As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

The post How Democracies Die: The Script for a Three-Act Play appeared first on Coda Story.

For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

The post From Russia with hate appeared first on Coda Story.

But if things were getting uncomfortable for him in Buenos Aires, bounding onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland with a chainsaw, he seemed right at home. The chainsaw was a gift for Elon Musk, an unabashed admirer of Milei’s economic policies, his belief that government needs to essentially just get out of the way.  

In Argentina, Milei frequently cites his international clout as evidence of the appeal of his libertarian ideology. He says that Trump brought Musk into his government to replicate the role of Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation. Whether Musk is a committed libertarian in the Milei and Sturzenegger mold is unknown. And unlike them, Musk has no electoral remit to enact his reforms. Back in September 2024, though, when DOGE had not yet taken shape, Musk posted on X that the “example” Milei was “setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”

And With DOGE fully up and running, Musk described Sturzenegger’s “Chainsaw 2.0” or “deep chainsaw” plans as “awesome.” In this plan, the national government of Argentina would, for instance, not build public housing because it’s something the private sector can do. The “lesson for other countries,” Sturzenegger says, “is that we should revisit the limits of what can be done.”

Just over a year into his government, Milei cut public spending by 30%, shut down half of the country's ministries, eliminated hundreds of laws and decrees, slashed nearly 40,000 public sector jobs, and reduced public works budgets to a bare minimum—all without major civil unrest, in the face of an opposition that remains largely paralyzed.

The shock Americans feel as they try to comprehend exactly how much power DOGE has been given, is how Argentinians felt as they watched Milei’s government—largely composed of individuals with no political experience, some without even a formal appointment—dismantle the state. 

While Milei has dramatically reduced inflation to 2.2%—no small feat in a country where inflation had crossed 200%—his cuts, alongside soaring costs, have also pushed some into poverty and his once high approval ratings are falling. 

That’s why his trip to the U.S. was important. At CPAC it’s Milei’s conservatism – last month in Davos, he railed against the “promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism” – that counts, not the facts of his governance. Milei takes pride in his high standing within the global right wing. He is a part of what Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, in her own CPAC speech, called a global conservative collaboration. “When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created a global, leftist liberal network in the 90s,” she said, “they were called ‘statesmen.’ Today when Trump, Meloni, Milei and, maybe, Modi talk, they are called a ‘threat to democracy.’ This is the left’s double standard.” It is this global prominence, Milei hopes, that will continue to propel his agenda forward in Argentina and shield him from the fallout of the crypto scandal. 

As for Milei’s effect on the U.S. – both Trump and Musk appear to be looking at him as the canary in the coalmine of radical deregulation. Just how far can governments go down the path of libertarianism? How far can they go to redefine the role of government in society?  Both approaches reflect a foundational shift in governance philosophy - from institutional processes to disruption by outsiders who view existing systems as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Milei’s first year in government offers a preview of what's unfolding in America. Musk is now taking Milei's playbook further by adding technology - developing AI tools to automate the government downsizing that Milei executed manually with his 40,000 job cuts. Both men use their credentials as disruptors to justify radical changes while dismissing criticism as establishment resistance. And both have created a mutual amplification system - Milei points to Musk's support as validation while Musk points to Argentina as proof that his approach works, despite emerging evidence to the contrary in both cases. A U.S. district judge has, at least temporarily, stopped DOGE from accessing treasury data on the grounds that such data might be “improperly disclosed.” As questions mount about DOGE’s intentions, including from its own employees, Americans should watch Argentina’s libertarian experiment closely. It could serve not as a blueprint but as a warning about what happens when bureaucratic guardrails are dismantled with chainsaws, real or metaphorical.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Musk and Milei’s chainsaw bromance appeared first on Coda Story.

PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The end of consensus appeared first on Coda Story.

When he declared last week that Ukraine should "secure what we're giving them with their rare earth and other things," he inadvertently exposed a bitter truth: gauzy Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn’t apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

It was a lesson I learned for myself, reporting from Georgia in 2008 as Russian tanks rolled towards my hometown.By the time a ceasefire was called, Russia had invaded and seized 20% of Georgian land, the territory of America's most loyal non-NATO ally in the region. And Georgia had suffered a wound that would prove fatal. Just months later, Hillary Clinton, Obama's newly minted Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button in Geneva. 

Despite the recent Russian aggression, there was Lavrov, laughing and joking with Clinton about a mistake in the transliteration from English to Cyrillic of the word “reset.” Every Georgian, Kazakh, or Ukrainian who had experienced Russian colonialism first hand, knew that what he was really chuckling about was the fact that Moscow had just gotten away with murder. 

Trump has exposed a bitter truth: gauze Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn't apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine was positioning itself to be a key player in the global green technology transition. The country's vast deposits of lithium and various minerals - including 22 of the 34 minerals that the European Union deems to be “critical” – promised a pathway to genuine economic sovereignty. But that future was stolen by Russia's invasion, with a significant percentage of Ukrainian minerals now under Russian control, including half of its rare earths reserves. 

The mineral deposits that remain – resources that could finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction – are now being demanded by Trump as collateral for military aid. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy leapt at the offer: “let’s do a deal,” he told Reuters about Trump’s conditions, “we are only for it.” Zelenskiy’s desperate need for continued American support means he has little choice but to bargain away Ukraine’s resources. Even if it raises the grim colonial specter of the U.S. and Russia sitting across the negotiating table and carving up Ukrainian wealth amongst themselves.

Trump's approach eerily echoes Victorian-era colonialism. When Cecil Rhodes declared in 1902 that he would "annex the planets if I could," he expressed the same ruthless resource-extraction mindset that now drives Trumpian foreign policy. Both men share a vision of power measured in territorial control and resource ownership, backed by military might.

In his first term, Trump was frequently described as an isolationist, unwilling to continue to fund American military adventurism abroad, unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other countries, unwilling to shelter migrants, and unwilling to abide by international agreements and institutions. Back then, the label was suspect, a badge of convenience. Already in the first weeks of Trump’s second term, the label has become absurd. 

But Trump's mineral-for-weapons proposition, crude as it is, strips away decades of Western illusions. It acknowledges what leaders in Washington and Brussels long refused to see - that countries in Russia's shadow have never had the luxury of true independence. 

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue. It’s a pattern that requires the West to bury its head in the sand after each example of Russian aggression. For instance, after Russia's cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, Western leaders dismissed it as an anomaly. And then, after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, they rushed to "reset" relations. Six years later, after the seizure of Crimea, they still spoke of finding diplomatic solutions. Each time Putin tested the West's resolve, he emerged more emboldened, his every action treated as an aberration rather than as part of a coherent imperial strategy.

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue.

The medieval assault on Ukraine in 2022 seemed, finally, like a wake-up call. For a moment, it appeared that politicians in Europe and the United States understood that Putin wanted to rebuild a Russian empire. But the moment didn’t last long. Even as Putin openly declared his imperial ambitions, even as he openly dismissed Ukraine's right to sovereignty, Western leaders continued to search for off-ramps and resets that existed only in their imagination.

Joe Biden's tactics - treating the conflict as a crisis to be managed rather than a war to be won - became the final chapter of the West’s failed post-Cold War politics. Each delayed weapons delivery, each hesitation justified by the fear of escalation, reflected a familiar priority: stability with Russia over the right to sovereignty of its neighbors.

Those underground deposits in Ukraine tell the story: a large portion now lies in territories controlled by Russia or too close to the front lines to be mined. No wonder, Zelensky is courting Trump’s interest in its rare earth deposits. The choices facing Ukraine's leadership and people remain what they've always been - a series of impossible decisions to be made in the shadow of an empire that has never accepted their right to decide.

“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe's values," a Ukrainian soldier told me in 2015. His words haunt me now as we enter this new, cynical era. Deep beneath Ukraine's soil lies both promise and peril - deposits of minerals that could fuel either independence or a new era of colonial extraction. The familiar irony for Ukraine is that these resources, which make sovereignty viable, must also serve as collateral in a great game between colonial powers.

Now that the magical thinking and pretense is over and the hard calculations begin, the only certainty is that the cost will be borne, as always, by those who do not have the privilege of being able to harbor illusions and magical thoughts in the first place.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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And that’s without counting the cost of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization which has particularly serious implications for Africa. Eventually, Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state, walked back some of the order, saying exceptions would be made for “life-saving aid” including HIV treatments.

Despite Rubio’s clarification that essential aid would be granted a “humanitarian waiver,” many aid workers said they hadn’t yet been told whether they could resume operations, having already been told to cease operations last week. In Uganda alone, an estimated 1.2 million people would have been affected by the withdrawal of funds from AIDS relief. The Ugandan-born executive director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said that the United States’  “unwavering commitment to addressing HIV stands as a global gold standard of leadership.” If Trump continued to back AIDS relief, she added, the U.S. could effectively “end AIDS by 2030.” 

But few Ugandan politicians expressed any anger or even disappointment in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s blanket order to freeze funding. On X, human rights activist, Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya asked “where is the outrage?” Months before, he had told me how the autocratic Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s government monitored social media posts and sometimes used online criticism as grounds to arrest activists.  

By contrast, in August, 2023, when the World Bank decided to suspend new public financing to Uganda, Museveni himself took to social media. The World Bank made its decision in the wake of Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023” which sought to “prohibit any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex” and to “prohibit the promotion or recognition of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” 

The range of punishments included life imprisonment and even the death penalty. For LGBT activist Hans Senfuma, the passage of the act into Ugandan law turned his nightmare into reality “It essentially gives the go-ahead to attack those who are assumed to be LGBTQ+,” he said, explaining that he himself now lived a life of secrecy, rarely leaving his apartment for fear even of his own neighbors.

It is, posted Museveni, “unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money.” Uganda, he added, “does not need pressure from anybody to know how to solve problems in our society. They are our problems.” Later that year, Joe Biden suspended Uganda from a group of African countries granted special duty free access to the US for specified products.

With the election of Trump, Uganda sees an opportunity to return to the fold. “We are going to start engaging with the new administration as soon as possible,” said Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, a senior foreign ministry official. “The tone which His Excellency Trump has set is favorable.” Over a five-year period, it was estimated that Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law would cost it over $8 billion. But with Trump having signed his own anti-LGBTQ executive orders, the Ugandan government sees him as a likely ally, as someone who shares their values. 

Trump has used his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world access to contraception and safe abortions. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

Indeed, as The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported, Valerie Huber, a former adviser to the Trump administration, has been traveling across Africa soliciting government investment in her sex education programs. Huber, TBIJ noted, is the “driving force behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement signed by 34 countries saying that there is ‘no international right to abortion.’” 

Trump’s executive order commits the United States to recognizing “two sexes, male and female” which are apparently “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This has emboldened anti-LGBT activists across the continent. In Ghana, for instance, a bill has been proposed to imprison people for “identifying” as LGBT or funding LGBT groups. While the new Ghanaian president John Mahama, who like Trump was inaugurated in January, says the bill is “effectively dead on procedural grounds,” activists have been pushing for its passage into law. “With Donald Trump’s return,” said one activist, “Ghana is on the right side of history.”

In a paper commissioned by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education in September, the researcher Malayah Harper assessed the global ramifications of the implementation of Project 2025 proposals. Project 2025, she argued, “calls for an end to using U.S. diplomatic soft power in Africa to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, and refers to this diplomacy as ‘imposing pro-LGBT initiatives.” Connected to this, is the conservative desire for Trump to pull the plug on U.S. funds for foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. 

