reporters. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that 711 journalists have been murdered since the revolution began in 2011. In 2022 alone, a spokesperson from Reporters Without Borders told me, at least one Syrian journalist has been murdered, ten have been imprisoned, and four taken hostage. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is behind only Somalia as a country in which journalists are killed with impunity.

“Syria is a country at war,” the independent journalist Doja Daoud said. “So you’re not safe naturally. You don’t have your basic needs and you have to beg for them.” 

More than a decade of civil war has destroyed Syria’s media sector. Though the months following the civil war’s onset brought about a brief resurgence in journalism across the country — nearly 119 new publications emerged — that renaissance was short-lived. The Syrian regime quickly began to use oppressive tactics to silence those who challenged them: murdering, imprisoning, censoring and discrediting journalists they regarded as inconvenient. The only news outlets that survive within the country are closely tied to the government. Reporters Without Borders ranks Syria at 171 out of 180 countries in this year’s Press Freedom Index.

The only journalists who thrive in Syria today are those who serve as mouthpieces for the Syrian and Russian regimes. Many of these mouthpieces include American-based, far-left websites such as The Grayzone and MintPress News. Idrees Ahmed, an editor at global affairs magazine New Lines, says such friendly foreign media, even if obscure and dismissed by the mainstream, has “made the job of propaganda easier for [authoritarians].” 

In September for example, a Grayzone article claimed that the White Helmets, a civil defense group responsible for significant reporting on Syrian atrocities and the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives, corrupted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) investigation into the 2018 Douma chemical attack. 

Among those who shared the article on Twitter was the Russian Embassy in Sweden. In a report by human rights organization The Syria Campaign, in the seven years since Russia’s intervention in Syria, the White Helmets have been targeted by more than 21,000 tweets designed to discredit them.  

Among the best known peddlers of disinformation about the White Helmets and the Syrian civil war is the US-born Canadian commentator and self-described “independent journalist” Eva Bartlett, who became prominent in 2016 after a video of her claiming, among other things, that the bombing of a hospital by Syrian forces that left 55 people dead was a piece of rebel disinformation. Bartlett, who writes for the Kremlin-funded Russia Today website, accused the White Helmets of transporting children to different sites as propaganda tools.

Despite the claims quickly being debunked, and despite the fact that Bartlett was not working “independently” — in the weeks leading up to that conference she went on a regime-chaperoned trip through Aleppo where she can be seen wearing an “I <3 Bashar” wristband — the video spread like wildfire, fueled mostly by the backing of various Russian-funded media. As recently as March 2022, it’s been viewed nearly ten million times across a variety of platforms. In the years since that incident, Bartlett has built a devoted audience through her outlandish pro-Assad claims.

She and a few other marginal Western journalists became Assad boosters, and by extension supporters of Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, in exchange for a public profile and platform that they had never previously enjoyed. “These are people who are not exactly accustomed to this kind of attention,” Idrees Ahmed told me.

Bartlett currently resides in Russia and has over 124,000 followers on Twitter. The disinformation campaign in which she voluntarily participates has moved on from using foreign journalists to selectively “debunk” the Western mainstream media’s “narrative” about Syria to using foreign influencers to normalize the Assad regime. Since last year, the Syrian government has been giving visas to travelers to make videos that promote the country as essentially stable — a safe, effectively governed tourist destination. Bartlett, naturally, contributed to the effort with a column in RT last year arguing that a “war-torn country becoming a tourist destination is a good thing.”

This past summer, local tour operators reported an uptick in Western tourism and Syria’s Ministry of Tourism has already claimed the year as a grand success, announcing that the country received nearly 700,000 visitors during the first half of 2022, a figure that many analysts say is dubious.

It’s proving to be an effective formula: make life impossible for independent journalists looking to report as truthfully as possible from Syria, and roll out the red carpet for foreigners to trot out the government line. “For the regime, it works,” Ahmed says sardonically, “and for Western governments, these types of things become useful.”

What he means is that Western governments can use the manufactured image of a stable Syria to force refugees to return. The Danish government, for instance, having accepted tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, has started to reassess and revoke the status of refugees on the grounds that Damascus and its environs are safe. And just weeks ago, Turkey, which has taken in millions of Syrian refugees, reportedly rounded up refugees, including unaccompanied minors, and forced them to return to Syria at gunpoint. It “now looks like Turkey is trying to make northern Syria a refugee dumping ground,” said a researcher at Human Rights Watch. 

