If something was very difficult, I was taught that you just had to reframe it as a small or insignificant moment compared to the vast eternities and infinities around us. It was a Mormon community, and we were a Mormon family, part of generations of Mormons. I can trace my ancestry back to the early Mormon settlers. Our family were very observant: going to church every Sunday, and deeply faithful to the beliefs and tenets of the Mormon Church.

There's a belief in Mormonism: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become." And since God is perfect, the belief is that we too can one day become perfect. 

We believed in perfection. And we were striving to be perfect—realizing that while we couldn't be perfect in this life, we should always attempt to be. We worked for excellence in everything we did.

It was an inspiring idea to me, but growing up in a world where I felt perfection was always the expectation was also tough. 

In a way, I felt like there were two of me. There was this perfect person that I had to play and that everyone loved. And then there was this other part of me that was very disappointed by who I was—frustrated, knowing I wasn't living up to those same standards. I really felt like two people.

This perfectionism found its way into many of my pursuits. I loved to play the cello. Yo-Yo Ma was my idol. I played quite well and had a fabulous teacher. At 14, I became the principal cellist for our all-state orchestra, and later played in the World Youth Symphony at Interlochen Arts Camp and in a National Honors Orchestra. I was part of a group of kids who were all playing at the highest level. And I was driven. I wanted to be one of the very, very best.

I went on to study at Northwestern in Chicago and played there too. I was the youngest cellist in the studio of Hans Jensen, and was surrounded by these incredible musicians. We played eight hours a day, time filled with practice, orchestra, chamber music, studio, and lessons. I spent hours and hours working through the tiniest movements of the hand, individual shifts, weight, movement, repetition, memory, trying to find perfect intonation, rhythm, and expression. I loved that I could control things, practice, and improve. I could find moments of perfection.

I remember one night being in the practice rooms, walking down the hall, and hearing some of the most beautiful playing I'd ever heard. I peeked in and didn’t recognize the cellist. They were a former student now warming up for an audition with the Chicago Symphony. 

Later on, I heard they didn’t get it. I remember thinking, "Oh my goodness, if you can play that well and still not make it..." It kind of shattered my worldview—it really hit me that I would never be the very best. There was so much talent, and I just wasn't quite there. 

I decided to step away from the cello as a profession. I’d play for fun, but not make it my career. I’d explore other interests and passions.

There's a belief in Mormonism: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become."

As I moved through my twenties, my relationship with Mormonism started to become strained. When you’re suddenly 24, 25, 26 and not married, that's tough. Brigham Young [the second and longest-serving prophet of the Mormon Church] said that if you're not married by 30, you're a menace to society. It just became more and more awkward to be involved. I felt like people were wondering, “What’s wrong with him?” 

Eventually, I left the church. And I suddenly felt like a complete person — it was a really profound shift. There weren’t two of me anymore. I didn’t have to put on a front. Now that I didn’t have to worry about being that version of perfect, I could just be me. 

But the desire for perfection was impossible for me to kick entirely. I was still excited about striving, and I think a lot of this energy and focus then poured into my work and career as a designer and researcher. I worked at places like the Mayo Clinic, considered by many to be the world’s best hospital. I studied in London at the Royal College of Art, where I received my master’s on the prestigious Design Interactions course exploring emerging technology, futures, and speculative design. I found I loved working with the best, and being around others who were striving for perfection in similar ways. It was thrilling.

One of the big questions I started to explore during my master's studies in design, and I think in part because I felt this void of meaning after leaving Mormonism, was “what is important to strive for in life?” What should we be perfecting? What is the goal of everything? Or in design terms, “What’s the design intent of everything?”

I spent a huge amount of time with this question, and in the end I came to the conclusion that it’s happiness. Happiness is the goal. We should strive in life for happiness. Happiness is the design intent of everything. It is the idea that no matter what we do, no matter what activity we undertake, we do it because we believe doing it or achieving the thing will make us better off or happier. This fit really well with the beliefs I grew up with, but now I had a new, non-religious way in to explore it.

The question then became: What is happiness? I came to the conclusion that happiness is chemical—an evolved sensation that indicates when our needs in terms of survival have been met. You're happy when you have a wonderful meal because your body has evolved to identify good food as improving your chances of survival. The same is true for sleep, exercise, sex, family, friendships, meaning, purpose–everything can be seen through this evolutionary happiness lens. 

 So if happiness evolved as the signal for survival, then I wanted to optimize my survival to optimize that feeling. What would it look like if I optimized the design of my life for happiness? What could I change to feel the most amount of happiness for the longest amount of time? What would life look like if I lived perfectly with this goal in mind?

I started measuring my happiness on a daily basis, and then making changes to my life to see how I might improve it. I took my evolutionary basic needs for survival and organized them in terms of how quickly their absence would kill me as a way to prioritize interventions. 

Breathing was first on the list — we can’t last long without it. So I tried to optimize my breathing. I didn’t really know how to breathe or how powerful breathing is—how it changes the way we feel, bringing calm and peace, or energy and alertness. So I practiced breathing.

The optimizations continued, diet, sleep, exercise, material possessions, friends, family, purpose, along with a shedding of any behaviour or activity that I couldn’t see meaningfully improving my happiness. For example, I looked at clothing and fashion, and couldn’t see any real happiness impact. So I got rid of almost all of my clothing, and have worn the same white t-shirts and grey or blue jeans for the past 15 years.

I got involved in the Quantified Self (QS) movement and started tracking my heart rate, blood pressure, diet, sleep, exercise, cognitive speed, happiness, creativity, and feelings of purpose. I liked the data. I’d go to QS meet-ups and conferences with others doing self experiments to optimize different aspects of their lives, from athletic performance, to sleep, to disease symptoms.

I also started to think about longevity. If I was optimizing for happiness through these evolutionary basics, how long could one live if these needs were perfectly satisfied? I started to put on my websites – “copyright 2103”. That’s when I’ll be 125. That felt like a nice goal, and something that I imagined could be completely possible — especially if every aspect of my life was optimized, along with future advancements in science and medicine.

In 2022, some 12 years later, I came across Bryan Johnson. A successful entrepreneur, also ex-Mormon, optimizing his health and longevity through data. It was familiar. He had come to this kind of life optimization in a slightly different way and for different reasons, but I was so excited by what he was doing. I thought, "This is how I’d live if I had unlimited funds."

He said he was optimizing every organ and body system: What does our heart need? What does our brain need? What does our liver need? He was optimizing the biomarkers for each one. He said he believed in data, honesty and transparency, and following where the data led. He was open to challenging societal norms. He said he had a team of doctors, had reviewed thousands of studies to develop his protocols. He said every calorie had to fight for its life to be in his body. He suggested everything should be third-party tested. He also suggested that in our lifetime advances in medicine would allow people to live radically longer lives, or even to not die. 

These ideas all made sense to me. There was also a kind of ideal of perfect and achieving perfection that resonated with me. Early on, Bryan shared his protocols and data online. And a lot of people tried his recipes and workouts, experimenting for themselves. I did too. It also started me thinking again more broadly about how to live better, now with my wife and young family. For me this was personal, but also exciting to think about what a society might look like when we strived at scale for perfection in this way. Bryan seemed to be someone with the means and platform to push this conversation.

I think all of my experience to this point was the set up for, ultimately, my deep disappointment in Bryan Johnson and my frustrating experience as a participant in his BP5000 study.

In early 2024 there was a callout for people to participate in a study to look at how Bryan’s protocols might improve their health and wellbeing. He said he wanted to make it easier to follow his approach, and he started to put together a product line of the same supplements that he used. It was called Blueprint – and the first 5000 people to test it out would be called the Blueprint 5000, or BP5000. We would measure our biomarkers and follow his supplement regime for three months and then measure again to see its effects at a population level. I thought it would be a fun experiment, participating in real citizen science moving from n=1 to n=many. We had to apply, and there was a lot of excitement among those of us who were selected. They were a mix of people who had done a lot of self-quantification, nutritionists, athletes, and others looking to take first steps into better personal health. We each had to pay about $2,000 to participate, covering Blueprint supplements and the blood tests, and we were promised that all the data would be shared and open-sourced at the end of the study.

The study began very quickly, and there were red flags almost immediately around the administration of the study, with product delivery problems, defective product packaging, blood test problems, and confusion among participants about the protocols. There wasn’t even a way to see if participants died during the study, which felt weird for work focused on longevity. But we all kind of rolled with it. We wanted to make it work.

We took baseline measurements, weighed ourselves, measured body composition, uploaded Whoop or Apple Watch data, did blood tests covering 100s of biomarkers, and completed a number of self-reported studies on things like sexual health and mental health. I loved this type of self-measurement.

Participants connected over Discord, comparing notes, and posting about our progress. 

Right off, some effects were incredible. I had a huge amount of energy. I was bounding up the stairs, doing extra pull-ups without feeling tired. My joints felt smooth. I noticed I was feeling bulkier — I had more muscle definition as my body fat percentage started to drop.

There were also some strange effects. For instance, I noticed in a cold shower, I could feel the cold, but I didn’t feel any urgency to get out. Same with the sauna. I had weird sensations of deep focus and vibrant, vivid vision. I started having questions—was this better? Had I deadened sensitivity to pain? What exactly was happening here?

Then things went really wrong. My ears started ringing — high-pitched and constant. I developed Tinnitus. And my sleep got wrecked. I started waking up at two, three, four AM, completely wired, unable to turn off my mind. It was so bad I had to stop all of the Blueprint supplements after only a few weeks.

On the Discord channel where we were sharing our results, I saw Bryan talking positively about people having great experiences with the stack. But when I or anyone else mentioned adverse side effects, the response tended to be: “wait until the study is finished and see if there’s a statistical effect to worry about."

So positive anecdotes were fine, but when it came to negative ones, suddenly, we needed large-scale data. That really put me off. I thought the whole point was to test efficacy and safety in a data-driven way. And the side effects were not ignorable.

Many of us were trying to help each other figure out what interventions in the stack were driving different side effects, but we were never given the “1,000+ scientific studies” that Blueprint was supposedly built upon which would have had side-effect reporting. We struggled even to get a complete list of the interventions that were in the stack from the Blueprint team, with numbers evolving from 67 to 74 over the course of the study. It was impossible to tell which ingredient in which products was doing what to people.

We were told to no longer discuss side-effects in the Discord but email Support with issues. I was even kicked off the Discord at one point for “fear mongering” because I was encouraging people to share the side effects they were experiencing.

The Blueprint team were also making changes to the products mid-study, changing protein sources and allulose levels, leaving people with months’ worth of expensive essentially defective products, and surely impacting study results.

