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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens if the workers actually win?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Since May, migrants on the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border who are hoping to apply for asylum have been required to make their asylum appointments through a mobile phone app operated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, known as CBP One. The new system has effectively oriented the first — and for many, the most urgent — stage of the asylum process around a digital tool that is, by many accounts, glitchy and unreliable.

On July 27, immigrants’ rights groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its use of the app, setting the stage for a legal showdown over the government’s decision to shift the first stage of the asylum application process into the realm of automation.

The plaintiffs include 10 migrants who sought asylum along the border but were turned away by U.S. immigration officials because they hadn’t made appointments using CBP One. Their suit alleges that the U.S. government’s use of CBP One has created steep, and in some cases insurmountable, technological obstacles that have prevented migrants from pursuing their right to asylum. As a result, they’re often left with little choice but to remain in Mexican border towns, where violence and crime targeting migrants is notoriously high. 

CBP One became the primary entry point into America’s asylum system after the Biden administration lifted Title 42, a Trump-era policy that barred most people from seeking asylum in the U.S. because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, in order to be eligible for protection, migrants must possess an up-to-date smartphone, internet access, mobile data and the ability to read and write in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole — the only three languages the app offers. These requirements, the lawsuit argues, disadvantage refugees who don’t have or can’t afford a smartphone and those who lack the requisite language skills. The suit also argues that the government has established new criteria for asylum applications that do not align with asylum laws that were vetted and approved long before the dawn of the smartphone. Imagine telling the authors of the modern asylum system, which was created after the Holocaust, that this guarantee is only accessible to people who arrive at the border with a miniature computer in their pocket.

And that’s nothing to say of the technology’s myriad flaws. As I reported in June, the app is notoriously unreliable, with facial recognition software that misidentifies darker skin tones and has a tendency to crash, freeze and log users out while they are trying to schedule their asylum appointments. 

“If I could give negative stars I would,” a user seethed on CBP One’s App Store review page, where the app has just 2.6 stars. “My family are trying to flee violence in their country and this app and the photo section are all that’s standing in the way.”

Critics have been sounding the alarm about these problems since the Biden administration announced the policy. Amnesty International argued that the government’s use of the app violates international human rights law by placing unnecessary technical and practical barriers in the way of migrants seeking to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum.

Immigration attorney Nicole Ramos spoke with me about the technical and linguistic challenges that asylum seekers encounter when they attempt to schedule an appointment on the app. Ramos is the Border Rights Project director for the immigrant’s rights group Al Otro Lado, which provides legal support to asylum seekers on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

“There are days where the app is unable to be used due to system-wide glitches,” she said. “There are days and weeks where people keep getting an error message that says that they need to be closer to the border in order to make an appointment and they are literally standing at the port of entry.” 

Asylum seekers who don’t speak or read in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole are left to try to make sense of the error messages and the app’s directions on their own. The government does not provide translation support to people who do not speak a language supported by CBP One. 

“The government is putting all the onus for language access on the asylum seeker themselves and already overburdened nonprofit organizations,” Ramos said. She explained that Al Otro Lado hires interpreters to help applicants who don’t speak any of the languages that the app offers but noted that this responsibility should fall on the government, not organizations like hers. “They are externalizing their responsibility to afford language access to individuals trying to access our legal system.” 

The government’s policy grants exceptions for asylum seekers with “exceptionally compelling circumstances,” like acute medical emergencies or risk of death, and says that those individuals should be permitted to ask for border officials for asylum without a CBP One appointment. But in practice, the plaintiffs say, the app has effectively become the only pathway to access asylum, even for people who are eligible for the government’s exceptions. Ramos said Al Otro Lado has seen border officials turn away asylum seekers without appointments who were in the middle of medical emergencies, including a man in the middle of an epileptic seizure at the port of entry. “The Red Cross was called, police were there and they were aware of the situation and they still refused to process him,” she said. Ramos also shared the story of an asylum seeker who was killed in Mexico while waiting for a CBP One appointment. When the victim’s surviving family members approached border officials with the person’s death certificate in hand and asked to apply for asylum without using the app, they were instructed to schedule an appointment on CBP One. 

The lawsuit alleges that border officials are “almost uniformly requiring asylum seekers to have a CBP One appointment in order to be inspected and processed, regardless of whether they may be eligible for an exception.” It describes two separate instances in which immigration officials rejected asylum seekers’ requests for special consideration after they were kidnapped by criminal groups in Mexico and missed their scheduled appointments. One of the victims escaped but left behind all of his valuables, including his cell phone, according to the lawsuit. When he appeared at the port and asked for asylum, border officials “emphasized that he needed to sign up through the app and denied him any opportunity to explain the exigencies of his situation.”

The post Migrants take the US to court over its glitchy asylum app appeared first on Coda Story.

Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

The post Missouri teenagers are on the front lines of the war on books appeared first on Coda Story.

Threlkeld, a history professor at Denison University in Ohio, teaches a seminar for first-year students focused on how American history has been taught through the centuries, parsing textbooks to explain how national narratives evolve. The course dissects some of the country’s most notorious battles in the great culture war over historical memory — from the 1990s-era clashes about how to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the conservative uproar in the mid-2010s over a U.S. history course framework emphasizing the country’s legacy of racism. The last few years of her course have coincided with a new front in America’s culture wars: how this legacy is discussed in public schools.  

Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. In the same period, universities and colleges have become a key battleground for conservative lawmakers intent on codifying an “anti-woke” view of history in the classroom, with nearly two dozen states introducing bills targeting history instruction and diversity training in higher education. 

Threlkeld’s students have been studying these fights in real time and reflecting on the future of a country afraid of its past. I spoke to her about what they make of this fraught political moment and the continuities between history wars of the past and present.

When you started teaching this class nearly a decade ago, what was the dominant history war captivating the public? And do you see any connections between that feud and what people are fighting over today?

Starting around 2010, the College Board decided to revisit the AP U.S. history framework. So they brought in historians and teachers and all the kinds of people you would expect. And it was a multi-year process that was all done by the College Board. And then in 2014, they released the revised framework around which schools could design the AP courses that fit with what they do in those districts. The right-wing reaction was exactly what you would expect, which was, ‘Why are these people listed and not these people?’ 

So for those first few years of teaching this class, I was able to show my students these reactions and to show them the responses from the College Board and the responses from school districts and ordinary teachers who were dealing with this in their classrooms every day. I could tell that students had never really thought about the politics behind all of this because they're just in class. They're just learning what they're being taught. One of the experiences that stays with me most strongly from this class is just seeing students realize how political history is.

Many students can probably study a specific battle over a textbook and not understand that history itself is often contested and politically weaponized. How do you explain this concept of history wars to your students? How do they react? 

It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years. The thing that I have done the last few times that I have taught the course is just to give them one of these bills. The last time I taught this course was the fall of 2022. And in the spring of 2022, the Ohio House of Representatives had proposed one of these ‘divisive concepts’ bills. So we talked through the process of how these bills work, and I just gave them the text and said, ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ And that was more powerful than anything I had tried before. 

Some of the other things I had done before were giving students two very different textbook excerpts of the same event and talking about why these excerpts would be so different. Even then, getting them to understand the political stakes always took more time. But with these bills, all I have to do is hand them the text of one, and they're just immediately thinking, ‘What is going on?’

Do students buy lawmakers’ rhetoric that these laws are intended to protect them from harmful and divisive concepts? 

Their first reaction is usually disbelief that anyone thinks that there are topics in U.S. history that high school and college students shouldn’t learn about. They are very thoughtful when it comes to thinking about younger children. But by the time students get to their age — 16, 17, 18 — they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there is something dangerous in learning about slavery or learning about racial discrimination of any kind. And some of them who come through this course and start to understand how little they know about American history, some of them are angry that they weren't taught the things that they're learning.

We do have some really interesting discussions about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic. Because they pick up on a lot of that rhetoric, too, that the purpose of public education is to make students patriotic citizens. And so, I do always get a couple of students who ask things like, ‘Well, how can I learn all these terrible things that the United States has done and still be patriotic?’ And I think that's an incredible question. Where a lot of them come to by the end of the semester is that they need to know these things in order to be patriotic. That being ignorant is not patriotism.

I grew up in California, but I have reported from and lived in the South. And while I was there, I learned that students were taught a very different version of Civil War history — including one that glorified the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ mythology of the Confederacy. For me, learning about the regional and geographic differences in U.S. history education was very eye-opening. Taking this a step further, I wonder what this course is like for students who aren’t from the U.S. Have they drawn comparisons to places they come from?

I love it when international students in this class feel comfortable enough to start talking about their experiences. At Denison, we have a lot of students from Vietnam, a lot of students from China, a lot of students from India. And when they do start to open up and start to reflect on the kind of history they were taught in high school, it's clear that they do understand how much of what they learn is controlled by the state.

I'm thinking about Vietnam in particular because I had this one really smart, thoughtful student in my class this past fall who was from Vietnam. And he was very conscious of the fact that in Vietnam, history education has been tied very closely to reunifying and rebuilding the country over the last 50 years. 

And so he was actually able to talk in a way that I don't think most 18-year-olds can about the political uses of history in that nationalist context. And for some of my students who are from the U.S., I could see the wheels turning in their heads, when they start to realize, ‘Oh, this stuff serves a political purpose. And what might be the purpose it's serving in my state? Let me think about that.’

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post The politics of teaching US history appeared first on Coda Story.

By the time Kat set foot in the safe house in Reynosa, she had already escaped death’s grip twice.

The first time was in her native Honduras. A criminal gang had gone after Kat’s grandfather and killed him. Then they came for her cousin. Fearful that she would be next, Kat decided she needed to get out of the country. She and her 6-year-old son left Honduras and began the trek north to the United States, where she hoped they could find a safer life.

It was January 2023 when the two made it to the Mexican border city of Reynosa. They were exhausted but alive, free from the shadow of the fatal threats bearing down on their family in Honduras.

But within weeks of their arrival, a cartel active in the area kidnapped Kat and her son. This is not uncommon in Reynosa, one of Mexico’s most violent cities, where criminal groups routinely abduct vulnerable migrants like Kat so they can extort their relatives for cash. Priscilla Orta, a lawyer who worked on Kat’s case and shared her story with me, explained that newly-arrived migrants along the border have a “look.” “Like you don’t know where you are” is how she put it. Criminals regularly prey upon these dazed newcomers.

When Kat’s kidnappers found out that she had no relatives in the U.S. that they could shake down for cash, the cartel held her and her son captive for weeks. Kat was sexually assaulted multiple times during that period. 

“From what we understand, the cartel was willing to kill her but basically took pity because of her son,” Orta told me. The kidnappers finally threw them out and ordered them to leave the area. Eventually, the two found their way to a shelter in Reynosa, where they were connected with Orta and her colleagues, who help asylum seekers through the nonprofit legal aid organization Lawyers for Good Government. Orta’s team wanted to get Kat and her son into the U.S. as quickly as possible so they could apply for asylum from inside the country. It was too risky for them to stay in Reynosa, vulnerable and exposed.

For more than a month, Kat tried, and failed, to get across the border using the pathway offered to asylum seekers by the U.S. government. She was blocked by a wall — but not the kind we have come to expect in the polarized era of American border politics. The barrier blocking Kat’s entry to the U.S. was no more visible from Reynosa than it was from any other port of entry. It was a digital wall.

Kat’s arrival at the border coincided with a new policy implemented by the Biden administration that requires migrants to officially request asylum appointments at the border using a smartphone app called CBP One. For weeks, Kat tried to schedule a meeting with an asylum officer on the app, as the U.S. government required, but she couldn’t do it. Every time she tried to book an appointment, the app would freeze, log her out or crash. By the time she got back into CBP One and tried again, the limited number of daily appointment slots were all filled up. Orta and her team relayed the urgency of Kat’s case to border officials at the nearest port of entry, telling them that Kat had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted and was alone in Reynosa with her child. The officers told them they needed to use CBP One. 

“It was absolutely stunning,” Orta recalled. “What we learned was that they want everybody, regardless of what’s happening, to go through an app that doesn’t work.”

And so Kat and her son waited in Reynosa, thwarted by the government’s impenetrable digital wall.

The southern​​ border of the U.S. is home to an expansive matrix of surveillance towers, drones, cameras and sensors. But this digital monitoring regime stretches far beyond the physical border. Under a program known as “Alternatives to Detention,” U.S. immigration authorities use mobile apps and so-called “smart technologies” to monitor migrants and asylum seekers who are awaiting their immigration hearings in the U.S., instead of confining them in immigrant detention centers. And now there’s CBP One, an error-prone smartphone app that people who flee life-threatening violence must contend with if they want a chance at finding physical safety in the U.S.

These tools are a cornerstone of U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration. Instead of strengthening the border wall that served as the rhetorical centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s presidential run, the Biden administration has invested in technology to get the job done, championing high-tech tools that officials say bring more humanity and efficiency to immigration enforcement than their physical counterparts — walls and jail cells.

But with technology taking the place of physical barriers and border patrol officers, people crossing into the U.S. are subjected to surveillance well beyond the border’s physical range. Migrants encounter the U.S. government’s border controls before they even arrive at the threshold between the U.S. and Mexico. The border comes to them as they wait in Mexican cities to submit their facial recognition data to the U.S. government through CBP One. It then follows them after they cross over. Across the U.S., immigration authorities track them through Alternatives to Detention’s suite of electronic monitoring tools — GPS-enabled ankle monitors, voice recognition technology and a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial recognition software and geolocation for check-ins.

Once in the U.S., migrants enrolled in Alternatives to Detention’s e-monitoring program say they still feel enveloped by the carceral state: They may be out in the world and free to walk down the street, but immigration authorities are ever-present through this web of monitoring technologies.

The program’s surveillance tools create a “temporal experience of indefinite detention,” said Carolina Sanchez Boe, an anthropologist and sociologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has spent years interviewing migrants in the U.S. living under Alternatives to Detention’s monitoring regime.

“If you’re in a detention center, the walls are sort of outside of you, and you can fight against them,” she explained. But for those under electronic surveillance, the walls of a detention center reproduce themselves through technology that is heavily intertwined with migrants’ physical bodies. Immigration authorities are ever-present in the form of a bulky monitoring device strapped to one’s ankle or a smartphone app that demands you take a selfie and upload it at a certain time of day. People enrolled in Alternatives to Detention must keep these technologies charged and fully functioning in order to check in with their supervisors. For some, this dynamic transfers the role of an immigration officer onto migrants themselves. Migrants become a subject of state-sanctioned surveillance — as well as their own enforcers of it.

One person enrolled in Alternatives to Detention told Sanchez Boe that the program’s electronic monitoring tools moved the bars of a prison cell inside his head. “They become their own border guard, their own jailer,” Sanchez Boe explained. “When you’re on monitoring, there’s this really odd shift in the way you experience a border,” she added. “It’s like you yourself are upholding it.”

As the U.S. government transposes immigration enforcement to technology, it is causing the border to seep into the most intimate spheres of migrants’ lives. It has imprinted itself onto their bodies and minds.

The app that Kat spent weeks agonizing over is poised to play an increasingly important role in the lives of asylum seekers on America’s southern border. 

Most asylum requests have been on hold since 2020 under Title 42, a public health emergency policy that authorized U.S. officials to turn away most asylum seekers at the border due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In January 2023, the same month that Kat arrived in Reynosa, the Biden administration implemented a new system for vulnerable migrants seeking humanitarian exemptions from Title 42. The government directed people like Kat to use CBP One to schedule their asylum appointments with border officials before crossing into the U.S. 

But CBP One wasn’t built for this at all — it debuted in 2020 as a tool for scheduling cargo inspections, for companies and people bringing goods across the border. The decision to use it for asylum seekers was a techno-optimistic hack intended to reduce the messy realities at the border in the late stages of the pandemic.

But what started out as a quick fix has now become the primary entry point into America’s asylum system. When Title 42 expired last month, officials announced a new policy: Migrants on the Mexico side of the border hoping to apply for asylum must now make their appointments through CBP One. This new system has effectively oriented the first — and for many, the most urgent — stage of the asylum process around a smartphone app.

The government’s CBP One policy means that migrants must have a smartphone, a stable internet connection and the digital skills to actually download the app and make the appointment. Applicants must also be literate and able to read in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole, the only languages the app offers.  

The government’s decision to make CBP One a mandatory part of the process has changed the nature of the country’s asylum system by placing significant technological barriers between some of the world’s most vulnerable people and the prospect of physical safety.

Organizations like Amnesty International argue that requiring asylum seekers to use CBP One violates the very principle upon which the U.S. asylum laws were established: ensuring that people eligible for protection are not turned away from the country and sent back to their deaths. Under U.S. law, people who present themselves to immigration authorities on U.S. soil have a legal right to ask for asylum before being deported. But with CPB One standing in their way, they must first get an appointment before they can cross over to U.S. soil and make their case.

Adding a mandatory app to this process, Amnesty says, “is a clear violation of international human rights law.” The organization argues that the U.S. is failing to uphold its obligations to people who may be eligible for asylum but are unable to apply because they do not have a smartphone or cannot speak one of the three languages available on the app. 

And that’s nothing to say of the technology itself, which migrants and human rights groups working along the border say is almost irredeemably flawed. Among its issues are a facial matching algorithm that has trouble identifying darker skin tones and a glitchy interface that routinely freezes and crashes when people try to log in. For people like Kat, it is nearly impossible to secure one of the limited number of appointments that the government makes available each day. 

CBP One success stories are few and far between. Orta recalled a man who dropped to the ground and let out a shriek when he made an appointment. A group of migrants embraced him as he wept. “That’s how rare it is,” she said. “People fall to their knees and hold each other and cry because no one has ever gotten an appointment before.”

The week after Title 42 ended, I checked in with Orta. In the lead-up to the program’s expiration, the Biden administration announced that immigration officials would make 1,000 appointments available on CBP One each day and would lengthen the window of time for asylum seekers to try to book them. But Orta said the changes did not resolve the app’s structural flaws. CBP One was still crashing and freezing when people tried to log in. Moreover, the number of appointments immigration authorities offer daily — 1,000 across the southern border — is not  nearly enough to accommodate the demand triggered by the expiration of Title 42. 

“It’s still a lottery,” she sighed. “There’s nowhere in the app to say, ‘Hey, I have been sexually abused, please put me first.’ It’s just your name.”

Back in the spring, as Kat struggled with the app day after day, Orta and her colleague decided to begin documenting her attempts. She shared one of those videos with me, taken in early March. Kat — slight, in a black T-shirt — sat in a chair in Reynosa, fidgeting as she waited for CBP One’s appointment-scheduling window to go live. When it did, she let out a nervous sigh, opened the app and clicked on a button to schedule a meeting. The app processed the request for several seconds and then sent her to a new page telling her she didn’t get an appointment. When Kat clicked the schedule button again, her app screen froze. She tried again and again, but nothing worked. She repeated some version of this process every day for a week, while her attorneys filmed. But it was no use — she never succeeded. “It was impossible for her,” Orta said.

Kat is far from the only asylum seeker who has documented CBP One’s shortcomings like this. Scores of asylum seekers attempting to secure an appointment have shared their struggles with the technology in Apple’s App Store. Imagine the most frustrating smartphone issue you’ve ever encountered and then add running for your life to the mix. In the App Store, CBP One’s page features dozens of desperate reviews and pleas for technological assistance from migrants stranded in Mexico.

“This is just torture,” one person wrote. “My girlfriend has been trying to take her picture and scan her passport for 48 hours straight out of desperation. She is hiding in a town where she has no family out of fear. Please help!” Another shared: “If I could give negative stars I would. My family are trying to flee violence in their country and this app and the photo section are all that’s standing in the way. This is ridiculous and devastating.” 

The app, someone else commented, “infringes on human rights. A person in this situation loses to a mechanical machine!”

In Kat’s case, her lawyers tried other routes. They enlisted an academic who studies cartels’ treatment of women along the border to submit an expert declaration in her case. Finally, after more than six weeks of trying and failing to secure an appointment, Kat was granted an exception and allowed to enter the U.S. to pursue her asylum claim without scheduling an appointment on CBP One. Kat and her son are now safely inside the country and staying with a family friend. 

Kat was fortunate to have a lawyer like Orta working on her case. But most people aren’t so lucky. For them, it will be CBP One that determines their fates.

Biden administration officials claim that the tools behind their digitized immigration enforcement strategy are more humane, economical and effective than their physical counterparts. But critics say that they are just jail cells and walls in digital form.

Cynthia Galaz, a policy expert with the immigrant rights group Freedom for Immigrants, told me that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which oversees Alternatives to Detention, “is taking a very intentional turn to technology to optimize the tracking of communities. It’s really seen as a way to be more humane. But it’s not a solution.” 

Galaz argues that the government’s high-tech enforcement strategy violates the privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of migrants and their broader communities while also damaging their mental health. “The inhumanity of the system remains,” she said.

Alternatives to Detention launched in 2004 but has seen exponential growth under the Biden administration. There are now more than 250,000 migrants enrolled in the digital surveillance system, a jump from fewer than 90,000 people enrolled when Biden took office in January 2021. According to ICE statistics, the vast majority of them are being monitored through SmartLINK, the mobile phone app that people are required to download and use for periodic check-ins with the immigration agency. Migrants enrolled in this system face a long road to a life without surveillance, spending an average of 446 days in the program.

During check-ins, migrants enrolled in the program must upload a photo of themselves, which is then matched to an existing picture taken during their program enrollment using facial recognition software. The app also captures the GPS data of participants during check-ins to confirm their location.

The government’s increasing reliance on SmartLINK has shifted the geography of its embodied surveillance program from the ankle to the face. The widespread use of this facial recognition app is expanding the boundaries of ICE’s digital monitoring system, this time from a wearable device to something that is less visible but ever-more ubiquitous.

Proponents at the Department of Homeland Security say that placing migrants under electronic monitoring is preferable to putting them in detention centers as they pursue their immigration cases in court. But digitization raises a whole new set of concerns. Alongside the psychological effects of technical monitoring regimes, privacy experts have expressed concern about how authorities handle and store the data that these systems collect about migrants.

SmartLINK collects wide swaths of data from participants during their check-ins, including location data, photos and videos taken through the app, audio files and voice samples. An FAQ on ICE’s website says the agency only collects participants’ GPS tracking data during the time of their check-ins, but also acknowledges that it has the technical ability to gather location data in real-time from participants who are given an agency-issued smartphone to use for the program — a key concern for migrants enrolled in the program and privacy experts. The agency also acknowledges that it has access to enrollees’ historical location data, which it could theoretically use to determine where a participant lives, works and socializes. Finally, privacy experts worry that the data collected by the agency through the program could be stored and shared with other databases operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE — a risk the agency recently conceded in its first-ever analysis of the program.

Hannah Lucal, a technology fellow with the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology, has studied the privacy risks of Alternatives to Detention at length. She told me she sees the program’s wide-ranging surveillance as “part of a broader agenda by the state to control immigrant communities and to limit people’s autonomy over their futures and their own bodies.”

And the program’s continuous electronic monitoring has left some migrants with physical and psychological damage. The ankle monitors, Lucal said, “cause trauma for people even after they’ve been removed. They give people headaches and sores on their legs. It can be really difficult to bathe, it can be really difficult to walk, and there’s a tremendous stigma around them.” Meanwhile, migrants using SmartLINK have expressed to Lucal fears of being constantly watched and listened to. 

“People talked about having nightmares and losing sleep over just the anxiety that this technology, which is super glitchy, may be used to justify further punishment,” she explained. “People are really living with this constant fear that the technology is going to be used by ICE to retaliate against them.”

Alberto was busy at work when he missed two calls from his Alternatives to Detention supervisor. The 27-year-old asylum seeker had been under ICE’s e-monitoring system since he arrived in the U.S. in 2019. He was first given an ankle monitor but eventually transitioned over to the agency’s mobile check-in app, SmartLINK. Once a week, Alberto was required to send a photo of himself and his GPS location to the person overseeing his case. On those days, Alberto, who works with heavy and loud machinery, would stay home from his job to ensure everything went smoothly.

But one day this past spring, Alberto’s supervisor called him before his normal check-in time, while he was still at work. He didn’t hear the first two calls over the buzz of the room’s machinery. When things quieted down enough for Alberto to see another call coming in, he picked up. Fuming, Alberto’s supervisor ordered him to come to the program’s office the following day. 

“I told her, ‘Ma’am I have to work, I have three kids, I have to support them,’” he told me in Spanish. 

“That doesn’t matter to me,” the case worker replied. 

When Alberto showed up the next day, as instructed, he was told by his Alternatives to Detention supervisor that he had more than a dozen violations for missing calls and appointments — which he disputes — and he was placed on the ankle monitor once again. 

The monitor is bulky and uncomfortable, Alberto explained. In the summer heat, when shorts are in season, Alberto worries that people who catch a glimpse of the device will think he’s a criminal.

“People look at you when they see it,” he said, “they think that we’re bad.” The situation has worn on him. “It’s ugly to wear the monitor,” he told me. And it weighs even more heavily on him now that he is not sure when it will come off.

Over the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of people with extensive knowledge of Alternatives to Detention, including immigration attorneys, researchers, scholars and migrants who are, or were, enrolled in the program. Those discussions, as well as an emerging body of research, suggest that Alberto’s reaction to the electronic monitoring he was exposed to is not uncommon. 

In 2021, the Cardozo School of Law published the most comprehensive study on the program’s effects on participants’ well-being, surveying roughly 150 migrants who wear ankle monitors. Ninety percent of people told researchers that the device harmed their mental and physical health, causing inflammation, anxiety, pain, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and depression. Twelve percent of respondents said the ankle monitor resulted in thoughts of suicide, and 40% told researchers they believed that exposure to the device left them with life-long psychological scars.

Berto Hernandez, who had to wear an ankle monitor for nearly two years, described the device as “torturous.” “Besides the damage they do to your ankles, to your skin, there’s this other implication of the damage it does to your mental health,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez, who uses they/them pronouns, immigrated with their parents to the U.S. from Mexico at age 10. In 2019, when they were 30 years old, they were detained by immigration officers and enrolled in Alternatives to Detention as their deportation case proceeded.

Hernandez was in college while they had to wear the monitor and told me a story about a time they drove to a student retreat with a peer a few hours away from their home in Los Angeles. All of a sudden, the ankle monitor started beeping loudly — an automatic response when it exits the geographic range determined by immigration authorities. 

“I had a full panic attack,” Hernandez told me. “I started crying.” Although they had alerted their case manager that they would be out of town, Hernandez says their supervisor must have forgotten to adjust their location radius. After the incident, Hernandez had a physical reaction every time the device made noise.

“Whenever the monitor beeped, I would get full on panic attacks,” they explained. “Shaking, crying. I was fearful that they were going to come for me.” Hernandez thinks the level of fear and lack of control is part of the program’s objectives. “They want you to feel surveilled, watched, afraid,” they said. “They want to exert power over you.”

Hernandez was finally taken off of the ankle monitor in 2021, after appealing to their case manager about bruises the device left on their ankles. Hernandez was briefly allowed to do check-ins by phone but will soon be placed on SmartLINK. They don’t buy the government’s message that these technologies are more humane than incarceration.

“This is just another form of detention,” they told me. “These Alternatives to Detention exert the same power dynamics, the same violence. They actually perpetrate them even more. Because now you’re on the outside. You have semi-freedom, but you can’t really do anything. If you have an invisible fence around you, are you really free?”

Once on SmartLINK, Hernandez will join the 12,700-plus immigrants in the Los Angeles area who are monitored through the facial recognition app. Harlingen, Texas, has more than double that amount, with more than 30,600 placed under electronic monitoring — more than anywhere else in the country. This effectively creates pockets of surveillance in cities and neighborhoods where significant numbers of migrants are being watched through ICE’s e-monitoring program, once again extending the geography of the border beyond its physical range. 

“The implication of that is you never really arrive and you never really leave the border,” Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University researcher focusing on U.S. immigration enforcement who has studied the evolving geography of the border, told me. Kocher says these highly concentrated areas of migrant surveillance are known as “digital enclaves”: places where technology creates boundaries that are often invisible to the naked eye but hyperpresent to those who are subjected to the technology’s demands. 

“It’s not like the borders are like the racial impacts of building freeways through our cities, and things like that,” he noted. “They’re kind of invisible borders.”

Administering all of this technology is expensive. The program’s three monitoring devices cost ICE $224,481 daily to operate, according to agency data.

On that end, there is one clear beneficiary to these expansions. B.I. Incorporated, which started out as a cattle-tracking company before pivoting to prison technology, is the government’s only Alternatives to Detention contractor. It currently operates the program’s technology and manages the system through a $2.2 billion contract with ICE, which is slated to expire in 2025. B.I. is a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a private prison company that operates more than a dozen for-profit immigrant detention centers nationwide on behalf of ICE. GEO Group earned nearly 30% of its total revenue from ICE detention contracts in 2019 and 2020, according to an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union. Critics like Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the immigrant’s rights group Mijente, say this entire system is corrupted by profit motives — a money-making scheme for the companies managing the detention system that sets up financial incentives to put people behind physical and digital bars.

And B.I. may soon add another option to its toolkit. In April, ICE officials announced that they are pilot testing a facial recognition smartwatch to potentially fold into the e-monitoring system — an admission that came just weeks after the agency released its first-ever analysis of the program’s privacy risks. In ICE’s announcement of the smartwatch rollout, the agency said the device is similar to a consumer smartwatch but less “obtrusive” than other monitoring systems for migrants placed on them. 

Austin Kocher, the immigration enforcement researcher, said that touting technologies like the smartwatch and the phone app as “more efficient” and less invasive than previous incarnations, like the ankle monitors, is tantamount to “techwashing” — a narrative tactic to gain support and limit criticism for whatever shiny new tech tool the authorities roll out.

“With every new technology, they move the yardstick and say, ‘Oh, this is justified because ankle monitors aren’t so great after all,’” Kocher remarked. For people like Kocher, following the process can feel like an endless loop. First, the government detained migrants. Then it began to release them with ankle monitors, arguing that surveillance was kinder than imprisonment. Then it swapped the monitors for facial recognition, arguing that a smartphone is kinder than a bulky ankle bracelet. Each time, the people in charge say that the current system is more humane than what it had in place last time. But it’s hard to know where, or how, it will ever end — and who else will be dragged into the government’s surveillance web in the meantime.

For people like Alberto, there is no clear end in sight. He doesn’t know when the monitor will come off. But he knows it won’t be removed until his supervisor gives the okay. It can’t malfunction if he wants to avoid getting in trouble again. And he can see his daughter is paying attention. 

Recently, she noticed the monitor and asked him what it was. Alberto tried to keep it light. “It’s a watch,” he told her, “but I wear it on my ankle.” She asked him if she could have one too. 

“No,” he replied. “This one is only for adults.”

The post When your body becomes the border appeared first on Coda Story.

But the success of the e-commerce giant’s rapid-fire delivery model depends on what happens inside Amazon’s “fulfillment centers” — sprawling warehouses where workers sort and pack orders for shipment, all under the watchful eye of technical systems that track their every move. For years, workers have said that the company’s algorithmically-driven approach pushes them to the brink, treating them “like robots” in the service of meeting unattainable productivity quotes and driving up injuries in the process.