In May, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he planned to resettle a million Syrian refugees in northern Syria. More recently he has suggested that relations with Syria could be normalized, a far cry from his statement, in December 2017, that Assad was “a terrorist who has carried out state terrorism.”

Doja Daoud, the independent journalist from Lebanon, told me that in Jordan, “many Syrian journalists face deportation risks and smear campaigns against them.” She says the Assad regime’s disinformation campaigns are having an effect primarily because “Syria is a blackout country for the media.” She despairs, she says, that “Syrian stories no longer matter in the eyes of the global public.” While influencers and regime-friendly journalists are welcomed into Syria, Daoud says, many of the reporters she knows who cover the war from Lebanon no longer have jobs because most international publications no longer devote space to the now prolonged conflict.  

If the result of a lack of serious coverage of Syria is that refugees are forced to return to a supposedly stable country, Daoud says, the consequences will be disastrous. Switching to Arabic, she told me, “we’re going to see massacres again. We’re going to see our friends disappear.”

For Syrian journalists like al-Mahlool, though, there’s no choice but to persevere. In 2019, his home was bombed by Syrian planes. He remembers dragging his aunt out of the debris, her body wrapped in bedsheets. 

“I’m still afraid my home will be bombed again,” he tells me. “But I must continue to share the truth of my people and the struggles we face.”

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Last month, the website Dall:E (named after the Spanish artist Dali, and the Pixar character Wall-E, from the eponymous 2008 movie), announced that users were creating over two million AI generated images per day. The site added that it had fine-tuned its filters to reject violent or sexual content or other images that violate its policies.

But given the ease of access and increased sophistication of text-image generators, many experts predict that it won’t be long before the technology becomes yet another weapon in the arsenal of those looking to spread disinformation and propaganda. The technology already raises serious questions about copyright and the commercial use of artificially generated images.

Getty Images, for instance, unlike some of its competitors, banned the sale of AI generated illustrations on its site in September because of uncertainty around the legality of such images, while also announcing a partnership with a site that uses similar technology to enable the substantial and creative editing of existing images. The difference being emphasized here is that between image generation and image editing, even if the effect of the editing is to create an entirely different image.

In a recently released report, Democracy Reporting International observed that this “combination of a text model and a synthetic image creator raises the prospect that we will see a shift in disinformation strategies, moving from manipulation of existing content to the creation of new realities.” For the researchers the application of AI technology goes “beyond the manipulation of existing media” to the “production of fully synthetic content… eventually allowing for the quick and easy generation of fake visual evidence as a direct complement to false (news) narratives.”

Another significant concern, say critics, is that the AI technology will continue to reproduce stereotypes and biases that already exist within our society as it pulls from existing images online when it generates pictorial responses to textual commands. This would make it easier for those who want to create visual “evidence” to display alongside falsified narratives targeting marginalized communities.

Democracy Reporting International does offer recommendations on how to prepare for and respond to the growing mass of AI-created content. It argues that widespread digital literacy is essential if people are to recognize false narratives and disinformation. The researchers also suggest prebunking, that is being proactive in countering falsified images and text, rather than to merely react. 

I spoke with Beatriz Almeida Saab, co-author of the report, about the threat text-image generators represent and how best to mitigate potential damage. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

While preparing the report, what came up unexpectedly for you in your research?

The threat is not the technology itself, but the access to this technology. Because the technology to manipulate media has always been there, it’s just a matter of how easy and fast you can do this. Plus, we’ve seen that people believe in much less sophisticated manners of manipulation. Our whole point is that it will get to the point where malicious actors will have easy access to this and it will be effortless. This kind of technology is open access meaning it’s available for everybody. There’s no regulation in place, meaning that if we are not discussing it at a policy level, how will we be prepared to see the consequences?

What would be your nightmare scenario with text-to-image generation?

A malicious actor creates a false headline, builds a story around it, and uses artificial intelligence (AI), specifically text-to-image generation models, to create an image that perfectly supports their false narrative, manufacturing realistic fake evidence. Consequently, this false narrative is harder to verify and debunk, so people will not change their minds as a shred of fake evidence supports the story, and there is no room for questioning an image. 

How does text-to-image generation differ from “deep fakes” that already exist? 