When Bryan then announced they were launching the BP10000, allowing more people to buy his products, even before the BP5000 study had finished, and without addressing all of the concerns about side effects, it suddenly became clear to me and many others that we had just been part of a launch and distribution plan for a new supplement line, not participants in a scientific study.

Bryan has not still to this day, a year later, released the full BP5000 data set to the participants as he promised to do. In fact he has ghosted participants and refuses to answer questions about the BP5000. He blocked me on X recently for bringing it up. I suspect that this is because the data is really bad, and my worries line up with reporting from the New York Times where leaked internal Blueprint data suggests many of the BP5000 participants experienced some negative side effects, with some participants even having serious drops in testosterone or becoming pre-diabetic.

I’m still angry today about how this all went down. I’m angry that I was taken in by someone I now feel was a snake oil salesman. I’m angry that the marketing needs of Bryan’s supplement business and his need to control his image overshadowed the opportunity to generate some real science. I’m angry that Blueprint may be hurting some people. I’m angry because the way Bryan Johnson has gone about this grates on my sense of perfection.

Bryan’s call to “Don’t Die” now rings in my ears as “Don’t Lie” every time I hear it. I hope the societal mechanisms for truth will be able to help him make a course correction. I hope he will release the BP5000 data set and apologize to participants. But Bryan Johnson feels to me like an unstoppable marketing force at this point — full A-list influencer status — and sort of untouchable, with no use for those of us interested in the science and data.

This experience has also had me reflecting on and asking bigger questions of the longevity movement and myself.

We’re ignoring climate breakdown. The latest indications suggest we’re headed toward three degrees of warming. These are societal collapse numbers, in the next 15 years. When there are no bees and no food, catastrophic fires and floods, your Heart Rate Variability doesn’t really matter. There’s a sort of “bunker mentality” prevalent in some of the longevity movement, and wider tech — we can just ignore it, and we’ll magically come out on the other side, sleep scores intact. 

The question then became: What is happiness? I came to the conclusion that happiness is chemical—an evolved sensation that indicates when our needs in terms of survival have been met.

I’ve also started to think that calls to live forever are perhaps misplaced, and that in fact we have evolved to die. Death is a good thing. A feature, not a bug. It allows for new life—we need children, young people, new minds who can understand this context and move us forward. I worry that older minds are locked into outdated patterns of thinking, mindsets trained in and for a world that no longer exists, thinking that destroyed everything in the first place, and which is now actually detrimental to progress. The life cycle—bringing in new generations with new thinking—is the mechanism our species has evolved to function within. Survival is and should be optimized for the species, not the individual.

I love thinking about the future. I love spending time there, understanding what it might look like. It is a huge part of my design practice. But as much as I love the future, the most exciting thing to me is the choices we make right now in each moment. All of that information from our future imaginings should come back to help inform current decision-making and optimize the choices we have now. But I don’t see this happening today. Our current actions as a society seem totally disconnected from any optimized, survivable future. We’re not learning from the future. We’re not acting for the future.

We must engage with all outcomes, positive and negative. We're seeing breakthroughs in many domains happening at an exponential rate, especially in AI. But, at the same time, I see job displacement, huge concentration of wealth, and political systems that don't seem capable of regulating or facilitating democratic conversations about these changes. Creators must own it all. If you build AI, take responsibility for the lost job, and create mechanisms to share wealth. If you build a company around longevity and make promises to people about openness and transparency, you have to engage with all the positive outcomes and negative side effects, no matter what they are.

I’m sometimes overwhelmed by our current state. My striving for perfection and optimizations throughout my life have maybe been a way to give me a sense of control in a world where at a macro scale I don’t actually have much power. We are in a moment now where a handful of individuals and companies will get to decide what’s next. A few governments might be able to influence those decisions. Influencers wield enormous power. But most of us will just be subject to and participants in all that happens. And then we’ll die.

But until then my ears are still ringing.

This article was put together based on interviews J.Paul Neeley did with Isobel Cockerell and Christopher Wylie, as part of their reporting for CAPTURED, our new audio series on how Silicon Valley’s AI prophets are choosing our future for us. You can listen now on Audible.

The post When I’m 125? appeared first on Coda Story.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

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The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

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

The post Shattering the Overton Window appeared first on Coda Story.

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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Over the last few weeks the US has been thrown into a tailspin over the impending divest-or-ban law that might possibly block the youth of America from accessing their favorite short-form video app. But if you've only been following the Supreme Court's hearing on TikTok you may have totally missed an entirely separate Supreme Court hearing on whether or not southern American states like Texas are constitutionally allowed to block porn sites like Pornhub. As of this month, 17 US states have blocked Pornhub for refusing to adhere to "age-verification laws" that would force Pornhub to collect users' IDs before browsing the site, thus making sensitive, personal information vulnerable to security breaches. 

But it's not just US lawmakers that are questioning what's allowed on their corner of the web. 

Following a recent announcement that Meta would be relaxing their fact checking standards Brazilian regulators demanded a thorough explanation of how this would impact the country's 100 million users. Currently the Brazilian government is "seriously concerned" about these changes. Which itself is almost a verbatim repeat of how Brazilian lawmakers dealt with X last year, when they banned the platform for almost two months over how the platform handled misinformation about the country's 2023 attempted coup.

Speaking of X, the European Union seems to have finally had enough of Elon Musk's digital megaphone. They've been investigating the platform since 2023 and have given Musk a February deadline to explain exactly how the platform's algorithm works. To say nothing of the French and German regulators grappling with how to deal with Musk's interference in their national politics.

And though the aforementioned Chinese Great Firewall has always blocked the rest of the world from the country's internet users, last week there was a breach that Chinese regulators are desperately trying to patch. Americans migrated to a competing app called RedNote, which has now caught the attention of both lawmakers in China, who are likely to wall off American users from interacting with Chinese users, and lawmakers in the US, who now want to ban it once they finally deal with TikTok.

All of this has brought us to a stark new reality, where we can no longer assume that the internet is a shared global experience, at least when it comes to the web's most visible and mainstream apps. New digital borders are being drawn and they will eventually impact your favorite app. Whether you're an activist, a journalist, or even just a normal person hoping to waste some time on their phone (and maybe make a little money), the spaces you currently call home online are not permanent. 

Time to learn how a VPN works. At least until the authorities restrict and regulate access to VPNs too, as they already do in countries such as China, Iran, Russia and India. 

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

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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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For years, Silicon Valley's tech moguls have systematically engineered a world where truth is optional, equity and justice are expendable, and facts are toxic waste. By dismantling both fact-checking operations and DEI programs, Meta stands to save millions - with DEI programs already facing cost-cutting measures in 2023, the move shows that the only responsibility Zuckerberg appears to take seriously is the bottom line. The surprising part isn't that Meta has stopped pretending to care about anything but their power and profit - it's that we were ever naive enough to believe they did.

The consequences of this decision will play out globally, and few understand those consequences better than Maria Ressa. The founder of Rappler, was among the first to document how social media platforms enabled the rise of authoritarianism in her native Philippines, where Facebook became so dominant that it "rewired our people's brains." Ressa, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. says "propaganda is like cocaine - you take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become an addict. And we are all addicts today." When she spoke these words at Coda's Zeg Festival last June, they felt like a warning. Now they read like a prophecy fulfilled.

Her warning wasn't just about addiction to propaganda – it was about the deliberate architecture of our digital world. "These tech companies are engineering a world without facts," she says, "and that's a world that's right for a dictator."

The Engineering of Chaos

Tech pioneer Judy Estrin frames the problem in stark infrastructural terms: "Digital platforms mix 'digital water' and 'sewage' in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy and our democracy."

This pollution isn't accidental - it's a feature, not a bug. Meta's announcement, coinciding with Elon Musk's open championing of far-right movements in Europe, reveals a profound transformation in Silicon Valley. Tech moguls who once felt pressured to champion openness and truth are now racing to shed any pretense of responsibility.

It isn't just about catering to Donald Trump and the sentiments of his followers. The shift is about how tech companies view their stakeholders. Where platforms once felt compelled to respond to pressure from employees, users, and advertisers concerned about digital pollution, they've now consolidated power solely around profits. The workforce  that once served as a guardrail for online behavior has been neutralized - a trend Elon Musk pioneered when he bought Twitter. And Meta's move to end its 'Diverse Slate Approach' to hiring and representation goals, while adding Trump allies like the Ultimate Fighting Championship supremo Dana White to its board, shows exactly where power now lies.

The Infrastructure of Authoritarianism

For years, we've analyzed electoral manipulation, documented democratic backsliding, and tracked the rise of strongmen while treating platforms as mere conduits rather than active architects of our political reality. The entire debate around content moderation appears in retrospect to have been a carefully crafted distraction – a game of Whack-a-Mole that kept us focused on individual pieces of content rather than the systemic nature of the problem. As one former Meta employee said, "It's like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier."

"Facebook's 'fact checking' initiative was at heart always a PR exercise," argues Emily Bell, whose research at the Tow Center at Columbia University focuses on the intersection of platforms, media and information integrity. "Nothing has changed about the platform's mission: to make money from the exploitation of IP and data created for free."

By abandoning civic responsibility, while disingenuously claiming to be acting in the interests of free speech, Zuckerberg and Musk aren't so much transforming their platforms as finally being honest about what these platforms have always been: engines of engagement designed to maximize profit and power, regardless of societal cost. The real shift isn't in their behavior – it's in our belated recognition that no meaningful conversation about democracy can exclude the role of the broligarchy in shaping our information ecosystem.

The Future of Truth

Tech platforms have wielded the First Amendment much like the gun lobby has wielded the Second: turning constitutional protections into a weapon against regulation and accountability. Just as gun manufacturers claim they bear no responsibility for how their products are used, platform owners insist they're merely providing neutral spaces for free expression – all while their algorithms amplify lies and fuel society's most self-destructive impulses.

And we are all complicit. The endless scrolling of TikTok and Instagram, the ease of WhatsApp communications, the ability to instantly connect with friends and family across the globe – these aren't just corporate products, they're now fundamental to our daily lives. But in our embrace of this convenience, we've sleepwalked into a future where the rejection of facts isn't just the domain of authoritarian governments in Moscow or Beijing, but of giant tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Many respected journalists and human rights defenders lent their credibility to Meta's Oversight Board – a body that could review a handful of content decisions but had little effect on the platform's fundamental design or business model. "The Oversight Board is absolutely the wrong problem [to address]," Ressa says. "They tried to call it the Supreme Court for content. Content is not the problem. The distribution and the rate of distribution is the problem. The design of the platform, none of which they have any power over. But yet they were able to get very credible people."