And Trump has done exactly that, using his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world, including in Africa, access to contraception and safe abortions. Significantly, while speaking of the government’s “humanitarian waiver,” Rubio made sure to say exemptions did not apply to abortion, family planning, transgender surgeries, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

It is a key trope of Russian propaganda that homosexuality is a decadent Western concept. Russia, the Kremlin insists, is the last bastion of traditional family values, a pitch which has resonated with conservative communities everywhere. Now that the U.S. is following along the same path, the effect on women’s health could be catastrophic. 

Also, as Trump retreats from public health initiatives in Africa and elsewhere, it leaves the door open for others, particularly China to step in and reshape global alliances to its benefit. Anna Reismann, the Country Director for Uganda and South Sudan at Konrad-Adenaur-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a major center-right political party, told me that dropping aid funding only fueled anti-Western narratives. “It plays to sentiments against colonialism and paternalistic behaviors of Western powers," she said. In other words, the vacuum left by the U.S. would be filled by China, Russia and other non-Western powers that do not impose human rights conditions on funding. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.

For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate. 

“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017. 

That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.

There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls.  What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.

"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.

For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism. 

An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat." 

These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions. 

That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development. 

DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual." 

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it. 

As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China. 

Security concers aside,  what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors. 

In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.

At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.

Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI,"  Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."

The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.

This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.

We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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As anticipated, Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again); withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, completing a process he began in 2020; suspending all U.S. foreign aid programs for 90 days, in part because the industry and bureaucracy “serve to destablize world peace”; insisting that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and ending “the Federal funding of gender ideology.” He also unleashed a number of aggressive economic threats, potentially sparking a global trade war.

But beyond these attention-grabbing gestures designed for both domestic and international audiences, Trump is engaged in a game of international high stakes poker. At his inauguration, Silicon Valley leaders shared front-row space with Cabinet picks, visual confirmation that Trump primary allegiances are to the tech billionaires. It is these already stratospherically wealthy men, that Trump seeks to further enrich – the unseemly scramble to buy TikTok, effectively the seizure of a foreign-owned asset, being an example of how the administration and the broligarchs will work together. 

In response, countries in Trump’s crosshairs – China particularly – will reconfigure their own alliances to counter the effect of the U.S. president’s penchant for protectionism and isolationism. Tellingly, Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a widely publicized video conference call just hours after Trump’s inauguration to reaffirm their deep, abiding strategic partnership and to reform the “global governance system” dominated by the United States.

It was a strong move in the geopolitical chess game. Here's how some of the key players are positioning themselves for what comes next:

China: Unspecified Chinese goods will be subject to a 10% tariff from February 1, claims Trump. "We always believe there is no winner in a tariff or trade war," said a Chinese spokesperson in response, continuing China's tactic in the face of the U.S. president’s pronouncements of acting like the only adult in the room. If anything, by saying he would impose only a 10% tariff, Trump had climbed down from his earlier talk of 60% levies. Still, both the Chinese yuan and stock markets fell in response to Trump’s threats. Before the inauguration Trump and the Chinese president had apparently had a productive call. But, as noted earlier, the most prominent call in the hours after Trump began his second term was between Xi and Putin and their ambition to reshape the global order .

Russia: President Trump used his first day in office to issue a rare and blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin. "I think he should make a deal," Trump said about Putin's position in the war with Ukraine. "I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia is kinda in big trouble." It suggests Trump believes Putin is feeling the heat and might be pushed, however unwillingly, to take a seat at the negotiating table. Putin, for his part, praised Trump's character and courage and willingness to "avoid World War III." His chummy tone was followed through by the state-owned Russian media, which uniformly praised Trump's values as aligning with Russian values. Still, Putin's first call was to Xi, not Trump – a reminder that Russia intends to play a key role in a new global order that challenges American dominance.

Canada: It’s not just China that is Trump’s crosshairs. Also on February 1, Trump insists he will impose 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico as retribution for apparently letting swathes of illegals and fentanyl, the drug synonymous with the opioid crisis, cross over into the United States. The fentanyl, incidentally, Trump insists, comes from China. Justin Trudeau, Canada's lame duck prime minister, said Canada would be willing to "inflict economic pain" on the U.S. if necessary to get Trump to back off. Will Trump really begin his term in office with a trade war against America's closest allies? The European Union too, Trump says, “treats us very, very badly, so they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

India: As with Putin, Trump is said to have chemistry with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But in keeping with his belligerent post-inauguration mood, Trump threatened to levy "100% tariffs" on BRICS nations, including India, if they sought to reduce dependence on the dollar as the currency of international trade. Indian stock markets traded lower with investors nervous about retaliatory tariffs against India. But the Indian government is reportedly mulling tariff cuts on U.S. goods to placate Trump. Other placatory gestures include India indicating its willingness to take back 18,000 illegal migrants. Modi is said to be desperately seeking bilateral talks with Trump in February. Trump’s decision to end so-called birthright citizenship from February 20, thus denying babies born in the U.S. citizenship if their parents are not permanent residents, has left hundreds of thousands of Indians on temporary visas in limbo. India has long maintained that the movement of skilled Indian labour from India to the U.S. benefits both countries.  Should Modi get his longed-for audience with Trump next month, they will have a lot of tensions to address.

Trump's first week back in the White House reveals a clear strategy beneath the apparently freewheeling threats. America first, in his view, has always meant not just putting the interests of America and Americans first but maintaining America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power. And that means eliminating or at least neutralising the opposition.

From his actions in the first week, it’s clear Trump’s mind is on China. His newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held his first meeting not with European allies but with counterparts from India, Australia and Japan - members of the Quad, a group explicitly intended to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region. While Trump builds this coalition with one hand, with his other hand he wields targeted economic threats against BRICS, a group which has proposed itself as an alternative to Western hegemony. India happens to be a member of BRICS too, though key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, which had said it would join BRICS, have postponed any such step, perhaps recognising Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Meanwhile, Putin and Xi's video call signals the possibility that Trump's return to office might accelerate the urgency to execute on their shared vision of a post-American world order. The question is whether Trump's strategy of mixing economic coercion, even against allies, with strategic coalition-building will hold them at bay or further weaken America’s global standing.

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On Chinese social media, the crisis in California is being treated as conclusive evidence that US society is broken. Some of the criticism cuts uncomfortably deep - for instance, Chinese commentators have pointed to the stark divide between rich and poor Californians and how they have faced different fates after losing their homes. "Even the world's largest economy still does not have the ability to protect the safety of its citizens when disasters occur," wrote academic Lu Qi. Another blogger put it more bluntly: "So, do you know why the wildfire in the United States is out of control? Because there is no one in control. Of course, they didn’t put out the fire or save anyone"

Chinese state media drew flattering comparisons between China’s response to catastrophe and that of the U.S. government. Look at last week's Tibet earthquake, Chinese media crowed, where over 14,000 rescue workers were deployed on search and rescue operations. And remember the 2022 Chongqing wildfire, they added, reposting videos of locals transporting extinguishers, supplies and emergency workers to remote areas on mopeds to fight the fires. Writing in the state-owned Beijing Daily, columnist Bao Nan described the fires as a “completely man-made disaster.” The fire chief, he alleged, borrowing far-right tropes, “seemed more focused on LGBT initiatives.” Proclaiming the superiority of China’s governance and capacity for collective action, Nan argued that  “superheroes in American blockbusters may stir up some passion for a moment, but when facing actual disasters, we don't need solitary heroes.” What’s more effective, he wrote, is “the power of group solidarity."

Russian coverage of the California wildfires took a different but equally calculated tack. Rather than dwell on comparisons between the United States and Russia, they amplified American political conflict and the ongoing corrosive blame game. Russian state media, such as RIA Novosti, has extensively reported Elon Musk's condemnation of the California government and its supposed mismanagement of federal resources. 

Meanwhile, the Russian-appointed governor of occupied Kherson, opted for some straight-up trolling. “The California fires have left many ordinary residents homeless,” he told the state-run news agency TASS, “therefore, our region is ready to welcome any American citizen who has lost their home and livelihood. Naturally, this applies only to those who have not financed the Ukrainian army or supported the current Kiev regime, which has caused far more civilian casualties through its actions than the fires in LA.” 

What's consistently been missing from Chinese and Russian coverage is, of course, context, balance and introspection. When it comes to holding up mirrors, both Moscow and Beijing make sure that theirs only point outward. Each regime is crafting a self-serving narrative. China positions itself as the champion of collective action and social cohesion, while Russia seizes every opportunity to show the United States as fundamentally flawed and dysfunctional. What both Beijing and Moscow get is that the most effective propaganda isn't necessarily about creating fake news - it's about distorting truths to exacerbate genuine societal tensions.

What makes this type of propaganda so effective is the marshaling of selective facts and manipulation of issues that resonate with people, playing up any polarizing political implications. While we often focus on detecting "fake news," authoritarian states have mastered something more sophisticated: using social media to exploit points of conflict, appealing to users’ prejudices to effectively turning them into useful idiots. Silicon Valley's platforms have handed these states an unprecedented ability to influence communities worldwide with propaganda narratives. 

And they don’t even need to make up stories about inequality or government dysfunction. Because the most effective propaganda is the kind that is grown from kernels of truth.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here for more insights like these straight into your inbox.

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Now the United States could become the latest nation to pass an anti-terror law that will effectively stifle dissent.

Undeterred by a failed attempt earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives tried again last week to pass H.R. 9495, a bill that gives the treasury secretary the authority to designate non-profits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” This time, with Donald Trump poised to take office and retribution on his mind, the bill passed. It gives, noted Human Rights Watch, “the executive branch broad and easily abused authority.” 

Gravely titled the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support. No one objects to the parts of the bill that seek to alleviate tax burdens and deadlines on “U.S. nationals who are unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad or held hostage abroad and their spouses.” Or the “refund and abatement of tax penalties and fines paid by hostages, detained individuals, and their spouses or dependents.”

But, bundled together with its uncontroversial sections, the bill also announces its intent to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” How such organizations are designated appears to be entirely up to the treasury secretary who is appointed by the president. According to Human Rights Watch, the bill does not “clearly define” criteria by which organizations can be deemed to be enabling terrorists, nor does it “require the government to provide evidence to support such a decision.” Instead, it requires the nonprofit to prove to the government that it does not support terrorism.

In a letter to the House of Representatives, civil society groups asked why such legislation was necessary when it is already a federal crime for nonprofits to provide “material support to terrorist organizations.” Such a law, the letter argued, would hand the U.S. executive “a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.”

Shoved off the news agenda by the intense speculation and reporting over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks, the bill has received scanty mainstream media coverage. Its impact, however, could be outsized, particularly on free speech. “A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional,” said the Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin as the bill was debated on the House floor. It is, he said, “a werewolf in sheep’s clothing” giving the American president “Orwellian powers and the American not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”    

Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the bill was “part of a broader assault on our civil liberties.” Introduced in the wake of protests on American campuses over the war in Gaza, the bill, Tlaib warned, is not “just about Palestinian human rights advocacy organizations, this is about the NAACP, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.” It criminalizes social justice organizations, she added, the “folks that have been trying to make it safe for our kids to go to school away from gun crisis and violence.” 