On May 16, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a pioneering workplace safety bill that could improve labor conditions for Amazon employees subjected to the company’s worker tracking system. Organizers behind the legislation say it will provide the strongest labor protections in the nation for people working in warehouses like Amazon’s.

Work in Amazon warehouses is overseen entirely by technology: Algorithms track workers’ speed and productivity, measure the so-called “time off task” that employees spend logged out of their workstations and alert managers when workers don’t meet their productivity quotas. Mohamed Farah, a 50-year-old Amazon employee who came to the U.S. in the mid-1990s as a refugee from Somalia, works a 10-hour shift packaging items for shipment at a Minnesota warehouse. He said the company’s grueling pace of work and “time off task” rules have worn on workers’ bodies and minds, including his own. “They say you have to pack a minimum of 80 boxes per hour, but you cannot do it,” he told me. “If you try to pack 80 per hour, you cannot go to the bathroom. If you go to the bathroom, the rate is down.” 

Amazon’s “time off task” measurement is a constant source of worry for many workers. The company tracks the time employees are gone from their workstations. If you spend too much time away from your station, you get in trouble. Internal company documents obtained by VICE revealed that Amazon can fire employees who accumulate 30 minutes of “time off task” on three separate days over the course of a year. The documents also showed that the company tracks the amount of time employees spend in the bathroom. Some employees have described needing to urinate in bottles while working to avoid penalties for using the bathroom.

Farah, who has worked for Amazon for seven years, said that workers get hurt trying to keep pace with packaging quotas. He has come home with three injuries over the last few years. “You go home feeling very tired. Headache, muscle aches, leg aches,” he told me. “They want us to work like robots.”

Farah’s experience is common across the company. A recent survey of more than 2,000 Amazon workers across eight countries found that the company’s performance monitoring and tracking system has taken a physical and emotional toll on employees’ well-being: 57% of respondents said their mental health suffered due to the company’s productivity monitoring, and 51% claimed it harmed their physical health. Amazon has twice the injury rate of comparable warehouses in the U.S., according to a recent analysis of injury data submitted to federal safety regulators.

“You do a lot of bending and back-and-forth walking for hours. You get thirsty, and you go to the bathroom, and it’s on a different floor,” explained Qali Jama, a 39-year-old Amazon warehouse worker who also hails from Somalia. “And then you go to the bathroom, which only has two toilets. If those toilets are occupied, you need to wait to go to the bathroom. The whole time you’re gone your time accumulates, it adds up. And next thing you know, the manager goes up to you and tells you a couple of days later, ‘You have time off task.’”

It was these conditions that fueled a raft of organizing efforts in Amazon facilities across the U.S., including the nation’s first successful union drive at a company warehouse in New York last year. Workers from East Africa, like Qali, were among the first Amazon employees in the nation to confront the company over its labor practices and have been at the helm of organizing efforts in Minnesota. 

The Minnesota bill, which state lawmakers passed on May 16, will not just apply to Amazon — though lawmakers who supported the legislation said it was spurred by reports of injuries at Amazon and a lack of transparency around the company’s productivity quotas. The policy will require any warehouse with more than 250 employees to provide employees with the quotas and work speed metrics used to evaluate workers’ performance. The law also requires for this information to be communicated in employees’ preferred language. Organizers say this will force Amazon to be transparent with its employees about the company’s often opaque workplace productivity metrics — a system they claim increases injuries among workers. The legislation also prohibits employers from imposing quotas on workers that prevent them from taking bathroom, food, rest and prayer breaks.

The law is the product of years of organizing by East African migrant workers, many of whom came to Minnesota as refugees escaping Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s and formed what became the largest Somali diaspora community in the United States. Somali workers now make up large numbers of Amazon’s labor force at warehouses. They were the first in the country to take on Amazon’s labor practices in 2018, when a cohort of workers in the Minneapolis area staged a walkout over working conditions at local warehouses, forcing the company to the negotiating table. 

“Before anyone in the labor movement, we took on Amazon,” said Abdirahman Muse, the executive director of the Awood Center, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that advocates for East African workers’ rights. “And everybody thought we were crazy. But we were not.” Muse compared the Minnesota Somali workers’ trajectory to “the story of David and Goliath” — a small group of refugees and immigrants “facing one of the biggest companies in the world.”

It was the realities of working inside Amazon’s warehouses that prompted Qali to begin organizing for better labor conditions last year. “When I started working there, I said, ‘This is not right what they are doing,’” she recalled. “I always felt like we were slaves there. I always fought against them, I knew my rights. I felt that there were people who have only been in the United States for 30 days. They need money. They come from hunger. They will take anything. And I think that’s what Amazon depends on.” 

“I want people when they come to America to know that they are still human,” she added. “This country does stand for what they believe, but you have to speak — and act.”

The post How Somali workers in the US are fighting Amazon’s surveillance machine appeared first on Coda Story.

From ankle monitors to smartphone apps to the new Fitbit-esque smartwatch, the Biden administration has overseen a dramatic expansion of the technological toolbox used to surveil immigrants awaiting their hearings in the U.S. White House officials say these measures, all part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, are more humane than traditional detention. But critics argue that the system reproduces the dynamics of incarceration with a technocratic spin, compromising the privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers while leaving them with lasting psychological damage.

The program has also left migrants and human rights advocates with lots of questions about what exactly the government does with the substantial amounts of data that it collects. In a curious turn of events, less than a month before ICE announced its plans to pilot test the smartwatch, it unveiled its first-ever analysis of privacy risks that the Alternatives to Detention program carries.

All U.S. federal agencies are required by law to assess the potential privacy impacts of any technology they plan to use before actually deploying the software or tool. Although ICE first rolled out its electronic monitoring program in 2004, it didn’t get around to publishing an assessment of the program’s privacy-related risks until just last month.

Nearly two decades overdue, the assessment alludes to — but doesn’t answer — a number of key questions about the technologies that the agency uses to monitor immigrants to the U.S. 

Critics say the document does little to address the privacy civil liberties and human rights concerns they have long raised with the agency about the program. Instead, they say it presents red flags about ICE’s broad data collection and retention policies — indications that the agency is failing to meaningfully confront the long-term consequences of placing migrants under an invasive surveillance regime.

“These technologies represent an assault on people's bodily autonomy,” said Hannah Lucal, a technology fellow with the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology. Alternatives to Detention, Lucal added, “is not a departure from the system of punishment that ICE produces. It's really an extension of it.”

Although ICE’s e-monitoring program began two decades ago, the number of migrants subjected to electronic monitoring has exploded during Biden’s presidency. When he took office in January 2021, there were 86,000 people in the program. Now, over 280,000 migrants are enrolled in the digital surveillance system.

Migrants assigned to Alternatives to Detention are placed under one of three forms of electronic surveillance: a GPS ankle monitor with 24/7 location tracking, a phone reporting system that uses voice recognition to verify a person’s identity or a smartphone app that uses facial recognition software and GPS location tracking for check-ins. The smartphone app, SmartLINK, is responsible for the exponential growth in enrollment under the Biden administration. About 253,875 immigrants under ICE’s electronic monitoring system are on SmartLINK, according to the most up-to-date statistics from ICE. That’s up from 26,000 people on the app when Biden took office.

SmartLINK has been a focal point of concern for privacy experts. Despite the rapid addition of migrants to the app in recent years, ICE has provided little information about the data it collects and how it might be shared with other agencies. The app is operated by B.I. Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a private prison company, as part of a $2.2 billion contract with ICE. 

Last year, when I spoke with advocates who sued the federal government for more details about the app’s functionality and data collection policies (the lawsuit is ongoing), they posed some key questions about SmartLINK: Is the data collected by the app accessible to other government agencies? Does SmartLINK have the technical ability to gather location data about Alternatives to Detention enrollees beyond their designated check-ins? Does ICE provide adequate oversight of B.I.? Does B.I. have the ability to share the data it collects on Alternatives to Detention participants with third parties, such as other state agencies, or even other companies?

In 50 pages of explanation and assessment, the document does little to answer these questions. Chief among critics’ concerns are questions about location data tracking. The privacy assessment states that SmartLINK app is only able to collect GPS location data at the time of the program participants’ check-ins and when they log into the app. But a F.A.Q. about SmartLINK on ICE’s website complicates the picture. The page refers to another SmartLINK device — a B.I-issued phone with the app pre-installed — given to some program enrollees. According to the F.A.Q., this phone has the technical capability to monitor enrollees’ locations in real time, but “this is not a feature that ICE has elected to use for participants.” 

Lucal, from Just Futures Law, is skeptical. If the agency has the capacity to turn on continuous location monitoring, “there is absolutely no assurance that that is not happening or would not happen,” she told me. The absence of discussion in the privacy assessment about the B.I.-issued phone’s continuous location monitoring capabilities “seems like a gaping hole,” she added. “At any time, it could become active. And how would we know?”

‘Abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE’

Privacy experts also told me they feared the data collected through Alternatives to Detention could be disseminated to other databases. The privacy assessment acknowledges that there is a risk that the information from the electronic monitoring program could be stored in other databases run by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. It alleges that this risk, however, is “partially mitigated” by referring to a DHS policy that states that information is shared within the agency in accordance with the law and only for authorized purposes because officials “must have timely access to all relevant information for which they have a need-to-know to successfully perform their duties.” Jake Wiener, an attorney and surveillance expert with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says this portion of the policy ostensibly acknowledges that “instead of being mitigated, this risk is an open, ongoing, and harmful practice.”

This is no small matter, Wiener points out, given recent reporting from WIRED that found that ICE employees and contractors abused their access to internal databases to search for information about former partners and coworkers, provided their login information to family members and even shared privileged information with criminals in exchange for cash. The assessment, Wiener says, “fails to consider that abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE, and that putting that data in more hands by sending it to DHS’s far-reaching databases increases the likelihood of harm.”

The document also reveals that ICE agents and case managers employed by the contractor B.I. have access to the historical location data of migrants who used GPS ankle monitors. The document does not explain why officials would need access to participants’ historical location data — information that could be used to patch together a full picture of enrollees’ routine movements, including where they work and regularly spend time. Last year, a former SmartLINK participant told me he became anxious about the agency’s access to his location data after learning that ICE officers used data collected from workers’ GPS monitors to orchestrate a mass immigration raid at a poultry plant in Mississippi.

“A major concern is that ICE can use any of the data that it extracts to carry out location surveillance of not just the people they subject to these programs, but also anyone who might be in close proximity to them, like family members or people they live with or neighbors,” Lucal said. “There's just this massive scale of surveillance that's happening through this program. And the privacy assessment is trying really hard to obscure that, but it's coming through.”

There is also a glaring omission in the assessment. In an announcement last week, ICE touted its latest surveillance tech tool — GPS-enabled wristwatch trackers —  but there is no mention of the technology in the privacy assessment. One can only wonder how long it will be before ICE endeavors to assess the risks of its newest tool if the agency decides to deploy it en masse when the pilot testing period ends.

White House officials say these technologies are more humane than detention. But they still have adverse, real-world impacts on the people who use them. Migrants I interviewed last year described how the phone app and the agency’s other e-carceration technologies harmed their relationships and employment prospects and brought them emotional and physical distress. 

A 2021 report by the Cardozo School of Law found that 90% of people with ankle monitors said the device negatively affected their physical and mental health, causing everything from electric shocks to sleep disruption, social isolation and suicidal ideation. In interviews with me last year, people forced to use SmartLINK, meanwhile, expressed deep anxieties about the app’s technological glitches, fearing that malfunctions during the check-in process could lead to their deportation. Carlos, an immigrant placed on SmartLINK, described the app as a “shadow” hovering over his family. 

“Every time I get a call from an unknown number and they see it, they think that it’s from ICE asking me where I am.” He said no matter the technology used — from ankle monitors to smartphones — the outcome is the same: “Fear. The only thing that changes is the system.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post Immigrating to the US? ICE wants your biometrics appeared first on Coda Story.

She looked at the uniformed man in disbelief. She was the mother of a toddler and a long-time public servant. The scene of the alleged offense was not an adult bookstore or the dark web. It was a high school library. The officer explained the situation. A parent had told the police that she was circulating pornography to students through the books in the school’s library collection. The policeman, a school resource officer employed by both the Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department, came to the library to investigate the claim. He came back again six months later, prompted by similar complaints from another parent at the school. The visit did not lead to any disciplinary action against Amy. But it left her deeply unsettled. 

“It just honestly shook me,” Amy, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym, told me. “The audacity to claim that I was making pornography available to kids, it was just devastating. Like, what is this going to do to my reputation if this is what people truly think I’m doing?”

The Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department did not respond to my requests for comment.

At the time of the officer’s visit, it was illegal under Missouri law to give pornography to minors. But what enraged a parent enough to call the police was a school library book — Amy never found out which one. At the time, library workers were trusted to choose books based on school board-approved selection criteria.

But that changed in August 2022, when the Missouri state legislature passed a law banning books that contained “explicit sexual material.” Under the new rules, police visits to libraries may become a more regular occurrence — and librarians found guilty of violating the policy could even end up behind bars. The statute, Senate Bill 775, has led to the removal of hundreds of children’s books across the state and caused library workers to aggressively self-censor under the threat of incarceration.

“This has struck fear into the work that many of our members are doing professionally,” said Tom Bober, the vice president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians, which represents hundreds of library specialists statewide. To Bober’s knowledge, no one has been criminally charged under the new rules yet — my reporting indicated the same. But the message the rules send is clear to him. 

“What we have with SB 775 is politicians saying, ‘We are going to determine what books should sit on your library shelves and be available to your students. And if you go against what we said there are criminal implications,’” Bober said.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable for Amy when she began working in the field 15 years ago. But over the last several years, the conditions for library workers in Missouri and across the United States have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The Missouri law is part of a much broader movement, largely driven by conservative politicians and parents’ rights groups, whose primary target is books dealing with race, gender and sexuality. PEN America found that more than 80% of the 1,648 books banned from schools in 2021 and 2022 focused on, or featured, LGBTQ+ characters and people of color, and attempts to ban or restrict access to books from school and public libraries since 2020 have shattered previous records.

The movement’s secondary target is the workers who make those books available to students. As I reported for Coda last year, librarians have been subjected to online harassment and verbal attacks, accused of grooming children and promoting pornography, inundated with hateful messages, threatened with physical violence and, increasingly, targeted with hostile laws like SB 775.

The Missouri law is among the most extreme of the state policies singling out library work, although states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have also passed new laws targeting “obscene” materials in school libraries and databases. Tacked on as an amendment to a bill aimed at combating child sexual exploitation and protecting sexual assault survivors, the Missouri law makes it a Class A misdemeanor for librarians, school officials and teachers to provide students with “explicit sexual material.” Any librarian or educator found in violation of the policy faces steep penalties: a yearlong prison sentence and up to $2,000 in fines.

State library associations and library workers I spoke with described the law’s rollout as chaotic and panic-inducing. Librarians and school officials scrambled to make sense of the sweeping language of the bill, which defined “explicit sexual material” as any visual image that showed sexual intercourse, masturbation or genitalia, except for images that appear in books on anatomy or biology. Districts’ interpretations and applications of the law varied widely. According to Bober, whose organization surveyed hundreds of librarians statewide about their experiences with the law, some librarians received lists of titles to remove from district administrators and attorneys, while others were left in the dark and instructed to interpret the statute themselves.

Statewide, nearly 300 books — a disproportionate number of which are written by or about LGBTQ+ people — have been removed from school library shelves in response to SB 775, the nonprofit PEN America found. And the lack of guidance from state officials has become visible on library shelves. Some school districts have chosen to ignore the law or remove just a handful of books, while others have interpreted it more broadly. Wentzville, where Amy works, pulled 220 books after the law went into effect — more than any other district in the state. The long list of removals included a handful of Holocaust history books, scores of graphic novels and comic books, illustrated adaptations of Homer’s “Odyssey” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and more than 70 art history books featuring works by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. PEN America has a complete list of the books banned on the basis of SB 775.

Mernie Maestas, the lead librarian for the Wentzville School District, said the district’s middle school and high school librarians were given two weeks to go through their entire collections and remove any books that could potentially violate the law or lead to prosecution. “We had one librarian who began pulling absolutely everything because the fear became so overwhelming,” she said. “Others wound up shutting down their library for periods of time just so they could ensure they had gone through everything.” 

Amy told me that she was in tears as she pored over the books in her school’s library, confused and overwhelmed about how to evaluate the material on her bookshelves. “Do I pull a picture because there are breasts on the page? Are breasts included with genitalia? Who decides?” she said. “It was just a mess because you didn’t know what you were looking for.” 

Amy decided not to ask other library staff to help make decisions about what books to keep because she didn’t want anyone else to be liable for potential criminal charges. So she went through it all by herself. She estimates she set aside about 30 books to be reviewed by the district’s legal team. The entire process “felt so wrong, like I was being used for something I did not support,” she explained. But she felt she had no other option. She had a kid. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the law. “What do you do when you think you could go to jail?” she asked.

Following a public outcry, most of the Wentzville titles that were taken down — including an illustrated children’s version of the Bible — have been put back on the shelves. But 17 have been permanently banned, including the graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and illustrated adaptations of “The Handmaid's Tale” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” according to a list compiled by PEN America, which has been tracking statewide book removals. 

Wentzville librarian Maestas said the law has caused library workers to rethink which books they add to their collections. “You second-guess everything that you’re purchasing so you wind up self-censoring, even though that’s not our goal,” she said. “But you’re fearful.”

Maestas runs a reading club at the elementary school where she works. One day, a parent contacted the school to complain about a book on the group’s reading list, which explores themes related to sexual identity. The parent withdrew their child from the club and accused the district of promoting an “agenda.” 

Maestas worries about how the children in her school process that kind of language. “The kids absorb what’s happening in their home,” she explained. “And so when parents feel like the library has potential evil in it, so do the kids.”

So far, Maestas has not removed any books from her library under SB 775. I asked if she worries about the possible consequences of her decision. “Yes,” she replied. “All the time.” When she became a librarian nearly two decades ago, she added, “never would I have ever thought that the library could land me in jail. For people to think that I’m a monster and a villain, it stabs at your heart.”

For some, the pressure is too much to sustain working in the field. Amy had planned to be a librarian until she reached retirement age, but instead she is leaving the profession at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. She said the police visits, as well as SB 775, played a role in her decision to switch careers. She told me that the restrictions imposed on librarians under SB 775 left her unable to adequately carry out her job’s responsibilities, including providing students with material that could help them make sense of their identities, such as books about LGBTQ+ experiences.

But Amy also feels conflicted about the decision to leave the field: “In many ways, it feels like a cop out,” she confessed. “It is this war of, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I don’t know. It’s been very difficult in the last couple of years and I’m just choosing something different.” To be a librarian in Missouri feels like a precarious tightrope walk, where criminal prosecution is always a looming threat. Some, like Amy, are choosing to walk away.

But others are fighting to put librarians on more stable ground. Last month, the Missouri ACLU sued the state over SB 775 on behalf of the Missouri Library Association and the Missouri Association of School Librarians, arguing that the law is vague to the point of being unconstitutional and puts educators in the position of violating students’ First Amendment rights or exposing themselves to criminal prosecution. Just last week, a top Missouri Republican lawmaker responded to the lawsuit by threatening to cut the entire state budget for public libraries in his proposed state funding package. On Tuesday, the Missouri House of Representatives approved the lawmaker’s budget. If approved in the state senate, it will strip public libraries of $4.5 million in state aid that they were slated to receive in the next year. The Missouri secretary of state has also proposed a rule change that would force public libraries to adopt a variety of “age-appropriate” checkout policies for minors or lose public funding. 

Joe Kohlburn, an academic librarian at Jefferson College in Missouri, said the array of policies targeting public library employees has prompted many in the field to search for jobs out of state. He mentioned a colleague who recently fled Missouri for Florida. “It’s pretty bad when you move from Missouri to Florida,” he chuckled. “I definitely am getting the message the Missouri state government is sending, that they don’t value librarians and are antagonistic towards our foundational ethics. And who wants to work in that situation?”

At the center of all of this are the students themselves, the subjects of so many of these laws, book challenges and policies — who rarely get airtime to weigh in on what they want to read, despite their starring role in the debate. But some are speaking out. When a set of proposed book bans came to a high school in Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high school students decided to push back. In preparation for a school board vote on the books, they asked hundreds of their classmates about their position on the restrictions and discovered the vast majority of students opposed the bans. 

Then, they put themselves to work, reading each and every book on the list, like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” which explores the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the African diaspora. They also read Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Thomasina Brown, a high school junior, said the coming-of-age story resonated with her as an “important representation of the adolescent experience,” helping teens process themes like grief, trauma and mental health in their own lives. If the district banned the book, “I felt like maybe kids wouldn’t be exposed to things they might deal with later in life,” she told me. 

Brown’s classmates also brought their observations to the school board meeting, describing the books and characters that reflected parts of their identities and life experiences or introduced them to new perspectives. But the meeting quickly descended into chaos, with some parents booing loudly, shouting over the students and calling on the school’s librarians to resign. 

Meghana Nakkanti, a high school senior who took part in the meeting, likened the situation to a role reversal: The students were showing more maturity and capacity to deliberate on the issue than the adults in the room. But the board ultimately voted to remove several books. 

The students found the adults’ vilification of the librarians they knew especially painful. One meeting stood out to them. A parent stood up and declared that the school’s two librarians should be placed on a sex offender registry. One of the librarians, who was present in the room, burst into tears and rushed for the door. Someone had to accompany her to her car because she was so distressed, the students recalled. That’s when the severity of the situation dawned on them: These librarians were being named, confronted and run out of public meetings in tears. Not just by adults, but by parents. 

Nakkanti told me it was hard to watch the librarians smeared because “of a few people who aren’t willing to read more than a few pages of a book that someone told them they shouldn’t like.” The students in the group, she added, are “trying to make people realize that the words that people say and the implications that are surrounding this have real meaning. These are people and they deserve to be respected.” 

A classic lesson from an adult to a child — turned upside down.

The post Missouri librarians are risking jail time – for doing their jobs appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Texas lawmakers want to erase abortion from the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

Although nearly a quarter of Colombians identify as either Black or mixed race, the African diaspora and Colombia’s deep roots in the slave trade are conspicuously absent from official narratives about the country’s history. When Muntú Bantú opened in 2009, the museum was wholly unique in a country with one of Latin America’s largest Black populations yet no institutional centers or museums dedicated to their history, culture and heritage. The name is a tribute to the region’s African roots, referencing Bantu, a family of languages spoken across the African continent. According to the museum, Africa’s Bantu diaspora has a strong linguistic and cultural presence in the Chocó region, where it is located.

“Sometimes people enter as one person and exit as someone else,” Sergio Antonio Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian historian and the museum’s founder, told me in Spanish over a shaky WhatsApp connection. 

Visitors would pass through the building’s yellow facade and descend into the bowels of a ship, meant to evoke the transatlantic slave trade, and then be immersed in exhibits about African history and biodiversity, Black achievements in cinema and Afro-Colombian feminism. Some left transformed. 

“They found themselves with their history, their ancestors,” Mosquera added. “It’s a huge experience, understanding the world in Afro-diasporic thinking, not Eurocentric, Christian and white as we were taught.”

But no one is walking through the museum now. A few months back, a local armed group set its sights on Muntú Bantú and sought to extort Mosquera and his colleagues, threatening violence if they didn’t pay up. The harassment led them to shutter Muntú Bantú in January, forcing the museum’s vast archive of Afro-Colombian history underground. 

In Chocó, the impoverished region in Western Colombia where it’s located, Muntú Bantú was a revelation — a gateway to an archive of repressed national memory. It had become a hallowed space in the community — so much so that for years, it was able to stay open despite the violence and instability plaguing Chocó.

Rich in natural resources like coca and gold, the Pacific Coast province is in the crosshairs of a violent battle for control between criminal groups lured by illegal mining and drug trafficking. These groups prey upon local businesses and organizations through extortion and harassment, and Muntú Bantú was no exception. When death threats and so-called extortion “war taxes” landed in front of Mosquera and his colleagues, they saw no option but to close up shop indefinitely over concerns for their safety.

The closure highlights the increasingly precarious position of activists working in the country’s conflict zones, particularly in the years since Colombia’s 2016 internal peace treaty, which is now faltering. It also comes less than a year after the inauguration of Vice President Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian to hold such a high office.

Violence against activists and community leaders has reached record levels in Colombia as criminal organizations and armed groups fight to control territories and drug trafficking routes. Gangs threaten, harass and murder local leaders, activists and anyone they see as a threat to their power. Last year, according to government officials, at least 215 Colombian activists were murdered, the highest number ever recorded.

The violence has been especially pronounced along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, where Chocó is located. According to Gimena Sánchez, an expert on Afro-Colombian issues at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group, a disproportionate number of the 1,200 human rights workers assassinated in the country since 2016 were of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous backgrounds. “Up until now, they’ve respected the space, which is seen as a source of pride,” she told me. But the winds seem to be shifting. In the city of Quibdo, the home of Muntú Bantú, the situation has “turned into a nightmare,” Sánchez said. “There are shootings every day. [Paramilitaries] extort absolutely everybody. It's out of control.”

And then there’s Márquez, whose ascent has brought increased visibility of Afro-Colombian history, memory and culture in public life. Márquez herself — who before entering politics was an outspoken activist fighting against illegal gold mining — has been a top target of racist trolling, death threats and harassment. In January, Márquez denounced the threats against Muntú Bantú on Instagram, calling the museum a “sacred temple” for the Afro-Colombian community. Mosquera explained to me that this racist backlash has trickled down to the Afro-Colombian community as a whole, reaching public figures and everyday people. The threats aimed both at Márquez and Muntú Bantú seem to be a byproduct of this volatile and historic political moment: an era of increased exposure, and danger, for Afro-Colombian leaders as parts of the country remain locked in conflict. 

All the while, Colombia’s 50-year civil war looms in the background. The conflict between the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (also known as FARC) left 260,000 Colombians dead and 8 million displaced. It officially ended in 2016, after the two parties brokered a historic peace agreement that was supposed to finally put an end to the bloodshed. The complex and wide-ranging treaty established a ceasefire and created a pathway for FARC militants to reintegrate into Colombian society in exchange for laying down their arms and demobilizing. The deal was also supposed to address the structural issues fueling the conflict — poverty and inequality — by investing in the economic development and security of long-neglected parts of the country that bore the brunt of the violence. But in places like Chocó, this redevelopment never happened.

After the accord went into effect, thousands of guerrillas turned in their weapons and the FARC withdrew from Chocó, bringing several months of relative peace and stability to the region. But in less than a year, it all came crashing down. New armed groups rushed to fill the void left by the FARC’s exit and the ongoing absence of the state, thrusting Chocóans into yet another cycle of violence and terror. 

There are versions of this scenario across the country, where peace remains elusive seven years after the agreement was signed. Critics say the treaty failed to live up to its lofty promises. Various armed factions, from paramilitary organizations to drug cartels and rival guerrilla groups, have muscled their way into territories formerly held by the FARC, holding a vice-like grip on local communities. Experts say these gangs recruit impoverished youth and threaten, harass and kill anyone they believe poses a danger to their economic and political interests, including activists and teachers.

“They’re seen as a threat by illegal groups because they’re educating people, so they [the armed groups] think that they’re educating people against them,” explained Sánchez.

María Fernanda Parra, the museum’s director, believes that Muntú Bantú may have been targeted because of the alternative vision it shares with the youth sought for recruitment by criminal groups. The center, she explained, provided activities to prevent young people from joining gangs. “We are teaching them another path and that there are other choices [one] can make,” Parra said, “So we are a target. But we didn’t think the aggressors would fight against culture. We thought culture was untouchable because it nourishes education and it shouldn’t be censored.”

Muntú Bantú’s closure threatens the fragile preservation of a history that’s long been ignored by the state. “We are paying a huge cost,” Mosquera said, “because our knowledge is not circulating.”

The post Afro-Colombian culture is under siege as armed conflict rages on appeared first on Coda Story.

Maya Amerson is one of these people. Amerson began working as a content moderator for Reddit in 2018, reviewing violent and disturbing content and identifying posts that violated the company’s terms of use. After three years on the job, she began suffering from panic attacks and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She repeatedly sought support from her employer but didn’t get it. Now, she is taking Reddit to court.

Currently pending before the San Francisco Superior Court, Amerson’s lawsuit alleges that the Reddit management ignored her requests to move to a different position with less exposure to this kind of material, even after she returned from a 10-week medical leave following her PTSD diagnosis. The lawsuit also claims that Amerson’s supervisors belittled her after she came back to the office. This led to her resignation in September 2022. She filed the suit three months later. When we asked Reddit for its side of the story, we were told that we could attribute the following to a company spokesperson: “At Reddit, our employees' well-being is a top priority and we offer a robust set of resources for content moderators.”

The allegations in Amerson’s lawsuit are specific to Reddit, a social media giant valued at $6.6 billion that has garnered praise for its unique and decentralized approach to content moderation. But they tell a story that goes well beyond Reddit. A growing number of legal actions are taking aim at tech platforms over their treatment of content moderators and the psychological hazards of the work. These cases highlight the tension inherent in a job that cannot yet be automated and is routinely exported to low-wage contractors overseas.

They also raise an essential and unresolved set of questions: Is vicarious trauma inevitable in the work of content moderation? Or can the tech giants who hire scores of moderators around the world do more to meet the psychological needs of the workforce? If so, are any of the major platforms doing it right?

A brief history of the “front page of the internet”

Founded in 2005 as the aspirational “front page of the internet,” Reddit allows people to create discussion groups, known as subreddits, on topics that interest them. Each of the over 100,000 subreddits across the platform has its own ethos and culture. And each subreddit has its own set of rules that are enforced in addition to the company’s own content policy.

What makes all this work? At the heart of Reddit lies an army of thousands of volunteers who carry out the grueling work of content moderation. Known on the platform as mods, these volunteers oversee each subreddit, removing content and banning accounts that violate their established community rules and norms. Some of the platform’s largest subreddits, like r/politics, have more than 1,000 volunteer mods. The company also employs a paid staff of moderators, like Amerson, to ensure that the content posted on the site does not run afoul of the law or of the company’s own content policy.

Across Reddit, it is these volunteer mods who conduct most of the content moderation on the site. According to Reddit’s most recent transparency report, volunteer moderators were behind 59% of all content removals in 2021, while paid content moderators handled most other removals. 

Reddit characterizes its moderation approach as “akin to a democracy, wherein everyone has the ability to vote and self-organize, follow a set of common rules, and ultimately share some responsibility for how the platform works” and maintains that its bottom-up system “continues to be the most scalable solution we’ve seen to the challenges of moderating content online.” 

In doing this work, however, volunteer mods are providing essential quality control services for Reddit without getting paid a dime. A 2022 study from Northwestern University attempted to quantify the labor value of Reddit’s estimated 21,500 volunteer moderators and concluded that it is worth at least $3.4 million to the company annually. 

While the volunteer moderators do their work for free, many are unaware of the monetary value of the labor they perform for the company. “We wanted to introduce some transparency into this transaction to show that volunteer moderators are doing a very valuable and complex job for Reddit,” said Hanlin Li, the co-author of the report.

Volunteer moderators often describe their work as a “labor of love,” Li explained, but they also have been forthcoming about the need for more institutional support to combat hate speech and harassment. “Over the years we’ve seen a lot of protests by moderators against Reddit, essentially because they thought that they were not supported adequately to do this volunteer job,” she explained. 