The Path Forward

The solutions we've pursued – from fact-checking initiatives to content moderation boards – have been mere band-aids applied on a deep systemic wound. As platforms poured millions into lobbying and institutional capture (Meta spent $7.6 million on lobbying the U.S. government in just the first quarter of 2024), we settled for superficial fixes that left their core business model untouched. As long as news organizations treat platforms as mere distribution channels rather than existential threats to information integrity, we will remain trapped in a cycle of ineffective half-measures. 

Before journalists point fingers solely at tech platforms, we should also look in the mirror - especially those of us who've made careers out of dealing in facts and telling truths. Journalists, researchers, scientists, educators - we're all part of this story. While tech platforms may at some point be regulated (though good luck with that during a Trump administration), we need to get real about our own role in this mess.

While we must figure out how to work toward systemic change, there is still power in how we choose to engage with these platforms. Every scroll, every share, every moment of attention we give is a choice. By being more conscious about where we get our information, how we verify it, and most importantly, how we pass it on, we can start reclaiming some control over our information environment. Small individual actions - from supporting independent journalism to thinking twice before spreading unverified content - add up to collective resistance against a system designed to exploit our worst impulses.

Those of us in journalism and media must also ask ourselves: Have we been complicit in providing cover for systems we knew were fundamentally broken? Have we prioritized our convenience and digital reach over the integrity of information? Most importantly, are we ready to acknowledge that our industry's survival, and arguably that of democracy overall, depends on confronting these platforms' role in undermining the very foundations of factual discourse?

The answers to these questions will determine whether we can rebuild an information ecosystem that serves society rather than corrodes it. But the very first step towards a society in which facts matter and truth has value, is admitting that the destruction of truth wasn't an accident - it was by design.

*Disclosure: Maria Ressa serves on Coda's Board of Directors.

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Nishita Jha: Doctor Saha, why do you think we are obsessed with cults and how did your own obsession with cults begin? Relatedly, why do you think they are a source of such deep fascination in the world of books and cinema and streamers? 

Poulomi Saha: I think cults are much more than just a pop cultural phenomenon, they are a phenomenon that has seeped into all parts of our life, popular, political, social and psychic. The class that I started teaching during the pandemic [Cults in Popular Culture] began because, like many other people, I was spending my days and nights watching docuseries and listening to podcasts on cults. In some ways, it was one of the singular forms of feeling connected to other people. I was getting a little concerned for myself and I was pretty surprised to see myself giving up on my own, long held, sometimes innate reactions to cults. In some ways, the class was an attempt to make sense of this with hundreds of other people. Around me too, I saw the attention and obsession with cults getting more fanatical. It seemed like it was time to move this kind of social analysis outwards.

NJ: One genre of TikTok videos I know your students keep sending you is “What would it take to get you to join a cult?” and it’s a question that’s been memed and stitched by millions of users — a mini-cult of people who love cults on Tik-Tok, which is a platform that spawns its own consumer cults of Stanley Cup users and beauty treatments and such. Did writing your book make you more aware of the many cults that surround us today?

PS: The meme on Tiktok you’re referring to is fascinating because you also have this remarkable effect that in the repetition (through stitching the videos) you are producing a structure that we might actually call cultic: to participate in this imagination together. In the meme, someone says “Would you join a cult if they offered you a free lunch?”, you respond “Well, I would join a cult. I don't even need the free lunch. I would take a donut.” But what is really happening is that the two people now have something in common. They are repeating the same words back to each other so that they recognize that they think in the same ways, they are announcing an affiliation to each other, and that is a powerful thing. Memes are a really interesting and new vehicle to produce a kind of group think. I'm trying very hard not to pathologize it or to suggest that memes are hypnotizing people into mindless repetition or some hypnotic state. I actually think the repetition is actually a way to articulate a long standing desire to simply be like other people. So we see a kind of second form of sociality being produced here in social media, and we also see it in the world of politics. 

NJ: How does that need for belonging play out in American politics? 

PS: I live in Northern California — so I am in some ways, at the epicenter of a particular version of the cult phenomenon. I have a theory which I'm delighted to have proven wrong, that America is a unique place when it comes to cults. America in its vision of itself as this great open space which drives the settler colonial fantasy, has long been obsessed with newness. Americans have really envisioned themselves as a new man, long before the advent of something called the State of the United States, and well into the early part of the colonial project. That fantasy is so compelling and it stretches to all parts of American life, from politics to economics to society. And what it gives birth to is a really unique phenomenon, where we say this is the only place where newness is celebrated as innovation and it's not condemned as heresy.

In most other societies, if you announce the advent of a new messiah it's not just that you're going to have, like, local resistance. There are often overarching religious and/or social and political structures that will limit this. I mean, imagine a new messiah announcing their advent in Italy. It's hard to imagine, right? 

NJ: I see what you mean, in that there is almost a uniquely American obsession with what the era-defining Big New Thing will be, in culture and spirituality, tech, health and of course politics.

PS: We see the ways in which these kinds of things flourish outside the mainstream. What popular culture has done has brought the outside, the fringe, not just into the mainstream, but literally into our homes. We're watching, we're listening, we're obsessing on the internet, and this is where I think we're seeing a new vision of what cult culture is. When you have people who watch a docuseries become quite obsessed, what do they do next? They're not largely going out and joining these groups in the world. Instead, what they are doing is joining subreddits. What they are doing is getting on social media and producing Tiktok, what they're doing is actually trying to reproduce the feeling of being fully immersed with other people.

Along with the invitation to newness, at the same time it is also a highly normative conformity seeking culture. So you have powerful guardrails in place that would claim to keep most people outside of these radical choices, these insular groups, these new religious movements, except the more powerful the guardrail, the more powerful the interdiction, the more powerful the draw. 

NJ: How does the cult of personality shape American politics? What we see now is this almost perfect and uncanny merging of political leaders with social media and reality TV. They are characters with narrative arcs and followers, we watch whether we love them or love to hate them. 

PS: The cult of personality is so interesting because there's a way in which it operates is a totally different thing than social cults, but they do have a couple important things in common. The term “cult of personality” actually comes out of the Romantic period where Immanuel Kant spoke about the cult of genius — that there was a way of thinking and being in the world that should make you exceptional, and that exceptionality was singular in your mind, but always producing a kind of collective. The cult of genius was about finding these figures who had a particular kind of understanding of clarity of the world, a kind of philosophical elevation and becoming their followers. Now, when you become a follower, of course you never become the genius. Within the cult of genius, there's only one genius, and you have inside these followers who go looking for profound truth….

You think about charismatic leaders, whether they are charismatic figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, but also Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King … you cannot know how a person comes to have this kind of power. Again, they aren't faster, stronger, necessarily smarter, and yet when they speak, you feel yourself elevated, transformed, transported. When you have a kind of charismatic figure, so much of the power comes from the fact that they will often tell the story about themselves, a kind of self mythologizing in which they'll say things often like either I am an ordinary person or I was born ordinary. My parents were normal. They were working class, middle class. I had no silver spoon. I had no great grace from on high. What I am before you is utterly ordinary. And of course, as they say it, their effect is so extraordinary that it really kind of burnishes this image of magic, of something you cannot explain and you cannot touch, and it is so compelling. What happens is they begin to develop a following, and the followers all recognize that they witness the extraordinary in this figure. 

So you feel as though you are in the presence of the Divine and all around you when you go home and you're talking to your family when you go to work, you're trying to describe the inordinate force of this person. And people are like — that person? They're a buffoon, they're not very smart, they're not very successful, they're not a real billionaire. That dissonance, rather than breaking through the mind of the follower, actually solidifies the sense of a kind of magical capacity that the charismatic leader has.

Now the follower is also imbued with it because they believe they can see the truth that no one else can. It produces a kind of fanaticism. If you believe that you have access to a new kind of messianic figure and people all around you don't see it, it is very easy to begin to feel like you too are chosen. You too have a kind of special capacity.

It's incredibly compelling, and especially for people who have historically felt as though they're disenfranchised or that their birthright has somehow been taken from them, to have it resurrected. I mean, that's a pretty good compensation to having felt kind of economically disenfranchised for a couple decades.

NJ:  You may not have the answer, but I wonder if that also produces a profound alienation from the rest of the world that doesn't get it. I'm thinking of politics, of how easily groups that are fanatic, or disenfranchised can become militarized or turned into violent mobs. Is the leap from one to the other made easier through disinformation and mass media, and how easy it is to spread the word of the messianic figure?

PS: It does produce a kind of alienation, and I think that there are many different ways that people cope with that. A lot of mass media really flattens the experience of it, we've gotten very good at diagnosing not just misinformation, but a kind of misunderstanding in the followers of these charismatic figures. Here I am really profoundly thinking of Donald Trump. You'll see again on social media, the phenomenon of young reporters, usually lay reporters who go to these Trump rallies and they try to catch the follower in a kind of gotcha moment, to sort of reveal the fundamental cognitive dissonance in a MAGA believer.

So they'll say things like, now, how do you feel about the fact that Joe Biden didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs? And you'll have a person who's like, “He's a coward! He's a disgrace! He cannot be commander-in-chief.” And then the reporter will say, oh, I misspoke. I meant to say Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs, and then the follower will say, “Well, you know, my father had dropped arches. It was so painful, and that's a real danger, not just to himself, but to his platoon.” This is actually a video that I watched recently, and of course, as the viewers watching this on Tiktok or on Instagram we are supposed to laugh. We're supposed to think —  look at this sad, pathetic person who doesn't even see that they're being conned.

It is really satisfying for those of us who believe that we see the truth. We see beyond the smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't allow us to actually contend with what is happening individually to those people, socially, within that group and as these people live in the world.

But it is not possible that the people at the MAGA rally are totally unaware of the gap between what they say and what they believe. But you have to find some kind of compensation. People do that by refusing information that refutes their beliefs and surrounding themselves with people who share those beliefs. So the phenomenon of the Trump rally is important, it becomes a place and time where you get relief from the barrage of being told no, you're not right, you're wrong, not true, not good. In the space of that rally, everyone around you is saying, yes, they're saying you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not being manipulated by someone smarter than you. Community is bound together by so many things, including a mutually reinforcing truth, and that truth becomes more and more potent.

NJ: I’d like to go back to what you said about the American obsession with newness, but also that it is a society that is conformist, or wants to protect the old, in a sense. You see that tension play out with the candidates right now, where someone like Harris must always find a way to balance the fact that she represents newness — there’s never been a US President that looked like her — with someone like Walz, who fits into the American ideal of an older, white patriarch. If you had to make a guess, will America choose the new or the old? 