Less than 10 days before the House passed the bill on November 21, it had been voted down, failing to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. Earlier this year in April, a version of the bill gained overwhelming support in the House only to be stalled in the Senate. Now in its third iteration, the bill may yet languish in the upper house of Congress, though most analysts expect it to be brought before Congress again next year if necessary when the Republicans will have a majority in both houses.

Across the globe, legislation aimed at the funding of civil society has had an inevitable chilling effect on dissent. “The misuse of anti-terrorism legislation,” observed the European commissioner for human rights in April, “has become one of the most widespread threats to freedom of expression, including media freedom, in Europe.” Why would the United States, even with its much vaunted protection of free speech, be any different?

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Pakistan is the latest in a series of countries – from Türkiye to the UAE – seeking to clamp down on or outright ban VPNs. In Russia, Apple has been actively aiding this censorship effort by removing over 60 VPN services from its app store between July and September alone. Apple, reports show, have removed nearly 100 VPN services from its app store in Russia without explanation. Russian authorities claim they have only asked for the removal of 25 such services.

Restricting VPN services is increasingly becoming a vital tool of state control. In September, it was reported that Russia has budgeted $660 billion over the next five years to expand its capacity to censor the internet. The Kremlin, while not banning VPNs, has worked to block them off and curtail their use. VPNs are only banned in a handful of countries, including North Korea, Iraq, Oman, Belarus and Turkmenistan. But in several others, such as China, Russia, Türkiye and India, governments must approve of VPN services, thus enabling the monitoring and surveillance of users.    

Last month, the Washington D.C.-based Freedom House published its annual Freedom of the Net report, concluding that “global internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year.” The report named Myanmar (alongside China) as having the “world’s worst environment for internet freedom.” It specifically noted that the country’s military regime had “imposed a new censorship system that ratcheted up restrictions on virtual private networks (VPNs).” In desperation, anti-regime forces have tried to set up Starlink systems in areas under their control, though the Elon Musk-owned service isn’t licensed in Myanmar.

VPN use typically surges in countries which seek to control access to the internet. In Mozambique, for example, demand for VPNs grew over 2,000% in just the week up to November 5, following a ban on social media in the wake of a disputed election. And in Brazil, demand for VPNs grew over 1,000% in September, after the country’s Supreme Court formally blocked access to X. Posting on X, owner Elon Musk called for Brazilians to use VPNs and millions did even at the risk of incurring thousands of dollars of fines each day. Brazil’s Supreme Court also called on Apple and Google to drop VPNs from their app stores before dropping that requirement, though there were allegations that Apple had already begun to comply.

The United Nations has described universal access to the internet as a human right rather than a privilege, which means countries seeking to deny citizens access to information are denying them their fundamental rights. For people in countries beset by crisis or controlled by authoritarian governments, VPNs are a “lifeline,” as one young Bangladeshi wrote after the government cut off the internet and began to violently suppress protests in July,

In September, The White House met with Big Tech representatives, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare, and urged them to make more server bandwidth available to VPN services partially funded by the U.S. government through the Open Technology Fund. The OTF claims users of VPNs it funds, particularly in Iran and Russia, have grown by the tens of millions since 2022 and it is struggling to keep up with demand.

With governments around the world now eager to keep tabs on and control VPN use, many internet security and freedom advocates back Mixnet technology, which hides user identities within a chain of proxy servers, as a more effective means to evade snooping. But in a world that appears to be turning towards more authoritarian governments and leaders, can internet freedom continue to escape the clutches of determined censors?
Back in Pakistan, VPN services will now have to be registered with the government by November 30 or be considered illegal. It is a decision that the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan described from his cell as “a direct assault on the rights of people.” Ironically, on November 6, when the current Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, congratulated Donald Trump on his election win, he did it on X. Something he could have only done, as Pakistanis around the world scornfully pointed out, if he used a VPN.

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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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Think pieces and blogs across Chinese state media hailed the conversation as yet more evidence that Putin backs China’s claims over Taiwan — which in turn bolsters his own expansionism. 

“Putin is very good at helping China teach a lesson to its rebellious son. He made demands on Musk and hit Taiwan's weakest points,” wrote one Chinese military commentator to his 300,000 followers following the revelation. 

SpaceX responded to the allegation by saying that Starlink doesn’t operate over Taiwan because Taiwan won’t grant the company a license. The island democracy doesn’t want Starlink having majority ownership control over any satellite connection, so it’s been racing to build its own independent satellite internet service, free of Elon Musk’s grip.

Musk said last year, to Taiwan’s fury, that he believes Taiwan to be an “integral part of China,” comparing it to Hawaii. So it makes sense that the self-ruled island doesn’t want the billionaire in control of its satellite internet. 

Nonetheless, satellite internet is something Taiwan urgently needs. Its undersea fiber optic cables connecting the island to the internet are vulnerable, easily severed by ships in the South China Sea. It’s happened 27 times in the last five years. And as the Chinese military stages almost daily “war games” and drills around the island, including simulating a blockade of the island’s ports — an exercise it carried out most recently in October — it feels more urgent than ever that Taiwan has some way of accessing the internet via satellite. But it doesn’t want Starlink having the power to turn on – or off – that connection.  

What would Trump do if Xi Jinping imposed a blockade on Taiwan? “Oh, very easy,” he told a Wall Street Journal reporter last month. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%,” meaning he would impose tariffs. When asked if he would use military force against a blockade, Trump replied “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and knows I’m fucking crazy.” 

Our colleagues at the China Digital Times collected and translated a series of responses to this statement that are worth a read. It was “intriguing”, wrote Hong Kong professor Ding Xueliang, that this was Trump’s only response. 

Chairman Rabbit, a nationalist WeChat blogger with more than two million followers, went further: “Trump has absolutely no interest in Taiwan or the South China Sea, and has no intention of becoming embroiled in a conflict with China,” he wrote. 

Since the Musk-Putin revelations, Taiwan’s government has said it welcomes applications from all satellite internet services, including Starlink, “provided they comply with Taiwanese laws.” 

The irony is that manufacturers in Taiwan actually make some key bits of hardware for Starlink satellite systems, like circuit boards and semiconductor chips. 

Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and Trump wants to slap tariffs on those too. He has said in the past, without providing much evidence, that Taiwan “stole our chip business.” 

But Taiwan’s politicians say Trump needs Taiwan just as much as Taiwan needs Trump. Francois Wu, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told reporters this week that "without Taiwan, he cannot make America great again. He needs the semiconductors made here."
On election day in the U.S., it was revealed that Starlink had asked its Taiwanese suppliers to shift manufacturing off the island, citing “geopolitical risks.” The report sparked fury in Taiwan, with talk of boycotting Tesla, and viral praise for Musk’s “foresight” across Chinese social media.

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Case in point: In June last year, residents in western Azerbaijan began demonstrating against a proposed new reservoir to store toxic waste from a British-owned goldmine near the village of Söyüdlü. The Azeri regime  accused first the West, and then Russia, of organizing the protest. The mine, operated by a UK company called Anglo-Asian Mining, uses cyanide to separate gold from the bedrock, and then dumps the toxic sludge — which locals say is leaching into their soil and rivers. Residents in the area have been complaining of respiratory illnesses from the fumes and say lung cancer rates have increased, too. 

Journalists from one of Azerbaijan’s few independent news outlets, Abzas Media, came to investigate, and began publishing stories about the mine and the environmental damage it was inflicting on the local community. Then, in late 2023 — as COP28 in Dubai was getting underway — the Azeri authorities arrested the outlet’s founder Ulvi Hasanli, followed by four of its reporters. 

Context: Last week, Leyla Mustafayeva, the acting editor-in-chief of Abszas Media – who now lives in exile – spoke at a Climate Disinformation Summit in Copenhagen,’ run by the European Journalism Centre. I joined a disturbed, rapt audience as she described how her colleagues were languishing in pre-trial detention, while their relatives were threatened and their bank accounts frozen. The village itself has been cordoned off by police,with no outsiders,bar state-approved journalists, allowed to enter and talk to residents. 

Mustafayeva told the Copenhagen summit how “COP29 helps Azerbaijan’s government greenwash their fossil fuel exports” while protecting Western corporations. We’ll be watching closely to see how Azerbaijan continues to scrub its image in the run-up to COP. 

Connecting the Dots: If you think this story sounds far away from you, the gold mined in this place could well be in your iPhone, your laptop, or that Tesla you bought to help the planet.  

What to do about it all? Stay informed. That’s the least you can do. Mainstream media no longer have bureaux or correspondents in the South Caucasus, and local journalists are under enormous pressure from the authorities. Working with exiled Azeri journalists, the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories is trying to fill the gap, gathering  40 reporters  to continue investigating the impact of gold mining in Azerbaijan and keep the story alive. 

What to Watch For: nearly 200 countries are due to discuss a new plan to provide financial assistance to developing countries suffering the effects of climate change. But it’s not clear whether the United States, the world’s largest economy, will back the plan, with the summit taking place five days after the American presidential election..  As a result, many leading financial institutions are not bothering to send representatives, according to the FT, because, as one finance executive put it “You only go to the party if everyone is going.”

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One million people are on the move in Lebanon, says Save the Children. With one fifth of the country’s population fleeing attacks. It is a continuing cycle of escalation, in which Israel retaliates for Iran’s recent missile attack that it launched in retaliation for Israel’s attacks. 

Nasrallah’s assassination followed a weeks-long Israeli strike on other Hezbollah leaders and their foot soldiers, using both air strikes and exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. But even before these devices began blowing up in the hands of their owners across Lebanon, killing Hezbollah members, terrifying civilians and prompting parents to unplug their baby monitors, Israel had assassinated two Revolutionary Guard generals in Syria, a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon, and the political chief of Hamas visiting Tehran, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new President, to name just a few incidents.

How did Israel get so good at finding their targets? That was the question sent in from one of our readers, this week after Nasrallah’s asasonation on September 27th. For any journalist who has ever attempted to negotiate an interview with a Hezbollah commander, let alone Hassan Nasrallah himself, the fact that Israel finally got him is simply mind blowing. 

By 2008, the year I arrived in Lebanon to take over as the BBC’s resident Beirut correspondent, Nasrallah had stopped giving interviews. We kept trying, but even trying, or even a meeting with one of his commanders involved complicated negotiations, security clearances and endless trips to the Dahieh,–the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Nasrallah’s face was everywhere in Dahieh. A local boy turned leader of mythic stature. His picture was on store and office walls; looking down from giant roadside billboards or stenciled graffiti; or in countless car bumper stickers amid the city’s chaotic traffic. 

The image of Nasrallah that Hezbollah’s efficient marketing team cultivated with plenty of care and intention was that of omnipresence and invincibility. And his historical record helped make that image resonate.

In 2000, eight years after he assumed the leadership of Hezbollah following the assassination of his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi by Israel, Nasrallah forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, ending the 18-year long occupation. 

In 2006, Hezbollah, and Lebanon, paid a devastating price for its 34-day war with Israel. But by surviving and not ceding any territory, Nasrallah was hailed as a hero by his supporters and Hezbollah went on to become Lebanon’s dominant political force as well. 

Two years later, when I was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, his portrait was on every corner and his speeches were being used as mobile phone ringtones. I felt acutely aware that Nasrallah was also literally there: in the tunnels that Iran helped Hezbollah dig and maintain under the busy hubbub of the Southern suburbs. 