This has been a longstanding tension at Reddit, which developed a reputation early on for taking a laissez-faire approach to content moderation and hosting subreddits rife with bigotry and hate speech. This came to a head with a misogynistic incel community that formed on the platform in 2013 and became the ground zero for the 2014 Gamergate online harassment campaign that targeted women in the video game industry. The following year, when Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao announced that the platform would ban five subreddits for harassment, she was inundated with online abuse. Shortly after, she resigned. The incel subreddit‌ wasn’t banned by the website until 2017.

Despite its unique reliance on a volunteer-driven content moderation model, the site has flown under the radar of researchers and reporters, generating less attention than other social networks. But the lawsuit could change this.

Lawsuits target tech giants over moderator trauma, mistreatment

Maya Amerson’s case against Reddit is a reminder that the company, despite its unique approach to moderation, is not immune to the same kinds of allegations of worker harm that have formed the basis of lawsuits against the world’s largest tech platforms. 

That includes TikTok, Facebook and YouTube. TikTok was sued by two former content moderators last spring: They alleged that the company failed to create a safe and supportive working environment as they reviewed disturbing material including videos of bestiality, necrophilia and violence against children. Facebook agreed to a $52-million settlement in 2020 to compensate former content moderators who claimed their work caused psychological harm. And YouTube recently settled a $4.3-million lawsuit filed by former moderators who said they developed mental health issues while on the job. 

These suits all focus on a relatively new labor force and speak to an industry-wide concern about the toll of moderators’ work. “Generally speaking, content moderation is kind of the new frontier,” Nicholas De Blouw, one of Amerson’s attorneys, told me. “In 1992, there wasn’t such a thing as content moderation. I think that’s the interesting aspect of these cases, is seeing how the law protects people that are in roles that never really existed.”

Many social media platforms have shifted away from employing moderators in-house and now outsource their jobs to third-party contractors. Vendors like Accenture, CPL and Majorel employ people all over the world, from India to Latvia to the Philippines, typically expecting fast turnaround times on content review but offering relatively low hourly wages in return. In lawsuits, employees allege they’ve been exploited, made to work in substandard conditions and denied adequate mental health support for the psychological effects of their work. 

After TIME magazine showed how moderators in Kenya — working for Sama, a subcontractor of Meta — were paid as little as $2.20 per hour to review violent material while operating in a “workplace culture characterized by trauma,” one worker took both Sama and Meta to court. Sama has since canceled its remaining contracts with Meta. A separate investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism highlighted the plight of a “legion of traumatized” and underpaid Colombian moderators working under grueling conditions for a TikTok contractor. “You have to just work like a computer,” a moderator said of the job in Colombia. “Don’t say anything, don’t go to bed, don’t go to the restroom, don’t make a coffee, nothing.” 

Some social media researchers have suggested that eliminating the outsourced labor model could be a step toward improving conditions for workers. New York University professor Paul M. Barrett, who authored a 2020 report on outsourced content moderation, has called on companies to stop farming out the work and instead employ moderators in-house, where they would theoretically have more access to mental health support, supervision and proper training. 

But moving the job in-house alone won’t resolve all the alleged issues with this line of work, as Amerson’s lawsuit against Reddit makes clear. After all, she was not an outsourced moderator — she was a direct employee of the company. As Barrett explained, directly employing moderators does not guarantee that they will receive everything that employees in these roles need.

“There’s an irreducible aspect to this work that makes it hazardous,” he said. “If you’re doing this work, there’s a danger you’re going to run into very difficult, offensive, and unsettling content. You can’t really completely avoid that. The question is: How well-trained are you, how well-supervised are you, and are there options for you to get the kind of mental and emotional support that would seem to be common sense in connection with this kind of work?” 

Are any companies doing this well? Barrett said he was “unaware of a major platform doing content moderation well in terms of directly employing moderators who receive proper training, supervision and mental health support.”

What would incentivize platforms to implement these changes? While they could reform themselves, put an end to outsourced moderation and provide in-house employees with better benefits, compensation, oversight and training, there’s no reason to expect this to happen. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, Twitter has moved in the opposite direction, gutting content moderation teams. Layoffs at YouTube have left the company with just one employee overseeing global misinformation policy.

In an area that shows no appetite for self-regulation, actual oversight may be the only solution. Barrett has proposed enhancing the consumer protection authority of the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the social media industry. Such an expansion could give the FTC the authority to ask companies outright about their content moderation practices and to verify whether they live up to their commitments to consumers outlined in their terms of service and community standards guidelines, Barrett explained.

“They make promises just like other companies,” he said. “My argument is that the FTC could ask: So how many moderators do you employ? Do you have enough people to get this done? How do they interact with the automated system? And is all of that adequate, really, to fulfill the promises you make?”

A policy shift like this also would require Congressional action, which is hard to imagine in our gridlocked era of governance. But without major changes to the industry, it’s also hard to imagine lawsuits like Amerson’s — and the concerns that undergird them — going away anytime soon.

The post The occupational hazards of cleaning the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

The proposed ban is part of a sweeping legislative package that builds off of the conservative governor’s ongoing campaign to control the parameters of how America’s legacy of racism is taught in public schools. In announcing the policy, DeSantis — a former history teacher whose views on the Civil War prompted students to create a parody video in which they pretended to be him and argued that the war “was not about slavery,” according to the New York Times — declared that the changes “will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization.”

In addition to eliminating diversity programs, the proposal would also give university presidents wide-ranging power over hiring, firing, and tenure decisions, and require colleges to prioritize majors that could lead to high-wage-earning jobs over degrees that promote “political agendas.”

Jeremy C. Young, a historian who works for the freedom of expression organization PEN America tracking censorship efforts in higher education, called DeSantis’ proposal an “all-out assault on the autonomy of higher education” that, if enacted, would impose the most draconian restrictions on public colleges and universities in the United States.

The proposed legislation is the latest attempt by DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, to limit classroom instruction on the history of racism in America. On January 12, the Florida Department of Education banned an advanced placement course for high schoolers focused on African American studies because it included coursework about reparations — a move DeSantis, who also signed legislation in 2021 prohibiting the instruction of critical race theory in public schools, staunchly defended.

But the effort to codify a so-called “anti-woke” view of history into policy is not just a Florida phenomenon. Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or "divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. Other states have attempted to create hotlines or websites to report teachers who violate critical race theory or divisive concept bans. Experts tracking these legislative efforts say they show no sign of slowing down this year as lawmakers in statehouses across the country propose bills aimed at restricting how teachers discuss the country’s past and present.

To better understand the national picture of America’s history battles, I called up PEN’s Jeremy C. Young. We talked about what distinguishes DeSantis’ proposed legislation from the laws that have already passed and why he sees the policy as lifting a page from the global authoritarian playbook. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of big news about higher education has come out of Florida in the last few weeks. DeSantis announced his intent to gut colleges of critical race theory and diversity programs, and the state’s Department of Education eliminated a high school advanced placement course on African American Studies. You have been monitoring these kinds of legislative actions across the country, and I’m curious how you compare these two efforts. Does one of them stand out to you as especially noteworthy or unprecedented?

It’s a race to the bottom. I think I would probably start with the higher education proposal, what DeSantis refers to as higher education reform, which would really result in the total capture and control of public higher education institutions in Florida by the state government.

Among other provisions, the proposals that DeSantis laid out would ban all diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory initiatives in colleges and universities. It would ban any funding for them, including from private sources. It would effectively end tenure protections for faculty by giving boards of trustees the power to hire faculty members separate from those recommended by the faculty hiring committees, and it would also allow them to call a tenure review at any time for a tenured faculty member, essentially eliminating the protections of tenure.

It would also rewrite the mission statements of colleges and universities by the state. It would force colleges and universities to deprioritize certain majors which are considered by the government to be furthering a political agenda. If enacted, that package of proposals would be the most draconian restrictions on higher education probably in the history of the United States.

What distinguishes this proposal from other attempts to exert control over public university systems or their curricula? What makes this one so extreme?

The part of this that is unique is the attacks on the institutional autonomy of universities. In the United States, free expression at universities is guaranteed in part by institutional autonomy. That is to say, the government does not have day-to-day control over the inner workings and decisions made at the university, and those decisions instead are delegated to Boards of Trustees who in turn make those decisions through a process of shared governance, where all stakeholders at the university — faculty, staff, students, alumni, administrators  — work together to build policies. And those policies are then adopted by the Board of Trustees. 

We have seen waves of legislation, including in Florida in the past couple of years, that have restricted classroom instruction. But these policies go further because they also restrict the ability of governing boards to make their own decisions about their university. If you have the governor at a state rewriting college mission statements, you no longer have institutional autonomy. If they can't write their own mission statements, then they don't have any meaningful autonomy at all. 

So what really sets this apart from some of these other laws that restrict what can be taught in public universities is this attempt to subvert the public university system’s autonomy. This autonomy is, as you said, part of what fosters academic freedom in higher education. And that academic freedom – freedom from government and political intrusion in higher education – is part of what makes a democratic society. 

Our reporting at Coda has explored how educational censorship and book bans have taken root in backsliding democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey. When it comes to higher education, I would imagine there are parallels.

Hungary has banned entire fields of study and Poland has banned political history centers because the government doesn't like the research that they do. And what is being proposed here —  the state government being able to make these decisions about deprioritizing majors, rewriting mission statements, banning initiatives — is absolutely right out of the global authoritarian playbook. There is no meaningful difference between those provisions and what we see in those other countries. 

What about the elimination of the African American Studies course for Florida high schoolers? Did you see that coming?

There have been political controversies around advanced placement courses in the past. Most notably in 2014, when the College Board proposed a revision of the U.S. history course that was criticized by many conservatives as being an overly negative portrayal of American history. And the College Board responded to that, including some threats in Oklahoma and other states to disapprove the course, by adding a section in the course called American Exceptionalism that featured glowing statements that were positive about American history. So it's not surprising to see the College Board make these changes. They've made changes like this before.

What is surprising is for the governor of Florida and the state education department to outright reject a course. That’s never happened in the history of the advanced placement program, which goes back to 1952. And it's worth noting that there was a pilot classroom of this course going on at a lab school at Florida State University. The governor's office told the school that they had to cancel the pilot class that students were actively taking. So the willingness to deprive students of access to this causal material, including students who are already taking the class, is really unprecedented.

And this is all happening in tandem with all sorts of other state restrictions on what can be discussed in the classroom — more than a dozen states have passed legislation banning the instruction of critical race theory, or “divisive concepts.” I saw a headline a few days ago about a bill in Iowa that would attempt to create a website registry for parents to report teachers who violated the state's divisive concept bill that passed two years ago. Have you seen that elsewhere? What kinds of bills are you seeing?

We have definitely seen a variety of hotline provisions, including in states that don't even have these bills on the books, such as Virginia. These hotline provisions would involve people essentially snitching on their neighbors, on the teachers in their students’ classroom, to some kind of state authority who would then threaten their job for saying something that a particular parent didn’t like. And these bills, they've continued to proliferate this year. The rate this year of introduction is almost as great as the rate last year. We've seen over 70 [educational gag order] bills introduced already this year.

When I was talking to people about book restrictions in school libraries for my Coda piece, I was largely focused on elementary school, middle school and high school. And I asked historians and censorship experts if there was a historical precedent for the current volume of school and library book restrictions and bans. Several experts told me that a 1980s-era moral panic around Satanism led to a wave of book bans, but the last time that the country saw something of this magnitude was during McCarthyism. Do you see that historical parallel in higher education too?

I think McCarthyism is the right comparison. The laws promoted during that era — requiring faculty members to sign loyalty oaths saying that they were opposed to communism or laws restricting the teaching of particular subjects and government intervention in creating new, politicized departments in universities — were all hallmarks of the early Cold War and McCarthy era. 

And interestingly, many of those speech-related cases related to the loyalty oaths led to some of the most shining Constitutional jurisprudence in our history defending free expression in educational settings and elsewhere. And so the hope is that there will be some sort of legal protections around some of these areas that are being challenged. But just as it did in the McCarthy era, many of those decisions weren't rendered until the 60s or 70s, so it could be a long time.

The post Why Florida’s new university restrictions are ‘straight out of the global authoritarian playbook’ appeared first on Coda Story.

After the decision, red states moved quickly to ban or severely limit access to the procedure. This made the virtual sphere uniquely important for people seeking information about abortion, especially those living in states that have outlawed the procedure with little or no exceptions. 

Google searches for abortion medications increased by 70% the month following the court ruling. People flocked to social media platforms and websites with resources about where and how to end a pregnancy, pay for an abortion or seek help to obtain an abortion out of state. 

Despite state laws criminalizing abortion, these digital spaces are legally protected from liability for hosting this kind of content. That’s thanks to the landmark Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the 26 words that are often credited with creating today’s internet as we know it. Thanks to Section 230, websites of all kinds are protected from lawsuits over material that users might post on their platforms. This legal shield allows sites to host speech about all kinds of things that might be illegal — abortion included — without worrying about being sued.

But the future of 230 is on shaky ground. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a case that challenges the scope of the landmark internet law. The Court’s decision could have sweeping consequences for digital speech about abortion and reproductive health in a post-Roe America. 

THE BACKGROUND

When armed ISIS assailants staged a series of attacks in central Paris in November 2015, an American college student named Nohemi Gonzalez was among the 130 people who lost their lives. Her family has since taken Google (the owner of YouTube) to court. Their lawyers argue that the tech giant aided and abetted terrorism by promoting YouTube videos featuring ISIS fighters and other material that could radicalize viewers and make them want to carry out attacks like the one that killed Nohemi. Central to the case is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which feeds users a never-ending stream of videos in an effort to keep them hooked. Independent research has shown that the algorithm tends to promote videos that are more “extreme” or shocking than what a person might have searched to begin with. Why? Because this kind of material is more likely to capture and sustain users’ attention.

Section 230 protects Google from legal liability for the videos it hosts on YouTube. But does it protect Google from legal liability for recommending videos that could inspire a person to join a terrorist group and commit murder? That is the central question of Gonzalez v. Google. If the Supreme Court decides that the legal shield of Section 230 does not apply to the recommendation engine, the outcome could affect all kinds of videos on the platform. Any video that could be illegal under state laws — like abortion-related content in the post-Roe era — could put the company at risk of legal liability and would probably cause Google to more proactively censor videos that might fall afoul of the law. This could end up making abortion and reproductive health-related information much harder to access online.

If this all sounds wonky and technical, that’s because it is. But the Court’s decision has the potential to “dramatically reshape the internet,” according to Eric Goldman, a professor at California’s Santa Clara University School of Law specializing in internet law. 

Algorithmic systems are deeply embedded in the architecture of online services. Among other things, websites and social media platforms use algorithms to recommend material to users in response to their online activity. These algorithmic recommendations are behind the personalized ads we see online, recommended videos and accounts to follow on social media sites and what pops up when we look at search engines. They create a user’s newsfeed on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They have become a core feature of how the internet functions.

WHAT ARE THE STAKES IN A POST-ROE AMERICA?

If the Supreme Court rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, it could open up a vast world of possible  litigation, as websites and platforms move assertively to take down content that could put them at legal risk, including speech about abortion care and reproductive health. Platforms then would face the threat of litigation for recommending content that stands in violation of state laws  — including, in thirteen cases, laws against abortion. 

“That's going to dramatically affect [the] availability of abortion-related material because, at that point, anything that a service does that promotes or raises the profile of abortion-related material over other kinds of content would no longer be protected by Section 230, would be open for all these state criminal laws, and services simply can't tolerate that risk,” Goldman explained. 

In this scenario, technology companies could not only be exposed to lawsuits but could even find themselves at risk of criminal charges for algorithmically recommending content that runs afoul of state abortion bans. One example is Texas’ anti-abortion “bounty” law, SB 8, which deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” another person seeking an abortion. If the Court decides to remove Section 230’s shield for algorithmic amplification, websites and platforms could be sued for recommending content that helps a Texas resident to obtain an abortion in violation of SB 8. Most sites would likely choose to play it safe and simply remove any abortion-related speech that could expose them to criminal or legal risks.

The abortion information space is just one realm where this could play out if the Court decides that Section 230’s protections do not apply to algorithmic promotion of content. Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University who focuses on international tech regulation, explained: “Making companies liable for algorithmically promoting speech when they haven't themselves developed it will lead to the speech that is most controversial being removed from these online services.”

Goldman had similar concerns. “We’ve never had this discussion about what kind of crazy things could a state legislature do if they wanted to hold services liable for third-party content. And that's because Section 230 basically takes that power away from state legislatures,” he said. “But the Supreme Court could open that up as a new ground for the legislatures to plow. And they're going to plant some really crazy stuff in that newly fertile ground that we've never seen before.”

Consider the #MeToo movement. Section 230 protects platforms against defamation lawsuits for hosting content alleging sexual harassment, abuse or misconduct. Without the law’s shield, the movement could have had a different trajectory. Platforms may have taken down content that could have exposed them to lawsuits from some of the powerful people who were subjects of allegations.

“That kind of speech, which we have seen the internet empower over the last decade in ways that have literally reshaped society, would lead to the kind of liability concerns that would mean that it would be suppressed in the future,” Chander added. “So, when someone claims that Harvey Weinstein assaulted them, companies are in a difficult position having to assess whether or not they can leave that up when Harvey Weinstein's lawyers might be sending cease and desist and saying, ‘we're going to sue you for it for defamation.’” 

Proponents of Section 230, who have long argued that changing or eliminating the law would end up disproportionately censoring the speech of marginalized groups, are hoping to avoid this scenario. But it’s hard to predict how the Supreme Court justices will rule in this case. Section 230 is one of the rare issues in contemporary American politics that doesn’t map neatly onto partisan or ideological lines. As I reported for Coda in 2021, conservative and liberal politicians alike have taken issue with Section 230 in recent years, introducing dozens of bills seeking to change or eliminate it. Both U.S. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump have called for the law to be repealed. 

“This is not just a left-right issue,” Chander explained. “It has this kind of strange bedfellows character. So I think there's a real possibility here of an odd coalition both from the left and the right to essentially rewrite Section 230 and remove much of its protections.”

If the Supreme Court decides that platforms are on the hook legally for recommendation algorithms, it may be harder for people seeking abortions to come across the information they need, say, in a Google search or on a social media platform like Instagram, as those companies will probably take down (or geoblock) any content that could put them at legal risk. It feels almost impossible to imagine this scenario in the U.S., where we expect to find the world at our fingertips every time we look at our phones. But that reality has been constructed, in large part, on the shoulders of Section 230. Without it, the free flow of information we have come to expect in the digital era may become a relic of the past — when abortion was a constitutional right and information about it was accessible online. The Supreme Court’s decision on this tech policy case could, once again, turn back the clock on abortion rights.

The post What a law designed to protect the internet has to do with abortion appeared first on Coda Story.

The rise of the killer robot

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

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

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

America’s post-Roe abortion surveillance matrix

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

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

The spy in your pocket

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

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

Engineering a perfect society – through mass surveillance

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

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

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

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

The post The year in authoritarian tech trends appeared first on Coda Story.

“You need to look at this,” a friend messaged her, with a link to a Facebook post. When she clicked on it, she began shaking and gasping for breath.

“My heart was racing. My blood pressure was through the roof,” she said. “I lay in bed for two solid days and cried so much my eyes swelled shut.”

It had all started that week at a public library board meeting. The meeting’s official agenda included a vote on whether the library should restrict access to several books that dealt with themes related to gender, sexuality and LGBTQ issues. Jones, who is also the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, decided to weigh in. 

“No one on the right side of history has ever been on the side of censorship and hiding books,” she told the board. “Once you start relocating and banning one topic, it becomes a slippery slope.”

Other people spoke up and supported Jones’ opinion. The vote was taken off the table and the meeting adjourned. Jones was relieved. But then the Facebook messages started to appear.

It soon became clear that her speech at the meeting had activated the outrage machine powering the country’s nascent book-banning movement. In Jones, its cultural warriors had found a new target. A vicious trolling campaign ensued. People called her a pig, a pedophile and a groomer who needed to be “purged.” Some threatened to hurt her. Jones stopped leaving the house and started losing her hair.

What happened to Jones is not just a small-town, red-state story.

It’s a tale playing out in cities and states across the country, as a book-banning fever courses through the country’s body politic. Nationally, attempts to remove books from school and public libraries are shattering previous records. The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians who have found a rewarding culture war battle in children’s books about gender, diversity and sexuality. The majority of these groups were created during the pandemic as part of a broader “parents’ rights” movement that formed in opposition to Covid-related masking and remote learning policies in schools and that has since widened its focus to include challenging library and classroom books about race and LGBTQ issues. Some of these groups compile or circulate lists of “inappropriate” books, which can be used to agitate for book bans at schools and public libraries, using language about pedophilia, porn and grooming to gin up support for their efforts.

As various factions lobby to get those books taken off the shelves, librarians like Jones have been swept up in what veterans of the field say is an unprecedented wave of hostility.

For Jones, it played out largely on Facebook. One post included her photo, identified her by name and asked: “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section?” A different post, also featuring her name and photo, said she “advocated teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Hundreds of people in her small town liked, commented and shared the posts. Some identified Jones’ workplace. Shortly thereafter, someone submitted a public records request to her school, seeking her employment records and work emails. 

The digital harassment continued for months and began to ripple out to family and friends who were sent vitriolic messages from strangers. Her body started to react. Jones described “horrific” physical changes as the stress mounted. Her hair fell out. Her body broke out in hives. She stopped sleeping, suffered from panic attacks and lost dozens of pounds over the next two months. One day, a stranger sent her a death threat. “You can’t hide, we know where you live,” he warned. “You have a large target on your back. Click click.”

While efforts to ban books from public schools and libraries are not new, experts say the magnitude of the current campaign is unusual. 2022 will break records on book challenges, according to the data that the American Library Association began tracking more than two decades ago. As of September, there had been efforts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different books in 2022, more than three times the number recorded in 2019. 

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, characterized the book-banning movement as a politically motivated campaign to “disrupt education, stigmatize the voices of marginalized groups and engage in its own form of indoctrination.”

“What we have been observing is a growing effort to censor books that reflect the experiences of marginalized groups under this idea that, somehow, either that it's morally unacceptable for any young person to know that there are gay people in the world, or that a narrative about U.S. history that illuminates systemic racism is somehow un-American and Marxist,” Caldwell-Stone told me.

The effort has been fueled by more than 50 groups that have coalesced around book restrictions and bans at every level, according to the nonprofit PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression and has been tracking censorship attempts in schools. One of the most prominent players in this realm, the national nonprofit Moms for Liberty, has upwards of 200 chapters across the country and has backed hundreds of school board candidates nationwide, spending $50,000 on campaigns in Florida alone. The organization says it is “fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” Its local chapters have driven book challenges in schools from Virginia to Florida.

On Facebook, Moms for Liberty’s main page features posts about cancel culture, school mask mandates and “the sexualization of children.” The New Yorker’s Paige Williams, who recently wrote a deep dive on the group, noted that “its instant absorption by the conservative mediasphere has led some critics to suspect it of being an Astroturf group—an operation secretly funded by moneyed interests.”

Lawmakers have also helped propel the broader campaign, with some introducing legislation intended to exercise more control over libraries’ selection policies. Others have demanded that schools investigate whether their collections include titles that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex."

People and groups advocating for these challenges “do not all share identical aims, but they have found common cause in advancing an effort to control and limit what kinds of books are available in schools,” PEN notes. “Many of these groups use language in their mission statements about parents’ rights or religious or conservative views, some also make explicit calls for the exclusion of materials that touch on race or LGBTQ+ themes."

The effort has resulted in a surge of censorship attempts that range from the tragic (“The Diary of Anne Frank”) to the hilarious (“Captain Underpants''). In Tennessee, a parent’s group sought to restrict access to a picture book about seahorses because it contained an illustration of the creatures mating, “twisting their tails together and twirling gently around,” while school districts in Missouri recently banned the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus” after the state passed a draconian law criminalizing anyone who provides “sexually explicit material” to students. As I wrote last spring, “Maus” has been a global hotrod for years due to its frank depiction of Holocaust history, even leading to a staged book burning in Poland.

When Missouri-based high school senior Meghana Nakkanti learned that her county’s school board was slated to debate a book ban, she and a group of peers teamed up to push back. Nakkanti hails from an area in the state she described as the heart of the Bible Belt, a community “really conducive to that type of culture war issue because it is very conservative.” Yet when she and her peers surveyed their classmates about school library books, they found little support for book bans: just 5 students out of roughly 340 said they support such restrictions. “Among the student body, there is so much opposition because we all understand that at the end of the day, no one's forcing us to read,” Nakkanti said. “Even English teachers can’t get us to read actual textbooks.”

Nakkanti and her classmates began showing up to school board meetings to speak out in favor of library books, sometimes to the chagrin of the grown-ups in the room. She recalled one gathering in particular where the behavior of adults who opposed their efforts stood out as especially hostile. “There were these adults two, three, four times our age acting like children,” she said with a wry smile. “And our entire goal was just to remain like the rational ones. Because we are the rational ones.”

Amanda Jones is one among a growing number of librarians who have been publicly labeled as “groomers” promoting “pedophilia,” attacked on social media, harassed and threatened with violence and even criminal prosecution over these issues.

It happened to Martha Hickson too. At a school board meeting in the fall of 2021, a parent accused Hickson — a high school librarian in New Jersey — of grooming children and promoting pornography for including a handful of books in the library about LGBTQ themes. A group of parents filed a series of challenges with the school over the books, and Hickson was inundated with hate mail and attacks on social media. One afternoon, about a month after the meeting, Hickson collapsed from stress at school. 

“I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't talk full sentences. I was incoherent,” she recalled. At the instruction of her doctor, Hickson went on a brief medical leave and began to take anxiety medication. Though she’s back at work, the situation has continued to take a toll on her mental health. The morning we spoke, Hickson was reeling after experiencing another recent panic attack at work in the wake of a hostile email from a colleague. 

“I’m still going through it,” she told me. “I strive to make this library the safest place I can for kids, so that they feel that they can come here, be who they are and feel safe and valued. But I don't feel safe here anymore. It’s like the world that you knew is shattered.”

A library employee in Missouri, who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns that he could lose his job for speaking to the media, described protestors showing up at the library to harass staff over a sexual education book on the shelves. He does not believe the library has the support of the county government, which appoints library board members and has acquiesced to patrons’ book challenges. Over the last year, stress-induced chest pains have brought him to the hospital emergency room on three separate occasions.

“I love libraries, I want to be working in them for the rest of my life,” he told me. “But if it comes down to the library or my health, I have to choose my health. And this year I have had a lot of reflection on if I'm going to continue my library career. And I feel like more often than not, that answer is no.”

PEN America documented 15 separate cases last year in which people pursued criminal complaints against librarians over “obscene” or “pornographic” materials in school and public libraries. Librarians under pressure have resigned or been fired over their book displays. Members of the extremist group Proud Boys have turned up at school board meetings and bombarded drag and pride-themed story hours at public libraries from California to North Carolina.

A smattering of new bills in state legislatures are raising the stakes even higher. EveryLibrary, the nation’s only political action committee for libraries, is tracking state legislation in Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee that is either pending or passed. In Missouri, librarians who are convicted of “providing explicit sexual material to a student” can face jail time.

Carolyn Foote, a former Texas school librarian who co-founded a support group for librarians under attack, said she knows librarians who have lost their jobs or taken leave “because they just couldn’t handle it anymore.” “It's pretty outside the realm of what most librarians have ever had to cope with,” she told me.

More and more librarians are afraid to share their stories with news organizations or even library groups. When I spoke to the American Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone, she said she received two emails earlier in the day from librarians under duress who had gotten in touch and promptly instructed her not to respond because they were worried someone would find out they were in contact. “That’s the level of fear right now that many library workers are experiencing,” she explained. 

“This is the climate that we're living in, in which people have tried to sow doubt in the very institutions and people who [we’re] supposed to look to as experts,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America. “It's very worrisome for democracy.”

What’s happening today is distinct, but it is not new. Adults have long tried to exercise control over what children learn in public schools, and clashes over ideas and books have been a hallmark of the country’s fractious school wars for at least a century. But a common through line over time has been the conflict between the will of parents to exercise control over what their children learn in public schools and that of the state, a tension that has manifested over the years in the language of what is known as the parents’ rights movement.

In the 1920s, the contested educational material was biology, not sexuality or history. Legislatures in nearly two dozen states proposed anti-evolution bills, including measures that would ban the teaching of Darwinism in schools. Many of these laws were motivated by parents’ concerns that public schools were usurping their authority over what their children learned, even if it conflicted with their ideological or religious beliefs. In the decades that followed, attempts to censor material in public schools took on a range of subjects, from “subversive” textbooks during McCarthyism to books that allegedly promoted atheism amid a 1980s-era moral panic over “secular humanism.” In 2001 and 2002, the most contested book in the nation was Harry Potter. The reason? “Occult” or “satanic” themes.

While it was less common in previous eras to focus attacks on individual librarians, it did happen on occasion, noted the American Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone. She pointed to the case of Ruth Brown, an Oklahoma librarian who attempted to create an interracial storytime at the local library in the 1950s and was later fired for “promoting communism.” “Underlying that was her efforts to integrate the public library,” Caldwell-Stone explained. 

What distinguishes the trend today, librarians and library groups say, is the organized effort behind the current campaign to challenge books, the volume of contested titles and the ferocity of the attacks mounted against its targets. But is it book content that’s really pushing this forward? Many experts I talked to are dubious that the legislators and groups driving these efforts are animated by a genuine concern about the material in the challenged books. Rather, they believe many of the organizers of these campaigns are motivated by political opportunism, recognizing a red meat issue for a base group of supporters that can be milked repeatedly to turn a profit and increase turnout for elections. 

“The reason that they're creating the tension around the content of books in libraries is largely monetary gain,” said EveryLibrary’s Sweeney. According to Sweeney, mobilizing support for book challenges has been a fundraising coup for some of the groups involved in this effort.

“They're raising millions of dollars fighting to keep these books out of libraries,” he said. “It's very easy for an organization to find a book with a couple of pictures that they disagree with, take two pages out of context, send an email to their email list and ask everybody to donate a dollar in order to help them keep porn from the hands of children.”

Tempting as it may be to characterize this as a uniquely American story, there are echoes of it playing out around the globe. Book bans have taken root in countries that have been labeled backsliding democracies in recent years, including Brazil, Hungary and Turkey. 

The parallels to the U.S. are especially striking in Brazil, where conservative lawmakers, in a bid to rid schools of so-called “gender ideology,” have introduced more than 200 bills targeting gender and sexuality education. Like librarians in the U.S., Brazilian teachers whose lessons have addressed gender and sexuality say they have dealt with death threats, severe harassment and accusations of “indoctrinating” students from public officials. One teacher told Human Rights Watch that he was ordered to stop teaching “gender ideology” by a student’s parent who accosted him on the street. “He told me he was a member of a paramilitary group, that he was armed, and that he would shoot me,” he said.