PS: I do think that you are putting your finger on the pulse of something that really underpins a lot of this conversation around cults of personality and politics. Think about the MAGA project — Make America Great Again is about a return to a prior moment again. At these rallies, you have people being asked, When was America great? And the way in which they're struggling to find a moment is telling — it's always a moment before they were born, always a moment of a kind of mythic abundance and freedom, the 19th century or the industrial revolution. When you press on it and say, well wasn't that before women had the right to vote, or wasn’t that an era of racial segregation … you realize that the actual moment matters much less than the fantasy that there was a kind of reparative moment in America's past where the new man had all of this abundance before him.

Donald Trump, for a non believer, is a terrifying, sometimes funny, but a kind of monstrous figure. For his believers, he is a prophet, and he is a prophet who is able to see more clearly than anyone, a moment where America was great and return us there, with a kind of future oriented promise.

What we also see in world history across multiple generations of world leaders is that charismatic authority is never correct. When they die, or there's a transfer of power, the next leader is either a failed charismatic leader. That is, they cannot reproduce the same intensity, or they're a bureaucrat.

Many political scientists have been speculating on what will happen if Trump does not win this election. If he does not win this election, will Trump fade away, but Trumpism continues to flourish? What many liberal theorists want to believe is that the cognitive dissonance will be revealed. That Trump’s followers will think, “Oh no, I've been following this fraud and con man all along. I see clearly now I repent. Let me be reincorporated into this rational state.” I don't know what will happen in the election, but I do think that the latter is very unlikely to happen. I don't think that even if Trump loses, we are going to see the skies parting and the light of knowledge falling on the dark minds of MAGA. I think his influence has drastically changed what it is possible to do in American politics, and there are too many smart, canny, charismatic political figures in the machine who will want to capitalize on the fact that people are clearly hungry for that feeling of being together, believing in this impossible thing that on the outside is being laughed at, but where you know you have access the truth and freedom and Liberty. I mean, that's what drives American politics, rhetorically, at the very least. 

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and co-director of the program in critical theory. They are currently at work on a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.

The post Will the Cult of Personality Make America Great Again? appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The series was set to air on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, October 29, when Ataturk became president. Instead, Disney said that the show will be released as two films: one to be shown on the Turkish free television network Fox, which Disney owns, and another to be released in theaters at a later date.

Turkish media and government officials blamed the Disney+ cancellation on Armenian lobby groups in the U.S., encouraging a popular backlash in Turkey against the company. Organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America have expressed concerns that the series would gloss over Ataturk’s purported role in the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers in 1915 — actions that are widely recognized as a genocide, including by U.S. President Joe Biden.

The clash between the guardians of Ataturk’s historical memory and Disney — which was founded 13 days before Ataturk became president in 1923 — underscores a complex challenge for U.S. entertainment giants. They have to figure out how to produce content for global markets while some governments look to enforce their own views of history. 

In Turkey, Ataturk stands as a singular figure uniting Turkey. His image adorns walls everywhere, from barbershops to offices to fancy hotels. Prominent Turkish artists, journalists and politicians announced they would cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Singer-songwriter Mustafa Sandal wrote to his one million Twitter followers: “I canceled it. Now it's your turn! No Atatürk, no us!”

“I suspect that any film, even the most hagiographic film of Ataturk, would end up being dredged over the coals by the Turkish media simply because it could never be hagiographic enough,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University.

When the journalist Can Dundar made a documentary in 2008 depicting Ataturk as a heavy drinker with a fear of the dark, two university professors filed a formal complaint with an Istanbul court requesting an investigation into Dundar for “eroding Ataturk’s respectability.” Publicly insulting Ataturk in Turkey is a crime. Turkey’s top mobile telephone operator, Turkcell, canceled its sponsorship of the film.

Ebubekir Sahin, the chairman of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, a state agency in charge of regulating broadcasting that opened an investigation into Disney, wrote on Twitter that Ataturk is Turkey’s “most important social value.”

Ataturk is widely revered in Turkey, but not always for the same reasons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has sought to make Turkey a more religious and conservative society, has been selective about Ataturk’s legacy, downplaying his militant secularization of the country while praising his consolidation of the state and his fight against Western colonization in the Islamic world, according to Eissenstat.

There is a long history of U.S. media productions about Turkish history erupting into explosive debates, attacked by the Armenian diaspora or by Turks, according to Nicholas Danforth, a senior non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

In the 1930s, a film about the Armenian genocide was canceled after Turkey applied pressure on the U.S. State Department and MGM Studios, the maker of the movie. In 2002, the director of “Ararat,” a film about the Armenian genocide, was targeted with threats that Armenians in Turkey would be harmed as a reprisal for making his film.

The battle over cinematic portrayals of Turkey’s role in the Armenian genocide played out most prominently in 2016, when a film called “The Promise” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was only shown to a handful of attendees, but it received tens of thousands of one star ratings on IMDb, the film rating platform, followed by tens of thousands of ten star ratings, as Turkish nationalists and pro-Armenian groups flocked to the site to control the narrative.

No serious academics are willing to give genocide denial the time of day anymore, says Danforth. But, he said, there is frustration among historians about attempts to place all the blame at Ataturk’s feet. “There's plenty to criticize about Ataturk, but for very specific historical reasons, making him a stand in for all the crimes of Turkish nationalism is misleading as well,” Danforth said.

This is not the first time Disney has been caught between a state and a diaspora over accusations of whitewashing a genocide. Its remake of Mulan in 2020 was subjected to a boycott because it was filmed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is committing what the U.S. Department of State and parliaments in the U.K. and Canadia recognize as a genocide against the Uyghur people. In the credits, the movie gives special thanks to multiple Chinese government entities in the region, including to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan where several re-education camps have been identified.

Warner Bros’ blockbuster film “Barbie” caused a stir because, in one scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a child-like drawing of a map of the world. Next to what is supposed to be China is a dashed line that the Vietnamese government says is a representation of the nine-dash line, a maritime boundary that China claims marks its ownership of the South China Sea. The film was banned in Vietnam as a result. Meanwhile, the same map also depicts England as bordering Asia.

The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has divided the executive ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies, upended marketing plans and rattled prop masters. In the 2019 trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket, even though they had appeared in the original 1980s film. Fans complained. The flags were reinstated. The movie was banned in China.

The Chinese government has been ramping up pressure on the American film industry since the late 1990s, according to Chris Fenton, a film executive and former president of DMG Entertainment, a global media company headquartered in Beijing. As China’s market leverage grows, the Chinese government has become more forceful in demanding compliance with its views.

The Pentagon has expressed alarm. In July 2023, it announced that it will not share bases, ships and equipment with productions that allow the Chinese state to censor content in a way that advances China’s national interests.

Yet despite a desire behind closed doors to push back, Fenton said there is no coordinated effort within the film industry to counter China’s efforts to control content. 

Conservatives in the U.S., frustrated by the Barbie movie map, which they see as legitimizing China’s position in the South China Sea, have attacked the film for undermining their values. Political commentator Ben Sharpiro began a scathing 40-minute review of the film by setting fire to Barbie dolls. In late June 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated the U.S. national news cycle when he accused Disney of putting “sexualized content” in its programming for children.

“The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children is preposterous and inaccurate,” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger responded, adding, “The last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.”

Disney+ was launched in Turkey last year as part of a global expansion into 42 new countries. Losing access to Turkey, with its population of over 85 million people, would be a blow to those plans. Disney+ has an estimated 50,000 subscribers in Turkey, compared to Netflix’s estimated 2.6 million, according to FlixPatrol.

Turkey is moving away from the West, disentangling itself from decades of alliance structures and huge defense contracts, according to Selim Koru, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“This is an American entertainment company pretending like these things are more or less as they were maybe 20 years ago,” he told me. “That a founding father of this deeply divided country is sort of an easy or manageable subject for a historical drama produced by a foreign company.”

The post Echoing its battles in Florida, Disney circles a Turkish maelstrom appeared first on Coda Story.

As Lithuania joined the ranks of countries across the globe imposing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, LRT saw an avalanche of likes and shares descend upon its Facebook page. Posts that would normally receive 40 or 50 views were getting tens of thousands of interactions. And roughly half of the comments posted by LRT’s suddenly enormous audience espoused pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian sentiments — an unusual dynamic in a country where support for Ukraine has been strong since the first days of the invasion. Analysis by Debunk, a Lithuanian disinformation research group, later found that much of this activity was driven by accounts situated in either Asia or Africa. This was a coordinated effort, one that almost certainly relied on automated accounts or bots. 

Now, a bill moving through Lithuania’s parliament is attempting to rein in this kind of activity. Representatives are deliberating on a set of proposed amendments to the country’s criminal code and public information laws that would criminalize automated account activity that poses a threat to state security. 

Under the changes, it would become a crime to distribute “disinformation, war propaganda, [content] inciting war or calling for the violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Lithuania by force” from “automatically controlled” accounts. Violators could face fines, arrest or even three years’ imprisonment, depending on the particulars of the content in question.

The legislation is also expressly written to hold major social media platforms accountable for this kind of activity. It would empower the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission to issue content and account removal orders to companies like Meta and Twitter.

Proponents of the legislation argue that social media companies have been ineffective in the fight against digital disinformation in Lithuania. In an explanatory note, lawmakers said the amendments would “send a clear message to internet platforms that an ineffective or insufficient fight against this problem is unacceptable and has legal consequences.”

“Right now, there is no regulation or legislation against bots,” said Viktoras Dauksas, the head of Debunk, the disinformation analysis center. But, he noted, “you can deal with bot farms through dealing with Meta.”

Twitter is a target of the policy too. In January 2022, a month before the invasion, U.S.-based disinformation researcher Markian Kuzmowyczius uncovered a bot attack on Twitter that falsely claimed that the Kremlin was recalling its diplomatic mission to Lithuania due to malign U.S. influence in the country. Removing diplomats is often a signal that the threat level to a country is high.

More than Meta, Twitter has long been a hub for automated accounts of all kinds. This was a key talking point for Elon Musk, who vowed to tackle the problem of malicious bots once the company was in his possession. While the company’s account verification policy has zigged and zagged since Musk’s takeover, it also appears to be honoring more requests for content removals that it receives from governments than it did under Jack Dorsey — in what could be a boon for Lithuania.

As for Meta, what the company terms “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has long been a violation of company policy, but its track record on enforcing this rule is mixed. The proposed amendments in Lithuania are meant to put the company on notice so that it is prepared to respond to requests from Lithuanian authorities in this vein. This is nothing new for Meta, which has faced regulatory measures around the world that are intended to ensure that content on the platform adheres to national laws. But Lithuania is among the smallest of countries that has attempted to bring the company to heel in this style. 

Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act, casually referred to by policymakers as “Lex Facebook,” requires platforms above a certain size to remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours of receiving notice or face fines that could easily rise to tens of millions of euros. India’s 2021 IT Rules require large platforms to establish offices in the country and to dedicate staff to liaise with government officials seeking content removals or user data. In each case, the company has ultimately opted to comply, and it’s easy to see why. India represents Meta’s largest national market worldwide — it is unquestionably in Meta’s best interest to stay in good standing with regulators. And Germany’s position within the EU would have made it politically risky for the company not to fall in line.