But I also remember a lingering sense of a possibility of another, invisible spider web that was being weaved in the Dahieh at the time. Israel’s greatest failure during the 2006 war with Lebanon was that it failed to kill Nasrallah, the man who was behind the deaths of so many Israelis. After the war, as Hezbollah’s backers in Tehran invested heavily into modernizing the network of tunnels under the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israeli intelligence focused on building human networks, working hard to identify, cultivate and subsequently deploy every nugget of dissatisfaction and dissent that they could find. 

Reporting from Southern Lebanon, I often wondered who were the Israeli spies at Hezbollah’s crowded rallies or at dinners I attended in the suburbs. And while I could never tell who they were in Lebanon at the time, now we have proof that they were definitely there.  

Lebanon’s divided society and geopolitics made Israel’s task of penetrating Lebanon much easier. Scars of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s continued to ooze hatred and distrust. Israel was the enemy, but it was the region’s big powers that never let Lebanon heal: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria each supported different factions and sects within Lebanon, constantly deepening the existing divisions. 

Add to this hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East’s endless wars: Over the past decades Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians have all found shelter in Lebanon. Even the most functional governments would have struggled not to collapse under this combination of pressures. Lebanon’s government was the opposite of functional. 

Hezbollah thrived amid Lebanon’s dysfunction and corrupt, sectarian political environment. Yet many Lebanese “rejected Hezbollah's vision of perpetual war and hated Nasrallah’s recklessness for provoking the 2006 conflict with Israel. Many also correctly understood Hezbollah to be on the side of authoritarianism and theocracy,” writes Thanassis Cambanis, author of  A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Endless War, in this excellent piece. 

But for a long time, in a state that was on a brink of perpetual collapse, Hezbollah was also a force that actually got things done. Plenty of Lebanese voted for Hezbollah, not because it promised war, but because they needed a functioning state: someone to pick up garbage, keep schools open, run the government. During the 2009 elections in Lebanon that I covered, Hezbollah slogans called for war against Israel but also for better education, and for eradication of poverty and corruption. 

The problem was that the more political power Nasrallah’s party gained, the more corrupt Hezbollah itself became. Violence, corruption and economic hardship are a perfect mix for those working to recruit informants.

Assassinations of the entire command structure of the most powerful militia in the Middle East requires state of the art technology, incredible human penetration into target societies and extraordinary strategic patience. 

French media reported that Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah underground HQ was leaked to the Israelis by an Iranian mole. These reports have not been corroborated, but the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad produced a jaw-dropping sound bite when he told CNN Turk that even the head of the Iranian unit countering Mossad was an Israeli agent. 

Ahmadinejad said that twenty agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also worked for Israel, allegedly providing Mossad with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program. He said they were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the assassination of the nuclear scientist they killed with a remote controlled gun, or the warehouse in Tehran where Israeli officers blowtorched their way in, stole 50,000 pages of documents and 169 discs relating to the Iran’s nuclear program within 6 hours and 29 minutes, leaving the rest of the facility untouched. 

Security experts agree that it would have taken decades of infiltration of Iranian and Lebanese command structures to pull off the operation of the scale that killed Hassan Nasrallah.

Friends in Beirut, who have lived through many explosions including the devastating blast in the  Beirut port in 2020, said they have never heard anything comparable to the blast that shook the city when Israel dropped 2,000 pound US-made bombs on a residential block in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing many people, including Hassan Nasrallah who was hiding in a bunker 60 feet below the ground.

The ping pong of retaliations triggered by this bomb is certain to kill many more. Israel’s precision attacks are bound to impact millions of lives, in the Middle East but also all across our deeply interconnected world.

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Much of the fear around personal devices being turned into remote controlled explosives is two fold: Could any of our devices and appliances be turned into bombs? What does this mean for international supply chain contamination? Writing about Hezbollah, Kim Ghattas notes that mothers in Lebanon turned off baby monitors out of fear for their childrens’ lives.

To begin with, it’s important to understand why Hezbollah relies on low tech like pagers and landlines. Reuters reported earlier this year that Hezbollah switched to low tech to counter Israel’s sophisticated surveillance tactics. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones which makes them more resilient in times of emergency.

The AR-924 pagers that turned into explosive devices on 18 September were believed to have been made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese firm. Since the terror attack, Gold Apollo’s CEO has confirmed that it authorized another company, Budapest-based BAC Consulting, to use its brand name for product sales in certain regions. Gold Apollo has denied any links with BAC’s manufacturing operations. In turn, Hungarian authorities have reported that BAC Consulting was only an intermediary, with no manufacturing or production facilities in Hungary. They claim that Hezbollah bought its pager stock from a company registered in Bulgaria, Norta Global. The trail grows ever more complex, with Bulgarian authorities confirming that no customs records prove the existence of such goods being exported through the country. The Japanese company that was initially believed to have manufactured walkie talkies that blew up in the second attack in Lebanon, has also released a statement saying they discontinued making the devices in question ten years ago. 

An Indian man and a Hungarian woman who were part of the companies implicated in the manufactured devices are reported to have gone missing. 
Media coverage has both praised Israel for its tactical genius in targeting Hezbollah and described the attack as an act of terrorism — but it is important to remember that Israel is not the only country to have planted explosives in unexpected places. From the 1960s up until the 2000s, the US and CIA used multiple methods including exploding cigars and seashells in their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Contaminating supply chains is also an old intelligence tactic, according to Emily Harding, a veteran of the CIA and the U.S. National Security Council, who told Kevin Colliers at NBC that these stories are often kept from the public: “Supply chain compromises are tried and true in intelligence work,” said Harding. “I literally cannot think of a single example that is unclassified.”

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CONTEXT

The struggle between the right to free speech and curbing disinformation has a long history in Brazil, which has the world’s fifth largest digital population. 

As early as 2015, Brazil’s government has, on separate occasions, arrested employees from Facebook and shut down WhatsApp for not complying with government orders quickly enough. Then in 2018, Brazil’s government handed its police force the power to police social media platforms.

In 2021, the “fake news law” in Brazil mandated that social media services reveal the identities and personal details of users who shared anything decreed to be fake news or which threatened national security in any way. It also granted the government the power to shut down dissenting voices in any part of the internet.  And in 2022, before the election between Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s government granted itself further censorship powers to curb the use of disinformation during election campaigns.

ENTER ELON MUSK

Much of Musk’s ire at present is directed towards one particular judge in Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been described by the Brazilian press as “the defender of democracy” and “Xandão,” Portuguese for “Big Alex”, for his wide-ranging investigations and quick prosecution of those he deems to be a threat to Brazil’s institutions. 

Musk and de Moraes began to butt heads soon after far-right supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brazil this January. De Moraes asked X to purge far-right voices linked to the uprising, and Musk, who has frequently aligned himself with right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, accused de Moraes of censorship and stifling free speech. 

Last month, on Thursday, August 5, Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline from the Supreme Court to name a new legal representative for X, after the platform’s local office in Brazil was closed down mid-August. 

Soon after, de Moraes accused Musk of treating X like a “land without a law”, a place where misinformation, hate speech and propaganda thrive with no repercussions. Musk has responded with a characteristic tantrum (mantrum?) on X — he posted an AI-generated image of de Moraes behind bars, another image of a dog’s scrotum and called the judge “Voldemort”.

MUTUAL HYPOCRISY

Both free speech and democracy deserve better advocates in Brazil. While de Moraes is widely considered to be the man who saved Brazil’s democracy from the far right, disinformation and electoral interference, his unquestioned authority is cause for concern. Meanwhile, Musk’s haste in obeying right-wing governments in countries like India completely contradict his claims of being a “free speech absolutist”.

According to the New York Times, de Moraes has “jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal…His orders to ban prominent voices online have proliferated, and now he has the man accused of fanning Brazil’s extremist flames, Bolsonaro, in his cross hairs. Last week, de Moraes included Bolsonaro in a federal investigation of the riot, which he is overseeing, suggesting that the former president inspired the violence.”

A report from Rest of World says Musk has complied with 80% of the requests from governments to take down tweets — this is a 30% increase over what X (then Twitter) agreed to under previous leadership.

In India for instance, X blocked posts by journalists, celebrities and publications at the behest of the Modi government. The platform not only geo-blocked tweets in regions the government claimed social media was sparking public unrest during the farmer protests, but also globally banned accounts tweeting about the riots, including those of Canadian MP Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur.

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First, let us skim the similarities: Like Zuckerberg and Musk, Durov is a tech-bro with a massive social media and messaging platform that has run into trouble with different governments. Like them, he is insanely wealthy, obsessed with freedom of speech, loves free markets, capitalism and posting hot takes on his favorite app. Durov rarely gives interviews, choosing instead to post updates, vacation photos and thirst traps with meandering captions to his 11 million followers on Telegram. Like many tech-bros, he has a fascination with his own virility and recently claimed to have fathered over a hundred children across the world via his “high quality donor material”. In 2022, he also made paper planes out of 5000 ruble notes (approximately $70 at the time) and Henry Sugar-like, flung them into a crowd of people from his window. 

But unlike the American heroes of Silicon Valley, Durov is a man fashioning his own legend as an international man of mystery. His arrest is a striking example of how a tech billionaire’s monopoly over global information infrastructure gives them–as individuals–incredible geopolitical influence. 

Initial reactions from Russia have framed Durov’s arrest as an instance of Western hypocrisy on free speech. Russians (including voices from within the Russian government) are urging the Kremlin to intervene on his behalf. Access is tricky, but military blogs show deep anxiety as to what his arrest means for the Russian military–which relies on Telegram as one of its primary means of communication in the war with Ukraine.

Durov’s arrest and reactions from Moscow have once again raised a question about his links to the Russian government. The Kremlin’s position continues to be firmly aligned with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (now based in Moscow). who described it as “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association” and Elon Musk who has compared the arrest to being executed for liking a meme in 2030.

In a rare interview four months before his arrest, Durov described leaving Russia as a young child and moving to Italy with his family. His first experience with free markets, as he described it, convinced him that this was the way to live. His brother Nikolai was already a mathematical prodigy at school, and although Pavel struggled with English at first, his teachers’ dismissive attitude towards him spurred him to becoming the “best student”.

“I realized I liked competition,” he said with a smile.

The Durovs moved back to Russia when Pavel was a teenager, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pavel’s father, a scholar of ancient Roman literature, had a new job, and the family was able to bring back with them their IBM computer from Italy. Nikolai and Pavel continued to thrive at school—they were now learning six foreign languages each, along with advanced mathematics and chemistry. In his spare time, Pavel was writing code and building websites for his fellow students. It was at this time that he built VKontakte, an early version of social media that soon became the biggest messaging platform across several post Soviet-Union countries. At the time, Vkontakte had a single employee: Pavel Durov himself.

The story of Durov’s run-ins with Russia’s government is better known: in 2011 and again in 2013, the government asked VKontakte to share private data belonging to Russian protestors and Ukrainian citizens. When Durov refused, he was given “two sub-optimal options”: he could either comply, or he could sell his stake in the company, resign and leave the country. He chose the latter. In 2014 Durov sold his shares in the company and left Russia, announcing his departure with an image post of dolphins and an immortal line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

This is also when Durov’s story begins to differ from the smooth narrative turns of American tech broligarchy. Nikolai and Durov created Telegram, a new platform with the ability to host crowds of up to 200,000 people in channels, multi-media messaging, self-destructing texts and the ability to hold secrets. Durov traveled the world looking for a place to set up an office and rejected London, Singapore, Berlin and even San Francisco. “In the EU it was too hard to bring the people I wanted to employ from across the world,” he told Tucker Carlson. “In San Francisco, I drew too much attention.” (The only time Durov has ever been mugged was in San Francisco, he said, when he left Jack Dorsey’s house and phone snatchers attempted to take his phone as he was tweeting about the meeting. Durov says he fought them off and kept his phone.)