Deep fakes are typically used as an umbrella description of all forms of audio-visual manipulation — video, audio, or both. They are highly sophisticated manipulations using AI-driven technology, enabling those aiming to spread disinformation to make it seem that someone said or did something that they did not or that an event took place that never actually occurred. The main difference between deep fakes and text-prompt generated images is that deep fakes refer to sophisticated manipulations of existing audio-visual content. Text-to-image creation is novel as it moves from manipulating pre-existing media to the entire generation of new media, to the creation of an image that reflects the desired reality. 

Who is most directly impacted by the implementation of this technology? What responsibility do people on the frontlines of this new tech have?

On one level, everyone is impacted. The way we consume information, images, and everything online will change. We need to learn how to discern what is true from what is false online, which is very hard. A researcher we interviewed for the report pointed out that your brain will already process information just by consuming it, whether it’s true or not. Your subconscious will process it, and it will stay with you. It also impacts what we call provenance technology stakeholders, who can detect media authenticity. So it impacts the way you debunk. It affects the way you fact check. It involves all these stakeholders because creating fake evidence to support a false narrative is very serious. 

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“Robe-wearing bums, get ready,” a Brazilian man warned in a video made on Kwai, a short-form video platform owned by Chinese social media giant Kuaishou. Kwai is one of the top three most popular social media platforms in Brazil, and a top rival to TikTok, owned by Chinese corporate giant ByteDance.

“Not only are we going to invade the Supreme Federal Court, we’re going to hang you upside down,” the man threatened.

During the campaign, Bolsonaro galvanized supporters by taking aim at the integrity of Brazil’s courts, periodically vowing to appoint new judges to the Supreme Court among other threats to the judiciary’s independence. His supporters on social media have been eager to amplify his anti-judiciary narrative.

“LET’S THROW THE CRIMINALS IN POWER OUT,” wrote another online supporter, referring to court justices. On July 11, this was the second-most shared message in some of Brazil’s most popular WhatsApp groups that support pro-President Jair Bolsonaro. 

Nearly two weeks later, Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court judge and current president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, had enough. He ordered the man in the video to be temporarily detained. Moraes is a top target of attacks by Bolsonaro, who has accused the Supreme Federal Court of “interfering” with the exercise of power by the executive branch, and the Superior Electoral Court of “manipulating” the Brazilian electoral system.

Court-ordered detentions of individual bad actors did not put a halt to incendiary online narratives. Misleading and false information circulated on TikTok, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms in the lead-up to Brazil’s national elections on October 2. 

Although former president and left-wing candidate Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva captured a narrow lead at the polls, he did not secure enough votes to win outright. 

That triggered a rematch in a runoff election on this Sunday, October 30. Bolsonaro raised the stakes — he pushed rumors of voter fraud and stated on several occasions that he will only accept the outcome if he wins the runoff. 

Digital disinformation has played a pivotal role in Bolsonaro’s rise and now in his fight to stay in power. Agência Pública, Brazil’s first nonprofit investigative newsroom, investigated how short-form videos from platforms like TikTok have helped fuel false narratives and promote pro-Bolsonaro violence. 

Using data from the research organization Eleições Sem Fake, or Elections Without Fake News, Agência Pública identified a set of leading pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and then analyzed the videos that were most widely shared on those groups. The findings showed that nearly half of the most popular videos in these WhatsApp groups had originated on either TikTok or Kwai.

Both TikTok and Kwai have seen explosive growth in recent years. Their interoperability — meaning videos edited on one platform can easily be shared on the other — is part of what makes the platforms vulnerable to the spread of disinformation and hate speech. Tracking the origins of videos is an important tool in countering harmful content, which gained traction across social media in Brazil over the election campaign season.

One of the most popular videos circulated on pro-Bolsonaro social media over three weeks claimed that the 2014 election of former president Dilma Rousseff — who, like Lula, represented the left-wing Workers’ Party — was illegitimate, and sowed doubt about the security of Brazil’s electronic voting system. The two and a half minute clip, edited on TikTok by an account called @fabioprange, reposted part of a documentary made by a Brazilian production company with a streaming platform known as “Netflix of the Right.” The company had shared content that falsely denied reports of deforestation taking place in the Amazon rainforest and distorted Indigenous rights issues in Brazil.

The video was taken down after Agência Pública flagged the video for policy staff at TikTok.