But can Lithuania expect the same results? In December, Meta responded to allegations that Facebook was blocking pro-Ukrainian content in Lithuania and even sent representatives to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to discuss the matter with policymakers. But two months later, Meta issued a formal response to Lithuanian politicians insisting that the platform's moderation principles were applied equally to both sides of the conflict and that the algorithm did not discriminate. The incident highlighted the small Baltic nation’s willingness to stand up to the tech giant as Facebook continues to be the most widely used platform in the country. But it also demonstrated Meta’s confidence in asserting its power in the region.

A month later, the heads of state from eight European countries, including Lithuania, wrote an open letter to tech firms calling on them to fight disinformation that “undermines” peace and stability.

Weeding out harmful bots is a complicated exercise in any country that wants to uphold freedom of expression. Although the proposed amendments would only apply to bots spreading information that is already prohibited under Lithuanian law, the criminalization of activity by an automated account still treads into relatively new territory. Lithuanian supporters of the two amendments, including Dauksas, argue that a clear line can be drawn between trolls, who are often people or profiles for hire, and bots, who Dauksas says should not be afforded human rights protections. Scholars like Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts, take a different stance. “Even in a bot farm, there are humans clicking the buttons and directing these armies of automated accounts. The distinction between human and automation is more nuanced and there are many layers of complicity,” he argues.

Speaking from the sidelines of TrustCon, a meeting of cyber security professionals in San Francisco, Ong was eager to stress that blunt force regulation is often not the answer to the complex set of challenges that arise when combatting bots. 

“We all agree that some regulation is necessary, but we need to be extremely careful about using punitive measures, which could create further harm,” he said. 

In Ong’s view, we need to be cautious about what kind of information is shared between platforms and governments and what data is exchanged between platforms and law enforcement agencies, all of which would depend on sustained levels of trust and transparency. While Lithuania is rated “Free” in Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report, such legislation could pave the way for new forms of censorship in countries where democracy is under pressure or has been eroded completely.

Underlying all of this is also a persistent dearth of independent research on these dynamics, research that would require full cooperation from companies like Meta and Twitter where the vast majority of operations like these play out. Calls for more transparency around bot and troll farms have been ongoing from analysts and scholars, but, so far, no social media platform has been open to independent audits of their own investigations, Ong said.

The post Lithuania goes after bots following spikes in pro-Russian propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Hate speech sparks fears of violence against Yazidis in Iraq appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Documenting the women warriors of Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What counts as inappropriate? An official announcement on the Department of Education’s website says that parents should report lessons that focus on “race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.” The hotline closely mimics a project that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin began in January 2022 and ended about eight months later due to receiving “little or no volume” of serious accusations, according to a Youngkin spokesperson.

The program was a key campaign promise of Arizona’s newly elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, whose platform focused on promoting right-wing notions of patriotism and attacking critical race theory. It is hard to come by an Arizona educator who would say that the scholarly theory — that race is a social construct used to oppress people of color — is taught in Arizona’s K-12 schools. 

Horne insists otherwise and is quick to assert his dedication to studying U.S. history. “If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would have been a history teacher,” Horne told me in an interview. “I’ve been reading history every day since I was 14.” Horne, who served as the superintendent of public instruction from 2003 to 2011, was the only Republican in Arizona to win a major statewide role last November.

His campaign website could be a case study in 21st century American far-right spin. Offering only dubious citations, the homepage sets up a mock polemic between Horne and his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman, in which he trots out right-wing, fear-mongering narratives about gender, race, slavery and capitalism in America, and of course about Covid-19. He attacks Hoffman for closing Arizona schools during the pandemic, offering social support for LGBTQ+ students and encouraging teachers to assign Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project.

‘If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say?’

The hotline was billed as a solution to these so-called problems. But Arizona public school teachers — the state employees whose work most directly affects student outcomes — have largely been left out of the discussion. What will the hotline mean for their work in the classroom? Teachers I spoke with expressed confusion about the program and fears that they would be subject to investigations concerning “inappropriate lessons.”

“Teachers are on a daily basis reaching out to us as union officers and asking if it’s okay to teach things in the approved curriculum,” said Kelley Fisher, who has taught kindergarten for 24 years. “If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say? What can and can’t they say in their classrooms? They’re scared, and that should not be what happens in a classroom. Teachers should not be afraid to teach students to think for themselves.”

Others worry that the hotline will cause parents to complain to state officials rather than addressing their concerns directly with teachers or administrators, creating a dynamic that could foster distrust and make it harder to resolve conflicts.

“There are already very well established ways for parents to bring concerns directly to teachers, or, if necessary, the school principal or administration,” said Emily Kirkland, a spokesperson for the Arizona Education Association. “The hotline goes around those existing systems entirely and leaves teachers with no due process at all. It’s really poorly thought out.”

Amber Gould, who has taught English for 12 years in the Glendale Union High School District and serves as treasurer for the Arizona Education Association, was among several educators who said they had received no guidance about what to expect from hotline reports or how to respond to investigations. In an interview, Horne confirmed that the department has not issued guidance to teachers.

Horne is primarily concerned about parents who feel they aren’t listened to, not teachers, he told me. “This has been intended to be a way for parents to communicate with us,” he said. He acknowledged concerns about bypassing existing systems, adding that parents with complaints should go to teachers and principals first. “[The hotline] wasn’t intended to do that,” he said. With regard to the process, Horne said he believes that the department would call the principal first, then the teacher, who would be asked to stop teaching whatever had triggered the call. “If they persist, theoretically we would make a discipline referral to the state board,” he said.

For Kelley Fisher, the hotline is an effort that neither helps teachers nor ensures that students are receiving the best instruction possible.

“This hotline was about appeasing the people who got [Horne] elected,” said the veteran kindergarten teacher. “It’s not about transparency in the classroom, it’s not about making sure teachers are doing a good job.”

Attacking standard K-12 teaching techniques

Perhaps most worrisome to educators is Horne’s vilification of social emotional learning, a key method used by teachers to help students learn to communicate, solve problems and act with compassion toward others. With little concrete evidence, Horne has alleged that teachers are using social emotional learning techniques to disguise their teaching of critical race theory, echoing narratives from right-wing organizations like the Center for Renewing America.

Several teachers expressed confusion about the link between critical race theory and social emotional learning, which they say are completely different. Abby Knight, a kindergarten teacher in the Kyrene School District, said the current discourse has created a deep misunderstanding about what social emotional learning is.

“There is a level of disconnect when you’re not in the classroom and you’re not doing it,” she said. “SEL is made up of really basic concepts that, if you’re not an educator, you don’t realize are crucial to teaching young kids.” 

She explained that you need to teach kids how to communicate effectively, problem solve, consider others and understand what constitutes an appropriate behavior for a given circumstance, in order to foster an effective learning environment.

“Learning really doesn’t take place unless there’s a lot of behavioral work that goes into a classroom,” Knight said. 

Empowering pranksters while leaving teachers behind

What has the hotline actually achieved since its mid-March launch? It has seen plenty of action but almost no reports of “inappropriate” lessons. Instead, its staff have been bombarded by thousands of prank calls from outside Arizona and about 1,000 calls from within the state, the vast majority of which also came from pranksters. In an email, Arizona Department of Education spokesperson Rick Medina said that as of April 10, the department had received only a handful of calls that warranted investigation.

Horne said there was one serious hotline case he was aware of: “Someone called us about [a teacher] evangelizing in the classroom. We called the principal who said he was aware of it already, so we dropped it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona educators continue to face very real pressures that the hotline isn’t going to fix. The state is facing a critical shortage of teachers — one in five positions is unfilled — and wages haven’t kept pace with economic changes. Nevertheless, state-mandated responsibilities keep rising.

“People are leaving because it’s not feasible mentally or financially," Knight said.

“It’s about the way teachers are being treated and it’s driving them out of the classroom,” Kelley Fisher said. “There are plenty of people in this state who are certified to be teachers, but they just don’t want to be teachers right now. It’s really sad.”

Amber Gould, who began teaching at the end of Horne’s last stint as the public schools superintendent, said she felt deja vu about his return to office. “I would hope that we’re able to have conversations with [Horne], because at the end of the day I hope that he wants to do what’s best for kids and not necessarily for his political talking points.”

It remains to be seen whether the hotline will fizzle out like in Virginia or lead to actual investigations into teacher conduct.

“I honestly feel like it’s more of a publicity stunt for Superintendent Horne and his office, but when the fight comes, we’re going to be ready,” Gould said. “We know our rights and we know that in the end, we’re going to do what’s best for kids.”

The post A hotline to report teachers ratchets up tensions in US schools appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.

For Catholics in Belarus, “the whole atmosphere has become one of fear,” said Natalia Vasilevich, a Belarusian theologian and human rights lawyer based in Germany. “Sermons are being watched, trust is even being tested inside some communities, even the social networks of priests are being checked. People cannot trust any structures anymore. They can only trust the relationships in front of them.”

Historically, the Belarusian Catholic Church has close ties to the Polish Catholic Church, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, helped to beef up the numbers of the Belarusian Catholic clergy. By working to sever the ties between these two Churches, Lukashenko believes he has exorcized a malign Western influence hanging over the country’s second-largest religious community.

If the Catholic clergy in Belarus was hoping that the Vatican would advocate for their right to free speech, they have been mistaken. In fact, Vatican diplomacy has seriously weakened the ability of the Catholic Church in Belarus to withstand the slings and arrows of Lukashenko’s government. Instead of defending its priests, the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomats have taken a conciliatory tone with the Belarusian regime, ensuring that the Church’s high-level influence is not diminished. It’s a move reminiscent of Ostpolitik, a Cold-War era strategy that saw the Vatican open communication channels with the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

“The role of the Vatican in Belarus has been to make the Catholic Church less visible as a protesting institution,” said Vasilevich, the Belarusian theologian. The justification for such a move, Vasilevich argues, is that the Vatican has seized an opportunity to become a bridge between Lukashenko and the West while foreign diplomats close their doors in response to Belarus’ alliance with Russia. 

In November 2022, nine months after the first Russian tank rolled across Belarus’ border to invade Ukraine, the Vatican’s ambassador to Belarus gave a speech to celebrate 30 years of relations between the Holy See and Belarus. He stated that the relationship between the two states “continues to be supplemented with new wonderful pages.” His speech came weeks after mass was banned in Minsk’s iconic Catholic Red Church, which was damaged in a mysterious fire that September. Later that year the same Vatican ambassador, Ante Jozic, told Belarusian state TV that Minsk could host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a line also parroted by Lukashenko.