“I’d be eating breakfast at 9 am and the FBI would show up,” he said. “It made me realize that perhaps this was not the right place for me.”

Durov became a citizen of the UAE and of France. In 2022, he was named  the wealthiest man in the UAE, His current net worth is 15.5 billion USD.  

In July 2024, Telegram had 950 million active users, placing it just after WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. Telegram isn’t just one of the most popular messenger apps in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries, as digital freedoms are shrinking, the app’s popularity is growing across the world. The platform began to be used increasingly during COVID lockdowns when disinformation was rife, and platforms like Facebook were allegedly under pressure from governments to censor posts about the pandemic.

Telegram’s popularity has also grown through political crises and protests in Egypt, Iran, Hong Kong, Belarus, Russia and India—Telegram provides a secure means of communication and organization for protesters, but while calls for violence are explicitly forbidden on the app, little else is.

“Telegram is a neutral platform for all voices, because I believe the competition between different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone,” Durov told Carlson. But this glib take does little to address the very real concern about child pornography, revenge porn and deepfakes that are able to thrive on the app because of its lack of moderation.

In his telling, competition and freedom are the twin motivations behind all of Durov’s decisions. It’s always one or the other that will explain why he does what he does, whether that’s living in the UAE, resisting content moderation on Telegram, or refusing to invest in real estate and private jets. 

“Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down,” he posted after a Meta outage in March. “Telegram is more reliable than these services—despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user. We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster. Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime!” 

Since his arrest and interrogation, prosecutors have said that the judge in Durov’s case sees grounds to formally investigate the charges against him. Durov has been released from custody, but is banned from leaving France. He  paid a bail of €5 million and must present himself at a police station twice a week. 

Durov’s arrest has also raised questions about whether tech titans can personally be held responsible for what users do on their platforms. In India, Narendra Modi’s government has already said that it will also be investigating Telegram, while the Indian press has been agog with details about Durov’s personal life, fixating on his virility and the blonde woman who has reportedly been missing since Durov’s arrest. Durov’s brother, the once-child prodigy Nikolai is also wanted by French authorities, and a warrant for their arrest was issued as early as March. Durov’s Toncoin has crashed since news of his detention. What remains to be seen is whether Pavel will fall prey to the cult of his own personality or regain that which he claims to value above all else—his freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kappan’s arrest,” says Chatterjee, “was a chilling message from the Uttar Pradesh police to all reporters that there are matters they should not investigate and that it will cost them dear if they do.” RSF has said that the “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When France sent its soldiers to the Malian capital Bamako in 2013 — as part of the much-feted Operation Barkhane intended to put an end to terror attacks by Islamist groups waging IS and Al Qaeda-backed jihad — they were greeted as heroes by ordinary Malians singing paeans of gratitude.

After early successes, though, the French soldiers struggled and the relationship with Malians deteriorated to such an extent that the French were suspected of supporting the very terrorists they were meant to be fighting. 

On Facebook, a Malian activist group, “Yerewolo Debout sur les Remparts,” responded to the departure of French troops with glee, describing it as a historic triumph. The group posted a cartoon which summed up the feelings of many Malians – a French soldier on the receiving end of a giant Malian boot.

But now it's not only Malians who are celebrating the unceremonious exit of the French. The Kremlin too is delighted, happy to declare Operation Barkhane a debacle, with billions of dollars spent and the loss of thousands of lives, including dozens of French soldiers, to little effect.

If the West was hoping to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia sees an opportunity in the “global South” to gain more diplomatic influence and secure lucrative economic deals. “Russia is using Africa as a pawn to out-muscle the west,” Jean le Roux, Africa expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), told me.

Russia, for years now, has been adept at playing on and inflaming anti-France sentiment in former French colonies, from Mali to the Central African Republic. The Kremlin has largely succeeded in charming African leaders into tighter alliances and upsetting both the United States and particularly Europe, whose once unshakeable hold on the continent, in terms of trade, has considerably weakened.

Even now Russian trade with Africa ($14.5 billion in 2020) is but a fraction of the value of the continent’s trade with the EU (over $280 billion), China (around $255 billion) and the U.S. (over $65 billion). But Russia supplies a significant portion of Africa’s weapons, its wheat and grains, and its fertilizer.

And, as some have argued, Africa’s trading relationships with the EU are starting to chafe. In February, for instance, Odrek Rwabwogo, an adviser to the president of Uganda, wrote that “restrictive trade policies from wealthy western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports…while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still.”

RUSSIA’S AFRICA STRATEGY

Last month, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov undertook a five-day whistle-stop tour of Africa to talk up the growing collaboration between countries on the continent and Russia as a respite from colonial arrangements and colonial condescension from the European Union. Russia also blamed U.S. sanctions for the rising price of grains and fertilizer that had led to food insecurity and acute hunger in several African nations.

In a column, published in prominent newspapers in Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia, Lavrov wrote on July 22 that, “Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression.” Lavrov also evoked the “master-slave” dynamic that he wrote continued to characterize relationships between European powers and their former colonial possessions.

It is an argument that has been amplified on social media in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to a receptive audience. Big Tech platforms, including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are notoriously lax in their moderation policies in much of the world, enabling social media in Arab countries, Latin America and Africa to be a practically unfettered space for Russian propaganda.

And Russia’s narratives are finding their mark.

In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory published a whitepaper describing Russia’s experiments with disinformation in Libya, Mozambique, Sudan, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In these six countries, the researchers concluded, Russia was “engaged in a broad, long-term influence operation.” Their tactics included posting “almost universally positive coverage of Russia’s activities in these countries,” while the posts also “disparaged the U.N., France, Turkey Qatar… most often while purporting to be local news sources.”

The researchers noted 73 Facebook pages set up by Russian agencies on Facebook alone targeting audiences in the six African countries, with as many as 8,900 posts being made across the pages in a single month. The disinformation came directly from companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the researchers said, whose Internet Research Agency had played havoc with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Backing up its cyberspace guerilla tactics, Prigozhin’s shadowy companies, chiefly the notorious Wagner Group, also had boots on the ground, providing paramilitary fighters and services across Africa.

THE ROLE OF THE WAGNER GROUP 

In Sudan, for instance, protests have been ongoing for over a year to remove the military junta that deposed the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, only to hold on to power rather than create the conditions for democratic elections and a civilian government.

In Khartoum, more than a hundred protestors have been killed since October. Many more have been wounded. Democracy activist Nasr Eldin Safiyah was injured in a rally in June, the side of his head split open by a teargas canister hurled into the crowd. “I have not been well,” he told me. “But we are determined to take down this corrupt military junta.”

Standing in his way are Wagner Group mercenaries. “It’s a known fact here in Sudan that Russia supports the military junta,” Safiyah says. “Wagner is operating and training militias and they are helping them to loot our gold.” An investigation last month in the New York Times revealed that Russian firms are active in Sudanese gold country, mining tons of the precious metal and described the Wagner Group as providing “interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations.”

As with the six African countries, including Sudan, studied in the Stanford Internet Observatory paper, Mali too has been the target of a sophisticated Russian campaign. Le Roux, the Africa expert at DFRLab, wrote back in February that a “network of Facebook pages promoting pro-Russian and anti-French narratives drummed up support for Wagner Group mercenaries prior to the official arrival of the private military group in Mali.” He added that these carefully constructed fake pages “also mobilized support for the postponement of democratic elections following a successful coup in May 2021, Mali’s second in less than a year.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin called Mali’s military leader Asimi Goita, as the last French soldiers prepared to leave, and reportedly reassured him that food, fuel and fertilizers would be made available. Goita tweeted to pointedly praise Putin’s respect for “the sovereignty of Mali and the aspirations of its population.”

Earlier this month, Russia also delivered several warplanes and a helicopter to Mali to bolster its defenses in its ongoing fight against Tuareg rebels and Islamist terrorists. And last year the Malian foreign minister visited Lavrov in Moscow in part to discuss the deployment of Wagner Group paramilitary troops in Mali. Both countries deny the official presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali, describing the militants as instructors to Malian soldiers.

But a U.N. report unearthed this month by the Associated Press claimed “white soldiers” had been seen with Malian troops committing likely war crimes in the massacre of at least 33 civilians. Both U.S. and U.N. officials have confirmed the presence of Wagner soldiers in Mali. 

The Wagner Group, albeit supposedly unconnected to the Kremlin, is also playing a growing role in the fighting with Ukraine. State-sanctioned Russian media have lavished praise on the exploits of Wagner Group fighters in the Donbas region. And the presence of Wagner Group soldiers in Mali, even if it’s not clear how many, is in keeping with Russia’s intervention in the affairs of several African countries.

Prigozhin, the oligarch who controls the Wagner Group, is known as “Putin’s chef” because he apparently owes his great wealth to catering contracts signed with the Kremlin. He is also linked to Russian companies that have filed into countries like Sudan to illegally mine tons of gold which they carry away from military airports. Miners along the lawless Sudanese border with the Central African Republic accuse Russian mercenaries of massacring their colleagues and stealing their gold. Sudanese officials admit that about four-fifths of the country’s 100 million tons of annual gold exports are smuggled out of the country.

Mali, incidentally, is Africa’s third largest gold exporter.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On the day the military took power in Mali in May, last year, Malians took to the streets to cheer. Some shouted slogans in support of Russia, some raised the Russian flag and chanted “France degage!” Clear out, France. The support for Russia is real, despite groups like Human Rights Watch pointing to arbitrary detentions and torture and the connection of Wagner Group fighters to massacres of civilians.

DFRLab’s experts say Malian social media is where there is most praise for Russia and mentions of the Wagner Group. But neighboring Burkina Faso is catching up. In January, there was a military coup in the country and since then complimentary social media chatter about Russia and its influence in Africa has dramatically increased.

Burkinabe protestors have been rallying against the French presence in their country too, as French troops relocate Operation Barkhane to Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In the last month, demonstrators in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, have burned the French flag and chanted, “France, the godmother of terrorism, get out,” and, “We are all for the liberation of Burkina Faso!”

Are Wagner Group mercenaries already packing for the 500-mile journey from Bamako to Ouagadougou?

The post Russian trolls and mercenaries win allies and good will in Africa appeared first on Coda Story.

In July, technology companies were required by the government to comply with new, strict licensing rules for technology platforms. These rules — called Ministerial Regulation 5, or MR5 — require tech companies to take down content deemed unlawful or that “disturbs public order” within four hours if urgent, and within 24 hours if not. 

Under these rules, technology companies are also required to release user data to the government upon request. 

“Ministerial Regulation 5 represents an attempt by the Indonesian government to hide one of the most repressive internet governance regimes in the world behind the veneer of the rule of law,” Michael Caster, Asia Digital Program Manager at the freedom of expression group Article 19, told me.

Indonesian journalists have faced a wave of physical harassment and intimidation this past July.  In one case, an aide for Maluku province’s Governor Murad Ismail grabbed TV reporter Sofyan Muhammadiyah’s phone while he covered student demonstrations against the governor and deleted some footage.