In Turkey, more than 300,000 books have been removed from Turkish libraries and schools over the last several years for their alleged references to Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric who the Turkish government claims masterminded a failed coup in 2016. According to Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director of PEN America, the purge also has swept up books related to Kurdish culture and history, as well as children’s books accused of containing “obscene” content. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary passed a law in 2021 banning LGBTQ characters from appearing on television or in school materials — legislation that has been compared to Russia’s infamous 2013 anti-gay propaganda law. 

It may be easy to write off those examples as unrealistic trajectories in the U.S. But PEN America, which has been tracking book bans, says there are 32 states with at least one ban in place. Johnson told me that 96% of these bans underwent “no process whatsoever.” “If we continue down this path,” she said, “we could begin to see more and more of our freedoms erode.”

As the digital storm began to die down, Jones started to register a different emotion stirring inside. Not anxiety or panic, but genuine rage.

At first, Jones didn’t fight back when angry hordes came after her on social media. She didn’t argue with the commenters calling her a groomer or defend herself from their vicious attacks. But then, something started to change. As Jones put it: “I got pissed!”

She understood that everything that had happened to her — the harassment and the pressure — had a purpose. “The bullies want me to be quiet,” she said. “And so, I decided that I will be the opposite of what they want me to be. My mother did not raise a weakling, and I’m not raising a weakling. It’s important to stand up and speak out.”

She decided it was time to bring the fight to court. “I just kept saying, ‘I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m mad,’” she told me. “I want to sue.”

With the help of a friend, Jones launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise legal fees for an attorney and filed a defamation lawsuit against two people who stated in Facebook posts that Jones shared “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” with young children and advocated “teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The posts, the lawsuit argued, accused Jones of criminal conduct and harmed her personal and professional reputation, portraying her as a “danger to children and exposing her to misplaced contempt and ridicule in the community.” 

The judge presiding over the case dismissed Jones’ lawsuit, arguing that the defendants had expressed their opinions in the posts and so their statements were not defamatory. But Jones is undeterred. She filed a motion for a new trial, which the judge denied, and intends to appeal the decision and move the lawsuit forward until her money runs out. Her motivations are two-fold: she wants to see the posters held accountable for what they said about her online, but she also wants to stand up for the profession and the librarians who don’t feel comfortable speaking up. Scores of librarians have reached out to her in the months since her case has gone public. “I've had about 300 emails from librarians in the past few months, and a lot of them want to stay silent,” she told me. “They're very scared to be vocal.” 

Jones is not the only one fighting back in court. In Texas, residents of Llano County are suing local officials in federal court for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights over a series of book removals from the public library system. In Missouri, the American Civil Liberties Union recently filed a lawsuit against a school district over its book removal policy after the school board permanently banned a book with a nonbinary gender character from elementary school libraries.

Outside of legal action, various efforts are underway to support library employees under attack and to come to the defense of challenged books. The #FReadom campaign, co-founded by retired librarian Carolyn Foote, provides resources for librarians and schools facing book challenges, letter templates for community members opposing book bans to send to school board members and superintendents and advice for establishing local groups to support school board candidates. It also encourages people to share positive stories of librarians on social media. 

The National Coalition Against Censorship has compiled resources for educators dealing with removal requests and a way to report school censorship and material challenges. The American Library Association, which also has a detailed guide for reporting book challenges, recently launched a national “unite against book bans” campaign with resources and strategies for organizing against book challenges at the grassroots level, which is where many of the groups driving book challenges have gained momentum. Dozens of local groups, from Florida to Idaho, have come together to fight censorship threats in school districts and on social media. 

For Jones, the fight for now remains in court. Though she is likely to face an uphill battle with her defamation claim, she is ready to push it as far as it can go, and has few, if any, regrets about the choices that led to this moment. I asked Jones if she would have changed her decision to speak out at the library board meeting in July, given all that has happened since. 

She didn’t hesitate to answer me. “I’d still do it,” she replied, “in a heartbeat.”

The post America’s culture warriors are going after librarians appeared first on Coda Story.

Part 1: Losing home

Madigan Traversi, 17, gives the property tour in Northern California’s wine country like a seasoned real estate agent. We’re standing on top of a hill in Santa Rosa, overlooking a sweep of golden ridges and green oaks. The two-story home is surrounded by redwoods, fruit trees and a carefully maintained vegetable garden. Traversi, in oversized sunglasses and brown leather boots, leads me to an outdoor pool with a panoramic view of the hills, and then to one of her favorite spots on the plot of land, a majestic old oak tree. As a little girl, she used to spend whole afternoons beneath its branches. They were so large she could duck under them and play make-believe for hours, lost in her own world. “I just turned it into this little haven,” she told me. “When I was there, it was my happy place.”

Traversi and I are standing in front of where the tree once stood, staring at the open air. Nothing we are looking at is actually there, not now anyway. The massive oak tree, the garden, the living room with the big glass windows — it was all lost in October 2017, when the Tubbs Fire devoured 36,807 acres of Sonoma and Napa counties, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and killing 22 people. It was the second-most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, and for many people living here, the marker of a new chapter in California’s story: an era bound by flames.

Traversi’s home was among those lost in the blaze, burning down in less than 30 minutes after she evacuated with her mom on the evening of Sunday, October 8. Traversi, who was 12 years old at the time, was still awake when the landline rang just before midnight. A recorded message explained that three homes were on fire eight miles away and urged them to leave. Traversi and her mom evacuated shortly after, taking their dog, Traversi’s school backpack and the bare necessities. They waited it out in a nearby hotel, assuming they would be able to go back home the next day. But the blaze grew bigger, Traversi’s school closed, and they relocated with some friends to a place just outside San Francisco. A few days later, they learned that their home burned down shortly after they fled. Gone was Traversi’s bedroom and the photos, art projects, journals and family heirlooms that anchored so many of her childhood memories.

Even the cherished oak tree did not survive. All of it was gone, engulfed in a roar of flames propelled by 50 miles per hour winds.

Five years later, Traversi walks around the property and can picture everything just as it was, straddling a split screen between the present and the past. Through her eyes, the open air in front of us flashes into a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room with a wall of glass windows. 

She can still see it all, vividly, in color and texture. A home that no longer exists.

The road leading up to the house was transformed, too. The street is now lined with rebuilt  homes. Traversi pointed out the changes as she drove me to the property on a scorching late summer afternoon. “The houses look so different than they did before,” she observed, as we passed an immaculate two-story home with gleaming windows. “You can see how new everything looks.”

Outside our windows, the sky is a bright blue and the vegetation is achingly dry — so parched that it’s hard not to think about when the next spark might ignite. This is what it’s like to live in California in 2022, a golden state blazing red. Fire is omnipresent, and the last seven years have accounted for 15 of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. They have left their imprint on the land and our minds. 

A building that burns can be rebuilt. But if fire incinerates a state of mind, can that be put back together? After neighbors move, new homes rise from the ones that burned, and the landscape is marked by the fingerprints of flames – the time before can feel like a past life. It’s the kind of rupture that transcends space and time, shaping our memories, our goals for the future and even our understanding of where we belong. Part of living here now means grappling with apocalyptic scenes and with whether this version of California can still be called home. 

But this is not just a California story. These emotions will spread as the climate crisis intensifies, as biblical floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought displace communities from Puerto Rico to Pakistan. 

We are just beginning to contend with these phenomena and how they are shaping our collective well-being. “These losses are enormous,” said Robin Cooper, a San Francisco psychotherapist and the co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a group of psychotherapists focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.”

Cooper’s organization is part of a broader movement of people — activists, artists, psychologists, young people and residents — centering emotions in conversations about climate change. Experts are developing resources, therapeutic treatments and even new language to help people process the psychological impact of climate change. ​​Universities in California and Washington are offering courses for students about navigating the emotional landscape of climate change, including anxiety, hope and grief. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance offers resources and training about the psychological effects of climate change and curates a list of climate-aware therapists. There are also online forums where strangers from all over the world can gather and discuss the emotional toll of climate change and natural disasters, and dozens of virtual and in-person groups across the U.S. focus on processing the grief of the climate crisis.

The Finnish academic Panu Pihkala, whose research focuses on the emotions surrounding climate change, has created a detailed database of peoples’ responses to the climate crisis in what he calls a “taxonomy of climate emotions.” In Finnish, Pihkala has also developed a detailed vocabulary of climate emotions as specific as “winter grief,” mourning the loss of traditional winters, or “snow anxiety,” related to uncertainty about whether it will snow.

lumiahdistus: snow anxiety

talvisuru: winter grief

talvi-ilo: winter joy

lumihelpotus: snow relief

longing for snow: lumikaipaus / lumikaipuu

The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with a word in 2003 to describe a concept he believed language hadn’t yet captured: the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. Albrecht’s term, solastalgia, drew on the meanings of solace, desolation and nostalgia, but deviated from the latter in one crucial way. Rather than describing the melancholia experienced by people away from their home and yearning for it — nostalgia — it referred to the pain felt by those who stayed put.

Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

Solastalgia: Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of nostalgia, solace and desolation. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos — return to home or native land — and the New Latin suffix algia - pain or sickness, and solace from the Latin verb solari with meanings connected to the alleviation or relief of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events.

I relate to this, intimately.

When I read about solastalgia for the first time, I felt unburdened, that particular flavor of psychological relief that comes from having someone else articulate a previously felt, but unidentified, emotional state. Yes, that’s precisely how I felt about living here: solastalgia. Finally, I felt like I had found a single word that embodied my complicated and often sad relationship with California, a place I couldn’t imagine leaving but also cannot bear watching burn year after year.

My journey through solastalgia would probably start in the fall of 2018, when I moved back to California after spending the better part of the decade living unhappily on the East Coast, where everything felt muted, cold and bland. I never felt like I fit in there: I hated the frigid air and prep school energy. Before going to college in Maryland, I went to a big, raucous public high school in downtown Berkeley. The student body numbered in the thousands, and it was diverse and eclectic, including everyone from the children of ‘70s radicals who staged Iraq war protests at lunch to kids immersed in the Bay Area hip-hop scene of the mid-2000s. My most vivid memory of those years is laughing.

In the spring of 2018, I decided to move back to California permanently. For weeks after I moved back, I wandered around with my cell phone camera propped open like a tourist, giddily snapping photos of the Pacific, the deep green forests and the lavish gardens blooming with succulents and fruit. I had arrived.

But shortly after I moved back, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the Camp Fire, tore through Northern California’s Butte County, killing 85 people, torching the town of Paradise and choking the air with smoke. A friend in D.C. texted me a link to an article with the headline: “Is California becoming uninhabitable?” “I think they’re trolling you,” she joked. It didn’t help when I later drove past a bar throbbing with music, and two men wearing hazmat masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke were in line. It all felt like a slow-motion existential crisis. Staring out my window at the scene in front of me, I had a dawning feeling that my home was changing — quickly, in front of my face — and may never be the same.

The fires have not abated. As I sat down to write this article, there were multiple fires burning at both ends of the state, including one in the Sierra Nevada foothills that, as of publication, burned more than 76,000 acres. Fueled by climate change, the traditional fire season is stretching further beyond its traditional lifespan of spring to fall.

Those who choose to stay must learn to inhabit this unsettling liminal space between our imagined apocalypse and the reality of hazmat masks and smoke-filled skies. To recognize that home can vanish even as we never leave.

After the fire, Traversi’s family decided not to rebuild their home on the hill. 

They moved to a new place about 10 minutes away. Eventually, the chaos unleashed by the fire receded, and life resumed. Traversi went back to school, played piano, hung out with her friends. Traversi didn’t seem too outwardly sad about the aftermath of the fire, and her mother worried about how — or if — she was processing it at all. She went to a therapist. But Traversi was 12 and wasn’t ready to unpack all of that trauma. 

Over time, though, the weight of Tubbs began to sink in. As a teenager, Traversi dealt with anxiety and depression, and as she started peeling back the layers of those struggles, she began to recognize the ongoing toll the fire had taken on her mental health.

Traversi was not alone in struggling with the painful aftershocks of Tubbs: a recent survey conducted by the Sonoma County Office of Education found that nearly 3,000 students in the county, and 400 school employees, are still showing “increased anxiety, stress, depression, behavioral problems, or decreased academic performance as a result of the 2017 wildfire.” One of the educators surveyed pointed to an increase in suicidal threats or attempts in the wake of the fire. “Teachers reported kindergarten children crying and running inside after seeing the smoke while on the playground.” Years after the fire, the county superintendent of education concluded, schools are still dealing with students and staff who have been traumatized.

For Traversi, the grief became acute. Processing the loss felt “very similar to how I felt when I’ve lost family members or close friends,” she told me. The home, the property and everything inside the house had been anchors of stability throughout her childhood. As she began grappling with the toll these losses had taken on her, she got her driver’s license and found solace in going back to the old property. Up on the hill at the site of the blaze, taking in all that had been destroyed and all that was still standing, Traversi’s sadness finally had space to breathe. “I found it really healing to go back and sit there and just ignore everything around me,” she said. “It was the first time that I was really able to objectively think, ‘wow, I went through something huge and I lost a really big part of me.’”

Living through Tubbs also helped lay the groundwork for Traversi’s path to climate activism. In high school, she joined a local climate action campaign run by students and educators. Like returning to the property, becoming involved in the effort helped her process the trauma of losing her home. As part of the campaign, she and another local youth climate activist worked with their congressman to help co-author a resolution introduced in the House last spring, which calls on lawmakers to incorporate mental health into disaster preparation and provide funding to schools for youth mental health support after climate-related disasters.

While working on the resolution, Traversi came across a piece of research that blew her away: a survey of 10,000 people aged 16-25 across ten countries about the mental health impacts of climate change. Nearly half of the youth surveyed said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives and functioning, and 75% described the future as “frightening.” More than half of the 10,000 youth surveyed — 5,566 — agreed with the prompt “humanity is doomed.”

For Traversi, the findings were revelatory. “It was the discovery that kids aren't stressed because they have this irrational fear that they need to work through with a therapist. They're stressed because there's a genuine threat to their futures,” she said.

Part two

The grievers

Over the last several years, as wildfires throughout California have threatened some of the state’s most cherished places, from its splendid redwood forests to its picturesque coastlines, they have unleashed an outpouring of collective anxiety and sadness. It’s the grief of lives lost and iconic landscapes altered and the awareness that the state will become even more unrecognizable.

As this grief becomes ubiquitous, so too are the grievers. They are part of a nascent movement of climate mourners, people who see grief as a central — and overlooked — human response to the climate crisis. They are meeting up in person and online over the climate’s great unraveling, absorbing darkness so that they ultimately may come blinking into the light.

An assured mother of three living in Northern California, Kristan Klingelhofer joined the mourners nearly three years ago. It was the beginning of the pandemic and she was searching for resources that might help her manage her emotions over parenting and climate change. Her children began asking her about mass species extinctions and reading United Nations reports about global warming when they were in elementary school, nearly a decade ago. Klingelhofer was torn on how to appropriately respond. “Do you shelter them?” she asked. “Empower them?” One day, she opened her computer to see if she could find anything that might help and stumbled across The Good Grief Network, a 10-step, peer support program to help people process their climate grief. The program, which was inspired by Adult Children of Alcoholics’ 10-step approach, runs a weekly support group designed for people grappling with climate distress. The organization doesn’t heavily market or advertise its groups on social media, “so if you found this, it’s because you needed it,” executive director Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg told me.

Step 1: Accept the severity of the predicament

Step 2: Be with uncertainty

Step 3: Honor my mortality and the mortality of all

Step 4: Do inner work

Step 5: Develop awareness of biases and perception

Step 6: Practice gratitude, witness beauty and create connections

Step 7: Take breaks and rest

Step 8: Grieve the harm I have caused

Step 9: Show up

Step 10: Reinvest in meaningful efforts

The first class focused on the program’s first step: “Accept the severity of the predicament.” Klingelhofer and her husband emerged from the meeting in tears. “It was like we took our masks off,” she explained. Ten weeks later, they finished the course, and Klingelhofer signed up to be a Good Grief facilitator.

“People come in feeling so isolated, and with such a bottled-up bunch of emotions,” Klingelhofer said. “Whether it's outrage or panic or numbness or depression or fear,” she said. “There's always grief at the bottom of it. And it just comes out.”

In 2021, The Lancet, a medical journal, published an investigation into young peoples’ attitudes towards climate change. As part of the landmark study, researchers surveyed thousands of young people globally and uncovered a persistent future-facing dread. From Nigeria to France, respondents expressed sadness, anger and despair. Two-thirds of youth in the 10 countries surveyed reported feeling afraid. More than half said they believe the things they value most will be destroyed, and nearly 60% felt their governments had betrayed them because of how they were responding to climate change.

The study’s authors posited that governments’ failure to address climate change may be contributing to “moral injury,” which they describe as “the distressing psychological aftermath experienced when one perpetrates or witnesses actions that violate moral or core beliefs.” This often manifests in feelings of not just betrayal but abandonment.

The findings underscore what may be a generational gap in expressions of climate grief. For many young people, the heartache of climate change is slanted toward the years ahead. As they contemplate carving out a life amid a series of cascading environmental crises, they wonder: Where will I be able to live? Work? Find community? And in the absence of any certainty, how can I plan ahead? One Washington-based student I talked to, who just graduated college, told me the threat of wildfires in California had thwarted her plans to apply to graduate school there — a decision her parents couldn’t comprehend and found “ridiculous.” She described the process of climate mourning for her generation as “grieving the potential futures we could have had.”

That includes a future with kids. Nearly 40% of the youth surveyed worldwide in The Lancet’s study said that concerns about climate change have made them hesitant to have children. Traversi, whose home burned in the Tubbs Fire, said the subject comes up regularly in her peer group. “Everyone is looking at what they're going to do after high school. There's such a huge conversation about, like, ‘I really wanted to have kids, but now I think I don't want to because of climate change,’” she said.

This is a different flavor of mourning than the nostalgic sadness that has punctuated my relationship with California. Solastalgia is rooted in the past and present, the feeling that your home environment is moving away from you and your relationship with that place has changed because it’s no longer what it was. The younger people I talked to, however, are grieving something different: children they may never get to meet, glaciers melted, species lost, life plans derailed. This is grieving for a future that may never come to be, as opposed to a past that was.

“I think we see that future orientation much more with young people,” Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, said. “So many of them really are mourning the loss of the future, the children they will never have or the security from their parents’ generation that won't be available to them.”

Atkinson has been a professor at the University of Washington for more than a decade, but about five years ago, she told me, she began to notice a plunge in student morale. People were coming into class telling Atkinson they couldn’t sleep or focus because they were consumed with thoughts of climate breakdown. The future looked too dark. Atkinson observed that her students’ sense of despair was interfering with their ability to learn: they were feeling powerless and despondent, unable to process the material she was trying to teach. So Atkinson decided to create a seminar dedicated to helping students navigate the emotional landscape of climate change. The idea was partially inspired by Good Grief’s 10-step program.

In Atkinson’s class, students study the academic literature on climate emotions while also delving into their personal responses to ecological loss. Her seminar was the first time that 22-year-old Joe Lollo, who took the course last spring, began to explore and later articulate his climate-related feelings and anxieties. That included his sorrow and dread when he visited Mount Rainier, an active volcano looming above Washington’s Cascades, and saw that one of the glaciers draping the mountain was melting, part of a trend that has seen glaciers across the state shrink dramatically as the world warms. Lollo had learned about glacier loss in his high school environmental science class, but coming face-to-face with Mount Rainier’s receding ice mass was the first time he had seen anything like it firsthand. As Lollo absorbed the changes, he began to cry. “I remember this being overwhelming for me, but I kept it inside,” he told me. “I had a lot of emotions that I didn't know how to express.”

Much of Atkinson’s work in class is focused on making grief acceptable to students. She encourages them to think of grief not as a pathological feeling to run from or bury, but as an emotionally healthy response to climate change. “If we got rid of these feelings, we’d lose so much of the motivation to stay in this fight,” she explained. “The core of all of it is to emphasize that grief is an expression of love.”

Part three

The end of magical thinking

There is another character in this story, hovering over the page as I write. Frustratingly, I cannot interview her. Outside of my dreams, I cannot talk to her. She is gone. And mourning her death taught me how to recognize grief wherever it lurks, including the edges of flames.

When you lose someone prematurely, there is always a before and an after: a moment when life as you understood it disappears abruptly and you are tasked with creating a new one out of the absence that remains. Mine came in May 2018, just before midnight, with a call from my sister. “You need to sit down,” her voice taut on the other line. The next sentence came so quickly that I didn’t have time to process the instruction, or why her voice was cracking. A handful of words that changed it all. Your best friend, she told me, had ended her life.

I bolted up from my bed: What? Through the receiver I could hear my sister crying, my mom sobbing and my dad calmly telling me to buy a flight back to California because her funeral would be in a few days. I was in too much of a state of shock to cry, so I sat at the edge of my bed repeating the same question in disbelief: What? What? What? “But she just emailed me!” I wailed. Indeed, she had sent me a routine email the day before she died — “just saying hi” — and in my rush to meet a deadline I hadn’t responded. I fell forward, my palms smacked onto the ground, and I screamed. I don’t remember anything after that.

Four days later, I was in California, eulogizing my best friend at her funeral, in front of hundreds of people. Everybody was in black, weeping, in shock. I was inconsolable. My right hand wouldn’t stop trembling. Even though I was surrounded by friends, family and community, I had the sensation that the only person who could understand what I was feeling was the person we were all there mourning. I wanted to gossip with her about the people who unexpectedly showed up at her funeral and talk to her about how profoundly alone I felt without her. More than anyone else in my life, I knew she would see what I was feeling in its fullest, truest form. Nothing prepared me for the heartbreak of realizing that could never happen again and the anguishing mental exercise of training myself away from reflexively texting or calling her first when something happened to me.

I’ve never recovered from that call, and I know that I never will. If my phone rings after 11 p.m. my stomach drops and my palms sweat, bracing for the impending news that someone I love has died. She was my oldest friend, the closest person to me outside of my family and partner. We met when I was two years old. She was like an exaggerated version of myself. My hair was big, hers was enormous. I was a silly dog-obsessed kid, but she was way quirkier. She collected handmade tiny mouse figurines dressed up as British royalty from a specialty store 30 minutes away. I was extroverted, but she took it to a whole other level. She would talk to anyone, anywhere, and inevitably find a way to relate. She was also the funniest person I’ve ever known — so charismatic that friends I introduced to her once would ask me about her for years after they met. After she died, laughter was in short supply for a long time. I felt so out of sorts I wondered if my sense of humor had permanently vanished.

The year before she died, she visited me in North Carolina. One weekend, I took her to the local farmer’s market. She decided to wear a graphic t-shirt with a uterus above the expression “Don’t tread on me.” I wandered around the stands for a few minutes and found her deep in conversation with an elderly pig farmer in overalls working at a stand selling meat, talking about the complexities of adult female friendships. He gave her earnest advice about how to handle a conflict with a friend. I was amused, but not surprised. It was so completely her, charming her way into the hearts of the pig farmers of the world in a uterus shirt.

While this recollection makes me smile, it also makes me confused. Lots of my memories with her are that way. I think back to different moments of our friendship, like the afternoon at the farmer’s market, and I wonder if she was unhappy and I had missed it. I wonder how, or if, her missed unhappiness should change how I remember our past. This confusion makes many of my memories with her strangely inaccessible, like childhood photos engulfed in flames.

This is the part of the story I’ve been avoiding writing. Reliving the call is agonizing; the funeral, gutting; the death, nearly impossible to talk about. My ability to mourn was blocked by the way she died. I didn’t see it coming and couldn’t understand it, poring over the last text she sent me (a close-up of a pug’s face with no context), searching for clues about what I missed, what I could have caught and prevented if only I had seen it first. 

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s classic book about grieving, she writes about her obsession with her husband’s shoes after he passed away. She was unable to get rid of them, because, Didion reasoned, he might need them in case he came home. Although she knew perfectly well that her husband was gone, she clung to the illusion that he might still stroll through the front door as a psychological salve for her grief. The behavior became an example of what she describes in the book as magical thinking: “thinking as small children think,” she writes, “as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

I am very familiar with this chaotic line of reasoning.

My best friend died a few months before my birthday, and a few months after her own. We were planning to celebrate both when I moved back to California permanently, in the fall of 2018. Two months before I was scheduled to drive across the country, she passed away. I couldn’t hit pause on my decision to move home: I had already quit my job and given up my lease, and my partner had enrolled in graduate school in California. I was moving home — back to the place I had grown up with my best friend, where she was living when she died — whether I was ready or not.

My return to our hometown plunged me into a grief deeper than what I had felt when I was living on the other side of the country. To make myself feel better, I came up with an illogical psychological salve. My friend had a habit of sending me eclectic handmade cards on my birthday, and so I convinced myself that a birthday letter would arrive from her posthumously, explaining everything with her characteristic humor and observations. Although this imagined letter would not bring her back, it would at least give me a semblance of closure about why she took her life and leave me with words to revisit when I missed her. I would finally have answers to the questions that kept me up at night.

Of course, a note like this would never arrive. But I felt confident that it would appear in my mailbox before my birthday, this letter-turned-death-Rosetta Stone, giving me a coherent narrative to understand her death. When my birthday came and went without a letter, it marked the end of my magical thinking and the beginning of my painful descent into reality. I recognized that I had to accept that she was gone, and that I would never get the answers I wanted. Sometimes things just don’t make sense. My future wouldn’t include her in the ways I had always imagined, and my childhood memories would now always be imprinted with her loss.

Death, like fire, had upended my past, present and future, as well as my relationship with home — a place that no longer included her. In order to exist in the world as it was, the one that I reluctantly saw in front of me, I finally needed to grieve.

In retrospect, when I moved back to California, I was actually mourning two things at once: the loss of my friend and the loss of my sense of home. It took me years to identify the latter because the former was so all-consuming.

But after I acknowledged my solastalgia and began working on this story, I started to recognize the familiar shape of my California fire heartache. The homesickness, the urge to stay rooted in the California of my past, the despair lurking beneath my nostalgia — that all began to feel like my entry point into mourning. I started to see solastalgia as the first stage of my climate grief.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in the book “On Death and Dying,” laid out the process of grieving the loss of a loved one in five separate stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This doesn’t necessarily describe a linear process, and plenty of people don’t relate to this framework, but I found acceptance to be a transformative stage of my grieving, a process that has left me much more attentive to the quiet pain of so many people moving through the world. While imagining a reality that included my best friend provided me with great nostalgic comfort, it also kept me locked in denial and magical thinking. It left me unable to process and exist in the present, like wearing a jacket of despair lined with silk sleeves. Eventually, I had to accept that she was permanently gone. The world I thought I knew had changed, the ground had hollowed out beneath me, and I needed to figure out a way to find my footing over the fragments that remained.

I’ve been wondering if a similar process is needed to confront the realities of climate change. Maybe our collective fear of descending into grief is sabotaging our ability to emotionally process the depths of the crisis. Grief is generally regarded in our society as a scary and unpleasant emotional state to avoid at all costs, or, if we must, to push through quickly and overcome, not voluntarily submit to. But my process of grieving my best friend was essential. It forced me to digest the depth and pain of my loss. It taught me that some losses are just too big to ignore.

“Every wisdom tradition and psychologist will tell you that sitting with grief is a necessary part of recognizing and internalizing a new reality in the face of a loss,” Jennifer Atkinson, the University of Washington professor who teaches the climate grief seminar, told me. “And one of the things that I've encountered in a lot of the research and work and interviews that I've done is how valuable and productive grief is in finally shaking us out of this collective denial or disavowal. You don't have to really be a climate denier, deny the science, to sort of deny the fact or disavow the fact that our lives are truly unraveling and will not be what we thought they were.” Grief, Atkinson argued, “is the opposite of indifference.”

What would it look like to let go of our denial and magical thinking, and instead open ourselves to climate mourning? For people who take part in the Good Grief Network’s course, it means beginning with what, for some, is an emotionally overwhelming task. The program’s first step is to “accept the severity of the predicament.” Acceptance is not the last step of the process, but the first.

Part four

Ritual

One summer night, I descended down the mountains for a concert in the city of Santa Cruz. I wound down the redwood-dotted hills, watched the surfers bobbing on the deep blue waves of the Pacific, and then made my way to the final stop of my day, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

The evening’s headliner was “The End of Rain,” a multimedia performance reflecting on Californians’ emotional responses to fire and drought. The composer, Scott Ordway, spent more than a year traveling across the state, collecting firsthand accounts of wildfire and drought from more than 200 Californians. He used their words to create a text and a musical score, which was performed by a chorus and accompanied by his own videos and photos taken from visits to different sites of wildfires.

Ordway, a Santa Cruz native who now lives on the East Coast, followed the 2020 Santa Cruz wildfire from his home in Philadelphia. He watched the fire, which was sparked by lightning, descend on his hometown, evacuating his parents’ town and bearing down on places he knew vividly from his childhood. “I knew immediately that I wanted to respond artistically,” he said. So he hit the road, asking people throughout the state about how the wildfires are reshaping their relationship to land, community and self.

That night was Ordway’s composition’s world premiere. The theater was packed, and he stepped onto the stage. “When the lightning struck, I never felt so far from home,” he told the crowd. The lights dimmed and the chorus began to sing the words culled from dozens of Californians, as photos of fire-scarred landscapes flashed on a projector behind the performers. For the next 45 minutes, the audience listened in rapt silence. It felt like a mourning ritual, a public space where a community razed by fire could hear the words of others who had gone through the same thing.

Ordway told me that when he began working on the composition, he thought he would end up writing “a funeral piece for my beloved landscape, for my home, for California.” But in the process of traveling across the state and collecting peoples’ stories, it went in a different direction. Ordway explained that the people he spoke to did not want him to write “a requiem — a sad, somber piece about what was going on” but wanted something that left open even a sliver of room for a salvageable future. He recalled an elderly woman who grabbed him by the shoulders during an interview. “Young man,” she ordered, “don’t you dare put a sad ending on this piece.”

Ordway tried to encapsulate those feelings in the composition’s last two lines of text:

We must change now.

Things will grow back.

Maybe this is where grieving leaves us, suspended between heartache and hope. Staring at an unrecognizable home, with so much left to save.

The post Grieving California 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.

Even in Democratic-majority cities, public anxiety about crime seems to be peaking. Determined to assuage people’s concerns (and keep their votes), major cities including San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans are turning to technical surveillance as a solution.

This marks a big shift, especially for a city like San Francisco, which in 2019 became the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by local public agencies, including the police. Boston, Portland, Oakland, and Jackson, Mississippi, have since followed San Francisco’s lead, passing similar restrictions of their own that prevent public agencies from using privately-developed technologies to identify individuals in the course of criminal investigations or other procedures. 

Spearheaded by privacy advocates and buoyed by mass protests against police abuse after the killing of George Floyd, these policies were intended to keep cities from treading into the legal and ethical gray area where facial recognition technology currently sits. 

But now the tide seems to be turning. A recent poll found some 65% of voters in San Francisco report feeling less safe today than they did in 2019.

“We went from a long-term view to an extremely short-term view,” explained Tracy Rosenberg, the advocacy director for Oakland Privacy, a group that advocates for surveillance oversight in the Bay Area. 

“The narrative that was dominant in 2019 was the long-term implications of the ubiquitous use of facial recognition, which is basically the end of public anonymity. And I think that narrative has largely been replaced by a narrative that [says]: ‘Who cares about the future when right now your car is getting stolen or your store is being looted?’ And that basically the short-term implications on your life right now are more important than any sort of future surveillance state that might develop.”