In another video posted by @luizalbertoradio, a man claims that Brazil’s Armed Forces discovered potential cases of fraud in the 2014 and 2018 elections, and that Bolsonaro was going to share evidence confirming this. The channel has nearly 97,600 followers and has received over 790,000 likes for its pro-Bolsonaro content. 

The most shared video of the investigation featured former presidents Lula and Dilma congratulating de Moraes, the Supreme Court Justice. The caption on the video reads “Here’s the guy who’s going to take care of the elections. May God have pity on us.” 

By early September, the video had garnered more than 883,000 views and had received 23,000 shares, 42,000 likes, and 2,362 comments on TikTok. 

Meanwhile, the video sharing platform Kwai has hosted videos claiming the Supreme Court was behind rigged electronic voting machines. 

The rampant disinformation trafficked on TikTok and Kwai during this year’s election circulates in a country already overwhelmed with false narratives and concocted news. In 2018, a survey of Facebook and Twitter users found that nine out of ten Bolsonaro voters were exposed to invented, false content during the 2018 presidential elections. This year, according to a study carried out by the Poynter Institute, 44% of Brazilians have said they come across fake news on a daily basis.

Researcher Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, who studies political content on TikTok at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, said social media platforms’ lack of transparency freezes study of the problem by researchers. 

“Because these [platforms] are black boxes right now, we are talking about things that we usually see as users, but we don’t know how much they happen and we don’t know how exactly the platform contains them and moderate them,” he told Agência Pública.

TikTok’s Brazil press office said to Agência Pública that the company takes “extremely seriously the responsibility that we have to protect the integrity of the platform and the elections.” Kwai stated that it has “security mechanisms that combine artificial intelligence with human analysis to identify and remove content which violates or infringes their policies,” and that it “does not tolerate” content “that has been manipulated with the intention of attack an individual, group, or organization or which attempts to obstruct democratic processes.”

Both platforms have signed partnerships with fact-checking agencies for elections. From April to June of 2022, TikTok reported that it removed nearly 4 million videos for violating the site’s terms. But platform-wide, 0.7% of these were removed for violating rules concerning “integrity and authenticity.” Kwai wrote in its biannual transparency report that between January and June it removed more than 8 million videos for violating its Community Guidelines. It, too, reported that these removals represented less than 1% of the total number of videos posted on the platform during that time period.

This report was originally published by Agência Pública

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“My darlings, my main mission here is to talk about Jesus, but I cannot look at how we are living and not open your eyes,” said Leonardo on an Instagram video, endorsing the reelection of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The video was posted on October 3, one day after the first round of the Brazilian elections. Leonardo ended with a plea: “Leftist ideology will destroy us. Have mercy on our country.” 

Up until that day, Leonardo, who has over 33 million followers across his social media channels, had nothing to say about politics. The 32-year-old from southern Brazil had only posted motivational speeches, messages about God and the Bible, and the itinerary of his national tour. But his social media agenda changed immediately following the first round of Brazilian elections. 

In a deeply polarized country, the election was close enough that neither the right-wing populist Bolsonaro, who received 43.2% of the votes, nor Lula da Silva, his main opponent from the leftist Worker’s Party who garnered 48.4% of the votes, could claim victory. A second voting round occurs on October 30. 

In the meantime, Brazilian social media has been transformed into macabre accusations of candidate transgressions. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation have spread quickly, invoking allegations of involvement with pedophilia, freemasonry, satanic rituals and cannibalism. 

One issue, however, has dominated public debate: religion. Bolsonaro’s campaign has accused Lula of hostility to Christianity. “Religions have been instrumentalized [for political purposes] for a long time, but never like now,” said Fernanda Faria Medeiros of the Center for Studies in Communication and Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.

Influencers of faith go online to evangelize, but they also seek to strengthen and consolidate institutional ties between their audiences and their churches. “We think that we’re discussing religion, but what we’re actually discussing is the morals of the candidates,” said Medeiros.

Armed with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above all,” Bolsonaro has positioned himself as an envoy of a muscular Christianity, an ally of the growing evangelical electorate and the defender of their agendas, such as the non-decriminalization of drugs and abortion. 

“There is a very strong claim that runs through Bolsonaro’s candidacy: that it is a candidacy that will build the kingdom of God,” said Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a professor at the University of Brasília. Bolsonaro sells himself as a politician guided by Christian ethics, said Teixeira, and that resonates with evangelicals. 