And on July 14, three unidentified men harassed one journalist working with CNN Indonesia and another with a local news website while they covered the aftermath of the shooting of a police officer in Jakarta.

These instances of harassment and intimidation were physical, but are symptomatic of the growing threat to press freedom in the country. In Indonesia, like in many other countries around the world, the assault on press freedom and freedom of expression is also legislative.

Governments often describe this sort of restrictive legislation as necessary to protect the public. For instance, in Indonesia, content related to terrorism or child sexual abuse must be taken down. However, any content that the government deems to be disturbing community or public order also has to be removed.

This sort of language, Caster points out, “is so vague and broad as to mean anything the authorities choose.” As a result, arbitrary restrictions on speech will likely become the norm, drastically expanding the government’s capacity to censor criticism. 

Indonesia’s Washington, D.C. embassy did not reply to an email requesting comment for this story.

The MR5 regulations were first released in late November 2020, and technology companies were told they would lose access to the Indonesian market if they didn’t comply. Indonesia has a population of over 270 million, and more than 190 million of them are internet users. Major companies like Google, Zoom, Twitter and Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all complied with the new rules by the government’s deadline.

According to Ika Ningtyas, the Secretary-General of Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), the new rules are an “obstacle to the work of journalists and the media.” In early August, she met with Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information, but officials refused to cancel the new regulations.

Drafted as they are, the rules could enable the authorities to censor journalists and coverage of sensitive issues, like human rights abuses in West Papua. There’s also a risk that the government will force tech companies to turn over the user data of journalists in particular. 

“The regulators, implementers, and supervisors are all in the hands of the Ministry of Communication and Information,” Ningtyas wrote in a Signal message to me. “There is too much authority held by the Ministry and this can be abused.”

These repressive new rules aren't the only attempt to curtail press freedom. The latest draft of the Indonesian criminal code includes at least 14 articles that effectively criminalizes routine journalistic work. Defamation against the president and vice president is still listed as a crime in the draft, as is slander against the government and the spread of misinformation. Journalists could face prison sentences of up to two years for publishing so-called “incomplete” articles.

“This will be the next dangerous regulation that could bring many journalists to prison,” Ningtyas wrote in a message to me about the potential criminal code revisions. Press freedom groups have urged the government to drop these controversial articles and consult with civil society during the revision process. 

But the Indonesian government has not been transparent while working on these potential revisions, civil society groups say. Even organizing peaceful protests now can lead to fines and prison sentences of up to six months.

If the government abuses these new regulations, “we will have no free space to express ourselves,” said Nenden Arum, the head of the freedom of expression division at the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet), a Bali-based digital rights group. “It will really affect our democracy.” 

Much of what is happening in Indonesia parallels broader trends in Southeast Asia. All ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the likes of the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore, sit in the bottom half of the 2022 World Press Freedom Index, according to Reporters Without Borders. 

“Governments around the world are increasingly flexing their muscles to assert their authority over social media platforms,” Freedom House analyst Kian Vesteinsson says. “MR5 is one of the pieces of legislation that really embodies this trend around the world.”

He told me that the language of MR5, in common with similar regulations, is intended to enable authorities to force tech platforms to remove broad categories of speech and give up data without needing court orders. “These laws often dangle access to a given country's market in exchange for compliance with these really problematic censorship provisions,” Vesteinsson says. 

In recent years, Indonesia has embarked on a campaign of “digital authoritarianism, marked by high repression using digital technology,” Ningtyas told me.

When I asked SAFEnet’s Arum whether she was hopeful about the future of freedom of expression in Indonesia, she laughed. The Indonesian public largely appears to oppose the government’s increasing control, she said, but “there is still a long way to go.” 

Caster from Article 19 believes the future is bleak. “If Indonesia insists on going down this path,” he told me, “it risks becoming one of the most restrictive internet governance regimes in the world.”

Working as both a journalist and press freedom advocate means AJI’s Ningtyas is more likely than most to face harassment, she said. As Indonesia’s new regulations are implemented, she worries about what the future holds for her in a country where the government is intent on using legislation to quash free expression and exert authoritarian control over the internet. 

“I work in the shadow of terror,” she said. But she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. 

The post Is Indonesia criminalizing journalism? appeared first on Coda Story.

The showrunners blamed technical issues, but Weibo users weren’t convinced, as China Digital Times recently reported. They suspected that the actual reason was “historical nihilism,” which broadly refers to any versions of Chinese history that conflict with the state’s more selective narrative. The show’s male protagonist, Liang Xiang, is based on the Manchu nobleman Liangbi, who led the effort to quash the 1911 Wuchang Uprising. That uprising eventually sparked the Xinhai Revolution, which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. 

That narrative was likely a problem for the government. To the Chinese Communist Party, the Xinhai Revolution is celebrated as having “ignited hope for a revitalized China.”

Last year, Chinese president Xi Jinping stressed the need for Chinese Communist Party members to know their tradition and history, to reprioritize their ideological education, in order to effectively carry forward the revolution. He spoke out against historical nihilism as dangerous, a theme he has expounded on since he came to power a decade ago.

Two months before the centenary celebrations in July last year, the Chinese authorities admitted to deleting more than two million posts on social media that a party spokesman described as having “polluted” the conversation. The offending posts, he said, were “disseminating historical nihilism.”

China must “dare to brandish the sword, dare to fight, and have the strength to refute historical nihilism and other wrong ideas and viewpoints,” wrote Zhuang Rongwen, the director of the all-powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in an April essay about strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control of the internet. 

Chinese social media giants responded in swift succession. As China Digital Times reported, Douban, Douyin, Toutiao and Weibo all announced their own campaigns against “historical nihilism,” including encouraging users to report posts that conflicted with the CCP’s preferred narratives. 

This development underscores the CCP’s binary view of history as both a valuable resource and a threat, argues Katie Stallard, an editor at the New Statesman magazine and author of “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” published in April. 

It just comes down to which version of history we’re dealing with — and who’s in control. 

“I see it as an attempt to codify the Communist Party’s version of history and to classify anything that challenges that version of history or the party’s interpretation of history as being nihilism,” Stallard said in a phone interview. “I see it as being a way to try and seal off their preferred version of history from challenge.”

One of the most important historical reference points for the CCP — and Xi himself — is the Century of Humiliation, according to Stallard. The Century of Humiliation refers to the period of intervention and subjugation of China by foreign powers from 1839 to 1949. 

The crucial endpoint of that story is the rise of the CCP and how they present themselves as rallying the people to fight back and defeat Japan at the end of World War II. “It’s critical to the story the Communist Party tells about itself and why it must be in power,” Stallard explains. “And so it needs to keep that under quite tight control. There are elements of truth in it, absolutely. But it’s a very selective version of history.”

Opposing the state’s version of history can have serious consequences. For instance, in May former journalist Luo Chanping was sentenced to seven months in prison for a social media post that questioned the wisdom of China’s military strategy during the Korean War and joked about soldiers who froze to death. 

But these consequences, as with the consequences to breaking many other rules in China, are enforced erratically. Jeremiah Jenne, a historian and writer based in Beijing, told me that in China “there are so many different ways to get in trouble. And most of the time, none of those ways will get you in trouble. Until that one time when they decide that you are in trouble.” 

The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to Coda Story’s request for comment on the concept of historical nihilism.

Stallard said the CCP believes a key component of national security is control over the ideological environment, and that includes history. “They formally classified [historical nihilism] as a tactic that China’s enemies are using to undermine the country and the Communist Party’s rule.” 

The CCP often points to the Soviet Union as a warning of what can happen if historical nihilism is not quashed. Xi has said that the threat of historical nihilism was an important lesson learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Xi fearing that Mao could be rejected in a similar way to Stalin and Lenin. 

To the CCP, controlling history is important for survival, says Angeli Datt, a China analyst at Freedom House. Document No. 9 — a high-level, internal CCP memo from 2013 — made the paranoid assertion that the “goal of historical nihilism, in the guise of ‘reassessing history,’ is to distort Party history and the history of New China.” 

But Datt thinks the CCP is blowing the significance of historical nihilism out of proportion. “These things aren’t going to topple the government. For a party with the size and the power of the CCP, to be afraid of that shows a level of deep insecurity,” she said. 

Jenne, the Beijing-based writer, agrees. “They talk a lot about cultural self-confidence, political self-confidence, but maybe a little bit of that is like the affirmation on the sticky note on the mirror in the morning, like, ‘We are the ruling party. The military works for us. All is well.’ But sometimes you don’t always believe your own affirmations,” he told me.

It’s difficult to determine what Chinese citizens genuinely believe about Chinese history, Stallard said. But to a certain extent, it doesn’t actually matter, since deference to the party narrative functions as a litmus test. 

“Xi is taking history very seriously,” Stallard said. “So you need to show that you do, too.” But whose history and whose narrative is a question Chinese people continue to ask, at the risk of being silenced.

The post China wages war on ‘historical nihilism’ appeared first on Coda Story.

On April 27, Musk took a cheap shot at Gadde, mocking past decisions made by her team. Gadde, who is female and hails from India, soon faced a barrage of harassing messages, including racist and sexist insults. Musk was all but proving that point that many had made surrounding his bid to buy the company: under his ownership, Twitter may become a much more hostile place, especially for women and LGBTQ people.

Whether it’s a top executive at Twitter, a BBC reporter in Iran, or a Muslim feminist activist in India, or a journalist at The Washington Post in the U.S., women and sexual minorities — especially those with a public profile — face various kinds of online abuse, from violent threats and hate speech on social media to doxxing attacks that expose their personal information. Since the start of the pandemic, online abuse and harassment has become more severe for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.

Many advocates say tech companies should do more to tackle online abuse, but with people like Musk in charge, it’s hard to see this happening any time soon.

For the foreseeable future, it will be up to those who are targeted to take individual actions to protect themselves. Last week, I spoke with a few key voices dealing with online harassment and gathered their insights.

Speak out, but don’t feed the trolls

Zeba Warsi, a journalist from India, has extensive experience with online abuse. 

“In the beginning I used to reply to every single troll who would lash out with abusive language or be disrespectful. I used to respond to them and then I started realizing when I would respond to people — especially to accounts which were just like bots, with close to no followers, who were thriving on hate — I was in fact giving them more traction by engaging with them. So then I eventually stopped responding.”

Though it doesn’t mean she’s not speaking out. “Address the issue on your own platform, post about it, tweet it, but don’t engage with them. Don't give them the platform, they don't deserve it,” Warsi told me.

The latest major attack she endured was in January, when she appeared in a fake auction app in India, called Bulli Bai, that included profiles and photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, offering them up “for sale.” Like Warsi, most of the women featured in the app are Muslim and do public-facing work — among its targets were politicians, other journalists, and the Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.

She said disengaging with the trolls has helped her mental wellbeing. Warsi is now pursuing a journalism degree at Columbia University.

“I decided to take a break from my career in India and get this distance from all that hate. And despite all that distance, it still haunts me. You wake up to it, on the 1st of January, the beginning of new year and you get so many messages from your friends and colleagues that your picture is being plastered on this disgusting, degrading, humiliating, fake auction.”

“It gets to you,” she said. I had a very distressing phone call with my father back home in India. He was really upset and he was really scared for my safety, even though I'm not physically in India, because that's the kind of fear that it creates.”

Separate the personal from the professional

Warsi also recommends keeping personal and professional lives separated online as much as possible. 