Public concern about crime has clearly gone up, but national crime data reveals a complex picture. The murder rate spiked in 2021, reaching its highest point in nearly 25 years, but now appears to be decreasing, with homicides in major cities down nearly 5% in 2022. All other kinds of violent crime have held steady or dropped since 2019, according to Pew. And cities’ experiences with violent crime are not uniform. As of November 2022, murders have increased by nearly 30% in New Orleans and Charlotte compared to the same time period in 2021, and decreased in others, including San Francisco and Oakland. 

Despite San Francisco’s pioneering ban on the use of facial recognition technology, in September 2022 the city’s Board of Supervisors passed a policy that will allow law enforcement to access the video footage of private security cameras in real time. During a 15-month pilot phase, San Francisco police will be able to view up to 24 hours of live video footage from private surveillance cameras during criminal investigations and large public events. 

In a letter to city officials, a coalition opposing the ordinance, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, argued the proposal “massively expands police surveillance” and could give officers the ability to “surveil any large gathering of people in San Francisco, including the crowds that gather for the Pride Parade, street markets, and other political and civic events.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matthew Guariglia described the Board’s decision as an attempt to “[put] voters at ease that something, anything is being done about crime.”

These San Francisco legislators are not alone. Their decision reflects a broader trend playing out in left-leaning cities nationwide. Cities are expanding the use of surveillance technology to reduce crime, or at least assuage some citizens’ concerns about crime, sometimes without clear evidence that these tools are effective as such. These cities also risk entrenching a permanent surveillance infrastructure that may be difficult to dismantle down the road. “The history of surveillance suggests that it's not easy to put the genie back in the bottle,” argues Rosenberg. 

One of  the most high-profile examples of this dynamic comes out of New Orleans, where lawmakers are poised to expand police surveillance less than two years after passing a sweeping facial recognition ban. In July, the New Orleans City Council voted to allow the city police department to request access to facial recognition technology from the Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange, which analyzes data for police, to investigate certain kinds of crimes, including rape, murder, carjacking, robbery, and “purse snatching.” 

The ordinance passed amid a surge in violent crime in New Orleans not seen since the mid-1990s. In early July, just weeks before the city council approved the policy, New Orleans reportedly had the highest murder rate in the nation. Supporters of the measure, including the city’s mayor, claimed that it would help police rein in crime by helping officers track down perpetrators more effectively. 

This raises a critical question: Do these tools actually help reduce or solve crimes? As one city council member who voted against the New Orleans policy pointed out, the argument was not backed up by empirical evidence. 

During a hearing on the vote, an official with the police department admitted that he had no information about how frequently the department used facial recognition before it was banned in 2020 and whether its use had led to any arrests or convictions. “You have no data, sitting here today, telling me that this actually works, that it leads to arrests, admissions or clearances,” the councilmember Lesli Harris said. 

The Louisiana chapter of the ACLU blasted the council’s decision to “expand racist technologies,” highlighting research that has found that facial recognition disproportionately misidentifies women and people of color. A 2019 federal study found that the majority of facial recognition systems are biased, misidentifying Black and Asian faces at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. 

These flawed matches have real-world consequences: At least three Black men in the U.S. have been wrongfully arrested after facial recognition software incorrectly identified them for crimes they did not commit.

Elsewhere, cities are embracing a controversial gunshot detection surveillance technology that a study from the Northwestern School of Law found to be “inaccurate, expensive, and dangerous,” sending police on “unfounded deployments” in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. The technology, ShotSpotter, uses a system of discrete acoustic sensors to identify the location of gunshots and then send an alert to the police, who can then decide to send an officer to the scene of the alleged crime.

The firm has contracts in over 120 cities nationally, some of which have come under fire for pouring millions into a technology that critics say is error-prone and ‌ineffective. ShotSpotter contests claims of inaccuracy, saying the technology has a 97% accuracy rate. But a 2021 analysis of the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter by the city’s Office of Inspector General found that just ​​9% of alerts were linked to gun-related crimes.

A recent class action lawsuit, filed by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University, alleges that the city “has intentionally deployed ShotSpotter along stark racial lines and uses ShotSpotter to target Black and Latinx people.”

Despite such criticisms about the technology and its impact on policing, cities are still using it. Earlier this month, the Detroit City Council ended a months-long, divisive debate about whether to expand ShotSpotter when it approved a $7 million contract to deploy the system to 10 new neighborhoods in the city. Detroit’s decision came just days after Cleveland’s City Council voted to quadruple the size of ShotSpotter’s current use area. Other cities that have recently moved to expand or renew contracts include Sacramento, Houston and Chicago.  

Meanwhile, in New York, Mayor Eric Adams, whose ‘90s-style “tough on crime” rhetoric has been a hallmark of his campaign and time in office, has been a vocal proponent of high-tech policing, including facial recognition and gunshot detecting technology like ShotSpotter. Adams, a former New York City police officer, has sought to dramatically expand the use of facial recognition within the police department and has expressed interest in installing metal detectors in city subway stations and replacing school metal detectors with new technology that would scan students for weapons. 

The overall picture, says Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York, is one of “surveillance opportunism” in which technology companies are pitching surveillance systems to lawmakers and law enforcement agencies seeking to quell concerns about public safety. To promote these technologies, Fox Cahn added, some public officials have positioned the expansion of surveillance in cities as a more humane alternative to traditional policing.

Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained, “Surveillance doesn’t come without the iron fist of the police department. Because even if they capture something on surveillance and they want to arrest a person, that person is not going to be arrested by a camera. They're going to be arrested by a person with a nightstick and handcuffs and a gun.” At the end of the day, this trend pushes them towards a vision of citywide surveillance favored by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.

For now, San Francisco’s facial recognition ban remains intact. But some civil liberties advocates worry that the decision by the city’s Board of Supervisors to grant the police wider surveillance powers could give license to other cities and jurisdictions to follow suit. 

“I think that's one of the most disturbing parts of what happened in San Francisco,” explained Oakland Privacy’s Rosenberg. “Because when you don't have those facial recognition bans in place, the green light from a big city, a progressive city, a city that's been famous for innovations in surveillance and looking at things with a critical lens — I think it provides a sort of implicit invitation to other cities that don't have these bans in place to jump on the bandwagon.”

Still, as many privacy experts are quick to point out, it’s unclear if this trend will have staying power. They point to the general ebbs and flows of crime — at its peak, a sense of public insecurity tends to garner more support for policing and a willingness to erode civil liberties than it may when citizens feel safer — as well as the strength of the growing anti-surveillance movement. 

“Five years ago, it was unimaginable that there could have been a ban on any type of surveillance technology,” ​​Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney for the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the ACLU of Northern California, remarked. “When we started talking about this at the ACLU, we got laughed at by folks in political spaces when we proposed the idea of banning facial recognition.” Now, though, he adds, there are “more groups who are opposed to government surveillance at the local level…by an order of magnitude over what that was five or ten years ago. And I think that’s an important trend even though on the policy itself, the votes didn’t swing the right way this time.” 

In the next five years, we will see if those groups have the power to put the genie back in the bottle.

The post As anxiety about crime peaks, US cities look to surveillance tech. But does it actually work? appeared first on Coda Story.

It was August 2020, and the young political asylum seeker from Uganda was about to walk out of the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in California, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ssemanda eagerly took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. He felt “joy and happiness” — a sensation that he was, at long last, “finally moving out.”

But then he saw the device: a black GPS-enabled electronic ankle monitor. Before Ssemanda was released, an employee at the detention center fastened the electronic bracelet around his leg, handed him a charger, and barked a few instructions at him about the device, a common tool used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to monitor migrants awaiting their immigration hearings. “If anything goes wrong, you’re coming back to the detention center,” Ssemanda recalled him saying. With the bulky monitor newly wrapped around his ankle, Ssemanda felt his mood lurch back to distress. 

“That is where my happiness stopped. That is the moment I regretted. I didn’t get that happiness of someone being free.”

The monitor gave Ssemanda his first scare a few days later when he flew to his new home on the East Coast. A few hours into the flight, his bracelet began beeping loudly, indicating that it was low on batteries. But Ssemanda had placed the charger in a checked bag. Mortified, he ran to the plane’s bathroom and hid there every time the device blared. “I was so uncomfortable, I didn’t want to attract people’s attention,” he recalled. When the plane landed, he couldn’t shake the worry that he had done something wrong, and immigration agents were on their way to scoop him up and put him back in detention.

“You feel like at any time, someone can come and grab you,” he told me. “You feel you cannot move freely. Like you are carrying a burden you can’t expose. I felt like I was a prisoner, inside another prison.”

Across the U.S., a surveillance system tracking the movements of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge or permanent residency in the U.S. is quietly but quickly expanding. The ankle monitor attached to Ssemanda’s leg is one piece of a program run by federal immigration officials known as “Alternatives to Detention,” (ATD) which places people in deportation proceedings and awaiting court hearings under electronic surveillance while their cases are pending. 

Authorities monitor ATD enrollees through three primary methods: the GPS ankle device; a telephonic reporting system that facilitates participant check-ins using voice-recognition technology; and an increasingly common mobile check-in app that uses facial recognition software. Although the program launched in 2004, the number of migrants placed under ATD has skyrocketed under the Biden administration. When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, less than 90,000 people were in the program. Now, more than a quarter million people, including asylum seekers like Ssemanda, are enrolled in the digital surveillance system.

This is due almost exclusively to the adoption of the mobile facial recognition app, SmartLINK. Just a year ago, one-third of all immigrants under digital surveillance were on the app; now, it accounts for 75% of enrollees. It’s unclear how many of these people are asylum seekers. ICE acknowledged a public records request that Coda sent seeking data on this question, but the agency had not fulfilled our request at the time of publication. What we do know is that anyone on ATD — asylum seeker or not — can expect to spend more than a year under the government’s digital eye. The average person is enrolled in the program for 421 days. This trend shows no sign of slowing down. The Biden administration has requested $527 million in funding for ATD in the 2023 fiscal year, an $87 million — or 20% — increase from its 2022 budget. The company overseeing the program in partnership with ICE has the ability to monitor up to 400,000 people in its current contract, according to Axios.

ICE spokespeople and officials at the Department of Homeland Security espouse the technology-driven approach to immigration enforcement as a kinder, gentler alternative to physical detention. But for people like Ssemanda, there was nothing humane or gentle about the ankle monitor. It merely shifted the boundaries of incarceration from cell to self.

“You feel you’re in prison again,” he said, likening the bracelet to an electronic cage that hovered overhead as he tried to carve out a new life in the U.S. It was an unwieldy symbol of his tenuous place in America, a subtle threat.

The monitor also brought up the sensation of being tracked in the country he fled, Uganda, where he was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for his advocacy against the government, mobilizing youth in support of democracy efforts. “I left my country because of certain kinds of problems I had, and then when I came here, I couldn’t believe that I’m the one having that bracelet. That I was facing this kind of situation in the U.S.”

“If they had told me that we are setting you out on the condition that you are going to have a bracelet, I would have told them, please, keep me inside,” he said. When Ssemanda caught up with friends who were still in detention, he would advise them to stay. “I told them, please don’t waste time moving out,” he added. “This bracelet, you won’t feel well. I’m outside, but I’m not okay.” The stigma attached to the ankle monitor, the anxiety produced by its beeps, the sensation that the government could be tracking his movements — it all weighed on him to the point he cried “tears of joy” when it finally came off after three months on his body, thanks to the successful appeals of his immigration attorneys.

Ssemanda’s experiences are consistent with findings from a 2021 report published by the immigrant rights groups Freedom for Immigrants, the Immigrant Defense Project and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. The study cited surveys of approximately 150 immigrants placed under electronic ankle monitoring, in which 90% of respondents said the device negatively affected their mental health, causing psychological harms ranging from anxiety to sleep disruption, social isolation, and depression. Twelve percent of respondents said the shackle led them to thoughts of suicide. Nearly 40% said they believed the monitor’s mental health impact was permanent.

Karlyn Kurichety, an attorney with the border-based migrant rights group Al Otro Lado, which provides legal support to asylum seekers, said ATD’s surveillance system has been “retraumatizing” for clients who have experienced government repression overseas. 

“We work with a lot of clients who are survivors of torture,” she said. “And oftentimes government surveillance in their country of origin was a part of the persecution or was something that led up to severe acts of violence against them.” Kurichety added: “[ATD] really serves no purpose other than just to harass and intimidate survivors, often survivors of violence who are exercising their legal right to seek asylum in this country.”

Roberto, a 36-year-old political asylum seeker from Latin America, said the monitor made him feel as though he was still in confinement. “That has a big impact and even more if you are running away from places where you weren’t free,” explained Roberto, who asked to withhold his country and real name due his ongoing asylum case. “You come from political persecution, running away from people who want to hurt you, from a system that wants to hurt you. And come here looking for help and shelter.”

He added: “The U.S. has been a role model for a lot of countries and if these solutions ended up in the hands of the dictatorships we are running away from, the impact would be truly negative. Imagine you are in a dictatorship and they put this ankle monitor on you for being opposed to the government. So I think the U.S. should think about this. Using these technologies and giving the idea of using them to other governments is a threat.”

The ankle monitor was stressful and psychologically burdensome for Roberto and even seemed to rub off on his young daughter, who recently told him she didn’t like the U.S. “I asked her why, and she answered that she didn’t like the monitor,” he said. “Even though she is 4, she can perceive that it is negative.” 

The latest iteration of ATD has shifted from ankle to face, thanks to SmartLINK, the mobile phone app that people are required to download and use for periodic check-ins with ICE. During check-ins, ATD enrollees must upload a photo of themselves, which is then matched to an existing picture taken during their program enrollment using facial recognition technology. The app also captures the GPS data of participants during check-ins to confirm their location. 

SmartLINK is expanding the boundaries of ICE’s digital monitoring system, this time from a wearable device to something that is less visible but ever-more ubiquitous. This expansion is taking place despite mounting concerns about the program’s negative effects on enrollees, and federal officials’ failure to provide adequate information about SmartLINK’s data collection policies and privacy safeguards. This is no small matter, especially given SmartLINK’s corporate origins. Along with the rest of ATD, SmartLINK is run by B.I. Incorporated, a cattle tracking-turned-prison technology firm and a subsidiary of the private prison company the GEO Group, which operates more than 100 state and federal prisons, detention centers, and other facilities nationwide.

Since the ATD’s inception during the Bush era, B.I. has contracted with ICE to provide its surveillance technology. ICE’s most recent contract with B.I., signed in 2020, allocates $2.2 billion to the company over a five-year period. Critics argue that B.I.’s partnership with ICE creates a financial incentive for the expansion of mass immigrant surveillance. They also say that it contradicts the government’s argument that the program is a genuine “alternative” to detention, given that the company earning the government contract for ATD technology is a subsidiary of one of the nation’s primary for-profit detention providers. 

Jacinta Gonzalez, ​​senior campaign director for Mijente, a group that campaigns against the use of surveillance in immigration enforcement, underlined this point. “To now have the same companies that have been in charge of private detention centers basically shapeshift and now pretend that they're the market for alternatives to detention, and promote that in a way that is really kind of expanding the surveillance web that is in the power and in the hands of ICE, is incredibly concerning,” she said. “It is marketing by a company that is just trying to continue to make a profit off of human suffering.”

“We don't really see these as a true alternative or really any alternative at all because they are still, in essence, punitive. They're surveilling people and restricting their liberty,” explained ​​Layla Razavi, interim co-executive director at the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants. She added: “Alternatives to detention is a phrase that first started being used over a decade ago by advocates to talk about what a vision would look like for a world in which we didn't have immigration detention centers, but instead were welcoming in supporting newly arriving immigrants into this country. And that phrase, as it began to gain steam among the immigrants rights movement and advocates, started to become co-opted by the very private prison companies that were advocating and lobbying the federal government directly for increased resources.”

There has been some pushback to the ATD’s rollout in Washington — more than two-dozen House Democrats recently sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, expressing concern with the program. But the general attitude within the administration seems to be enthusiastic about the tech, said Rebekah Wolf, policy counsel at the D.C.-based nonprofit American Immigration Council. “There is certainly a sense in the administration that there is no appetite for release without some form of surveillance, and so that’s why they are so dramatically increasing these programs. The impression is that this is the only way that they could ever make gains or move forward on some of their promises in reducing detention and restoring asylum at the border.”

Some speculate that the government has turned to SmartLINK because it is vastly more scalable — anyone with a smartphone can download the application and use it — and likely cheaper to implement than placing tens of thousands of people on a GPS tracking ankle bracelet. Julie Mao, deputy director of the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology, recalled working as an immigration attorney in Louisiana in 2014 amid an increase in border crossings. “That’s when we really saw an explosion of ankle shackles happen,” she explained. “I think we’re at a similar inflection point now.” Mao added: “I suspect they are reaching their supply limit for ankle shackles. The logistics of shipping ankle shackles back to the border, ankle shackles breaking, needing to resupply. That is costly and difficult compared to just downloading an app.”

Politically, it’s not hard to see why this would be an appealing approach to Biden administration officials, as Republicans’ bullishness on immigration has long left Democrats on the defensive. Shifting the geography of detention to the digital sphere puts liberal politicians in a different place on the continuum of immigration enforcement, giving them a new narrative, one in which they can fend off attacks from the right of being “soft” on the border while also claiming to take a more “humane” approach than their Republican counterparts.

Surveillance technology is inherently difficult to visualize and illustrate. “It effectively depoliticizes the technology because people can't get it in their heads,” said Austin Kocher, an assistant professor focusing on U.S. immigration enforcement with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research center based at Syracuse University. He continued: “Whereas the Republicans want very simple ideas and very simple concrete material things that are very easy to point to and mobilize around. Democrats are much more effective at sort of depoliticizing these technologies through their diffusion in society.”

The government has made little information publicly available about SmartLINK’s privacy and data collection policies. Since B.I. is a private company, it is not subject to federal public records laws.

Advocates have tried, and failed, to get more details about SmartLINK from the federal government. In September 2021, a coalition of immigrant’s rights groups filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with ICE seeking information “pertaining to the collection of data from the SmartLINK application, the retention, sharing, and use of such data, and the nature of monitoring through the application.” ICE never responded, and last month the organizations sued the agency under FOIA to try to obtain the information.

The lawsuit alleges that BI’s privacy policy for SmartLINK “allows for extremely broad collection of data,” and points to language in the policy, which states that the app collects  “individuals’ names, contact information, social security number;” “information such as facial images from photos and voice samples from audio files;” “[g]eolocation data about physical movements and location;” and “App activity and other usage activity such as Internet and similar network activity.”

Julie Mao of Just Futures Law, one of the groups that submitted the records request and is involved in the FOIA litigation, said she and other advocates are concerned that ICE “has not provided oversight over the contracting company that it’s using.” The agency and BI, she added, “are hiding the ball on what data is being collected on individuals.” In addition to Mao’s concerns about the app’s data retention and collection policies, there is a lack of clarity about whether the data collected via SmartLINK is accessible to other government agencies.

When Coda inquired about these practices with B.I., the company referred us to ICE. A spokesperson for the agency did not address questions about the app’s data collection, retention, and sharing policies, but stated that ICE is “committed to protecting privacy rights, and civil rights and liberties of all participants within the Alternatives to Detention Program.”

According to a fact sheet about ATD on GEO’s website, “All data collected through [electronic monitoring] is the property of ICE, not GEO or BI. Any biometric information collected through technology tools resides solely on the participant’s electronic device and is not transferred, transmitted or downloaded to any other device or system.” The company cites an excerpt of B.I.’s contract with ICE, which stipulates that “the Contractor shall not retain, use, sell, disseminate, or dispose of any government data/records or deliverables.” It also states that B.I. “complies with all federal privacy laws” but this doesn’t mean much in the U.S., where there is no comprehensive federal privacy legislation. One page on the website promises that B.I. “does not track individuals, collect background data, or conduct any ‘surveillance’ activities,” while another limits this pledge solely to “‘surveillance’ activities.”

In 2019, ICE told the Congressional Research Service that SmartLINK does not monitor SmartLINK’s enrollees’ locations through their phones “as a GPS monitor would” and only gathers location data during participants’ check-ins. But Mao noted that the application has the technical capability to monitor enrollees’ locations in real-time. People in ATD have expressed fears that the app is monitoring their whereabouts beyond the designated check-ins. 

“Our concern is that this program is being used as this mass surveillance control system for immigrants,” she said.

The privacy policy for SmartLINK offers a more detailed picture than what appears on the GEO website, including a long list of data that the app does collect — location data, photos and videos taken through the app, audio files, voice samples, and audio messages sent through the app, and information about a user’s device, including IP addresses and other unique identifiers. The policy acknowledges that third parties “may use automatic information collection technologies to collect information about you or your device.”

When Coda Story contacted B.I. for comment on the above policy, the company confirmed that the March 2022 document is up to date. Mao said the policy “confirms that BI is collecting a tremendous amount of sensitive data through its mobile application and sharing that information with third parties.” This is no small matter — independent research has shown that when this kind of data is available to third parties, it can be incredibly easy for anyone, from digital marketers to government agencies, to pinpoint a person’s identity and gather an enormous amount of information about their behavior.

And ICE already has access to a bulk of Americans’ data. An eye-opening investigation from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology recently found that the agency has built a sweeping national surveillance apparatus that has the ability to spy on most people in the U.S. by accessing state and local government databases and purchasing data from private data brokers, which package and sell peoples’ data for profit.

Like most technologies, SmartLINK doesn’t always work like it should. Problems like service outages or a phone falling into the toilet, that would normally just be cause for frustration, can trigger a deep sense of dread for enrollees, as can simple malfunctions. Juan, a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Central America, has been on SmartLINK for the last year. Before that, he was placed on an ankle monitor. One afternoon, he attempted to submit a photo of himself for his weekly check-in, but he couldn’t tell if the upload had successfully gone through. Shortly after the scheduled check-in, an employee overseeing the check-ins with B.I. called Juan and told him to upload a new photo on the app, which Juan did.

A few minutes later, Juan got another call, this time from a different employee. This person had a harsher tone, Juan recalled, asking why he didn’t take a picture, and telling him that his failure could result in a penalty. The remark upset Juan, who told him he intended to call his lawyer. “You can talk to your lawyer, the president, it doesn’t matter to me,” the employee replied. Juan instantly worried that a technical mistake made with the app could lead to serious consequences and even his possible re-detention. So, he explained, “I had to put my head down and do as he said.”

He added: “Sometimes I asked myself, why is there all this monitoring? So many photos, so much information. I think this is a question that not just me, but everyone in the program is asking. It makes no sense. As migrants, they act like we are criminals, risks to the community. But we are not.”

Juan is not the only person for whom SmartLINK’s technology has proven stressful. Some users have taken to expressing their frustration with the app’s functionality on the App Store, where SmartLINK has a 2.8 rating. In reviews, multiple users state they had trouble logging into the app and uploading photos and location data. “When I try to log in, I have to make 3 attempts every time,” one wrote. “Then today I never got the alert that I had a check-in. This is a pretty major flaw when your freedom relies on it.” (GEO disputes claims that the app routinely malfunctions, writing that “an average of 88.4% of SmartLINK check-ins were completed successfully over the last five years.”)

A report published this week by a coalition of immigrant’s rights groups found the app’s check-in process is emotionally taxing for enrollees and fears of constant surveillance trigger anxiety. The study published testimonials from 11 people on ATD. One respondent, who came to the U.S. from South Africa, said “SmartLINK reminds me of Apartheid in my country. The constant harassment by police everyday because you’re a member of a certain political party.”

Carlos, 39, has been on SmartLINK for about a year. He described the app as “the same” as the ankle monitor. “Physically, it’s different. But it’s the same uncertainty, worry. The only thing that changes is the system.” Carlos believes ATD’s surveillance has affected the psychological well-being of his entire family, including his three teenage daughters. He describes it as a “shadow” that hangs over the family. “Every time I get a call from an unknown number and they see it, they think that it’s from ICE asking me where I am. It’s the same fear.”

When it comes to migration, the turn to technology as the more “humane” way to enforce policy has followed a predictable narrative pattern. Criticisms arise with the status quo; new tech crops up to address said concerns and save the government money, and then the process repeats itself.

Each fork in the road to a digitally-enforced border and immigration system, however, beckons unintended consequences. Technologies first used on immigrants become susceptible to “mission creep” and later expand to other people and areas. “We know that oftentimes surveillance technologies are first used on marginalized populations at the border, against immigrant communities as a means of surveillance and then spreads to other places as well,” said Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy and surveillance.

Last year, Coda reported on communities that are subjected to constant technological monitoring along the U.S.-Mexico border. A resident of a town in Southern Arizona enveloped by surveillance technology said the area’s digital infrastructure made her feel “paranoid” about privacy and government intrusion and influenced how she moved around town. During the 2020 protests held in response to the police killing of George Floyd, CBP deployed drones to more than a dozen cities across the U.S., which logged hundreds of hours of video footage in a digital network managed by the Department of Homeland Security and accessible to local police departments.

Mario Perez, whose experience in detention led him to become an immigration organizer and activist, was on SmartLINK for three years. He began to worry about the data the app collected on him after learning of an ICE raid at a poultry plant in Mississippi. Nearly 700 people were arrested, thanks in part to data that authorities had captured from workers’ GPS monitors. Headlines about the raid made Mario wonder about the kind of access immigration officials had to the data on his phone. “It just seems like it’s a mess,” he said. 

“With reports about general surveillance in the U.S. and general American citizens being surveilled by ICE, if this isn’t worrying everybody — I don’t care if you are an immigrant or under one of these programs — this is just getting started from what we’re seeing. We don’t know far this is going to be taken. It’s really scary.”

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning book brings readers into the lives of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, and his rebellious cartoonist son, Art. The novel unspools two parallel journeys: Art’s attempts to document, understand and ultimately write a graphic novel about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Vladek’s terrifying odyssey from pre-war Poland to Auschwitz. 

As the novel flashes between past and present — from Art’s experiences pleading with his father to tell him his story, to Vladek’s path to the camps — two figures hover like ghosts over its pages. There is Art’s mother, Anja, who survived the Holocaust with Vladek but took her own life decades later, and Art’s older brother Richieu, who died during the war at the age of six, before Art was born. Throughout the text, Anja and Richieu are ever-present reminders of all that was lost during, and after, the war. 

Maus explores how those traumas haunt the two survivors of the nuclear family — Art and Vladek — whose relationship is both tender and deeply tumultuous. Vladek admonishes Art when he shows up at his home late; Art shuts down his father’s appeals for a closer relationship. In one scene, Art explodes at Vladek when he learns his father burned Anja’s diaries after her suicide. 

“God damn you!” he fumes. “You murderer!” Vladek recoils. “To your father you yell this way? Even to your friends you should never yell this way.”

The novel’s experimental qualities are not limited to Spiegelman’s fluid use of present and past. He also famously depicted all the characters in the book as having human bodies, but the heads of other creatures: Jews are drawn in the book as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Brits as fish, Americans as dogs and Swedes as reindeer. This device, which has fueled decades of controversy about the book, carries with it a subversive playfulness, giving readers some emotional distance from the story while simultaneously reappopriating the antisemitic trope of Jews as vermin, which was common in Nazi propaganda. The cover of the book also prominently features a swastika looming above Vladek and Anja.

But when the McMinn County school board convened, its members were not there to dissect the book’s family psychodrama or its characters’ emotional complexities. Instead, they voiced their objections to a handful of swear words in the book and a partially obscured cartoon image of a topless woman.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” one board member argued. “We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

After some back and forth, the board voted unanimously to withdraw the book from the curriculum. Minutes from the discussion were later published on the district’s website. Local media soon reported on the ban, and it quickly snowballed into an international news story, unleashing a flood of headlines and editorials.

“They’re totally focused on some bad words that are in the book,” said Spiegelman, in a CNN interview about the ban. “I think they’re so… afraid of having to defend the decision to teach Maus that it led to this kind of daffily myopic response.”

But was it really just swear words and nudity that made the board uncomfortable? Another person who spoke at the meeting referred to the book’s depiction of Nazi violence, pointing to an image from the novel showing four mice, representing Polish Jews, who were executed in the town square where Vladek lived. 

“It shows people hanging, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he asked. “It is not wise or healthy.”

“I can understand why people would feel cautious about that kind of violence,” said Hillary Chute, an English professor at Northeastern University who co-authored the 2011 book MetaMaus with Spiegelman, which describes Spiegelman’s process and explores the public reception of the text. 

“But the idea that this school in Tennessee is promoting it by showing it seems wrong to me. If they want to use the Holocaust in their eighth-grade curriculum, they're going to have to figure out what they want because there is no kinder, gentler Holocaust. And that's part of the power of Maus as a book.”

“Maus doesn’t wrap up the trauma narrative,” she added. “The book is very much about Vladek’s experience and not a watered-down version of it. And part of his experience is the swastika. Its horror and its power.”

Chute suggested the school board’s real objection to the text has much more to do with the horrors it depicts. She compared the charge of promoting violence with concerns about the book’s use of swastika imagery. In both cases, critics decontextualize these images, and portray the text as promoting — instead of testifying to — the violence and Nazi propaganda that Vladek witnessed.

The McMinn County school board’s response to Maus follows a longstanding American tradition of paranoia around comics, and in some cases, all-out censorship. In the McCarthy era, fears of the genre’s “corrupting” influence on youth ushered in a moral panic that was on full display at a 1954 congressional hearing on the links between comics and juvenile delinquency. This gave rise to a set of rules known as The Comics Code, which sought to eliminate objectionable content like sex and violence from comic books and similar media. The Code was finally shelved in 2011.

Biz Nijdam, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia whose research explores the intersection of comics and history, said peoples’ comic-related anxieties, born out in censorship and banning efforts, speak to the medium’s unique ability to engage readers at the visual level. 

“The way that visual media can articulate things that we can’t express with words scares people,” she told me. “And really conservative readers are afraid of what it will do to our children, because of the emotional response it creates in its reader. People can’t really do the work of ensuring that readers are reading things correctly, so instead, they just censor it.”

McMinn County is not the only place where the pioneering text has struck a nerve. While the book has been translated into at least thirty languages and is celebrated as one of the most influential graphic novels in history, it has also courted controversy all over the world. In its earlier days, Maus was scorned in Israel. It has been censored in Russia, and narrowly escaped the same fate in Germany. In Poland, Maus was subject to a staged book-burning, and its publishers were formally accused of “defaming” the nation.

The cover of Maus, which we cannot show here due to copyright protections, depicts the large face of a cartoon cat, at the center of a massive swastika. Two mice wearing long coats huddle beneath the startling symbol. The book’s depictions of swastikas, on the cover and throughout its pages, have been a top target of censorship threats outside the U.S.

Maus was taken out of bookstores in Russia in 2014, after the Duma passed a law forbidding Nazi propaganda and insignia, including swastikas. Russian booksellers had little choice but to remove copies of the text from their shelves, effectively erasing a work of Holocaust survivor testimony — under the auspices of rooting out Nazi propaganda. 

The cover of the book also caused problems after it was sent to a publisher in Germany, where it is illegal to display the swastika. The publisher asked Spiegelman to remove the swastika from the cover, but he refused. It was only after Spiegelman’s editor found a loophole in the law that allowed for the publication of Nazi imagery in works of serious historical research, a designation given to Maus, that the book was published.