To Belarusian Catholics, no other example reflects the Vatican’s coziness with the Belarusian government than the case of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. After defending the rights of anti-government protesters in 2020, the widely respected cleric was denied entry to Belarus on his return from a ceremony in Poland. When he was eventually allowed to return to Minsk following an intervention from Pope Francis, Kondrusiewicz was forced to retire and replaced with a Belarusian bishop, Iosif Stanevsky, thought to be more sympathetic to the regime. In November 2022, Stanevsky gave a papal Order of St. Gregory to Alexander Zaitsev, a close ally of Lukashenko and businessman subject to EU sanctions. 

“Now there is no illusion among Belarusian Catholics about the Vatican’s stance. However, at the parish priest level, almost all Catholic priests are against the authorities,” said Aliaksei Lastouski, a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. The Vatican declined to comment for this article.

In response, Catholic priests in exile from Belarus have mobilized to counter the threats to Catholic priests who remain in the country. Father Viachaslau Barok, an exiled parish priest, sent a letter to Pope Francis that questioned the Vatican ambassador’s relationship with the Belarusian government and pleaded with the pontiff not to be swayed by the regime. “Everyone can see that by calling you ‘the best Pope,’ Lukashenko only seeks to hide behind the authority of St. Peter’s successor,” he wrote. 

It’s not only the Vatican. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, the largest religious denomination in the country, has also sought to placate the regime. After the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of the Orthodox Church were reported to have removed senior members known to be critical of Lukashenko. Since the full scale Ukraine invasion, it has transferred priests as punishment after they showed opposition to the war. This alliance between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the state was on display when Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Minsk last June to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Belarus, a visit that highlighted Moscow’s willingness to drag Belarus, a nation widely regarded as one of the most secular former Soviet states, into its religious sphere of influence. 

All the while Belarus’ Catholics are becoming less engaged with the Vatican and more frightened of their precarious position in the country. “The Vatican is no longer a pillar that you know will always be on your side,” said Vasilevich.

The post The Vatican is turning its back on Belarus’ Catholics appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Over 400 miles north in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Ulan — a digital artist and video editor who asked not to use his full name — helplessly refreshed his social media feeds, trying to make sense of the unfolding violence. “I spent that day feeling useless, lost about what I should do,” he said. 

The next morning, Ulan responded to an Instagram story that he said “called for bloggers, video editors, fact-checkers, artists to contribute to telling the truth about what was happening on our border.” While Ulan did not take up arms with the border forces, he nonetheless felt pride in contributing his skills to another side of the conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan: the one that unfolded online. 

Kyrgyzstan’s bloggers launched coordinated hashtag campaigns, produced polished videos about the conflict in English clearly meant for global audiences, and used satellite imagery to make their case about this decades-old conflict. Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s media was forced to rely on government press releases. Previous reporting also showed that Tajik journalists frequented Kyrgyz outlets for updates on the conflict.

Fighting on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is not a new phenomenon. Previous clashes mostly involved citizens throwing rocks at their neighbors across the border. Given that half of the 600 mile border between the two countries remains undelimited, it is difficult to manage scarce water sources. While locals have frequently sparred over springs and access to pastureland, political elites on both sides have leveraged nationalist resentment to bolster the legitimacy of their rule. However, September’s spasm of violence marks a steep jump not only in the intensity of violence, but the asymmetry in digital information campaigns.

The distance between the two Central Asian countries’ media sophistication is rooted in their starkly different political environments — and their very different relationships to authoritarianism.

The Tajikistan government requires privately owned radio stations and television channels to submit all their proposed editorial productions in a foreign language for prior approval, and journalists are routinely denied accreditation, jailed and physically attacked. Asia-Plus,  arguably the only homegrown independent media outlet left standing and whose website has been one of the most visited in the country, has had its domain blocked inside Tajikistan for several years. 

“The Tajik regime has methodically stifled the freedom of press with bans on covering various topics, persecution of journalists, prohibition for government officials to speak with media without permission, you name it,” explained Temur Umarov, a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Tajikistan government also curtails social media activity of regular citizens. In 2020, it introduced fines for “disseminating incorrect or inaccurate information” about the Covid pandemic. This made it impossible to fact-check official statements, causing wariness of sharing any information about Covid on social media. Facebook users who posted nongovernmental data about Covid said they were subsequently summoned to prosecutors’ offices and given official warnings. The government also amended the tax code in 2021, requiring social media bloggers to register and pay taxes on any profits from their activities, another form of leverage over online communication that likely forces many bloggers to shutter their activities. As of July, the government is reportedly working on legislation that would criminalize dissemination of “incorrect or inaccurate information” about the country’s armed forces.

While Kyrgyzstan’s government has also used the pandemic to push through laws that threaten freedom of speech and independent press, it has traditionally been a more open space for journalism and digital communication. International organizations constantly provide funding for development of new media and information literacy in Kyrgyzstan. USAID, the American overseas development agency, has since 2017 invested over $10 million in media independence. 

“Kyrgyzstan’s media market is the exact opposite of Tajikistan’s,” Temur Umarov said.

While Kyrgyzstan ranks 72 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom around the world, Tajikistan is only ranked 152. “There is a lot of competition, partially because there is no one group of elites who control the narrative entirely,” explained Umarov. Kyrgyzstan’s competing political factions promote their respective narratives through the media outlets each of them control. But the rich and powerful do not enjoy perfect control over the media environment, and Umarov explained, “In such a competitive environment, the Kyrgyz media tirelessly train, develop, and try new formats.”

These new formats often play out online. “On everything that relates to accessibility and affordability of the Internet, Kyrgyzstan obviously wins,” said Timur Temirkhanov, a blogger and media trainer from Tajikistan. 

Kyrgyzstan ranks in the middle of 100 countries in the 2021 Freedom on the Net rankings, while Tajikistan didn’t even make the list. Kyrgyzstan’s Internet users enjoy the cheapest internet, the second-highest download speed and the highest mobile connection penetration rate in Central Asia. Meanwhile, Internet development in Tajikistan has been hindered by high prices, chronic meddling, over-regulation, and corruption. 

Kyrgyzstan’s relative press freedom and burgeoning IT community have fostered a tech-savvy fact-checking industry, and the country’s social media users adopted a hacker ethos in response to this latest escalation of the conflict. Administrators of massive Telegram channels toggled settings to disallow forwarding or copying of media content, which prevented Tajik social media users from analyzing and nitpicking the videos and photos coming from the Kyrgyz side. Accounts with substantial following on Facebook and YouTube coordinated mass reporting and blocking of outspoken Tajik social media accounts. And Kyrgyz accounts even launched DDOS-attacks on Tajik media outlets, including Asia-Plus.

Even though Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan both sit in the bottom 10% in global rankings of English proficiency, Kyrgyzstani social media users and media outlets leveraged slickly polished infographics and videos, many of which were produced in English, to build support in the West. Some of these videos even leveraged satellite imagery to make pro-Kyrgyzstan claims about the timeline of violence. “For once I got to use my skills not for some commercial purpose but to defend my country, to help my people,” Ulan said.

“There was no good analysis or reactions from the Tajik side, especially in English, no nuanced opinions at first. Things were very one-sided,” says Farrukh Umarov, a social entrepreneur from Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, who spent his undergraduate years at a university in Kyrgyzstan. Umarov was initially reluctant to express his opinion about the conflict online, but he described feeling taken aback by how his Kyrgyz friends disregarded every bit of information coming from the Tajik side. 

A post Farrukh Umarov uploaded to Instagram on September 19 was shared over three thousand times. He received 800 comments, many of them confrontational. “This conflict showed me that Tajikistan isn’t ready for an information war.”

When Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan reached a peace agreement on September 25, the information warfare had died down. Media outlets and bloggers in both countries have turned their attention to Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilization and the resulting uptick in Russian emigres to Central Asia. News cycles churn on, leaving the 140,000 Kyrgyzstanis who were forced to leave their homes and the families of the 41 casualties from Tajikistan and 59 dead from Kyrgyzstan to mourn in quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post In Nicaragua, there are no more newspapers appeared first on Coda Story.

Many Poles wrestle with 80 years of myths about the legacy of Nazi occupation, believing the country’s “good name” has been betrayed by hostile historians

While the conservative government promotes Polish virtue during World War II and sidelines Jewish victims, some Poles want to see Poland finally reckon with the realities of its 20th century history

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic archives of the secret police and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the "IPN law" within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the deportation site on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

“It is vital that such a description and the narrative of the events of German occupation in Nowy Sącz includes an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators of the crime, so that it does not allow for false and inconsistent interpretations.

These expectations are not exaggerated and unfounded, as we, Poles, have been facing attempts to shift the responsibility for German crimes onto the Polish people. Such attempts are particularly disgusting and unjust, taking into account our tragic war and occupation experience in the period of 1939-1945.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial. 

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S. 

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 military officers and Polish elite by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

"The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country," read a statement from Polish parliament on the opening of the Markowa museum.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Nine urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law. 

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: "I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group. 

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic. 

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down. 

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration. 

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

[CORRECTION 08/02/2023 10:00 AM EDT]: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed former President Barack Obama's statement about "Polish death camps" to a 2012 visit to Warsaw. The comments were made in Washington, D.C. in 2012 at a ceremony posthumously honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.]

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The post Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust appeared first on Coda Story.

“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”

“You can’t go live for 63 days”

For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France.

He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation. 

Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. 

The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly. 

Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back. 

As Karimi was pleading with one Meta employee, I cornered another one across the crowded reception hall, to deliver a similar message from a different part of the world. A friend working for an independent television station in Georgia had asked me to pass on that her newsroom had lost a staggering 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine.  The station, called Formula TV, made countless attempts to contact Meta but received no response. 

Was there anything these Meta staffers could do to help?

‘Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying’

“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself. 

This seemingly technical error caused the station to lose 90% of its audience, but also a chunk of its revenue. “Monetization has been suspended. It is a harsh punishment,” Ugulava said. 

The Tbilisi-based opposition TV station Mtavari saw similar declines when it ran a story about Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian volunteer paramilitary group that has been defending Mariupol, where some of the worst atrocities of the war have occurred. Facebook removed the story on grounds that it was “a call to terrorism.” The Azov Battalion is controversial because of the far-right and even neo-Nazi leanings of many of its members, but only Russia categorizes it as a terrorist organization. 

“We were already under constant attacks from Georgian government troll farms, but since the invasion Russian-backed organizations began reporting us too. Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, the channel’s Director General told me. 

Gvaramia says many of the Ukraine-related stories that Mtavari posted in early March were taken down by Facebook in early April, weeks after they were first published and seen by millions of people. The Mtavari team has good reason to believe they are being reported by Kremlin-backed accounts. 