Bolsonaro has also courted evangelicals as part of his digital mobilization strategy — a centerpiece of his campaign activity. He has addressed them online and invited influencers of faith to the presidential palace on several occasions.

Yudi Tamashiro, an actor who wants to become a pastor and has millions of followers said in a video “If you follow me here, you know that every week I go to church, every week I am preaching. You already know what my vote is. My vote is for Bolsonaro.”

In the runoff, 61% of evangelical voters said they will vote for Bolsonaro, versus only 31% who say they will vote for Lula, according to a recent Datafolha survey. This could provide a decisive margin of victory for Bolsonaro. The evangelical vote is significant in Brazil: evangelicals represent 31% of Brazil’s 210 million population, and are expected to outnumber Catholics in a decade. 

The numbers should worry Lula and the Brazilian left. After the election’s first round, one of the biggest evangelical congregations, the Assembly of God, announced it will punish worshipers who “defend leftist agendas within the Marxist worldview.” Less than two weeks before the run-off, Lula issued a public letter to evangelicals stating that it was a “sad scandal” to use faith for electoral purposes, and made a commitment to the freedom of worship in the country while promising not to use symbols of faith for political gain. 

An alliance between Christian nationalism and authoritarian governance helped sweep Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency in 2016, secured majority support in Hungary to Viktor Orban, and fueled the popularity of French far-right leaders Marine le Pen and Éric Zemmour. 

Online audiences have demanded Brazilian evangelical influencers articulate this alliance out loud. On social media, the public demands a point of view, said Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the University of São Paulo specializing in social media. Audiences develop expectations and begin to make demands, and influencers feel compelled to reveal their politics to maintain their bond with the majority of their followers.

Influencers of faith are also modeling others’ success. In the first round of the Brazilian elections, mainstream celebrities such as the singers Anitta and Caetano Veloso supported Lula. Their campaigning had significant reach and was incorporated into Lula’s digital messaging. But their support also generated a response: influencers of faith, country singers, and others, eyeing the celebrity success in endorsing Lula, publicly embraced Bolsonaro.

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Many influencers of faith are staking out ultra-conservative, nationalist and far-right positions. These messages resonate with evangelical influencers who had never been shy about their political inclinations. “It’s not a war of men, it’s not a war of [political] parties, I don’t even get into politics. It’s just that this has gone beyond politics, it’s a war of agendas,” said Tiago Brunet, an evangelical pastor with five million online followers.

Evangelical support for Bolsonaro has been accompanied by accusations of a personal profit motive. Rede Super, a TV station that broadcasts evangelical programming owned by André Valadão, who has over five million followers and has preached in favor of Bolsonaro for a long time, received approximately $140,000 from Bolsonaro’s government, according to an investigation by Agência Pública.

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Other evangelical influencers have been dogged by allegations of impropriety entirely separate from politics. Evangelical pastor Ivonélio Abrahão da Silva and his influencer son Patrick Abrahão are being investigated by the Federal Police’s Operation La Casa de Papel under the suspicion of a financial scheme using cryptocurrencies and emeralds that would have deceived more than one million investors in 80 countries. 

Teixeira, the professor who studies evangelical profiles and voting inclinations, said that evangelicals are not satisfied with Bolsonaro but vote for him because they are against Lula and The Worker’s Party at all costs. “They think he is the least worst in this electoral dispute, but he’s not a comfortable vote,” she adds. 

Bolsonaro’s campaign seems to know that evangelicals are not completely happy. “Don’t look at my husband, look at me who is a servant of the Lord,” said First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro in October to a group of evangelical women at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ. 

Despite what it may seem, not all influencers of faith are animated by opposition to Lula. Yago Martins, head of Two Fingers of Theology, has announced that he will not vote for any candidate. Prominent pastors like Paulo Marcelo, Sérgio Dusilek and others, have publicly expressed support for Lula. 

“The digital world is built from communities of interest, or when you trigger a value that brings people together,” said Karhawi, the researcher. She highlights that because of the internet’s attention span, influencers of faith can publicly support Bolsonaro now and right after the election, regardless of the result, go back to doctrinal posts about Christianity, as if nothing ever happened. Because the public is relentlessly presented with new information in social networks, there’s no time to register and elaborate, said Karhawi. Consuming social media “is going to be superficial. It’s not going to generate a memory, a deep connection.”