In an eerie twist, Germany’s publication of the book, swastikas and all, made it a desirable object for at least one neo-Nazi who couldn’t find the image elsewhere. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman recalled watching a documentary about Germany’s skinheads and unexpectedly catching a glimpse of a Maus poster in a neo-Nazi’s bedroom. “It was the only swastika he could get, poor fella!” he joked.

Once it was published in Germany, Spiegelman wrote in MetaMaus that its reception was “intense.” He described being confronted by a reporter at a book fair in Frankfurt, who asked him if he thought a comic book about Auschwitz was in “bad taste.” Spiegelman told him no. 

“I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste,” he replied. 

A few years later, Spiegelman traveled to Germany to accept an award for the German edition of the book. “It’s a strange thing for a mouse to receive an award from a gathering of cats, for telling a story of how cats killed mice,” he told the audience. “Giving me this award could be seen as the result of a guilty conscience, a kind of War Reparations to a child of a survivor.”

In Israel today, Maus is largely heralded as a groundbreaking work of historical testimony. But when it was published decades ago, the book’s reception was not so warm. Spiegelman’s Israeli publisher was threatened with a libel suit by the descendant of a character in the book, who Spiegelman depicted as a Nazi-installed Jewish policeman in Poland. At a 1997 lecture about the novel in Tel Aviv, Cornell University linguistics professor Dorit Abusch was met with boos, cries of protest and even a walkout. 

“[The audience] found it very insulting, the combination between comics and the Holocaust,” Abusch told me. “Because comics are perceived as low art, funny, vulgar. And the Holocaust is a very serious and tragic subject. So, the combination kind of disturbed them.”

But opinions have shifted in the country over the years. The website of Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, now includes a page about Maus and its educational value. Spiegelman’s exploration of transgenerational trauma and his fraught relationship with his father also inspired a new genre of the graphic novel dealing specifically with Holocaust testimony. 

“If you look at the small library of Holocaust memoirs to come out after that, they’re really all in dialogue with Maus,” the comics scholar Nijdam explained. 

One example is the Israeli illustrator Michel Kichka’s graphic novel, Second Generation: Things I Never Told My Father, which was published in Hebrew in 2013 and reflects on the formative moments in his childhood with a survivor father. Kichka told Haaretz the idea for his book was born out of reading Maus for the first time. 

“I felt a strong connection between myself and Spiegelman from the very moment I sat on a bench in the street and read it from cover to cover,” he said. “It wasn’t just the fact that we’re both cartoonists, but also the similarities between our stories and our father’s stories.”

Spiegelman’s book was also hugely influential for comic artists who didn’t share his family’s Holocaust past, but sought to explore their own cultural histories and identities through the graphic form. Gene Luen Yang, the cartoonist who wrote the 2006 graphic novel and National Book Award finalist “American Born Chinese,” told the Washington Post he first read Maus in his late teens. “Art Spiegelman set the standard for the rest of us… He gave us something to chase after.” 

Since the publication of Maus, memoirs have become a beloved subgenre of graphic novels, establishing a new medium for authors and readers to engage with history and memory.

The book’s most dramatic reaction came from Poland. Spiegelman's decision to portray non-Jewish Poles as cartoon pigs was met with widespread anger and offense inside and outside of Poland, and continues to be a source of controversy today. 

Maus was translated into Polish and published by Polish journalist Piotr Bikont in 2001. Soon thereafter, an angry crowd staged a protest in front of Bikont’s office and set the book ablaze. During the demonstration, Bikont donned a pig mask and waved at the protestors from his office window. 

“As he described it to me, he said he felt like the King of Denmark who wore a yellow star out of solidarity with the Jews,” Spiegelman recalled in MetaMaus. “He put on his pig mask in solidarity with the Poles who were burning the book.”

Even outside Poland, the pig metaphor and the novel’s portrayal of Polish people have generated pushback. They made it all the way to Pasadena, California, where, about a decade ago, a Polish American asked the city’s public library system to take Maus off shelves over its depiction of Polish people. “Maus made him uncomfortable, so he didn't want other people to read it,” explained an employee of the library in a 2012 article. It’s a criticism that lingers even today. 

Of the Polish reaction, Spiegelman suggested in MetaMaus: “There seems to be something deeply problematic about the Polish ability to assimilate the past. It proves that the book actually hit something alive, a nerve that needs to be cauterized.”

Tomasz Lysak, an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Warsaw, shed some light on that same sensitivity.

“The official line of Polish commemoration is the Holocaust was a great tragedy, but we couldn't really do anything about it,” he explained. “We were trying to help but couldn't do too much.” 

Lysak believes part of the response is rooted in a feeling that Poland needs to defend itself and its reputation abroad — it reflects a discomfort with stories that contradict nationally sanctioned narratives around the war and the Holocaust. Critics of the book’s pig metaphor, he added, “could be offended by the fact that most Poles are represented in a way that doesn't show them in a good light. But we have to take into consideration the fact that this is a Holocaust survival story. And Vladek Spiegelman ended up in Auschwitz because of some actions of Polish characters in the past.”

In MetaMaus, Spiegelman reflected on the different cultural responses to Maus he saw while promoting the book and conducting interviews for it at various points in time. In Sweden, Spiegelman described feeling othered — but in a good-natured way — recalling the time a journalist cheerily compared him to Woody Allen. In France, which has a rich tradition of comic art, the book’s graphic form was embraced and taken seriously, with small-time newspapers analyzing the novel’s artistic choices and illustrations. In Italy, interviewers seemed more interested in the book’s tumultuous father-son relationship than in its narration of the Holocaust and Second World War.

It can be hard to parse through the parallels between these objections at first blush. Some people are mad about cartoon pigs. Others are upset about comic nudity. Many are plainly uncomfortable with the book’s depictions of Nazi violence and propaganda, even though they were a central part of Vladek’s experience of the Holocaust. But among those people who criticized the text in the U.S. and Poland especially, you can see a pattern emerge, in which peoples’ discomfort with the history Spiegelman presents is displaced onto the comic form.

Polish critics who rejected Spiegelman’s work seemed unable to see themselves in this story of a Polish Jewish man who survived the Holocaust and encountered both kind and cruel Polish people along the way. For some, the simpler response was to reject the cartoon image of themselves. As Nijdam put it, “Instead of being upset about the history, they’re upset about the pigs.” 

The McMinn County school board’s rejection of the book can also be seen as an expression of unease with a form of storytelling that does not offer redemption through suffering or make heroes out of its protagonists, but rather, presents the history, and its characters, without sentimentalization or embellishments. 

Spiegelman’s honesty, ambiguity and lack of satisfying resolution run counter to the very American (and Hollywood-esque) impulse to search for heroism, or redemption, out of pain. He refuses to refract the horrors of the Holocaust into a cathartic moral takeaway and is untethered to the need to present the Jewish experience in the war with a neat and tidy resolution.  

Spiegelman himself may have said it best in MetaMaus when explaining his decision to present Vladek in all of his complexities: “It had never occurred to me to try to create a heroic figure, and certainly not to create a survivor who’s ennobled by his suffering — a very Christian notion, the survivor as martyr. And that meant a warts-and-all relationship that included being really unpleasant.”

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Otherwise, the 47-year-old knew plenty about his roots. He grew up steeped in his family’s stories, and fears, about Mississippi. He knew his ancestors were enslaved on a sprawling plantation about twenty miles outside of the picturesque town where William Faulkner grew up, and some of them were buried in a nearby cemetery lined with weathered headstones. He knew the slave owners of the plantation were Irish, and he knew, through a DNA test, that he had some Irish heritage, too. And he knew, from a story passed down from his grandmother, that a white man thrust a double-barrel gun in his great-grandfather’s mouth and stole his land. 

He just never knew about the lynching. Until he saw the photo.

The first time Tarrell caught a glimpse of the plantation, a chill came over his body. “You could feel it,” he recalled, winding down a lonely road in Mississippi. It was a stormy day in mid-December, and we were driving to the property where his ancestors were enslaved. The sky was dark and moody, and tall weeds shivered in the wind. The weight of it all hung in the air. “It’s heavy,” he told me, pulling up to a white house overlooking an open field.

Tarrell led me to a tangle of brush at the edge of the house’s lawn. He crouched down, scanning the earth for a budding rosemary plant. When he found it, he gave me a nod. “Here’s where we did it,” he said, pointing to the dirt. We were looking at the de-facto grave of William Steen, whose lynching was swallowed up by more than a century of silence.

Growing up, Tarrell knew nothing about Steen’s death, or that they were related. Nobody in his family did. Like many lynchings of that era, there are few public accounts of what happened. What we do know comes from two short newspaper articles published in the days after the killing: Steen, a former employee at a railroad shop, was hung by a mob on July 30, 1893, near Paris, Mississippi, about 30 minutes down the road from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “He boasted of being criminally intimate with an estimable white woman,” explained an article published the day after the killing. A second article described Steen as a “negro of ill-repute.”

It’s unclear if Steen was buried, or when the memory of his death began to fade. By the time Tarrell learned about it, nearly 130 years had passed. “I feel like I’m the voice for the dead,” he said.

Tarrell found out about two years ago while scrolling through his Facebook newsfeed. That’s when he came across a picture from America’s national lynching memorial of a rust-colored rectangular column inscribed with the names of seven lynching victims from Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Tarrell lived. He clicked on the photo and glanced at the names. When he saw William Steen, he paused. He knew he was related to a line of Steens from the same part of Mississippi. Could he have ties to this one?

Tarrell messaged the author of the Facebook post. She told him the lynching took place near the plantation where his family was enslaved, and the general area where they later lived. Tarrell reached out to a few family genealogy experts, and they began investigating the connection. Eventually, they concluded that Steen, the lynching victim, was the brother or cousin of Tarrell’s great-great-great grandfather.

Tarrell shared his findings with the members of the racial justice group documenting local lynchings, and they decided to arrange a long-overdue memorial for Steen in May 2021. Tarrell chose the property of the former plantation because of its proximity to his family’s ancestral cemetery. About 60 people showed up, including many of Tarrell’s relatives.

The realization bowled Tarrell over. He couldn’t believe that if he hadn’t checked Facebook, the whole story would have been wiped from his family’s memory. But he also didn’t think any of it would have been particularly surprising to people in Mississippi. The first time Tarrell drove to the former plantation, about a decade ago, a white friend told him to call her in two hours or she would alert the local chief of police. “They’re still active out there,” she warned. “The Klan.”  

When I traveled with Tarrell to the site of the former plantation and Steen memorial, about thirty minutes after we arrived, Tarrell led me to a tall cluster of weeds along the side of the road. He wanted to show me a historical marker identifying the nearby cemetery as a burial site for Black families after the Civil War. “Somebody shot bullets in it,” he said. But as Tarrell sifted through the brush, he realized the historical marker was nowhere to be found. He turned to me, incredulous.

“Somebody took it,” he said.

Steen was one of about 6,500 Black Americans lynched in a cluster of Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Mississippi was home to more lynchings than any other state in the country. Its legacy of violence stretches right up to the modern day — haunting family histories, memory, and behavior. When Tarrell’s grandmother learned he was quietly courting a white girl in high school, in the 1990s, she had an immediate, angry response: You could get lynched. “Those goddamn white folks gonna hang you,” she fumed. She wanted to protect him from the Mississippi she knew.

Lynchings weren’t hidden. They were often a deliberately public spectacle, drawing throngs of cheery white spectators who posed, smiling, in photos in front of the brutalized bodies, or brought home pieces of the victims as mementos. Like the Black man burned at the stake in 1899, dismembered, and sliced “into pieces, bones crushed into small bits and disposed of as souvenirs,” according to a newspaper account from the time. To deepen the terror, mobs would occasionally deposit victims’ mutilated bodies in Black neighborhoods and communities. In 1917, thousands sung Confederate hymns as they watched a Black man burned alive and decapitated in Tennessee. His severed head was then thrown onto Memphis’ Beale Street, the epicenter of the city’s Black business district. Such public, brutal displays of violence were intended to send an unambiguous message to Black Americans: Stay in your place, or else. 

The federal government tried, and failed, to step in. By the 1950s, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, but not one of them passed; they were often thwarted by Southern white Senators. The consequences of inaction were deep and long-lasting. “More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of Black advancement, independence, and citizenship in many small towns for half a century,” wrote Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in “On the Courthouse Lawn,” an examination of lynchings in the 1900s. Even today, research has found that the Southern counties with the highest rates of lynching also have the lowest rates of Black voter registration.

Lynchings were so traumatizing that some witnesses stayed silent about them their entire lives.

Tarrell belongs to a movement popping up from Arkansas to Alabama attempting to awaken the country’s memory of these dormant histories, by marking the landscape with echoes of its violent past. 

Despite thousands of documented lynchings, America’s first national lynching memorial did not open until 2018 – in Alabama, where an estimated 300 Black Americans were lynched from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and Confederate Memorial Day is still an official state holiday.

After more than a century of failed attempts, the U.S. Senate — for so long an obstacle to federal anti-lynching legislation — finally approved a bill designating lynching as a hate crime punishable up to 30 years in prison. On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed the historic bill into law. Still, as the country tiptoes toward a truth, it remains disabled by the long tail of its silence.

Silence distorts memory in various ways. It can happen when a nation, collectively, refuses to engage with the realities of its past, opening up space for revisionist histories and feel good counter-narratives that gloss over the horrors of the past. Sometimes national silence is summoned as an act of avoidance; other times, to serve a political or ideological agenda.

But silence also flows from the collective to the individual. A society can forget on a mass scale, not when the government imposes amnesia as a political project, but when people refuse to look within — to dig into the messy and complex family biographies that turn memory into a landmine, and forgetting into a psychological salve. Even the country held up as the global exemplar of historical reconciliation, Germany, is still haunted by the ghosts of family memory and perpetrator guilt. 

When it comes to facing the past, Germany is often praised as the poster child of success. The country even has a specific term for the painful process of reconciliation that unfolded in the decades after the Holocaust: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

The word, which has no equivalent in English, means “working off of the past.” It is occasionally used interchangeably with the English phrase “memory culture” to describe Germany’s wide-ranging and layered approach to Holocaust memory, which includes literature, education, art, popular culture, and physical memorials. I first learned the term in an email with a German historian while preparing to travel to Berlin. I began to use it almost obsessively when I arrived, and not just because there was absolutely no way I could pronounce Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. The idea of a collective, nationally sanctioned culture of remembrance intrigued me, maybe because it felt so impossible to imagine in America, a country perpetually at war with itself over how to remember the past (see: Critical Race Theory).

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung did not unfold easily or quickly, however. Most Germans were not particularly eager to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust after the war. Although the Allies imposed a denazification program in West Germany, its government was still chock full of former members of the Reich a decade after the war; in 1957, nearly 80% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry were former Nazis.

Meanwhile, narratives of victimhood were pervasive across Germany. There was a widespread feeling among Germans that they suffered tremendously during the war, and were its real victims. In the late 1960s, a wave of youth activism began to challenge some of these attitudes, as a younger generation moved to confront the country — and their parents — over its Nazi past.

A decade later, the release of the 1978 American  television miniseries “Holocaust” had an enormous cultural impact across Germany. Nearly 20 million West Germans tuned in to watch the show about a fictional Jewish family. It brought many viewers into the lives and stories of victims for the first time, and is widely seen as catalyzing the country’s reckoning.

In the 1990s, another crucial shift occurred when Germany reunified and memory culture became absorbed by the state: “In order to become accepted globally, a lot of money was put into mastering one’s past, putting up commemoration sites and museums,” Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, a German historian and the director of Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism, told me. Public memorials and museums later popped up across the country, including the famous Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Since then, Germany’s atonement has been invoked as a global success story: an example of a country that bravely dealt with its past and became a model for other countries’ long overdue historical reckonings.

In America, scholars and journalists have increasingly begun to talk about Germany’s process in conversations about race and reconciliation, poring over Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung for clues about how the U.S. can meaningfully confront its history of slavery and racial violence. Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student.

The Atlanta-raised, Berlin-based scholar Susan Neiman wrote an influential book about what the U.S. can learn from Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, inspiring an outpouring of articles in magazines and newspapers dissecting Germany’s reckoning in an American context. One of the most recognizable figures in America’s lynching memorial movement, the pioneering American civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, has often contrasted the two countries’ versions of remembrance, comparing America’s South “littered with the iconography of the Confederacy” to Berlin, awash in Holocaust memorials. Stevenson, the founder of America’s first national lynching memorial, said his initiative drew inspiration from Germany’s landscape of Holocaust memory and homages to the victims of Hitler’s killing machine.

“When you go to Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed next to the homes of families that were abducted during the Holocaust,” Stevenson remarked. “There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany.”

On a rainy morning in October, Gisela Martin placed a rose on top of a freshly polished gold stone. She stood outside of her mother’s last residence, an apartment building in a busy Berlin neighborhood, before she was murdered by the Nazis in the late 1930s. Martin was joined by her nephew, son, and a handful of locals, to lay a memorial stone in the sidewalk in front of the building. The brass block, roughly the size of a CD case, is inscribed with Martin’s mother’s name, birthday, and the dates she was deported and murdered by the Nazis. Rain and wind pelted the group, and Martin — petite, in a dark peacoat — stood quietly next to her nephew as volunteers placed the stone in the ground. It was jarring for Martin to see the truth of her mother’s murder, a long-guarded family secret, on the pavement for anyone who walked past it to see.

There are more than 75,000 of these memorial stones, called Stolpersteine, across Europe, making the project the largest decentralized Holocaust memorial in the world. 

“What really works are these little stones,” Michael Naumann, Germany’s Culture of Secretary from 1998 to 2000 as the government finalized Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, told me: “Because these are individual names. The only way you can actually teach the Holocaust is to grab you by your heart.”

In Berlin alone, the streets are studded with roughly 8,500 gold squares, which are impossible to miss once they’ve been pointed out. They glisten off some of the busiest avenues in the city and quiet side streets, in front of apartments, restaurants, cafes, and commercial buildings. For people who choose to read what they say, the individual stories within each stone force the kind of intimate, and personal, confrontation with Germany’s past that can get lost in the larger and more abstract memorials.

Gisela Martin’s mother was the casualty of a little-known Nazi extermination program called Aktion T4, which claimed the lives of about 300,000 people with disabilities between 1939 and 1945. The “euthanasia campaign,” as the Nazis called it, sought out to eradicate German society of people with mental and physical impairments. The victims were among the first targets of the Nazi regime, described as the Holocaust’s “trial run.” The medical establishment was involved in every step of the murder campaign, beginning with identifying victims and ending with overseeing and carrying out the killings. By 1941, the T4 program had exterminated some 70,000 people in death centers across Germany by lethal injection and gassing.

Gisela Martin’s mother, Hedwig Daum, was forced from her home and taken to a psychiatric hospital in December 1937, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Daum’s relatives are skeptical of the diagnosis, but say she was under a considerable amount of stress at the time and may have had a nervous breakdown). The following year, officials involved with the program forcibly sterilized her — another feature of the T4 program — and brought her to a psychiatric hospital. She was released, and then shortly thereafter brought back to a psychiatric unit, where she remained imprisoned until she was murdered on May 29, 1939.

Martin, who is 88-years-old, was four when Daum died, and her recollections of her mother are fuzzy. Memories come in abrupt flashes: sitting on her mom’s lap while food simmered on the oven, filling the apartment with rich scents, or waving to her through the window of the psychiatric ward. But a memory of her last glimpse of her mother when the authorities came to take her away is intact. “She fought and screamed like crazy, and my sister held me in her arms,” she told me. “It was terrible.” Daum’s only wish, according to medical records later obtained by her grandson, Reiner Lenz, “was to return to her children.” 

The circumstances around Daum’s death were kept for decades by only Gisela Martin, her siblings, and her father. Even among themselves, the topic remained a source of silence. “It was simply not discussed,” Martin said. The stigma and shame surrounding mental illness were so deeply rooted that Martin even kept the truth of her mother’s death from her husband. “I was afraid that if he heard about the psychiatric clinic, he would think that I'm also not right in the head if I lost my temper,” she explained. “It was kept secret.”

Martin watched solemnly as a volunteer cemented the plaque into the pavement and rinsed it off with water, leaving a gilded block nestled inside the street’s drab row of gray cobblestones. Then she crouched down, gingerly set a rose on top of the stone, and wiped away a tear. For Martin and her family, the unveiling of the marker served as a corrective against the country’s legacy of postwar amnesia about the Nazis’ crimes against the disabled. After so many decades of silence, Martin told me she was “finally ready to talk about what happened.”

The next in line to place a rose over the stone was Martin’s nephew, Reiner Lenz, who spent years researching Daum’s biography and tracking down her medical files to find the official record of her death.

“After the war, nobody talked about people like my grandmother,” he recalled. “They said, ‘forget it.’ But we shouldn’t forget. The death of my grandmother has left a gap for her children and grandchildren that has never been closed.” He believes the stone represents a quiet rejection of the country’s rising tide of right-wing nationalism. “It is intended to commemorate all the sick and denounced sick who need special protection by society,” he said. “It should be a reminder to all of us never to allow such an injustice again.”

Visiting concentration camps is not mandatory in Germany, but it is encouraged and in some schools required. One morning, I joined a class of about 20 high school students on a tour of Sachsenhausen, a Nazi death camp outside Berlin. Nobody in the class had visited a concentration camp before. They gathered quietly around their guide, a German history buff in her early thirties. She carried a black tote bag with “it’s a beautiful life without Nazis” emblazoned across the front in bubbly pink letters.

In recent years, Germany’s sites of remembrance have become a flashpoint among figures associated with the country’s far-right movement, who bemoan the country’s memory culture as a source of national shame and guilt. In 2017, a politician with the country’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, assailed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame in the capital.” The party grabbed headlines the following year when a group of its constituents interrupted a tour at Sachsenhausen, questioning the existence of gas chambers, and an AfD politician called on a local mayor to ban Stolpersteine, those gold memorial stones, calling the country’s remembrance culture “a dictatorship of memory.” In their narration, the act of remembering is akin to an assault on the German identity, and nowhere are the country’s memory efforts more visible than in its memorial sites.

I decided to join the high schoolers as they toured Sachsenhausen because I wanted to understand what Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung meant to a generation that was further removed from its history than their parents or grandparents. The students passed under the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and walked into the camp, somber as the guide led them around its grounds, through the reconstructed barracks where prisoners slept and the gas chamber and execution site where tens of thousands were murdered from 1936 to 1945.

About halfway through the tour, the guide paused and withdrew two photos from her tote. She asked the class to describe them. The first was a black and white picture taken from the camp’s watchtower in 1941, looming over a neat row of prisoners with the edge of a machine gun in the frame. She explained that it was a propaganda picture of the camp used by the Nazis to convey a message of order, intimidation, and control. The second was a fuzzier snapshot of an inmate kneeling in front of a group of SS officers, including one who was laughing. This photo, she said, made the officers look cruel and arrogant, and the prisoner sympathetic. She then asked the students if they thought the picture was a propaganda photo. The class agreed that the picture portrayed the soldiers in a negative light, and therefore was not used in Hitler’s propaganda machine.

The guide told me the goal of the exercise was to show students how to distinguish between propaganda and reality — and to challenge the myth that everyday Germans didn’t know what was really going on at the time. “It’s important to show that ideas of the concentration camp were distributed very widely.”

At the end of the tour, one of the students approached me and struck up a conversation. I asked her about what she took from the guide’s photo lesson. “It was amazing to see the actual faces of the people and to see who they were because they look like normal people,” she said. “But you imagine them as monsters.” How did she talk about this history with her parents? “We don’t talk about it at all, actually,” she replied. As we chatted, a handful of her classmates migrated over, and within a minute, I was surrounded by 10.

The students told me that visiting the camp was different than reading about it. But then the conversation drifted into what it meant to learn about the Holocaust as Germans, and how they believe the rest of the world views them. “When you go to other countries, they go, ‘Oh, the German guys, they are the people who started the wars and everything. They have stereotypes,” one girl said. “We are a new generation.” Another student chimed in: “We cannot be blamed for this.” In the exchange, I saw edges of the emotions exploited by the far-right in its weaponization of memory politics.

As the two were talking, one of their peers made a face. Germans are still voting for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he pointed out. Doesn’t that factor into the conversation about blame? He pointed to Sachsenhausen’s gate, visibly agitated. “Doesn’t everybody have at least a basic understanding of history?” He asked. “There’s still people who openly say they are Nazis.”

I asked the tour guide how memory is integrated into Germany’s educational system. “It is very victim-focused, which is important,” she answered. “But I think now it would be a good idea to focus more on perpetrators. Everybody agrees that the Nazis were evil. But, we have to see them as people, so we can understand that normal people are capable of doing these things.”

“It’s a wall of silence and denial, and also a wall of threat,” Dominik, a playwright, told me over Zoom from his home in western Germany, describing the process of trying to untangle his family’s past. He hoisted a black photo album in front of his screen, opening it up to a page of World War Two-era photos. 

The pictures, he told me, were from his grandfather’s time in the Nazi’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht, and the album was one of just a few family remnants from that period of time (the other: a certificate affirming his grandmother’s Aryan lineage). The first time Dominik leafed through the pages a few years ago, he focused entirely on his grandfather’s face. He had a powerful urge to see if he looked unhappy. The second time he looked at the album, he noticed something startling. In the background of the photos, he saw burning villages and what appeared to be Russian prisoners of war. Somehow he completely missed the horror in the pictures when he saw them the first time around.

To Dominik, who asked to be identified by his first name because he has been targeted by neo-Nazi threats, the omission revealed a longing to see his grandfather as he wanted, not necessarily as he was. “I was looking to find proof that my grandfather was innocent,” he told me. Towns on fire and prisoners muddied that conceptualization, so “I completely kept them out of my mind.” He doesn’t believe he’s alone in that urge. “I think many people have a desire to deal with the past, but they also have a desire to say: not my parents, not my grandparents. They were fine. They helped the Jews. They were resistance fighters or victims of the Nazis.” 

Dominik belongs to a cohort of Germans who are interrogating the country’s reputation as a champion of remembrance and pointing to the gaps within it as symptoms of deeper amnesia. He’s 39, with a dark sense of humor, and wary of the country’s memory worship. I mentioned some Americans’ invocation of  Germany’s process as a possible model for the U.S. He chuckled. “This is like the new export product of Germany,” he told me, wryly. “After the cars, we also make this ‘great’ memory culture.” 

In early November, Dominik, along with the other two members of his theater collective, screened a movie, which they will adapt into a play later this year, about how the descendants of perpetrators engage with their family histories. I attended the screening in Berlin along with a few dozen Germans who quietly sipped beverages and watched the film, which occasionally felt like a fever dream. The movie dealt with the emotional toll of silence within families and was based on interviews between the collective’s members and their parents. For each of them, confronting family narratives of the war and Nazism meant coming up against a “wall,” as Dominik told me, of shame, anger, and denial, from their parents. 

The trio sought out to make the film after recognizing, as a group, that the country’s celebrated Holocaust reckoning had stopped at their own doorsteps. Dominik’s grandfather was in the army and joined the Nazi party when he was 19; the grandfathers of the other two collective members were SS officials. Growing up, their family discussions of the war focused on German — not Jewish — suffering: “about how grandfather was freezing in the Soviet Union, and he was such a victim,” Dominik explained. “These narratives are there all the time growing up. There’s no conversation about the Shoah. There’s a lot of conversation about how cruel the war was.” 

Over time, Dominik grew to reject the narrative he absorbed as a child about wartime suffering, opting instead to research the parts of the story his family and so many others left out. These interrogations, and subsequent discussions with family, formed the basis of Dominik’s contribution to the collective’s film.

At first, the members’ parents were supportive of the movie, which they were told was about family memory and the war. But as the conversations grew deeper and closer to their families’ behavior in Nazi Germany, Dominik said there was a moment for each person where things took a noticeable turn. Their parents “got angry and their faces changed and they started insulting us.” For Dominik, that happened after he asked his father if he knew the history of the shop where his grandfather worked, which had been run by a Jewish family until the Nazis expropriated it. “He was like, ‘OK, now I want to know, what is this project actually about? Do you want to play police and say your family is all Nazis?’” Dominik recalled. “Then, he lost himself in the worst antisemitism I’ve ever heard in my family.”

Dominik said he was shocked and disgusted by his father’s antisemitic screed. But it also revealed to him an internal conflict. Even though he was furious, something unexpected came up: “I had the feeling that I must protect him,” he explained.

“From what?” I asked.

“From the shame I feel. He exposed himself. And it is him, not me, that I want to protect.”

I traveled to Germany to try to better understand the lessons of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and to unpack the narrative that I had consumed in America about Germany as a champion of memory. But during my reporting, I kept coming up against a particular strain of silence that I couldn’t move past, and I wondered if I had been thinking about the reckoning in the wrong way. Maybe the story was actually about the conversations the country couldn’t have.

Shortly after I arrived in Germany and began talking to people about the past, it became clear that there was a notable gulf between collective and individual memory: the way the country processed memory on a national level and how individuals confronted their own family histories. It didn’t take long for me to pick up on this distinction. I noticed that many appeared comfortable talking about the Holocaust in an abstract way, synthesized more or less under the umbrella of: “the Nazis were evil,”  but withdrew altogether when I tried to nudge them into more personal territory. A common set of answers to my questions about what took place within peoples’ families and communities was: “We didn’t talk about it;” or, “I don’t know.” A level of detachment I found perplexing, given what I had read and studied about Germany’s textured and successful reckoning. 

The lack of interrogation into peoples’ family histories I encountered seemed to stand in stark contrast to national culture of memorialization I saw throughout the country: the shrines and museums; the class field trips to concentration camps; the declarations of public officials on important dates, such as the anniversary of Kristallnacht. So, after attending the screening, I ran my observations past Dominik. Was I being too harsh, or was there a genuine gap between the individual and nation’s ability to process the country’s history?

“This is not just your impression,” he replied. “There is this official culture of remembering and some people are quite cool in talking about it, but there’s not a connection to your own person or to your identity or what actually happened.” 

He added: “The vast majority of Germans grew up with horrible mass murderers as their closest relatives. Or let’s say, to be kind, they grew up with people who were completely callous and indifferent towards mass murder and mass murderers. And then you have these people as your parents or grandparents. The thought that your grandfather, the man you love, who kissed you, who hugged you is such a monster, is actually too painful for many Germans.” 

In 2019, researchers with Germany’s Bielefeld University surveyed more than 1,000 people across the country about their understanding of their families’ roles during the war. Specifically, the researchers asked the subjects to choose if their ancestors were perpetrators, victims, or “helpers” who assisted victims during the war. Nearly 70% of Germans surveyed said their family members were not perpetrators. More than half said they were victims.

I’ve often wondered about the psychological source of a person’s aversion to digging into the dark areas of their family history. Is it rooted in a fear of learning the truth? Or, is it about how to hold on to two contrasting stories of someone you love?

Maybe no one is better positioned to mull over these questions than Peter Pogany-Wnendt, a Hungarian-born Jewish psychotherapist living in Germany. The 68-year-old son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Pogany-Wnend works both with the descendants of perpetrators and survivors in his therapeutic practice.