“The worst part is that there is no warning mechanism, there is no obvious criteria for these takedowns and appeals to Facebook take weeks … Facebook pages of real, independent journalism are dying,” Gvaramia said. His channel’s engagement, he said, dropped from 22 million in early March to 6 million in early April.  

For a place as small as Georgia (population 3.5 million) the consequences of these takedowns are huge. Like in many countries outside the West, Facebook has become the nation’s virtual public square – the place where people gather to discuss and debate their future. This discussion is existential in Georgia, because the future is so precarious: twenty percent of the country is already occupied by Russia, and many fear that Ukraine’s invasion will push Georgia further into Moscow’s embrace. Kremlin-funded disinformation campaigns have put independent media covering the situation under massive pressure. When media outlets like Formula TV and Mtavari disappear from people’s Facebook feeds, the very ideas of liberal democracy disappear from the public debate. 

“The power that Facebook has is scary. The way it is using it is even scarier,” a Russian journalist, who did not want to be named due to security concerns, told me. Her account was suspended after she was reported to Facebook by numerous accounts accusing her of violating community standards. She suspects the accounts that reported her were working on behalf of the Russian government. Like Karimi, who says Facebook is helping the Taliban, she says Facebook’s policies are aiding Vladimir Putin’s agenda. 

“Silicon Valley is helping Putin to win the information war. It is insane and it has to stop,” she said “But we don’t know how to tell them this, because it is impossible to speak to them directly.”

None of this is new

Meta has been accused of promoting hatred and disinformation around the world before, from Nigeria to Palestine to Myanmar where the company was famously accused of fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. And experts in regions like the Middle East and Africa have noted that even though tech platforms are failing to adequately address the content crisis around Ukraine, they have brought a faster and more robust public response in this case than in places like Syria or Ethiopia. 

With each new crisis, Meta has made new promises to better account for all the cultural and linguistic nuances of posts around the world. The company even put out an earnest-sounding human rights policy last year that focused on these issues. But there’s little evidence that its practices are actually changing. Facebook does not disclose how many moderators it employs, but estimates suggest around 15,000 people are charged with vetting content generated by Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users globally. 

“It is like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier,” one moderator told me. I cannot name him, or say where he is, because Facebook subcontractors operate under strict non-disclosure agreements. But he and other people with access to moderators told me that the Ukraine war is the latest proof that Facebook’s content moderation model does more harm than good. 

Facebook moderators have 90 seconds to decide whether a post is allowed to go up or not. From Myanmar to Ukraine and beyond, they are dealing with incredibly graphic images of violence or highly contextual speech that typically doesn’t line up with Facebook’s byzantine rules on what is and is not allowed. The system, in which posts live or die depending on a quick decision of an overworked, underpaid and often traumatized human, takes a toll on the mental health of the moderators. But it is also damaging the health of the information ecosystem in which we live. 

“The weight of this war is falling on outsourced moderators, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm,” says Martha Dark, director of Foxglove Legal, a UK-based tech justice non-profit group that is working on issues of mistreatment of Facebook content moderators around the world.   

“Despite its size and its colossal profits, Ukraine has shown that Facebook's systems are totally unequipped to deal with all-out information war,” says Dark. “No one is saying moderating a war zone is an easy task. But it's hard to shake the sense that Facebook isn't making a serious effort at scaling up and fixing content moderation – because to do so would eat into its profit margins. That's just not good enough,” Dark said.

Facebook has pledged to reply to my questions about the cases of Shafi Karimi from Afghanistan and FormulaTV in Georgia in the coming days – I’ll report on it as soon as I hear back. In the meantime, my contacts there offered this response, which is attributed to a “Meta spokesperson”: 

"We're taking significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services related to the war in Ukraine. We've expanded our third-party fact-checking capacity in Russian and Ukrainian, to debunk more false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it, and attach warning labels. We also have teams working around the clock to remove content that violates our policies. This includes native Ukrainian speakers to help us review potentially violating Ukrainian content. In the EU, we've restricted access to RT and Sputnik. Globally we are showing content from all Russian state-controlled media lower in Feed and adding labels from any post on Facebook that contains links to their websites, so people know before they click or share them.”

It’s true that the company has deplatformed some of the most prominent sources of Russian disinformation, such as Russian state broadcasters. And we can’t know what impact some of these other measures are having, due to the company’s lack of transparency about its actual day-to-day content moderation decisions. But the real power of Facebook, which is arguably the most potent communication tool in the world at the moment, lies in organic, peer-to-peer shares and that’s where so much disinformation flourishes. 

“We can no longer cover the war,” says the Georgian journalist Salome Ugulava. “Our followers are not seeing us on their feeds.” 

It’s not just Facebook: Twitter is facing similar accusations of doing a terrible job policing its platform when it comes to Ukraine. “You are failing,” tweeted journalist Simon Ostrovsky who is covering Ukraine for PBS Newshour. “Hundreds of sock puppet accounts attack every tweet that counters the Kremlin narrative, meanwhile you fall for coordinated campaigns to suspend genuine accounts.”

This story originally ran in our our weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world. We are currently tracking the war in Ukraine. Sign up here.

The post How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war appeared first on Coda Story.

A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.

“As far as we can tell, no one has done web archiving at this scale in a war before,” says Quinn Dombrowski, a project administrator at Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and a technology specialist at Stanford University’s Library. “Our goal is not to create an archive that people will study somewhere safely in the West. Our goal is to repatriate this data back to the Ukrainains.”

The war between Russia and Ukraine has opened the door to the wide scale destruction of their internets — for very different reasons. Ukraine's digital record faces annihilation from military invasion; Russia's internet destruction has been ordered from within. But people in both countries are now grappling with a shocking reality: their online records can disappear. The reality is now dawning that that their nation’s internet is fragile and impermanent

Websites are going offline in Ukraine for a number of reasons, from power outages, to local servers being destroyed by shelling, to hosting bills going unpaid. “When you get right down to it, it’s cables, it’s hardware, it’s things that exist in the physical world even though we think of the internet as a different sphere,” said Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s archiving initiative has set up a list of websites for volunteers to archive, prioritizing websites for organizations located in cities under siege or with active air raid warnings.

Their efforts point to one of the internet’s best kept secrets: the fragility of the internet.

Christopher Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science says he often encounters misconceptions about the internet’s durability. “What happens is people get shocked on both ends of the spectrum. Things that you thought would be persistent, go away. And things that feel like they should be ephemeral, stick around. Both of those things are true.” What lives on is determined by “power and resources,” he says, with a lot of what we think of as “junk” data, such as our browsing history and other user behavior information, actively maintained by governments or companies using it for revenue.

The archiving of websites and databases for the most part has not been incorporated into disaster or military preparedness. In the U.S., emergency digital archiving initiatives have sprung up after events like Ferguson in 2014, Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the election of President Donald Trump. After these events, volunteers captured websites, social media posts and federal databases before they were lost or they were taken down by government officials.

There is a growing awareness among the public for the importance of web archiving, according to Abigail Grotke, assistant head of the digital content management section at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Grotke joined the Library when it first began web archiving in the early 2000s. Today, the Library’s digital archive is one of the largest of any government body. By the end of 2021, over 100 web archive specialists have captured 21.7 billion digital documents or 2.827 petabytes.

The Library of Congress is in the process of switching their operations to a digital first approach. “In the past if something was available in both print and digital, we would prefer the print. But we’re switching focus now where digital is preferred,” said Angela Cannon, a reference specialist at the Library. Last summer the Library had to freeze its social media archiving work due to persistent barriers enacted by tech companies and the technological challenges in archiving content from private profiles and accounts.

“It’s been frustrating but it’s not just our problem,” said Grotke, pointing out that it’s something archivists around the world are trying to solve.

Cannon, the reference specialist at the Library, says this becomes especially important in regions around the world where public figures and politicians almost exclusively use social media for messaging.

“Increasingly politicians are not bothering with websites,” Cannon said. “If you’re not talking to traditional newspapers, and you’re not going on television, it is most definitely going to matter in the future. That’s a gap in our collecting, so how do we document that for our researchers?”

When Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began, Grotke and Cannon say their team’s first step was to increase the frequency of “crawls” for Ukrainian government sites and selected Russian sites.

While many governments, including Ukraine’s, have dedicated national digital archives, Russia is one of the few that does not. Instead, Russia has Ivan Begtin, a transparency advocate in Moscow who for over a decade has led a small team of archivists. Their work has new urgency as the Kremlin erases swatches of the Russian-language web.

“In the next month and a half many publications and cultural websites can disappear entirely,” said Begtin.

Since the war, dozens of independent Russian media sites have been blocked by the Kremlin for violating censorship laws banning the use of the word “war” in coverage of Ukraine. More quietly, hundreds of smaller publications, Russian cultural websites and online projects have gone offline as many western hosting services stopped accepting payments from Russia.

The list of websites archived by Begtin and his team of three in the past few weeks gives a snapshot of the current shattered state of freedom of expression in Russia. He prioritizes content that “forms our contemporary history, what people are going to use to write books and textbooks one day.”

The National Digital Archives, Begtin’s self-funded project, has captured content from independent news publications such as the Insider, Colta, Tjournal, Paper — all now blocked in Russia — along with websites like the “Forum of Kostroma Jedi,” a chapter of Star Wars enthusiasts that was recently listed as an “undesirable” organization by federal authorities; and dozens of historical memory projects from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group shuttered in December 2021 by court order.

The work is grueling and dangerous. “How much longer I can keep this up for, I’m not so sure,” said Begtin.

For years Russia’s internet existed as an unregulated bastion of free speech, pirated films, music and software. Its transformation into one of the most censored corners of the internet in the world has gone hand in hand with the transformation of Russian politics, said Begtin.

“This is a story of the erosion of your sense of freedom, the erosion of democracy, the erosion of people’s faith in themselves. Because many thinking people in Russia today speak in these words: there is nothing I can do to change what is happening.”

Begtin’s one-man crawl of the Russian web is a far cry from the wave of initiatives backing up Ukraine’s digital records. Dombrowski, the technology specialist at Stanford, says there is a much broader international conversation that has to happen around digital archiving, cultural heritage, and conflict.

“It’s inspiring when everyone comes together to do something to support this effort,” she said. “On the other hand, it represents a fundamental failure of infrastructure. It should never come to random people archiving Ukrainian websites on their laptops.”

Of all the work Dombrowski, who studied medieval East Slavic languages, managed to preserve in the past few weeks, one site was especially vivid: the website of a small museum in the Ukrainian city Novhorod-Siverskyi dedicated entirely to the medieval epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, famously translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov. The poem’s original manuscript was destroyed in 1812 when Moscow burned to the ground during the Napoleonic wars.