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Denied supplies of paper and ink, that headline, on the morning of August 12, 2021, was the last time La Prensa appeared in print. Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s president since 2007, had, since violent protests in 2018, been tightening his already vice-like grip on the country’s throat, squeezing the life out of its once voluble press. La Prensa might be going out of print, the headline asserted, but it was still in business.

As La Prensa prepared to go digital, their newsroom was seized by police. Renata Holmann texted her father, Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the newspaper’s publisher, to say she was proud of him and his efforts to keep the paper running. “Don’t worry,” Holmann texted his daughter back, “I will be okay.”

On August 14, 2021, in the early hours of the morning, Holmann was detained. He was held in pretrial detention until March, when behind closed doors he was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to nine years in prison. His cousins, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios and Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, both on La Prensa’s board, were also imprisoned by judges that week for money laundering and the misappropriation of funds.

“Not even Orwell could have dreamed up a country like this,” the former president of PEN Nicaragua told the Los Angeles Times. There are well over a hundred Nicaraguan journalists currently in exile and a couple hundred more who are being held as political prisoners.

Just three weeks ago, Ortega’s wife and Nicaragua’s vice president Rosario Murillo announced that La Prensa’s offices, including its printing presses, would be converted into a “cultural and polytechnic center” offering courses and workshops. In July, La Prensa announced that after two of its drivers were arrested, what was left of the staff, including photographers, reporters and editors, would be fleeing the country.

The options before them were stark: jail, harassment, or voluntary exile. Hundreds of staff members, including journalists, across Nicaragua have taken the same decision.

Nicaragua ranked 160 out of 180 in this year’s freedom of press index. According to the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), Nicaragua and Venezuela are the two countries with the highest rate of censorship in the Americas. Carlos Jornet, president of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, said that the arrest and sentencing of La Prensa’s Holmann, is “totally illegal and shows the desperation of the Ortega-Murillo regime to confront anyone who dares to dissent.”

Many La Prensa journalists have taken refuge in Costa Rica, from where the paper has continued to produce a digital edition, stories from which are clandestinely spread in Nicaragua — samizdat delivered via WhatsApp.

Freedom of the press in Nicaragua has been deteriorating steadily under Ortega. But the catalyst for ihis most concerted effort to rid the country entirely of independent media was a wave of protests that began in April 2018 over social security reforms that effectively raised taxes while reducing benefits. At its peak, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans took to streets in various cities in marches organized by Catholic churches calling for Ortega to step down.

By September 2018, Ortega declared protests of any kind to be illegal. And by February 2019, thousands had already been arrested and over 300 Nicaraguans killed by their own security forces. Since 2018, Ortega and his wife Murillo have presided over the closure of dozens of news outlets, jailing journalists, activists, politicians, rival presidential candidates and even priests. 

As recently as last month, on August 19, an influential Catholic bishop was placed under house arrest and eight of his colleagues were jailed. Among the shutting down of television and radio stations, many are affiliated to the Catholic Church. Religious processions have been barred. Even the Vatican’s envoy was told to leave the country.

By cracking down on the church, Ortega is sending a clear message to Nicaraguans: no dissent, no criticism, no disagreement will be brooked.

Eduardo Enriquez, La Prensa’s editor-in-chief now in exile in the United States, told me that the newspaper evacuated everyone they could by road from the Nicaraguan capital Managua in June and July. “There is no one who works for La Prensa left in Nicaragua,” he said, “because it is too dangerous for such a person to remain.” La Prensa’s journalists have instead recreated their newsroom in Costa Rica.

But even in Costa Rica — where many Nicaraguan journalists have fled and where, according to the United Nations, about 200 Nicaraguans per day were applying for asylum — it appears journalists are no longer welcome. Just last month, the country’s president, Rodrigo Chaves Robles, who only took office in May, described the country’s media as “rats.”

One of his first acts upon being sworn in was to declare a national emergency in response to a ransomware attack by Russian hackers. Costa Rica, Robles said, was at war with the hackers.  In a private meeting during the emergency period, Robles’s chief of staff is alleged to have described the press as the “enemy” and instructed press officers to limit access to information. “Don’t see it as censorship,” the chief of staff supposedly said, “but as extreme discipline.”