Over cappuccinos in a quiet Berlin cafe, Pogany-Wnendt told me he sees the country’s emphasis on public memorials as a national form of displacement from individual guilt. “Because we are making a memorial public, we don’t need to look in our families. That’s not right. Because a public memorial is only as good as it is anchored in the personal story.”

Pogany-Wnendt believes that when feelings of shame and guilt remain repressed and unaddressed, they pass along to the next generation, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. But he also believes that the emotions transmitted from parent to child come with an “impossible task” for the descendants of both survivors and perpetrators. For the descendants of survivors, the impossible inherited task is to mourn the suffering of their parents and grandparents; for the descendants of perpetrators, to atone for their descendants' guilt and repent.

"Their parents were not able or willing to do this emotional work," he explained. "As it is neither possible for the children of the victims to mourn the suffering and the losses of their ancestors, nor is it possible for the children of the perpetrator to atone for the guilt of their fathers and mothers, both sides have to give the original feelings back to their ancestors. This is an individual inner-soul process that liberates the descendants from their emotional heritage, pain or guilt, and from the impossible tasks." 

In Pogany-Wnendt’s case, that meant realizing he could not mourn for his father, whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust, and whose deep grief left a lasting imprint on him while he was growing up. Pogany-Wnendt realized he couldn't grieve his dad's losses for him. He had to give that pain back.

“My father, he was always very sad,” Pogany-Wnendt explained. “And I felt as a child that I had to make him happy. I always felt responsible for his sadness and thought I had to mourn for my father. I tried to identify with his sadness and to put it on my own shoulders. But then I realized that I can’t mourn for my father or work through his pain. I have to leave it with him.”

Pogany-Wnendt’s recognition that he could not mourn his father’s losses for him, or resolve his grief, helped him feel more compassion towards him. He sees how the descendants of perpetrators, too, can undergo a similar process. 

“It’s not the guilt they’re inheriting, but the guilt feelings,” he said. “Because you can’t inherit guilt.”

“But there is a responsibility to remember what they did.”

Like the cobblestoned streets of Berlin, there are pockets of the American South coming alive with long-suppressed memories. But the reckoning is far from settled. In some places, two versions of history inhabit the same space. In others, the urge to remember is overwhelmed by the desire to forget.

In November 2015, Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney, issued a memory challenge to Memphis, Tennessee.

At the time, Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, was a few years away from opening America’s first lynching museum in Alabama, and was at the forefront of the country’s lynching memorialization movement. Stevenson gave a speech to a crowd in Memphis, imploring them to honor the county’s thirty-plus lynching victims.

Recalled Margaret Vandiver, a retired criminology professor who became involved in the effort: “A couple people who were in attendance looked at each other and said: Yup.” A multiracial, intergenerational coalition calling itself the Lynching Sites Memorial Project of Memphis, or LSP, came together shortly after, and set out to begin marking the landscape. The group has installed three memorials and hopes to have another in the ground soon.

The Memphis memorial group is one of a dozen like-minded organizations that have sprung up across the U.S. in the last few years, especially in the South. There are now lynching memorialization coalitions in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, South Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Colorado, and Florida.

Vandiver, who published a book about lynchings in Tennessee, told me she has been surprised by the sustained interest in the group’s work. 

But where there’s support, there’s also opposition. One morning in December, Vandiver picked me up at the local library to show me a few of the city’s lynching markers. She brought me to a green sign installed in 2018 memorializing Lee Walker, who was lynched in 1893 after he was accused of attempting to rape a white woman. A mob of 3,000 people broke into the jail where Walker had been held, hung him on a nearby pole, and then burned and mutilated his body.

As we pulled up to the stop, Vandiver warned me to keep an eye out for an “angry-looking” man. “If he approaches us, just go back to the car and I’ll handle him,” she instructed. The man, she explained, used to own a nearby business, and was enraged after the memorial went up, claiming it loomed over the parking lot. We didn’t see him, but it wasn’t the only story I heard of the business community or local leadership pushing back against markers that unearthed the brutality of lynchings for passersby — including shoppers — to see.

Others would simply prefer to avoid the ugliness of America’s racial violence as a matter of emotional self-preservation. Fred Morton, an 82-year-old volunteer with the Memphis group, told me the predominant sentiment towards this kind of history among white people in his blue-collar, middle-class community is: “Let’s just not talk about it. This is unpleasant, this is unseemly, this is disconcerting.” 

Vandiver brought me to a grassy field in an industrial, gentrifying neighborhood in Memphis. The plot of land marks the spot where a white mob killed three Black businessmen in 1892. The murders profoundly affected Ida B. Wells, a crusading investigative journalist who was a close family friend of one of the victims. The killing led Wells to begin collecting data that would ultimately debunk the widespread myth that lynchings were a form of punishment for Black men sexually assaulting white women. Wells found that the lynchings were instead “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” 

Despite the significance of the lynching in the city’s history, there are no markers or signs noting what happened. The lot where the men were killed, in fact, now sits on the grounds of a hip new brewery.

Later that afternoon, I met up with Wayne Dowdy, a Memphis historian. Morton and Vandiver joined me, as well as two other local volunteers with the Memphis lynching memorial group, Randell Gamble and Laura Kebede. I intended to talk to Dowdy about Memphis’ history of lynching, but our conversation quickly veered into the personal. Gamble and Kebede are Black; Vandiver, Dowdy, and Morton are white. 

Vandiver, who grew up in Florida, recalled singing the de-facto national anthem of the Confederacy, Dixie, in school. Dowdy explained how he grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s, steeped in the narratives of the Lost Cause, one of the most enduring revisionist mythologies in American history. The story Dowdy absorbed about the Civil War, in school and his community, was “the Confederate soldiers were noble, brave heroes who were fighting to maintain a way of life which had nothing to do with slavery. It was regurgitated at home, in the neighborhoods. It was like the air and water. No one who was white questioned it.”

Vandiver added that her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, and regaled his grandson — her father — with vivid tales of it while he was growing up. “So there's that one generation between someone who fought for Confederacy and me sitting right here,” she said. “That's how close this all is.”  

“See, for me, I don’t hear these stories from whites,” Gamble interjected. “I hear about the violence from slavery, Jim Crow, with African Americans. But from whites, I don’t hear these stories you’re telling about their families.”

There’s not a lot of talking happening in Arlington, Tennessee. 

That’s one of the first things Cynthia Myers tells me when she greets me in the middle of the small town square, about thirty minutes outside of Memphis. It’s a quaint and small plaza, with a Christmas tree and an old-fashioned red brick store hosting a steady stream of weekend shoppers. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from the courtyard, however, is any mention of the man who was shot to death and castrated right there, in broad daylight in 1939.

“It’s a taboo conversation,” Myers, 59 years old, told me wearily. “People don’t want to talk about it.”

Myers grew up with the story because the lynching victim, Jesse Lee Bond, was a cousin. And she was close to his brother, Charlie Morris, who spent years trying to bring the lynching to light. He died a few years ago, after successfully lobbying the state legislature to pass a cold case bill reopening investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era. 

But Arlington remains silent on Bond’s lynching. There’s no sign in the town square marking the site of the killing or stone marking Bond’s grave. According to Memphis lynching memorial members I spoke with, some of the descendants of the alleged perpetrator still live in town but have not spoken up publicly about what happened. “Some of them are in this place of denial, the past is the past,” one Arlington resident told me.

Jesse Lee Bond was a sharecropper who bought his seasonal planting supplies from Arlington’s general store, S.Y. Wilson & Company. The owners tracked the debt of farmers who bought their supplies on credit in a private notebook, and, according to some accounts, Bond was suspicious of how much they claimed he owed them. One day in April 1939, Bond asked for a receipt after buying something on credit, a request that was seen as out of the ordinary for a Black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South, and reportedly infuriated the white store owner when he found out. He ordered Bond to come back to the store, and his aunt accompanied him. When he arrived, the store owner and his employee started shooting, according to the Memphis lynching memorial group. 

“They shot at him and shot him. He ran out to the outhouse. They riddled the outhouse,” Morris said Bond’s aunt later told him. “And when he staggered out of the outhouse, they threw him down and they castrated him and dragged him to the river.” County records reported the cause of his death as an “accidental drowning.” The store’s owner, Charles R. Wilson, and his employee were charged with first-degree murder but later acquitted by an all-white jury. 

Charlie Morris was at school when he found out his brother had been murdered. “It affected me very much,” he recalled in an oral history recorded before he died. “My mother had three sons. And when she passed away, I was six. And the last thing that she said, on her deathbed, was ‘keep my boys together.’ And this was broken when they killed Jesse.” 

On the 79th anniversary of Bond’s lynching, the Memphis lynching group hosted a memorial ceremony and vigil in the Arlington town square. But since then, efforts to install a memorial in the square or a marker on Bond’s grave have been unsuccessful. “Arlington is this little town with this nice cute square, and that’s the icon for the town,” Gordon Myers, a local Reverend, told me, over lunch in town. “There’s a lot of energy towards preserving this facade within the administration of the town and the politics and real estate development.” Placing a lynching memorial in the center of it all would complicate the image the town markets to itself and others.

But Myers wants to see just that. From her perspective, the town’s ongoing silence feels like an acceptance of the lynching itself. “It’s like they’re still supporting what happened. To not want to engage with it, deal with it, or even discuss it, she told me. “Even if you don’t apologize, just open up about it. That would make a difference. It would give some closure about what happened.” 

On one of my last days in the South, I stopped by the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, with Tarrell and some members of the local lynching memorial initiative, the Lafayette County Community Remembrance Project.

The group was about half white, half Black, and mostly over the age of 50, although there were a few younger people there. They wanted to show me the memorial dedicated to the county’s seven lynching victims that was installed on September 17, 2021 in front of the county courthouse after a years-long, messy approval battle with the County Board of Supervisors.

The group included people with deep ties to the town and its violent history. 67-year-old Oxford native Effie Burt told me her grandfather, a sharecropper, left town after he was threatened with a lynching for refusing to work. “That could have been him on that sign,” she said, motioning to the marker. His sons fled to Missouri in the middle of the night to escape the specter of violence. “That destroyed my family,” Burt added. “I grew up without my uncles.”

As we were talking, I couldn’t help but fixate on the visuals of my surroundings. We stood next to the lynching memorial, at one edge of the town square, near the county courthouse. A stone’s throw away, an enormous Confederate statue loomed over the front of the square. Calls to remove it have been unsuccessful, so the statue now uneasily skirts the lynching memorial. It’s almost too perfect of a metaphor for America’s relationship with its past: the tensions of the current moment in the country’s historial reckoning carved in miniature, between these two memorials, on this town square. 

As I reflected on the contrasting iconography, I thought of something Dominik, the German playwright, told me when I explained the fractured state of American memory politics. “To some extent, it’s not that bad,” he replied. “At least you have a fight. A fight about history and ideas and the future of the country.” 

A clash is also a sign of life. Not a calcified, collectivized consensus on the past, but a living organism, being worked out right in front of you — on the Oxford square, or downtown Memphis, or in the minds of white Americans as the country spars over how to narrate the truest version of its history to the next generation. 

“When you move the conversation from the larger historical systemic to the personal, I think that’s what people are afraid of,” Dr. William Horne, Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University, who has written on his family’s role in slavery, told me. “Sometimes I wonder — is the best we can do to have a systemic conversation about systemic wrongs?”

In Mississippi, Tarrell recently learned about a family in the area where Steen was lynched with the same last name as the white woman he allegedly had a relationship with. He told me hasn’t been able to get in touch yet, but he’d like to meet up. He’s not interested in blame. He just wants to get closer to understanding what happened on July 30, 1893, and why.

“I’m not trying to disgrace anyone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened. If I had the opportunity to talk to one of them, they might say something that could help me learn more about my ancestors. I’m just trying to find the truth. And have some closure for the family. That’s the only thing I want to do.”

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The White House vehemently denied the claim, but the report reinforced the cyberwar threat hovering over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After Biden announced sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, American officials warned businesses and local governments to brace for the possibility of ransomware attacks, which have been held up as a possible strategy for Russia to blunt the impact of sanctions from the U.S. and Europe. Russia is widely known to be a hotbed of ransomware activity. 

Ransomware attacks rose by more than 60% globally from 2019 to 2020, and nearly 75% of revenue generated from ransomware attacks in 2021 went to Russian-linked hackers, recent analyses have found. Increasingly, ransomware attacks share the same outcomes as disinformation campaigns, spreading social and political instability, fostering chaos, and eroding faith in government and institutions. As Russia mounts a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is a global cyber conflict on the horizon? 

Richard Forno, director of the graduate cybersecurity program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County discusses the cyber threat landscape in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.  

Everything is obviously moving very quickly. There are reports that the Biden administration was presented with options for cyberattacks against Russia, such as disrupting internet access and shutting off power, which the White House then vehemently denied. How are you thinking about this moment and the cyber threat?

I just published an article about the big picture and what this means for cyber in the United States.  

In general, the big money quote is this shows that cybersecurity, all cybersecurity, is local. It’s not something that happens in a vacuum on the internet in cyberspace. It has local in-purse ramifications. And geopolitics, i.e., the war, the invasion of Ukraine, events around the world can have cyber consequences here at home.

Not just for large companies and pipelines, infrastructures. But for everybody. Whether it’s a home user whose network might get compromised because they’re working from home, or they’re an individual who can’t fill up their gas tank because there’s been a hack of a pipeline and they can’t get fuel to the gas stations. So, there are a lot of consequences that can result from something that started kinetically, with explosions and missiles and tanks, halfway around the world.

There’s been some conversation about if this could kick off a genuine tit-for-tat cyberwar. What do you think?

I kind of cringe at the word cyberwar. It’s kinda catchy, but the reality is that it’s a tool in a nation’s arsenal. Certainly, Russia and the U.S., in some ways, have shown that they’re not afraid to use it. It’s a tool that can certainly be escalated in its use. 

The Russians and Chinese and others have been mapping out our infrastructure for decades precisely to have that knowledge available for situations like this where they might want to escalate.

It could very easily get into a tit-for-tat kind of a situation.

I talked to a cybersecurity expert a few months ago about the risks of geopolitical cyberwar and responding to cyberattacks from other countries in kind, and his position was that it’s very risky because he believes that the U.S.’s defenses around cyber are poor. Do you agree with that?

I totally agree. We, the United States, have always viewed offensive cyber as sort of the cool, sexy aspects of cyber. But cyber defense is kind of routine and boring and an everyday humdrum. It’s not as sexy, not as glamorous. And I think he’s exactly right in this regard. We’ve gotten better over the years, but I think when you look at where the dollars have gone, the interest has gone – political interest – it’s more on the offensive side looking at our adversaries while we continue to have this soft cyber underbelly in our infrastructure. Russia has addressed cyber much more holistically and completely than we have.

Cyber attacks have also targeted Ukrainian government and business websites. Can you explain how they could have effects that ripple outside of the country?

I don’t think it’s one-to-one, like if this happens in Kyiv, this happens in New York. I don’t think that’s the case. One doesn’t necessarily lead to another at a technical level. So Russia launches cyberattacks against the Ukrainian government, banks, etc. Where I see the probability of cyberattacks going beyond Ukraine is if the West retaliates in some way. Then it opens up a Pandora’s box where Russia can say ‘ok, we’re going to come after the U.S., the U.K., other countries and launch cyberattacks that way.’

But if malware is unleashed on Ukrainian companies operating globally, that could cause worldwide damage, couldn’t it?

Oh certainly. If you’re a large multinational company and you’re doing business in Ukraine, you may become targeted intentionally or caught up in an attack and that could have spillover ramifications.

A U.S. official recently warned after the first round of sanctions against Russia that there could be some sort of retaliatory ransomware attacks that could help Russia blunt the impact of sanctions and that’s something companies should be bracing for. Are you concerned about that as well?

Yes. Ransomware continues to be the go-to cyberattack that we’re seeing these days, whether it’s by a criminal group or a nation-state. It would not surprise me to see ransomware attacks launched by Russia or endorsed by Russia. It happened before, in 2015 with the NotPetya attack. Again, that was Russia in Ukraine but it impacted the rest of the world.

Ransomware is one easy attack. I could also see them finding ways to target specific infrastructures, or nodes in infrastructures, to disrupt critical resources. That’s a more labor-intensive approach. With cyber, like with nuclear weaponry, you can’t un-ring the bell. It’s out there.

What do you think is the most responsible thing to be doing at this moment as everything is escalating so quickly for people, businesses, governments, and companies worried about attacks?

The most responsible thing is vigilance. I’ve got a book coming out soon on local government cybersecurity here in the U.S. Nearly one-third of U.S. local governments could not tell you if they’re under attack or have been compromised. That’s pretty scary. You have to be extra vigilant. Not paranoid, but realize that one or two glitches that you didn’t normally expect to see happen, you might want to stop and think is this normal, or am I being caught up in something.

What are you not seeing or hearing discussed in the media in conversations about cybersecurity right now?

What was interesting to me this week is the number of articles and stories in the media talking about cyber. Not just in broad terms but as it affects businesses, and the tone was a little more intimate and personal than I’ve seen similar types of stories during other conflicts over the years. 

You look at places like local governments, hospital systems –they’re soft targets. They don’t have deep pockets to hire large cybersecurity teams to monitor networks. They’re left vulnerable in a situation like this were it to escalate even further.

It’s rare to see a cyber story leading the evening news. And yet there it was, I think it was NBC, a cyber warning. You don’t see that too often. And even with the Colonial Pipeline, it wasn’t starting off with here’s the warning from the government. And the tone conveyed to me a different approach than previous media coverage.

It underscores the level of vulnerability we face as a modern society. Here’s an example. I was at the dentist this morning and my dentist told me that on her way into the office, she stopped off to get gas. There were like 10 other cars ahead of her. This is a panic, or a growing panic. What if a cyberattack shuts down gas distribution? How am I going to fill up my car? That’s where cyber meets the real world.

In our ransomware Big Idea, we talked about how these kinds of attacks create mass panic and that can be an important strategic dimension of these attacks. The impact of attacks is not just practical, it’s also psychological.

Exactly, it all feeds in. Cyber is no longer just hackers but includes very much influence and disinformation using cyber capabilities. That’s been happening in Europe and in Ukraine. It keeps us employed.

I think the ball is kind of in the Russians' court as to what the next steps would be. I would not be surprised to see retaliation of some sort. More economic sanctions were announced this afternoon. There may be some cyber stuff along the way. I don’t know. It’s only 12 hours old. We are in the first innings of this.

The post The threat of ransomware attacks looms over the Russian invasion of Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

When the journalist arrived, he was greeted by a person who didn’t look familiar. He wasn’t a childhood friend. Instead, the man told the reporter, he worked with one of China’s state security agencies. He explained that before their meeting, he had paid a visit to some of the reporter’s family members back in Tibet — who were fine, he assured him — and then waved over two men sitting at a nearby table. The trio then besieged the journalist with questions — “Who are your sources in Tibet? How do you get your information?” — but the reporter refused to answer and hurried out of the hotel.

A few weeks later, he was ambushed on his walk home from work. According to one of the reporter’s former colleagues, two men sprung out of a vehicle, thrust a black hood over his head, and pushed him into the car. The van drove around for hours as the men interrogated the reporter about his contacts in Tibet and searched through his phone. Again, he refused to answer. After several hours, the kidnappers dropped the reporter off near his house, warned him not to turn around for five minutes, and sped away. 

According to a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist who had worked with the kidnapped man, this was the end of his colleague’s career in media. He was terrified that his journalism work could put him and his relatives back in Tibet in harm’s way. “He was so worried about his family he quit reporting right away,” he explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to risk my life and my family’s lives.’”

The U.S.-based Tibetan journalist, who was privy to the events leading up to and including the kidnapping, asked for anonymity and to withhold the location of the kidnapping to protect his colleague’s identity.

Fear of retaliation against family members back home, which forced the Tibetan reporter out of his media job, is a key feature of China’s pressure campaign against diaspora journalists and writers, particularly for members of religious and ethnic minority groups like Uyghurs and Tibetans. 

They are among the 55 ethnic minorities in the country outside of the Han Chinese majority, who make up more than 90% of the population. Under China’s President Xi Jinping, Beijing has pursued a sweeping policy of "Sinicization” aimed at assimilating the country’s ethnic minorities into the dominant Han culture. This approach includes a crackdown on local languages and religions and has been accompanied by wide-ranging and ambitious initiatives by the Chinese government to silence its critics. Both efforts can be seen as separate expressions of the same larger goal: to create a homogenous national identity defined by the state, with no room for alternative points of view. People who challenge the government’s sanctioned identity narratives can be subject to pressure, even when they live far away from China.

Borders do not necessarily constrain the government’s reach.

Writers and journalists from the country’s ethnic minorities, therefore, find themselves at the hostile intersection of China’s multi-pronged war against independent speech and identity. 

In Tibet, which has been under Beijing’s control for decades, the Chinese government’s long-simmering campaign of cultural erasure can be seen as a progenitor of the oppression it later unleashed on Xinjiang, which has been described as a genocide by U.S. officials. There, more than one million Uyghurs have been sent to concentration camps and the relatives of exiled reporters face relentless persecution, intimidation, and harassment. Many people I interviewed pointed out that the former party secretary in Tibet subsequently became the Chinese party secretary of Xinjiang. In Tibet, he expanded policing and cultural assimilation, and developed a widespread surveillance system. Experts say he continued to implement those same policies in Xinjiang. While the repression and government justification for it is distinct in each respective region, some see Tibet as a testing ground for the campaign later deployed in Xinjiang.

Beijing’s pathology around minorities’ distinct cultural identities is rooted in an understanding that they can act as a counterweight to the government’s desire to control the narrative. “They recognize the power of words and culture as an animating force,” said James Tager, the director of research at PEN America. “And they have these policies of culture diminution or cultural erasure, particularly in Xinjiang, and similarly, somewhat less intense but somewhat more sustained, is the effort to diminish Tibetan culture. Peaceful cultural advocacy is potentially criminal in China.”

According to the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world” — referring to the suite of tactics from surveillance technology to physical violence, intimidation, and harassment that governments use to persecute citizens of their own countries who live overseas. In China, the targets of this campaign include ethnic minorities like Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians, as well as Han Chinese reporters and writers covering China critically. Their experiences are a case study of what a well-resourced regime can do when it weaponizes technology, repression, and fear to create a sweeping information suppression apparatus that reaches around the globe. 

“The full scope of censorship needs to be understood as not only what is explicitly being banned but by the message that the targets of the censorship internalize. It’s called the chilling effect,” explained Tager. “And many writers across cultural and social spheres will feel chilled because they know that people who are seen as too critical of (Chinese Communist Party) governance may put their family members within China at risk.”

For Tibetan diaspora journalists, threats of retaliation against family members remain a powerful tool in the transnational repression playbook. The region has been under China’s control since the 1950s, when it was invaded by the newly formed People’s Republic of China. After an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India and set up the Tibetan government in exile, where some 90,000 Tibetans currently live, and which remains a focal point for the exile media community as it seeks to cover one of the world’s most restrictive media environments from outside. 

Tibet is ranked as the worst place globally for civil liberties and political rights according to Freedom House — tied with Syria and above South Sudan, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. Media outlets within Tibet are controlled by China, international broadcasts are routinely jammed, foreign journalists must apply for — and are often denied — permission from the Chinese government to go to the region, and Tibetans who pass information to foreign media risk arrest. Today, human rights groups and exile journalists say it has effectively become walled off from the foreign press. 

“Nowadays people tend to think that because Tibet is not coming up too much in the news, it’s because nothing is happening in Tibet. That’s not true,” Kalden Lodoe, the Tibetan service director at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C., told me. “The information flow is totally blocked there.” 

For journalists covering it from afar, like Lodoe’s team, “we feel like we are digging into a very strict police state where people are watched constantly,” he added. “It’s escalated and it’s only going to get worse. They have created this fearful society where if you have any contacts outside you will be in trouble.”

Authorities impose harsh penalties on Tibetans who communicate with journalists or family members living overseas who send information to exile media. According to data provided to Coda by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, over the last decade, 98 Tibetans have been detained for contacting journalists and source intermediaries outside the region. Sixteen are currently imprisoned and serving their sentences. Prominent cases include Kunchok Jinpa, a Tibetan tour guide who was detained in 2013 and later sentenced to 21 years in prison for “leaking state secrets” by providing information to foreign reporters about protests in Tibet. Jinpa died last February while serving his sentence due to reported paralysis and brain hemorrhage. Another well-publicized case is the imprisonment of Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan language advocate who was released from prison in China last year after spending five years behind bars over a charge of “inciting separatism" based on an interview he gave to The New York Times.

Some diaspora writers and journalists fear their work could expose relatives and sources in Tibet to detention or arrest, and sources in exile can be wary of communicating with the press for the same reason. They say that exiled journalists’ and writers’ family members still living in Tibet come under pressure from Chinese authorities. 

Sonam Tobgyal, a researcher with the U.K.-based human rights nonprofit Tibet Watch, said families living in exile with relatives still in Tibet have received threatening calls from unknown numbers after news leaks from the region that officials suspect they are connected to. “They will say, ‘If you do this again, your family is in your hands,’” he said.

“This is how they threaten, saying, ‘You are responsible for the safety of your family.’”

In Xinjiang, the relatives of diaspora reporters are also under siege. As of March 2021, more than 50 family members of journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service have been arrested by Chinese officials, according to the broadcaster, including relatives who have gone missing.

“The tactical maneuver is to make everyone think twice before they think or write or publish and to think about whether there could be negative consequences for their family members, their friends, and their communities,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.

In Tibet, the relative of one Radio Free Asia reporter was severely beaten and detained for a week after speaking to the news service, according to Lodoe. Two additional relatives of the same reporter were arrested and imprisoned for sharing information with the agency, and the family members of other Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan journalists have gotten visits from local officials. “People are very scared,” he said. “For example, our reporters in Washington, D.C., their families have told them, in coded language, ‘we are fine, please don’t call us.’ It’s not just one or two. Many reporters will not even talk to their parents nowadays.”

The lingering possibility of family and source retaliation carries a heavy psychological toll for exiled Tibetans working in the public eye. A Tibetan writer based out of India, who asked to be anonymous to protect his family’s safety, told me authorities have stopped by the home of his family members still in Tibet and interrogated them about his work and his whereabouts. “I recently got a message from my sister saying, ‘don’t come back to Tibet,’ the police were searching for me,” he said. Because of the risks, he added, “I hardly communicate with my parents. If I talk with them, we talk about sensitive issues in a code way.”

In the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Tibet was gripped by anti-government protests marking the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Eager to avoid bad international press in the lead-up to the games, Beijing moved swiftly to stamp out coverage of the protests, barring foreign reporters from entering Tibet and censoring and blocking international news reports and broadcasts. Tibetans who passed information to foreign media faced stiff penalties, including detention and imprisonment. Later, China responded to the unrest by ratcheting up control of the media and expanding surveillance and policing, according to human rights groups. 

Experts and journalists I spoke to said the situation in Tibet has worsened in the fourteen years since the protests, aided by a sophisticated surveillance dragnet in which police, cameras, facial recognition, online surveillance, and self-censorship are ubiquitous. “China is more effective now because they’re employing their whole state and human resources to spy, monitor, and surveil everything,” said Tibet Watch’s Tobgyal.

“It’s very difficult and it’s not getting better, but more disastrous.”

The Chinese messaging app WeChat has complicated the communication landscape for people within and beyond Tibet. The platform, which is China’s most popular messaging app, has given a place for diaspora Tibetans and their loved ones at home to stay in touch, while simultaneously exposing them to government surveillance. A 2020 report by the Canada-based cybersecurity research organization Citizen Lab found that the platform surveils accounts from outside of China and uses that content to train censorship algorithms deployed on accounts registered in China. Tibetan WeChat users have reportedly been detained for sharing photos of the Dalai Lama, spreading “rumors” about coronavirus on the app, and setting up a chat group without registering it with local authorities as required.

Despite the privacy and security risks, the app became widely adopted by Tibetans overseas, with an estimated 70% of the diaspora population using the platform as of 2019. In 2020, however, India banned the platform — a move Tenzin Dalha, who researches Chinese cybersecurity with the Tibet Policy Institute, said has presented communication barriers between exile reporters and Tibetans and their contacts back at home. Some use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the ban, but others do not have the technological know-how to figure it out. For the latter group, Dalha explained, “their communications completely broke down since the Indian government banned WeChat. There’s become more like a communication vacuum between inside and outside Tibet.”

Now, as all eyes are on Beijing for the Olympics, sources I talked to describe a complete information blackout from Tibet. Updates from the ground have halted, leaving family members living overseas in complete darkness about what’s happening at home. 

“We don’t know what’s happening inside Tibet,” Tobgyal told me. “If you have family in Tibet, it’s scary. You aren’t able to talk to them and you don’t know what’s going on. So you have to anxiously wait.”

Beijing’s clampdown on press freedom in Tibet has broadened over the last several years. It now sweeps up writing that’s not politically inflected. Even a year ago, there were a handful of websites in Tibet that published content about Tibetan culture, language, and the environment, according to Tseten Wangchuk, a senior editor with the Tibetan Service for the U.S.-funded international news outlet Voice of America. Now, Wangchuk said, “They all shut down. I think there used to be a borderline, a gray area where you could talk about the environment, Tibetan language, and things like that. Now it seems like nobody can write about anything — any topic — that’s outside of government control.”

There are clear links between China’s hostility toward Tibetan cultural writing and its Sinicization campaign, which has sought to eradicate the distinct religious and cultural identities of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. PEN’s James Tager said that Beijing sees cultural promotion as a threat. “Beijing tends to view expressions of culture through the lens of potential criminality. Particularly in ethnic minority communities, they treat cultural promotion, cultural engagement, cultural activism, as a substitute for political activism that they see as threatening and illegal.”

The assimilation project has taken aim at mother tongue education for ethnic minority groups. Under China’s “bilingual education” policy, schools in Tibet have shifted to teaching in Mandarin over Tibetan, according to human rights groups. A recent report by the U.S.-based Tibet Action Institute found that roughly 800,000 Tibetan school children are enrolled in boarding schools where they are taught primarily in Chinese. “Wait another 10 years and almost no one will speak Tibetan anymore,” said Human Rights Watch’s Richardson.

In Xinjiang, China’s campaign of repression, surveillance, and cultural erasure has been described as a genocide by the Biden administration. Chinese officials have sent more than one million Uyghurs to concentration camps, demolished mosques, and banned Uyghur language education in schools. Uyghurs living overseas, including prominent journalists, are subject to intimidation and threats. According to Alim Seytoff, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service director, eight U.S.-based reporters for the news division have family members in Xinjiang who are in detention or have disappeared. Seytoff said some of those reporters had relatives approached by Chinese authorities. “They basically said, ‘Tell your relatives in America working at Radio Free Asia to stop telling the world what’s happening,’” Seytoff said.

And in Inner Mongolia, the Chinese government in 2020 rolled out a new policy phasing out language instruction in schools from Mongolian to Mandarin, setting off massive protests. Enghebatu Togochog, director of the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, said the policy generated such fierce blowback because language is seen as the final symbol left of Mongolian’s distinct cultural identity. Already, Togochog said schools have implemented the language change and said the organization has heard of instances in which officials have taken down Mongolian language signs. 