“I have this sort of division between what is public for me and what is private. I think it helps me to have more control over my social media. So my Twitter is public where I put out my work and my Instagram is private, which is only for my friends and family. So I keep my account private so random Twitter or Instagram trolls are not going to find me there,” Warsi said. 

Keep a record

Gwen Taylor, a program manager at Glitch, a U.K.-based nonprofit working to eliminate online abuse, suggests documenting the abuse.

“Documenting online abuse is a really important step, not only to empower yourself to understand the patterns that are happening, but also to empower you to report it if you decide to do so, and it’s validating, in a way, that it is difficult and it is traumatic,” they said.

Be an ‘active bystander’

Warsi and Taylor both said when it comes to online abuse, having support and community is essential. But being a part of that supporting network also requires knowledge of how to do it.

Taylor says reaching out to people is extremely useful, as online abuse can be so isolating, but it requires thoughtfulness: “Whether you know them or not, just don't take action without their consent. Online abuse can feel very disempowering. You might think you're doing the right thing by reporting it, or by replying to it, but actually that might not be what the person wants. So reaching out, checking in with the person. Maybe giving them options of like, 'I was thinking of doing this. Is that okay? Is there something else you want?'”

Having a network that can report abuse on your behalf can be very powerful and much more effective than doing it alone, says Taylor.

They pointed to a group of women parliamentarians across countries in Africa who had formed a WhatsApp group to organize this kind of support. “Whenever one of them receives online abuse they go into chat and they're like, 'Can you help?' It's really powerful, having this network that empowered people that can go in and be like 'Yes, I'm going to come and report that for you and help,'” Taylor told me.

Amplify their voice, not their victimhood

The other advice Taylor gave on how to empower people being harassed and abused online is to amplify the person, not the abuse.

“Not amplifying the post that's getting the abuse, but in general, just amplifying their messages, their work. If it's an artist, retweeting. If it's somebody writing, saying that you like their writing or encouraging other people to read it,” they told me. “Because often what happens in incidents of online abuse is that the conversation ends up getting totally focused around the abuse. And actually, we want to take away from that. We don't want to give the person being abusive that power.”

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The post Online harassment is on the rise — and Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover isn’t helping appeared first on Coda Story.

Out of the 23 million tweets that posted the hashtag #IstandwithVladimir Putin, around 10,000 repeated the tweet five or more times. Before the invasion, these accounts had busied themselves tweeting about a range of political issues. Some pledged continual support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, others were in favor of Pakistan’s leader Imran Khan, still others backed former South African president Jacob Zuma or were concerned with Nigerian fuel shortages, or else trumpeted Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka. 

But on the morning of the same day, they all began marching in unison. Thousands and thousands of times, they tweeted pro-Putin hashtags, along with memes and pictures in support of the Russian invasion. The hashtags began trending on Twitter, and was yet further boosted by Twitter’s algorithm. 

“I was pretty astonished that Twitter was letting this trend,” said Carl Miller, a disinformation researcher at Demos, a London-based thinktank, who woke up on the morning of March 2 to find his Twitter feed blowing up with the hashtag. Using data from the site, he scrutinized the networks pushing the pro-Putin narrative, and found that many of the accounts appeared to be brand new, fake, hacked, or working in coordination with one another.

What’s going on? 

In the enormous echo chamber that is Western social media, we have seen a wave of blue and yellow, an overwhelming level of support for the people of Ukraine. There is near unanimous agreement that Ukraine is winning, hands down, the information war against Russia. 

“There’s loads of articles considering it such a truism — really now it’s just about explaining why — that ‘Putin’s left his propagandists flat footed’ or ‘Zelensky is such a genius media operator,’” said Miller. “I’m just never really sure these ideas are true. It’s very hard for us to say who’s winning or not.”

One thing is for certain: the West presently is not the main target of Russia’s information offensive. And in other parts of the world, the Russian narrative is being pushed and gaining traction.

In India, more than 500 Hindi-language, pro-Bharatiya Janata Party spam accounts switched from sharing millions of pro-Modi messages to sharing pro-invasion memes in English in early March. The accounts have since pivoted back to just promoting BJP content.

In South Africa, an anti-colonial set of voices usually tweets about former South African President Jacob Zuma, and pushes out content in solidarity with BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.) Miller said the South African group appears to be more organic than the Indian group — and yet, it jumped on the #IStandWithPutin hashtag.

What do the posts have in common?

Posts expand on how Russia has supported India, or focus on “whataboutism” -– looking at past offensives by the U.S. and NATO. Some of the posts are not necessarily “disinformation” in the strict definition of the term. But they are deceptive. For instance, a meme highlighting past western invasions — such as Iraq and Afghanistan — is designed to shift focus away from Russian aggression and violence in Ukraine. And when it’s amplified inauthentically, by thousands of fake accounts, then it begins to skew thinking, inflating the pro-Russian narrative in a way that’s misleading. 

“There’s one meme I remember very vividly, which shows Russia as a kind of mighty mother bear. Ukraine is a kid with a stick that’s prodding this bear. And the U.K., U.S. and NATO are behind, prodding this kid. So the bear is having to come out of her cave to protect her cub. That’s probably not literally disinformation. To my eyes it’s a ridiculous misportrayal of the narrative around NATO. But I wouldn’t say there’s a truth claim there,” said Miller. “It’s not to say anyone’s spending too much time worrying about telling the truth. Whether you want to call it emotionally dis-informative is the reader’s call to make.” 

Who is behind it?

That’s the tough question. At this stage, without a full investigation using open-source data into the roots of these accounts, we can’t definitively say who’s behind it just by looking at the accounts. But we can look at who benefits from this kind of information war.

Miller says: “if this isn’t Russia or someone being funded by Russia, I don’t understand what the interest, or the benefit would be. There’s nothing else really being gained here other than an attempt to try and garner pro-invasion support.” 

How should we read this?

This digital swarm of support for Putin’s invasion shows the information war is shapeshifting every day, it’s important not to hold up this activity as a bellwether for real-life sentiment in these countries. They don’t reflect reality, and they don’t necessarily reflect public opinion, because they are being pushed and promoted in a way that’s deceptive. 

“The world is a much bigger place than our own timelines,” said Miller. “There is a whole world out there for Russia to play for.”

The post Ukraine is winning the information war in the West. What about elsewhere? appeared first on Coda Story.

Or is it a terrible break with that past, the result of Putin’s separation from reality during two years of pandemic isolation?

Analysts, politicians, security and military experts are arguing over it now.

“I wouldn't want to slip into that temptation to look back and say, ‘We've missed something that was obvious all the way along.’ It wasn't obvious,” said Ben Noble, Russian politics professor at University College London and co-author of ​​”Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?”

“And that's the reason why lots of people are shocked, not only internationally, but also domestically, including members of the political and the economic elite in Russia.”

Precious N Chatterje-Doody, a politics and International Studies professor at Open University, U.K. and author of “Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories” also believes locating a premeditated grand plan in Putin’s actions is wrong. 

“One of the constant features of Putin's state leadership has been that he likes to make things unclear and to have multiple options. And in hindsight, he looks like a master chess player that had this planned all along,” she said. “I don't think that's usually true. I think he's a pragmatist. So he gives himself multiple options. It keeps people guessing. And then he kind of responds to situations as they occur.”

It’s impossible to read Putin’s mind. But Chatterje-Doody, Noble and other political scientists, journalists and writers, who have closely studied the country’s politics, identify political forces in Russia that the Putin government has harnessed to build the authoritarian state we see today. Here’s the breakdown.

Why is Putin claiming there are powerful Nazis in Ukraine?

“It's often misunderstood in the West, especially that Russia never reckoned with its totalitarian past, with mass repressions in the thirties under Stalin, basically a genocide of its own people,” said Olga Khvostunova, a Russian journalist and a researcher at the Institute of Modern Russia, in New York City.

Instead, Putin began emphasizing that Russia is a descendant of the powerful Soviet Union, the regime that saved the world from Nazism and crafted his rhetoric around it, especially during periods when he suffered from political unpopularity, said Khvostunova.

Instead of offering a unifying vision of the future that could lead to better post-Soviet Russia, Putin recycled the past. “What he offered as a unifying platform for the Russians was the vision of the past, which is, by the way, a very significant part of the fascist ideology — the great past that we need to restore,” said Khvostunova.

Putin’s campaign focused on glorifying the Soviet regime’s victory of Nazism, but distorted or minimized the history of mass repressions and massacres.

“It's basically the idea that Soviet soldiers paid for world freedom from Nazis and with their own blood, and this is used as a kind of constant refrain. It's like a key feature of contemporary Russian national identity,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Deflecting contemporary events onto World War II tropes also has been a key part of Putin’s narrative around the Ukraine invasion. Like most effective political propaganda, it has resonated at times because it contains a grain of truth. In the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Kyiv that ousted a pro-Russian president and in the subsequent war in the eastern Donbas region, military units aligned with neo-Nazism, like the Azov Battalion, were a part of Ukraine’s National Guard. In the 2019 elections, Ukraine’s far-right couldn’t even gather enough votes to enter parliament, and a Jewish comedian was elected president in a landslide victory. 

“What better way to weave doubt about the prevailing narrative in the West than to pick genuinely true bits of information and make them seem more significant than they are,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Strengthening the state against foreign interference

Since 2012, Russia has a law that allows the government to label NGOs and individuals receiving funds from abroad as “foreign agents,” subjecting them to reporting their every purchase at stores.

Informing this legislation is a foreign interference narrative that holds outside powers responsible for destabilizing the country.

“By claiming that the domestic opposition are traitors, the authorities can turn around and say, ‘you’re members of the opposition, but you are acting as agents of the West. You are traitors. You're not members of the loyal opposition,’” Noble, the University College London professor, explained. 

But it is in the last couple of years that the law has been applied much more aggressively against journalists and independent Russian newsrooms like Meduza, TV Rain and Mediazona.

Noble said the underlying message to the Russian populace is a powerful one. “You are not a critical independent journalist pointing out real problems in the country. You are creating false narratives and you are being paid and supported by people in the West. And the goal, your goal and those of your paymasters, the puppeteers, is to undermine the country.”

Protecting ‘traditional values’

The government’s repressive turn crystallized in campaigns against the LGBTQ community, portraying them as liberals out to destroy “traditional family values.” In 2013, Putin criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” 

Putin’s “anti-wokeness” ramped up support among right-wing and conservative politicians and influencers internationally. Russia has become the important power behind the World Congress of Families — a network of right-wing Christians opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Putin has strong ties with far-right European politicians including Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally party in France, former Italian deputy prime minister and leader of Italian far-right League party Matteo Salvini, and Milos Zeman, the president of Czech Republic.

“It's quite a savvy, communicative strategy in a lot of ways because this anti-political correctness or anti-wokeness movement is actually gaining a lot of ground in the West, especially online,“ Chatterje-Doody said. “And when you look at how the Russian regime tries to use the online environment — sowing seeds of dissent by using particular small facts and weaving them into something bigger — this is a really big social debate it can get involved in.”  

Understanding the arc of Putin’s thinking provides some clarity on current events, according to Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“It is about understanding how it is that Vladimir Putin came to be in a position where this war makes sense to him — it doesn't make sense to anybody else but it makes sense to him,” Greene said. “It also helps explain why it's so difficult for ordinary Russians, who don't like the war, to do anything about it.” 