Much of Central America is currently engaged in combat with the independent press in the region. In Guatemala, Jose Ruben Zamora, the director of an investigative newspaper that exposes corruption was arrested on July 29; and in a move straight from Daniel Ortega’s playbook, the Guatemalan government claimed Zamora was being arrested for money laundering not his journalism. In Honduras and El Salvador too, journalists are being more frequently attacked, even killed, and find themselves fighting legislation by governments intent on curtailing the right to report and share information freely.

It is as if Ortega’s campaign against the press in Nicaragua has opened the floodgates for leaders in the rest of the region. In Mexico, for instance, 14 journalists have been killed already this year, making it the “world’s deadliest country for the media for the fourth year running in 2022, ahead of countries at war such as Ukraine (with eight media deaths) and Yemen (with three).”

A particularly invidious tactic employed by several governments including Nicaragua’s is punishing the spread of supposedly fake news. Two years ago, Ortega’s government passed the “Special Cybercrimes Law” which punished “those who promote or distribute false or misleading information that causes alarm, terror, or unease in the public” with a two to four-year prison sentence. A further year or so was added if the information “incites hatred or violence, or puts at risk economic stability, public health, national sovereignty or law and order.” 

Of course, what is classified as false or misleading information is defined by Ortega and his government.

“For the government,” says Guillermo Medrano, who worked for years for the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, “fake news can mean an expert talking about public policy.” The Foundation was one of over a thousand civil service organizations that Ortega has shut down over the last year. Medrano continues, as an independent, to monitor the Nicaraguan media. He told me that Ortega’s behavior was in keeping with his Sandinista roots. Ortega, filled with revolutionary fervor, served as Nicaragua’s president between 1985 and 1990. “This same Sandinista government,” Medrano says, “has always been allergic to and intolerant of criticism. It has always been an enemy of the press.”

Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was Nicaragua’s first, and thus far only, woman to become president. She led Nicaragua from 1990 to 1997. Her husband Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal inherited La Prensa, though his murder in 1978 thrust his widow into the national spotlight. La Prensa by then had already developed a reputation as a fearless critic of the Somoza dictatorship, about forty years in which Nicaragua was controlled by Anastasio Somoza Garcia and his two sons.

Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal’s assassination can be said to have been the match that lit the flame of the Sandinista revolt. Violeta, Cardenal’s widow, and Daniel Ortega were allies, forced together by the need to overthrow the Somozas. Once Ortega was in power though, Violeta became an implacable rival.

Her murdered husband had been the scion of a grand Nicaraguan family. There have been six Nicaraguan presidents who have come from the Chamorro family, who were also the founders of La Prensa. Juan Lorenzo Holmann is just the latest Chamorro to be both at the helm of La Prensa and in prison because the family is at the helm of La Prensa.

“Nicaragua is a big jail,” says Victoria Cardenas, whose husband Juan Sebastian Chamorro was one of seven politicians planning to run against Ortega for president in 2021 who were arrested and unceremoniously imprisoned. “If you want to speak up, you either go to jail, or you speak up while you’re in exile.” Her husband is in prison. She, for now, is in exile.

Juan Sebastian Chamorro’s uncle was Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal. Chamorro’s father (Cardenal’s brother) was the founder, in 1980, of “El Nuevo Diario” which he hoped would provide competition to La Prensa. Newspapers clearly run in the Chamorro blood.

Chamorro and two of his cousins, including Holmann, publisher of La Prensa, were recently pictured in prison looking thinner and weaker. Nicaraguan human rights organizations say that several journalists are being held in conditions that are causing a significant deterioration in their health.

“Sometimes I can’t believe that this is my reality,” Renata Holmann told me. She hasn’t spoken to her father in 13 months, but for Renata to return to Nicaragua is out of the question. She is one of the many family members of political prisoners who have spoken up against Ortega’s regime and denounced its many human rights violations. But they can only speak from the relative safety of a foreign country.

“I have the opportunity to talk about the situation in Nicaragua now that I live in the United States,” Renata said. “Anyone in Nicaragua who dares to speak against the government, or just tell the truth, is in danger.”

As soon as Juan Sebastian Chamorro was arrested in June, his wife Victoria started to receive threats from the police. She was then accused of treason, before fleeing to the U.S. with her daughter. “There is a very direct pressure applied on relatives of prisoners who stay in Nicaragua rather than opt for exile,” says Carlos Jornet of the Inter American Press Association’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information. Ortega’s cybercrimes law gives the government the legislative power to go after anyone they choose.