“Right now what we are facing is wholesale cultural genocide,” he said. “First our political rights were taken away. Then our way of life was completely changed. Language is pretty much the last defense of Mongolian identity, so just get rid of that and these people will become Chinese.”

China’s crusade against free expression has turned the country into the most aggressive jailer of journalists in the world. The regime has placed at least 127 reporters behind bars — more than half of whom are Uyghur — according to the global press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which ranks China 177th out of 180 in its World Press Freedom Index. Beijing’s clampdown on the press has escalated dramatically under Xi Jinping’s leadership, who, Reporters Without Borders argues, has “restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which freely accessing information has become a crime and to provide information an even greater crime.”

Crucially, this campaign is not just limited to China. Over the last decade, China has invested heavily in its global media footprint, acquiring shares in foreign media outlets and vastly expanding the reach of international TV broadcasting. The state-owned China Global Television now airs in more than 160 countries while independent Chinese media overseas has shrunk.

Cedric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders’ Taipei Bureau Director, who has written extensively about press freedom in China, characterized Beijing’s approach to the press as: “If you can’t kill it, buy it.” The outcome, he added, “is that now, in 2022, there’s very few Chinese language overseas media that are critical of the Chinese regime.”

Adversarial reporters or journalists who cover Beijing's policies in an unflattering light outside the country have come under diplomatic pressure from Chinese embassies overseas, including foreign reporters like a Swedish journalist who received a threatening email from the Chinese Embassy in Sweden in 2021, accusing him of spreading anti-Chinese misinformation and demanding he cease his coverage or “face the consequences of your actions.” 

For journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service in Washington, D.C., the risks of the work are well understood.

“Our reporters understand the difficult situation we are in,” Seytoff told me. “But in spite of the detention and the disappearances of our loved ones, in spite of the fact that China is committing genocide against our people, and in spite of all of this tremendous psychological pressure on us, I think we have kept our cool. We are deeply devoted to journalism.”

China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints

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The post Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

Brazil

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

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

Israel

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

Germany

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

Peru

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post The year the Big Lie went global appeared first on Coda Story.

The digital ambush thrust the charity into uncharted and potentially catastrophic territory. Paying the requested amount was unthinkable for a nonprofit group, and even if it were able to foot the bill, news of the breach trickling out to donors could be devastating. The organization eventually turned to GroupSense, which has carved a niche out of negotiating ransom payments between hackers and victims, for help. 

“They were like, the number is so far off the mark that this seems hopeless. We’re doomed,” said Kurtis Minder, the company’s founder and CEO. 

The middlemen agreed to step in.

Wrangling with the subterranean world of cyber-hijacking requires some finesse. So, GroupSense created a set of principles to guide their conversations. “Don’t be antagonistic, be polite and treat it like a business transaction,” explained Minder. But this case tested the organization’s patience. “We were so angry,” he recalled. “We were like, ‘You hit a cancer charity. They don’t have any money. You should just unencrypt their files immediately, so they can go back to saving people.” The appeal to the hackers’ better angels was ignored, but the two groups were, eventually, able to settle on a much lower fee than the original demand: $10,000.

The incident provides a glimpse into a dawning era of cyber chaos, where unscrupulous actors are seizing upon the vulnerabilities of our digital world in increasingly brazen and frequent attacks. Some are doing so via ransomware, a form of malicious software that hackers deploy to encrypt victims’ data and then extort them for payment. 

From 2019 to 2020 alone, ransomware attacks rose by 62% globally and 152% in North America, according to a report by the cybersecurity firm SonicWall. Hackers have slipped into the electronic networks of schools, hospitals, voting systems, local governments, small businesses, and major food and fuel suppliers, disrupting the lives of millions of everyday people — all as the coronavirus pandemic cements a shift toward an ever-increasing reliance on digital systems.

The data suggests that we have entered a new phase of digital disruption. While nobody can predict what the future will hold, the evolution of disinformation could provide a useful guide. A decade ago, the issue was barely on people’s radar; now, it has become so ubiquitous in political and technological debates that a world without it seems almost unimaginable. Could ransomware follow a similar trajectory?

Disinformation and ransomware share an ability to fracture the body politic. Both can sow instability, chip away at social cohesion, and compromise peoples’ faith in institutions. There is also a clear geopolitical dimension to both. 

“They’re both of a piece — world politics slowly grappling with the realization that all information is strategic,” explained Ryan Williams, a PhD student in public policy at The University of Texas at Austin. “And the state that can best harness the implicit value of the data that’s all around us is going to be able to project their will more effectively.”

To be sure, there are some key differences between the two. As the name suggests, ransomware is an explicitly profit-driven exercise — the whole system is built on extorting money via the kidnapping of data. That’s why there is a consensus among many cybersecurity experts that the people and entities behind ransomware are largely motivated by financial gain. The distinction doesn’t mean that the politics and profit of ransomware are mutually exclusive. Governments can benefit from attacks they don’t order, and attacks of a large enough magnitude — for example, targeting critical infrastructure projects — can inflame geopolitical tensions, even if carried out by  individuals and groups not affiliated to the state.

The ransomware ecosystem is made up of murky criminal groups whose origins and intentions can be difficult to trace. But negotiators like Minder get a rare glimpse into the anatomy of attacks and the bureaucratic machinery of some of the large cybercrime syndicates that carry them out. 

Hacks usually take a similar shape: Someone tries to log in to their company or organization’s computer system and, instead, finds a note telling them that their data has been taken hostage and with instructions for how to get in touch, often via a chat on the dark web. Navigating to the suggested page may bring up a digitized clock counting down the amount of time a target has to comply with a ransom demand before attackers up the ante — like notching up the fee or wiping out a percentage of their data.

At some point in this process, Minder, who is 44, chatty, and surprisingly upbeat for someone who spends a significant chunk of his time submerged in the bowels of the internet, will step in to mediate. Although he’s spent two decades working in technology and start-ups, Minder’s descent into the dark arts of cybercrime negotiation began about 18 months ago, after GroupSense helped a software company resolve an attack. He agreed to lead the negotiations, and took to it naturally, talking down the ransomware demand significantly. After resolving the case, Minder’s team told him he had a moral obligation to continue helping victims of the growing ransomware industry. The work quickly snowballed. Minder estimates he and his team of two negotiators have handled roughly 100 cases in the last year and a half.

Minder is emphatic that his job is “not sexy. It's not like I'm jet-setting around, drinking martinis.” Triangulating between victims and hackers can be emotionally draining: imagine trying to help a petrified business owner on the brink of financial ruin; add in a low-level hacker on a different continent whose English is shoddy and is going to need to run your counter-offer by his manager; then multiply that by three — the number of cases Minder typically handles at once. How does he cope with it all? “I probably need to see someone,” he said.

Like a good millennial, I asked Minder about work-life balance. Unsurprisingly, I learned that cybercriminals do not respect the home lives of negotiators. “You know what sucks? The bad guys tend to attack on Friday nights, or before holiday weekends. So, I don't even plan anything,” he sighed. “Like, it’s Labor Day? I know what I’m doing.” For Minder, who is also a wine enthusiast, even post-work drinks can be a gamble — one too many can jeopardize a delicate negotiation. “If I get a feeling that it’s ok, then I can have a glass at 7,” he said.

Some of the more sophisticated cybercrime syndicates have strict reporting structures. When dealing with them, Minder says his primary point of contact is generally a low-level hacker with limited English who is likely cutting-and-pasting a script into the Dark Web chat and plugging responses into Google translate before passing negotiations off to their manager. “The first person you're talking to is probably 23 years old,” Minder explained. “And there's somebody behind them yelling at them. Although Minder deals with all sorts of hackers, he says that many of them appear to be operating out of Russia. “There’s no real mission other than take money,” he said. “They do seem pretty heartless.”

For Minder, the ability to place oneself in the shoes of both hacker and hackee is the one of most important skills in a negotiator’s toolkit. “I think empathy is invaluable,” he explained. “It doesn’t mean sympathy. It means understanding the situation that the person is operating under and the lens that they might look at this through, based on their situation.”

Experts are split on paying off ransomware demands, either directly or via middlemen like Minder. Some — including the FBI, argue that acquiescence motivates cybercriminals to continue launching attacks. Others say the role of a neutral third party is useful in negotiations and can reduce the ransom amount victims end up handing over. Minder is sensitive to opponents’ concerns but realistic about the pressures facing targets. If the choice is between shutting a company down or paying up, “that ransom is probably getting paid with or without me,” he said. “At least we’re going to pay these guys as little as possible.”

Whether you agree with Minder’s position or not, recent events suggest that he is likely to remain busy for some time to come.

Ransomware: Disinformation dressed up in code?

Ransomware is not a new problem, but a spate of recent high-profile attacks points to a criminal enterprise that is becoming increasingly brazen. Just this week, a ransomware attack hit the reproductive health clinic Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, compromising hundreds of thousands of patients’ healthcare data and personal information. Add that to a list of hacks in recent months that have targeted the United States’ largest fuel pipeline, the world’s biggest meat supplier and Ireland’s health care system. In 2020, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded nearly 2,500 ransomware attacks, totaling $29 million in combined losses — up from $9 million in 2019, even though that figure is widely believed to be an undercount.

"Ransomware has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar global racket that threatens the delivery of the very services so critical to helping us collectively get through the Covid pandemic,” Christopher Krebs, the former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in testimony before Congress in May. “To put it simply, we are on the cusp of a global pandemic of a different variety, driven by greed, an avoidably vulnerable digital ecosystem, and an ever-widening criminal enterprise.”

Ransomware attacks have wide-ranging consequences. They can leave small businesses on the brink of financial ruin, threaten election integrity, hobble critical infrastructure, destabilize municipalities, and jeopardize the lives of hospital patients. 

Ransomware attacks targeted nearly 2,400 schools, hospitals, and local governments in the U.S. in 2020. In May, hackers took down the sprawling Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Texas to New Jersey, driving up gas prices, causing fuel shortages, and unleashing pandemonium at filling gas stations across the southeast of the country. A 2019 attack paralyzed Baltimore for weeks, preventing people from paying water bills, parking tickets, and property taxes, ultimately costing the city an estimated $18 million. The White House has begun to acknowledge the magnitude of the threat. After the Colonial Pipeline debacle, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at shoring up the country’s cyber defenses and established a ransomware task force to combat attacks.

Richard Forno, director of the graduate cybersecurity program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said the spate of cyber attacks reveals “the fragility of the modern economic and social environment. Our nation is dependent on technology. We've built all these infrastructures and services, this digital world we live in, on top of some very flawed foundations.” He likens the contemporary landscape of cyberwarfare to strategic bombing campaigns during World War Two. “You attack a pipeline, you paralyze large swaths of the East Coast. That's almost as bad as actually physically blowing up the pipeline,” he said.

"Our nation is dependent on technology. We've built all these infrastructures and services, this digital world we live in on top of some very flawed foundations.”

The effects of such attacks extend well beyond the practical or financial. Ransomware leaves a mark on our collective conscience, reminding us that the electronic systems that we rely on are vulnerable to widespread disruption at any moment. Maybe it is time to start thinking about ransomware as a form of disinformation draped in code — one that fosters chaos, erodes institutional trust, and inflames geopolitical tensions.Major cyberattacks have also been linked to hackers operating out of Russia, China and North Korea. In July, U.S. officials accused Chinese government-employed contractors of carrying out a massive hack on Microsoft Exchange’s email server, which compromised tens of thousands of computer systems globally, along with ransomware attacks against private companies, prompting NATO’s first-ever condemnation of China’s cyber activities.

In February 2021, the U.S. Justice Department indicted three North Korean intelligence officers over an alleged global hacking scheme aimed at, among other things, stealing more than $1.3 billion from companies and financial institutions, including a 2017 ransomware attack on the U.K.’s National Health Service. Announcing the charges, a U.S. official described the case as a “striking example of the growing alliance between officials within some national governments and highly sophisticated cyber-criminals.” The same month, a report by a United Nations panel found that North Korean cyberattacks totaling hundreds of millions of dollars helped provide revenue for the country’s nuclear weapons program.

Currently, however, the main perpetrators of ransomware attacks appear to be operating out of Russia. According to Josephine Wolff, an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts University, the country is “the biggest player in the ransomware space and the one that causes the most problems for the United States.”

In June, the FBI accused the Russian cyber gang REvil — reportedly responsible for over 360 attacks on U.S.-based organizations in 2021 — of orchestrating a hack on the world’s largest meat producer, JBS, temporarily hobbling the company’s entire U.S.-based operation. That same month, the crippling of the Colonial Pipeline, which U.S. officials traced to the Russian hacking group Darkside, brought cybersecurity into the spotlight at Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first face-to-face meeting. “I looked at him and said: ‘How would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?’” Biden said in June 2021. The comments prompted a forceful denial from Putin, who argued that most cyberattacks originate in the U.S.

Perhaps the defining feature of Russia’s ransomware landscape is its ambiguity. Experts say it’s extremely difficult to determine if Russia-based hackers are operating at the behest of the government, or merely with its tacit approval. For years, the Kremlin has been accused of giving hackers free rein within its borders, as long as they don’t interfere with government interests or attack Russian targets. (Malware used by REvil is designed to avoid computers that use the Russian language, according to a report from one cybersecurity company). That dynamic allows the government to maintain a posture of plausible deniability about ransomware attacks, attributing them to criminal groups, while potentially benefiting from their outcomes.

“I do think the way that Russia handles this is brilliant,” Minder said. “It's like, well, it's not us. It's just some kids in somebody's basement. And they are achieving their nation-state goal. A bunch of that money is ending up in Russian banks. And it is highly disruptive to the U.S. economy and productivity. I don't know that they're orchestrating it. They just let that monster go.”

After the Colonial Pipeline attack, the Russian-linked Darkside group posted a statement on its website stressing the “apolitical” nature of its work. “We do not participate in geopolitics,” they wrote. “Our goal is to make money.” 

Julie Davila, the co-founder of the cybersecurity startup ZibaSec, is understandably skeptical. “What I find curious about people taking the word of some of these syndicates from the dark web is how quickly they trust the random username of some random spokesperson,” she said. 

And that unclear line between state and criminal groups moves ransomware into what the PhD student Ryan Williams of the University of Texas at Austin calls “the gray zone of conflict” Because this murky space can prove useful for governments, the future could, in theory, see states increasingly relying on intermediaries to disguise politically motivated attacks as financially driven intrusions carried out by criminals. Such ambiguity also provides fertile ground for the spread of rumor and conspiracy.

“You can imagine the worst-case scenario is an actual cyber-attack on some sort of key electoral infrastructure in an upcoming election that is themed as a ransomware attack from a private actor,” said Williams. “It would just be another huge cycle of really emotionally charged conflicts over the basic facts of our democracies.”

Ransomware: The New Disinformation

Ransomware could soon be about more than just money

Caitlin Thompson

Ransomware attackers are going after schools

Caitlin Thompson

The post The rise of the geopolitical hack appeared first on Coda Story.

The 1852 novel, written by Harriett Beecher-Stowe, for which the station is named occupies a fraught place in the annals of American literature, recognized both for galvanizing public opinion against the brutality of slavery and for reinforcing reductive racial stereotypes with the servile depiction of its main character. 

Pölking, whose parents are German and Cameroonian, spoke of his discomfort passing the station. “It woke up a lot of bad emotions,” he told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, arguing that it is way past time for it and a nearby street to be renamed.

So far, Pölking’s petition has not succeeded. The station’s name greets visitors on a large sign outside, emblazoned in white letters against a bright blue background. 

A few minutes down the road lie Onkel Toms Hütte stable and horseback riding school, a restaurant called Uncle Tom’s Burger and the Onkel Toms Hütte kindergarten. In fact, the entire area pays homage to a book once described by the Black American writer James Baldwin as a “catalogue of violence.” 

The existence of this neighborhood in modern-day, multicultural Berlin can be traced back to a surprisingly durable national fascination with America’s antebellum South, which first took hold in the mid-19th century. 

Soon after publication, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” became a global sensation and the only book in the 19th century to outsell the Bible. It made Beecher-Stowe Germany’s most beloved American author and had a profound effect on popular culture, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed beer gardens and campgrounds springing up across the country. Berlin’s Onkel Toms Hutte subway station opened in 1929, near an Uncle Tom’s pub and a sprawling housing development of the same name. 

These literary-themed homages tapped into a fantasy with the American South that sanitized the brutality of chattel slavery and characterized plantation life as bucolic, simple and comfortable for thousands of “loyal and happy” slaves. 

Heike Paul, is an American Studies professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg who has written extensively about Germany’s obsession with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She describes this inaccurate interpretation of a brutal and shameful period of American history as the “pastoralization of slavery” and a “total disconnect” from Beecher-Stowe’s text, which was written to expose the horrors of the practice.

Similar ideas are also central to the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist account of America’s past that surfaced after the defeat of Confederate forces in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Romanticizing plantation life and depicting slaves as the faithful servants of benevolent owners, the mythology of the Lost Cause also insists that the war was fought over state’s rights, not whether or not white people had the right to own and place other human beings in chains. 

While Beecher-Stowe was a staunch abolitionist, the unquestioning subservience of her central character reinforced stereotypes and a variety of racist ideas. According to Sanders Isaac Bernstein, a Berlin-based PhD student at the University of Southern California, whose work has included analysis of German nostalgia for the Confederate South, this archetype “was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization.”

Bernstein holds up as an example the introduction of a 1911 German translation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which states that “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

While living in the South, I encountered ideas rooted in the Lost Cause repeatedly. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Civil War casually referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or the myriad revisionist narratives I came across while covering North Carolina’s debate to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. Most people who opposed the idea argued that taking down or altering the monuments amounted to historical erasure, advancing the falsehood that the war was fought in response to northern “tyranny.” In reality, however, the defense of these symbols, included, at its core, a glorification of the Confederate cause and antebellum life.

Coming across these ideas in the contemporary South may be unpleasant, but it is not surprising. I did not expect to find traces of them in Berlin, though. Wanting to understand how this contentious American myth gained such a following in Germany, I asked Bernstein to meet me at Onkel Toms Hütte. He arrived, dressed in black. We both took photographs of the station’s sign and then moved to a nearby bench. 

Outside of the neighborhood of Onkel Toms Hütte, most of Germany’s homages to Beecher-Stowe’s book are no longer visible. The nearby tavern shut down in 1978 and the campgrounds disappeared decades ago. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not the only example of Southern storytelling that resonated in Germany. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” became an immediate bestseller under the Third Reich and its 1939 movie adaptation, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is said to have been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Revisionist interpretations of the Confederacy persisted under the Nazi regime, which had developed its own Lost Cause narrative to cope with the national humiliation that resulted from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. According to an account by the ex-Nazi leader Hermann Rauschnin, Hitler believed that the “American people themselves were conquered” when the South lost the Civil War. Since then, he argued, the United States had slid into a state of political and racial “decay.” 

You can still see clear signs of this strange love affair lingering in the Germany of today: Civil War reenactments in which the majority of participants want to take the losing side; Confederate flags flying at anti-lockdown protests, at country music festivals, or hung in the back of Berlin drinking establishments. In many instances, the Stars and Bars can be seen as a convenient alternative to the Nazi swastika, the display of which has been banned under German law since 1945. 

The cultural resonance of the Confederate war manifests itself in subtler ways, too. Bernstein, who is American, said: “Sometimes I’m surprised by the way in which one can still encounter people being like, ‘You know, the real America is in the South.' I think it comes back to a particular idea of the city being somehow part of the world capitalist system, but the country is where a nation’s cultural life truly exists. I can’t help but think that part of that is the remaining power of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’”

Of course, Germany is not the only country in which Confederate iconography can be seen. In recent years, the Stars and Bars has become a common touchstone for the far right from Ireland to Brazil. However, it is especially jarring in a nation that has, for decades, made rigorous efforts to confront the violence and prejudice of its past. 

Germany’s long and painful process of reckoning with the Holocaust, known within the country as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, is often hailed as a global model of historical reconciliation. According to Bernstein, it includes a deep suspicion of wistful longing for an imagined past, an emotion fostered and exploited by the Nazis to advance their ideas of antisemitism and volkisch nationalism. 

However such messaging remains powerful to this day. In a recent campaign, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland called for a return to a “normal” Germany. While, at least on the surface, about the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, one video juxtaposes grainily nostalgic cinefilm of a white family with contemporary footage of burning barricades, anti-fascist protesters and lockdown signs. At one point a garden gnome makes an appearance in a neat suburban garden, presumably owned by a clean-cut white, middle-class family — a bizarre symbol of the party’s cozy, quaint and culturally homogenous vision for the nation.

That these ideas still have a following in Germany may explain why Pölking’s campaign to rename Onkel Toms Hütte has, as yet, not been acted upon. After all, preserving the name allows people to cling to a German identity rooted in an illusory version of the past, far away from the complexities and tensions that exist in today’s world.

For Bernstein, that raises a worrying question: “Shouldn’t Germany, of all places, be aware of the trap of nostalgia?”

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington, DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

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The post Letter from Germany: A strange and enduring love affair with the antebellum South appeared first on Coda Story.

Her journey started simply enough. Searching Instagram using the hashtags “period” and “menstruation,” she quickly came across a deluge of posts promoting unsubstantiated ideas, such as girls being able to regulate or predict periods based on their astrological signs. Visiting the accounts responsible for them appeared to populate her feed with even more falsehoods. 

“When you get to one page, you start scrolling to the next and the next, and end up somewhere on the deep web,” she said.

The volume of distortions and inaccuracies shook Holopainen. So, she decided to meet them head-on. She was well-positioned to do so. For the past seven years, she has campaigned with the global girls’ rights organization Plan International. Bringing her experience of medicine and advocacy together, she set up an Instagram page — theperiodmove — to help girls climb out of the morass of pseudoscience that many of them have unwittingly stumbled into. 

On May 1, she published her first post: a soft pink grid detailing how misinformation seeps into discussions about menstruation. “Due to the taboo nature of periods, a lot of mis- and disinformation is being spread,” she wrote. “This may cause false and even dangerous beliefs.”

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It’s no secret that our digital spaces are rife with conspiracy theories and fake news. But new research from Plan International suggests that disinformation is taking a severe toll on young women and girls, exposing them to ideas that are dangerous to their physical wellbeing, eroding their trust in democratic processes and negatively affecting their mental health. The report comes amid increased scrutiny of social media’s influence on adolescents, following a series of damning allegations from a Facebook whistleblower about Instagram’s “toxic” impact on teenage girls, including exacerbating disordered eating and suicidal ideation.

Plan International’s study surveyed more than 26,000 girls across 26 countries about their exposure to disinformation and found significant numbers are harmed by online myths. In the United States, 80% of young women said misinformation has had a negative impact on their lives, while Brazil and the Philippines reported 91% and 95%, respectively. One-third reported that it has damaged their mental health, making them more stressed and anxious, and 20% said their faith in election results has been compromised.

The report also clearly showed that digital disinformation can affect the decisions that girls make about their physical health. For instance, a quarter of young women questioned whether to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. Like Holopainen, they also have also been confronted by a significant amount of erroneous health misinformation — one, in Brazil, recalled coming across a post suggesting that tampons cause cancer.

The flood of reproductive health-related misinformation has introduced Generation Z to a new variety of influencer: physicians debunking online misinformation about sexually transmitted diseases, fertility, the human papillomavirus vaccine, birth control and other reproductive health issues in snappy, bite-sized videos on TikTok and Instagram. But, for most doctors, myth-busting often takes place when they meet patients.

U.S.-based medical practitioners Trish Hutchison and Melisa Holmes routinely field an array of social media-driven questions on topics ranging from coronavirus vaccines to infertility. Hutchison, a physician who works at the College of Charleston in South Carolina,, and Holmes, an obstetrician-gynecologist in the state, also run an online sexual education hub for parents and teens called Girlology. This work has allowed them to see that what young women see on screen often migrates directly into their real-life choices and beliefs.

Falsehoods about menstrual products — such as the myth that non-organic tampons leak chemicals into girls’ bodies — are widespread. However, the most common lies that they find themselves patiently refuting are that the birth control pill causes infertility or that women need to periodically take a break from using contraception to “cleanse” their bodies. “The only thing that happens when you take a break from birth control is that you have an unintended pregnancy,” Holmes says. 

They also routinely confront misconceptions about feminine hygiene, largely propagated by online vendors of pseudoscientific products claiming to promote vaginal cleanliness. “Self-treating vaginas is huge on Instagram,” Hutchison told me. “I pulled a sprig of lavender out of a vagina a couple of weeks ago, because TikTok talks about how to clean yourself. Don’t do that.”

Some social media channels lay heavy emphasis on self-treatment and diagnosis, leading them to delay visiting a doctor until their conditions are more advanced than they need to be. Holmes pointed to a patient who developed a kidney infection after attempting to self-treat a urinary tract infection with cranberry juice, or young women who gave themselves skin conditions after using DIY remedies to treat what they wrongly believed were yeast infections.

“There’s so much self-treatment that’s happening based on Dr. Google that people are later getting health care from a trusted and licensed provider,” Holmes said. “Someone may think they think they have a yeast infection and it’s not getting better and they’ve looked online. They come in finally and they’ve got raging herpes infection, and they didn’t recognize what it was. We are definitely seeing more misinformation and it’s impacting people in bigger ways than it used to.”

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In the months leading up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban launched an aggressive social media campaign to promote their agenda and leaned on platforms like Twitter to project an image of calm as American troops exited the country — a sharp turn from the group’s approach to technology in the 1990s when they banned the internet. 

Philip Seib is professor emeritus of journalism and public diplomacy at the University of Southern California. A co-founder of the academic journal Media, War and Conflict, he has been writing for decades about media and war. In his latest book, “Information at War: Journalism, Disinformation, and Modern Warfare,” Seib charts the role of information in conflicts, including the Second World War, Vietnam, and the war in Syria amid a rapidly shifting media ecosystem. I talked to him about how digital tools have influenced the landscape of war and how the public could take the issue more seriously.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: ​​Your book goes back through history to trace the role of information in warfare. What made you want to write it?

Philip Seib: I find that more and more emphasis is being placed on the militarization of information and the use of information as a tool of warfare by various governments. I think this is a very important phenomenon which has not gotten enough attention.

Are you able to pinpoint when you started to see the deployment of information as a weapon of war?

I think what got me most interested in it was a book I wrote some years ago called “Broadcasts from the Blitz,” which is about Edward Murrow’s time in London. He and his colleagues from the U.S. and the UK recognized the importance of information in getting the U.S. to help a very beleaguered Britain. And so that was really my first experience in writing about this topic and my interest in it has grown since then. It certainly peaked by the use of information by Russia against the United States in 2016.

​​You write that “militaries are finding that information can be a valuable asset to conventional weaponry.” Can you elaborate on that?

The issue exists on several different levels. One level is the fairly traditional use of propaganda to soften up or influence a foreign public. To cite the pre-U.S. entry in the Second World War, the British were very active even within the United States in trying to affect American public opinion. Now the Russians and to a certain extent the Chinese have made information usage an integral part of their military doctrines. An example of that would be the Russian war against Ukraine.

The Russians have said that in the past, wars have been 90% conventional combat and 10% propaganda. Future conflicts might be 90% propaganda and 10% conventional fighting. If that’s really the case, it raises all sorts of interesting questions. Such as, if information is used as a tool of war, how can you legitimately respond to it? In other words, if Russia interferes in U.S. politics using information, do you have to respond just with information, or does that call for military action? I think this question is going to occupy policymakers for some time to come. I would add that policymakers have not really grappled with this effectively to date.

With the increased use of the internet and digital apps, will information warfare take up a more important role in conflicts?

Absolutely. And the reason I feel that way is because the information universe itself has changed so dramatically and there’s so many more ways to reach the public. You don’t have to try to get coverage on the CBS evening news, you can go on Twitter. There are just so many ways to reach the public. And that’s what the Russians did so successfully in the U.S. in 2016. As Donald Trump proved, he didn’t need any of the gatekeepers, he could just tweet and have his millions and millions of followers get the information — often inaccurate but also unfiltered. Militaries can use that for their own purposes as well.

You’ve been writing about this topic for a while. I’m curious if you foresaw the broader role of information in war as the internet came to be?

My crystal ball didn’t serve me well in this case. I’m intrigued by history, and I was thinking about doing another historical analysis of the role of the news media. But then looking ahead became more interesting to me. Especially because of the dearth of information and the lack of a coherent response by nations, by governments, by school systems, everything, to the malignant use of information. 

One of the points that I make in the book is that the country that has done the best job of responding is Finland. They have brought critical thinking related to information, they start that in kindergarten. And the U.S. has kind of a hit-and-miss system. In training journalists, we train people to do the medical beat, the government beat, and so on. We need to train future journalists in the information beat. They need to understand how all of this works. And most of them don’t.

What you’re saying raises a lot of questions about what we need to do as individuals and as societies to develop media literacy. But there’s also a role that journalists can play in this process, for better or worse. How is the media doing when covering these issues?

I think journalists and media institutions — publications and broadcasters — have greatly underrated the importance of this issue with sporadic recognition. The U.S. media are well behind the curve. Now it might be with the Biden administration that there are more people in the intelligence community and in the military and the State Department and elsewhere paying attention to this. But during the Trump administration, it was sort of a no-go zone to even talk about it because it implied that his election in 2016 was tainted somehow by Russian interference.

You provide the example of the Rohingya in Myanmar and there are many other current examples of human rights violations and conflict which have been exposed by social media. Do you think we become desensitized when we can theoretically pick up our phones, open Twitter, and see videos and photos of it in real-time? Or is it making us more sympathetic?

I think it’s both. Information overload has a tendency generally to desensitize people because there’s just so much of it. We’ve come a long way from, say 1940, when Murrow’s reporting about the Blitz really shocked people. I think people have become inured to shocking content of news reporting about all this. And even when you think about the planes flying into the World Trade Center, the first time you see that, it’s horrifying. The second and third times you see it, it’s horrifying. The hundredth time you see it, it’s television. I think there’s a tendency that we don’t discriminate enough in the way we progress from news coverage. We just sort of look at it and it’s like being a spectator sport. That’s why I think there needs to be more sophisticated and expanded critical thinking taught in schools. 

I find that very hard to envision that happening in the U.S.

I’m with you. One interesting thing about Finland is the amount of trust people have in the news media, it is very high. 

One trend I’ve covered is an issue around authoritarian countries closing off access to information during unrest. I mean internet blackouts around contested elections, protests, etc. Is that something that factors into how you think about information warfare? Not just how governments manipulate information, but often make it inaccessible?

Yeah, I think that’s a backdoor way of weaponizing information. Some governments that do that, that block access to certain websites and so on, they’re also simultaneously putting out their own information that they consider more useful to them. It’s part of the same issue. When people first talked about what a great democratizing force this new media would be, I think they tended to overlook the malign ways in which media could be used and controlled, and that is increasingly going to be an issue around the world.

Your book covers a long sweep of history, from the Blitz to the modern era. What do you see as some of the most important takeaways from your research?

I think people need to take information more seriously. We pick up the morning paper still, read it online, check the baseball scores and that sort of thing, and then set it aside. We don’t fully realize just how influential and omnipresent information is, and how it affects our behavior. 

The question is ‘will the public become smarter about dealing with this?’ It’s sort of like air pollution. The air keeps getting worse and worse and at some point, you hope the public says, ‘wait a minute. We can’t live like this.’

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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