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This decision has become urgent in Myanmar, where the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor has been trying to untangle itself from the country since the junta seized power in a coup on February 1, 2021. In doing so, Telenor is torn between selling its Myanmar subsidiary quickly or protecting the millions of users whose data could end up in the hands of the military.

Now the company faces a new hurdle, one that could have broader implications for how European companies do business in illiberal countries. 

On February 8, an anonymous Myanmar citizen and a Norwegian law firm filed a complaint with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority alleging that Telenor’s sale violates Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which applies to countries in the European Economic Area, which includes Norway. The complaint asks Norway’s state  privacy agency to investigate and intervene to ensure that the sale does not violate the right to privacy of its customers and put them at risk of exposure to military surveillance.

If successful, the GDPR complaint would require Telenor to delete or anonymize the data belonging to its 18 million Myanmar customers before selling its Myanmar subsidiary. In doing so, it is poised to set a precedent for how European companies operate inside authoritarian regimes.

The tussle over Telenor's exit from Myanmar is a microcosm of the struggle facing many executives at Western corporations interested in acting at least with a minimum of responsibility inside countries which challenge that impulse at every turn.  

“What we are hoping to bring across to Telenor is indeed that it's not not a question of wanting them to stay and continue to serve in that environment, but to act responsibly and act legally," said Ketil Sellæg Ramberg, a privacy and data security law specialist at SANDS, the Norwegian law firm that filed the GDPR complaint.

WHAT IS TELENOR AND WHY ARE THEY SELLING? 

The Norwegian government is a majority shareholder in Telenor Group. It’s subsidiary, Telenor Myanmar, is the second largest telecoms firm in the country with a population of over 54 million people. 

Telenor has been trying to exit Myanmar because of military pressure to install intercept spyware that would give authorities a straight line of access to users’ information, which would violate Norwegian and EU sanctions.

Installing the intercept tech is “unacceptable” and “would constitute a breach of our values and standards as a company,” said Telenor Group in a press release in September 2021. 

The likely buyers for control of Telenor Myanmar's data are M1 Group, a Lebanese company with a history of doing business in authoritarian countries like Syria and Sudan, and Shwe Byain Phyu Group, a group of  Myanmar companies with ties to the military involved in gem mining and petrol stations, The sale is expected to be finalized on February 15. 

Human rights groups in Myanmar are strongly opposed to the new buyers. The lives of civil society activists and journalists are “endangered by this secretive sale to a military-linked conglomerate,” said Yadanar Maung, the spokesperson for the human rights group Justice For Myanmar. 

“We are also concerned that Shwe Byain Phyu is a front for the junta, who want control of Telenor as a source of revenue, at a time when they are desperate for funds to finance their campaign of terror,” Maung added.

WHAT’S AT STAKE? 

The junta has extensive control over telecoms companies in Myanmar. By law, the government can request user data without a warrant, intercept communications or take control of telecoms services in “emergency situations.”

This data is valuable to the military, which has been carrying out a brutal crackdown since it staged a coup that has  killed over 1,500 people, according to the human rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. 

Authorities can use phone records and mobile payment receipts to map out pro-democracy networks, identify who is providing financial support to opposition groups and ultimately, target activists and squash dissent.

“They want it to crush the opposition,” said Oliver Spencer at the human rights group Free Expression Myanmar. “They want information about who’s criticizing the military and who’s organizing the military. And the Norwegian company owned by the Norwegian people is about to hand that information over.”

According to reporting by Myanmar Now, Telenor has complied with at least 200 requests for information by the junta-controlled Ministry of Transport and Communications since the coup. Some of these requests were for sensitive data, like the last recorded location of a phone number. 

Despite this, Telenor does stand out as the most sensitive to data privacy concerns in a country where the junta has significant sway over the other two leading telecom options, said Spencer. 

Telenor is “far better than their competitors in regards to the protection of data and therefore their users’ privacy. Without a doubt, they were far better,” Spencer said. 

It’s not a high bar. The Myanmar government runs 50% of MPT, the largest telecoms provider. Another firm, Mytel, is owned half by the Myanmar military and half by the Vietnamese military. Mytel or MPT SIM cards are likely being monitored.

If Telenor leaves the market, people “will all be forced to use companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by the military. Then, of course, the military has access to everything that flows through those telecoms pipes,” Spencer told me.

WHAT’S THIS GDPR COMPLAINT ALL ABOUT?

A GDPR complaint is a consumer’s tool to hold European companies accountable for how their data is used and protected. 

The major concern behind the complaint against Telenor is that, without proper privacy safeguards, the data of millions of users will be subject to surveillance by the junta in Myanmar, exposing activists, journalists and citizens and putting their safety at risk.

The use of GDPR in this context is unconventional. The privacy law is designed to protect EU residents and citizens, and it is rarely applied to international subsidiaries. But Ramberg, the law specialist at the firm that filed the complaint, argues that Telenor Myanmar is bound by GDPR because Telenor Group, based in Norway, has sufficient control over the company. “This actually has real life consequences for real life people,” said Ramberg, “This endangers people’s right to speak freely about issues that might not necessarily be in line with the dictatorship.”

The company disagrees, stating that Telenor Group “does not exert any control on the handling of customer data by Telenor Myanmar, and therefore GDPR does not apply to customer data in Myanmar,” wrote director of communications Cathrine Stang Lund.

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But 34 years ago, there was another seismic protest in Almaty. In December 1986, Almaty — then called Alma-Ata — was the site of some of the first large demonstrations protesting communist rule. When Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, installed an ethnic Russian with no connection to or knowledge of Kazakhstan to head the Kazakh Soviet Republic, students took to the streets.

Moscow sent in armed forces to violently suppress the crowds. Estimates range widely from 10 to 170 casualties. Over 2,000 people were wounded. The tragedy came to be known as Zheltoksan, which means December in Kazakh.

Then the whole thing was swept under the rug.

For years, Zheltoksan was not talked about — in Kazakhstan or anywhere in the former Soviet Union. Like scores of other rebel acts and repressive countermeasures in the Soviet Union, Zheltoksan pixelated into visual fragments, shards of aging memory hidden from history.

But amid the current unrest, the 1986 protests have been mentioned over and over on social media. Coda Story spoke to historians, sociologists and local journalists to understand Zheltoksan’s significance, how the trauma of suppressed historical memory impacts the thinking of protestors battling Kazakh and imported Russian police on the street’s of Kazakhstan’s far-flung, freezing cities.

In 1986 Kazakhstan was one of the first places where anti-Soviet protests started. Why there? What does it tell us about the political climate in Kazakhstan at that moment in history?

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made a big mistake, explained Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg. He replaced the ethnic-Kazakh leader of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian, who knew nothing about the country. This triggered the youth and intelligentsia.

“Kolbin didn't spend a day in Kazakhstan, didn't know Kazakh language, and he wasn’t familiar with Kazakh culture and politics. Ergo, his appointment was perceived as an insult by many Kazakhstanis. For by 1986 this country played an important role in the Soviet Union: it was the second republic by size, fourth by population, and its industrial and agricultural input was enormous,” said Shelekpayev.

One of the reasons anti-Soviet protests first erupted in Kazakhstan comes as a surprise to many is the false stereotype that Kazakhs are political conformists reluctant to upset the status quo.

“Kazakhs protested many times during the 20th century. They protested before the communists — let me remind you about the Central Asian revolt of 1916, which anticipated the 1917 Revolution, and they also protested after 1991. There were many worker’s protests in the 1990s, for example,” Shelekpayev said, pointing to a dearth of media coverage. 

Back then the protests were violently put down. The country’s independence followed just five years later. What significant impact did they have? 

For many people in Kazakhstan, the protests in 1986 are considered the first blow to the Soviet Union’s hold over the republics, said Aitolkyn Kourmanova, the senior editor of Central Asia Analytical Network at George Washington University. “That was the first display of the fact that the Soviet Union was not so uniform and the fact that the republics really wanted independence, which they achieved in five years.” 

The legacy of the 1986 protests has continued to shape political protests in Kazakhstan to this day. “In one way or another, they all go back to December 1986. It was a very defining moment in our history,” said Diana Kudaibergenova, who researches nationalism and political art in Central Asia at the University of Cambridge. 

She points to the civil rights movement Wake Up, Kazakhstan, which invoked December 1986 in their own protests. In 2019, when the group first emerged, activists gathered at Republic Square, formerly called Brezhnev Square, where the 1986 protests took place. They raised hands wrapped in red cloth to symbolize the blood they said was on the regime’s hands.

But the memory of the 1986 Zheltoksan protests is severely fractured.  

“We never know what to call these things,” said Kudaibergenova. “We still call the 1986 protests as events. Or in Russian, uprisings sometimes. But in Kazakh or in English, every time we write it, it’s always events because we don’t know what kind of vocabulary to use. It’s a traumatic event, but also it’s one that people are still trying to make sense of.” 

Zheltoksan is tremendously important yet never discussed. Why? 

Zheltoksan is omitted from Kazakhstan’s history books. It’s not by mistake, said Kudaibergenova.

With the power of the Soviet Union waning and the cracks in the relationship between Moscow and the republics starting to show, Gorbachev tried to keep the protests in Kazakhstan from spiraling. 

“They tried to silence it. They tried to forget about it. That erasure is very important,” Kudaibergenova said.

The protests were kept under wraps. Students were branded as hooligans, drunks and drug users. People who participated in the protests and survivors of the violent crackdown were silenced.

The Soviet leadership in Moscow also tried to pass off the protests as a provincial issue. “They tried to localize this conflict so that it wouldn’t grow further to some bigger conflictual situation.”

It worked. Many people across Central Asia don’t remember 1986, when in fact it was a defining moment in the  Soviet Union’s crack-up. Kudaibergenova is unsure how much fault lies with Soviet historical suppression and now much to blame Kazakhstan’s failure to recapitulate its own history. 

“It’s very much telling that we’re still trying to formulate that particular history and that particular discourse. For me, it’s still very unfinished business.” 

How has the Kazakh regime framed the protests of 1986?

The 1986 protests bolstered the power and influence of Kazakhstan’s founding dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a towering figure in Kazakhstan’s politics, who in 1986 held the position of prime minister of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. He became the first president of Kazakhstan in 1990 and ruled until 2019 when he was replaced by his handpicked successor, the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Nazarbayev attempted to fit Zheltoksan into a self-serving narrative, while ignoring his own role in the events that precipitated the protests and what he could have done to prevent the violent response directed by Moscow. It’s a tricky line to walk. 

“For the political system at this moment, which is a continuity of Nazarbayev rule from the 1990s, it's inconvenient to discuss Zheltoksan as it was because some current or past leaders of the country were either part of the government in 1986 or participated in the repression against the protesters after the events,” said Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg.

From the outside, it appears as if these latest protests came out of nowhere. The official cause is the rising liquid gas prices, but very quickly people demanded the government resign. What are these protests really about? 

“To be honest, I understand why many people had the impression that it was sudden because there has never been anything like that in the history of modern Kazakhstan,” said Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist based in Almaty and founder of Masa Media, a digital newsroom.

In reality, tension has been building amid pandemic mismanagement, rampant corruption, wealth disparity and social stratification. 

The rising gas prices were not just an economic reason behind the uprising, but also a political one, said Aigerim Toleukhanova, a journalist from Kazakhstan and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Kazakhstan is so rich in oil and natural gas, but clearly people do not benefit from these things. So I think it just shows that it reached this point where people would say that enough is enough.”

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