“The cybercrimes law is not only designed to silence or intimidate the press and journalists, but also the citizens,” says Guillermo Medrano, the media analyst who left Nicaragua after the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation was shut down. Even in exile, many Nicaraguan journalists choose not to put their names to their articles. La Prensa made the editorial decision to remove all bylines.

Just as the journalists elect for anonymity, so do their sources. La Prensa’s current editor in chief, Eduardo Enriquez told me that in “Nicaragua nobody talks about politics because everyone is afraid, so we are forced to work only with anonymous sources.” Another award-winning journalist, Julio Lopez, says people “who talk to journalists are charged with spreading false information or are arrested for fomenting conspiracies. There is a total silencing of the public conversation in Nicaragua which makes it near impossible for journalists to do their work.”

Still, people continue to find a way. One of these is by creating pseudonymous profiles on social media. I contacted Pinolera Vandalica, best known for her anti-Ortega posts on Facebook until threats forced her into exile. “Pinolero” is local slang for Nicaraguan, so her pseudonym translates loosely as “female Nicaraguan vandal.” 

We first got in touch on WhatsApp, using a feature in which messages vanish after 24 hours. Sometimes she sent me voice notes which both of us deleted. “I had always published on social media using my own personal data,” she told me. But now she lives with the constant fear of her family in Nicaragua being targeted if the authorities uncover her identity.

Pinolera Vandalica is the new breed of Nicaraguan citizen journalist, some of whom collaborate with the mainstream media in order to get their stories out. According to media analyst Guillermo Medrano, Nicaraguan journalists have now changed their reporting outlooks. “It’s no longer about the scoop,” he told me, “it’s now about spreading information as widely as possible, to create as much visibility as possible about what is happening in Nicaragua.”

The rise of citizen journalism and a media in exile that shares stories and sources, Medrano, says offers some hope for the future. As traditional newspapers such as La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario are forced out of print, “in the face of adversity came opportunity,” he says. “New means of communication started to pop up almost immediately. And some are here to stay.” 

He cites Despacho 505 for instance, a digital news platform that was founded in Spain by the first Nicaraguan journalists who were forced into exile. Medrano says he knows of at least 32 digital platforms that have now been created to share news about Nicaragua.

After Daniel Ortega was elected president for a fourth consecutive term in November 2021, in an election that seven out of ten Nicaraguan regarded as illegitimate according to a CID-Gallup poll, journalists knew that the gig was up. Exile was viewed as the only way for the Nicaraguan press to continue to function, chased out of the country perhaps but not silenced.

True to its word in its last printed headline, La Prensa formed an entire newsroom in exile to continue to report on Nicaraguan issues. In July alone, at least 17 journalists were forced into exile and 12 were displaced inside the country, according to a recent report on freedom of press in Nicaragua by Voces del Sur, a network of Latin American organizations that advocate for the freedom of the press and access to information.

Nicaragua may have some of the slowest mobile internet connections in the world, ranking a lowly 106 out of 140 nations tested, but that hasn’t stopped about half the population from using WhatsApp. The messaging app had nearly three million active users in Nicaragua in 2020. As Nicaraguans struggle to access reliable news online, WhatsApp has become a vital way to stay connected. La Prensa, like other prominent Nicaraguan news outlets in exile, has a WhatsApp Business account. Over 10,000 people, Enriquez, the paper’s editor in chief says, subscribe to La Prensa’s WhatsApp notifications. “It’s a very useful way to receive information.”

Within Nicaragua, people also turn to prominent social media critics of the Ortega regime such as Pinolera Vandalica to publish information. “People send me the news that they’re afraid to publish themselves, on their own accounts,” Pinolera Vandalica told me. She collaborates with several prominent Nicaraguan handles and media outlets to collect and aggregate anonymous reports about conditions inside Nicaragua, about what it’s like to live in a country that has been silenced, cut off from the rest of the world and unable to accurately assess itself.

“I am innocent and strong,” La Prensa reported its publisher Juan Lorenzo Holmann saying as he was sentenced to nine years in prison. “This is going to pass very soon.” Despite Ortega’s best attempts to destroy the Nicaraguan media and access to information, Nicaraguan journalists and citizen reporters continue to find ways to get information to the people.   

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