“I studied the poem in grad school and when I saw what this museum was about, my heart just stopped,” Dombrowski remembers. “Our automatic processes had failed so I manually went through each page on their website. There were 83 pages. I clicked on every image. I downloaded everything I could and saved the file. The thought of this beautiful museum being under attack, I immediately burst into tears.”

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The post The race to save everything as war threatens the internet in Ukraine and Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

In the last week, he’s been in some truly bizarre corners of the internet. He’s unearthed a network of QAnon influencers who believe Trump’s pronunciation of “China” is really a secret message about Ukrainian involvement in the origins of Covid-19. He’s drilled down into a conspiracy theory claiming there are U.S.-run bioweapon labs in Ukraine. He’s exposed fake Twitter accounts, like one purportedly owned by a Brisbane realtor that’s likely been hacked and transformed into a “Crypto QAnon Fascist” account.

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Owen Jones talks about how exposing disinformation plays into the hands of bad actors — but someone’s got to do it.

You spend your life studying disinformation patterns and going down some pretty bizarre internet wormholes. How did you get into this world?

I've always been very fascinated by the notion of deception — of what is true and what is not.  Growing up, my mum had a mental illness that was not diagnosed, but there were delusions involved. And sometimes she’d say things that I knew were demonstrably not true. I think just growing up around that, I became very astute at determining what was far-fetched and what was plausible. I think that subliminally played into it. 

When it comes to the Ukraine invasion, what narratives are you interested in at the moment? 

I’m kind of obsessed with the biolab one right now.

Us too. We’ve been covering the biolab story for years — because the Lugar Lab, an American-run research lab in Georgia, has been the subject of sustained Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns for a long time, claiming it’s really waging germ warfare. How has the biolab conspiracy theory come into play during the Ukraine invasion?

An independent Bulgarian journalist — who has actually made a documentary about the Georgian lab — tweeted that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had deleted documents about a biological program that they had. Now these documents are actually available so it wasn’t true, I think there were just some broken links. But it was enough to get over 12,000 retweets. And it was amplified by so many people — crucially, by Chinese diplomats.

Chinese state media also picked it up, asking, “What is the U.S. government trying to hide?” And now QAnon is basically saying that Ukraine created Covid. Every time I talk about QAnon I feel like I’m losing my mind.

If one person tweets a crazy conspiracy theory about a biolab — no one cares, right? You’ll ignore it. But if you have one thousand, two thousand people tweeting, and then state officials, you have to address it as a media organization. And then by doing that you're redirecting resources to discussing something, debunking it, and so on. And suddenly you’re not talking about the invasion of Ukraine or civilian suffering any more. That's part of the success of any propaganda agent, just getting journalists and researchers to redirect their resources.

Do you think we’d be better off if we just didn’t address these conspiracies at all? 

The thing is, we don’t have a choice but to direct resources to it. Because we have to intervene in the information space. Otherwise it would just be a deluge. It’s not like we have control of the information, or can tell the state or bad actors not to use propaganda. Unfortunately, the system that exists is one that facilitates deception. So we do have to step in. 

You’ve got a book coming out in the U.K. on April 28 called Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, due to be released in the U.S. this summer. At Coda we report on “currents,” and one of these encompasses authoritarian tech. We have our own idea of what that means — but I’m interested in hearing what it means to you. 

I see it exactly as the authoritarian use of tech. I would say if you look at digital authoritarianism generally, it includes surveillance, censorship. But it also includes social manipulation and harassment, targeted persecution.

I think when people think of authoritarianism, it's very state centric — they think of governments using tech. But the authoritarian use of tech is actually multiple actors, both existing in authoritarian regimes and outside them. And the West, or the Global North — whatever you want to call it — comes together to engage in these authoritarian practices too. Pegasus is a good example. Or Lynton Crosby, in London, using Facebook campaigns to whitewash Mohammed Bin Salman. You have these reputable companies in Mayfair, with shiny offices, doing these nefarious kinds of activities.

Tell me a bit more about how disinformation plays a part in authoritarian tech. 

Without the information space, digital authoritarianism is kind of meaningless because I think authoritarianism requires not just coercion, it requires attempts to persuade. You could call it cognitive hacking.

I think deception is often a better term than disinformation. Because deception incorporates the means of distributing that information as well as the content. You could, for example, have one thousand bot accounts spreading something truthful, but because they're bots trying to give the illusion that they're real, it's still deceptive. So I think deception is a better, broader term.

How would you describe the traction that the propaganda offensive against Ukraine has gained? 

I'd say for the first week or two, the dominant narrative was very clear. It was “Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is egregious. This is horrible.” It felt like everyone was on a similar page. 

Then we started to see the #IStandWithPutin hashtag creeping out — which was heavily pushed by inauthentic accounts. And then the narrative began to divide support for Ukraine. There was a concerted attempt to redirect attention away from Russia and Ukraine, by painting the conflict as Russia versus NATO, Russia versus the West. 

We were seeing people not necessarily being unsympathetic to Ukraine, but redirecting their attention, focusing on Western hypocrisy as opposed to a Russian invasion. 

We're now seeing the right, and the QAnon accounts, embracing a Trumpist legacy of suspicion of Ukraine. And that taps into what they’re interested in — the idea that the U.S. government is complicit in some shady goings on in Ukraine.

And then we’re seeing relative successes like the biolabs narrative. And gradually, the waters are getting muddied.

The post Biolabs, QAnon, and Putin: visualizing digital authoritarianism’s next move appeared first on Coda Story.

From polling, data research or scientific analysis, here are some of the most important recent studies about disinformation.

1) Remember the fake news campaign that brought disinformation into the mainstream discussion? Yes, that one: Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This research from 2018 by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a leading computer network analysis firm, for the United States Senate was, at the time, the most comprehensive analysis of Russian meddling. The researchers analyzed millions of posts and reactions online and determined how the notorious troll farm, the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, tailored different messages to galvanize individual Trump supporters and discourage non-supporters from casting votes at all. The focus had been on Facebook and Twitter; these researchers unraveled how the Internet Research Agency used YouTube in their campaign and also uncovered their sloppiness, like cases of them paying for political ads with Russian rubles.

2) How were scientists in different disciplines discussing fake news before disinformation went literally everywhere? In 2018, as fake news became a catch-all buzz term, a group of 16 political scientists, psychologists, computer scientists, media experts, historians, and journalists led by Harvard professors David Lazer and Matthew Baum teamed up to publish a paper about the science of fake news, looking at how it works on an individual and societal level.

3) In 2020 EU DisinfoLab published Indian Chronicles, an exhaustive research project uncovering a 15-year long international pro-India and anti-Pakistan disinformation campaign run by the New Delhi-based Srivastava Group, mainly targeting the UN and EU. Fake and “resurrected” think tanks and NGOs lobbied the European Parliament, spoke at sessions, and convinced parliamentarians to write pro-India and anti-Pakistan op-eds for over 750 of their fake media outlets across 119 countries. Reportedly, ANI, South Asia’s leading news agency, played a major role in spreading content from these websites, giving them credibility. Srivastava Group was also the organizer of controversial trips to Kashmir in 2019, when a couple dozen far-right European Parliamentarians visited the Indian-controlled disputed regions in Kashmir.

4) In 2020 QAnon, a conspiracy theory about how a global child trafficking ring is ruling the world, conquered every other outlandish conspiracy theory and went global. It infiltrated politics, public health, yoga groups, the hip-hop scene and disrupted the personal lives of thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad. Huge numbers of disinformation stories in the past year had something to do with QAnon, and this poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core published last May made clear just how far QAnon has traveled. In the U.S. alone, 30 million people believe at least some QAnon tenets, ranking QAnon next to major religions.

5) Last spring, amid Covid-19 vaccine rollouts, an international non-profit research organization, The Center for Countering Digital Hate, investigated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for harmful, Covid-19 related disinformation. They uncovered the “Disinformation Dozen” —  the influencers who accounted for 65% of Covid-19 related misinformation online. The list includes notorious anti-vaccine campaigners like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alternative medicine practitioners like Christiane Northrup and the leading pseudoscientific influencer-physician Joseph Mercola. Mercola, who has been profiting from his misinformation, also made our list of top business owners profiting off bad science. “He will continue to express his professional opinions and defend his freedom of speech,” his representative told Coda when approached for a comment.

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The post These 5 disinformation studies changed the way we think about fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

Barack Obama had just won reelection in a hard-fought presidential race and the celebrity host of “The Apprentice” was stewing. Back then, Donald Trump was a mere reality TV star and a staunch proponent of the birther conspiracy, the baseless claim that Obama was born abroad, and therefore ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Those were also the days when Trump was still on Twitter, and he took to the bird app to voice his dismay with the U.S. electoral college system. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he declared, in a series of now belligerently familiar tweets. “We are not a democracy!”

Fast-forward a decade. That Twitter tantrum that generated a few eye-rolls from coastal media in 2012 now reads like foreshadowing to the kaleidoscope of election fraud myths that have metastasized since the 2020 election and proven ever more resilient. Some 60% of Republicans believe that the last presidential election was stolen. 

This “Big Lie” – the meritless claim that the election was hijacked by voter fraud and President Joe Biden was its illegitimate victor – has had tangible policy consequences, leading to the introduction of a slew of state house bills in the U.S. that would restrict voter access, and inspiring Trump acolytes in swing states to run for offices that oversee elections, a development one Democratic secretary of state characterized as a “five-alarm fire.”

The Big Lie reshaping America’s electoral landscape is also providing fertile ground for politicians abroad, who are adopting the rhetoric of widespread voter fraud over the inconvenient realities of legitimate electoral loss. From Brazil to Israel, accusations of rigged elections are gaining momentum, animating conspiracists, and undermining faith in the democratic process. Here are four examples:

Brazil

Trump fanboy and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro defended Trump’s allegations of voter fraud the day after the disastrous January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. “What was the problem that caused that whole crisis, basically? Lack of trust in the election,” he hypothesized. “There were people who voted three, four times. Dead people voted. It was a free-for-all.” It’s not just the U.S. electoral system Bolsonaro railed against. For months, the Brazilian president has been leveling fraud claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system and already questioning the legitimacy of the country’s upcoming 2022 presidential race – but only if he loses, naturally.

Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s electoral system come as polls consistently show him trailing the candidate most likely to run against him, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Recognizing the importance of the upcoming election, Trump allies – including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon – have thrown their weight behind Bolsonaro and are faithfully propping up his voter fraud allegations. According to the New York Times, Bannon argued Bolsonaro “will only lose if ‘the machines’ steal the election.” Bolsonaro, too, has preempted a loss to Lula by declaring fraud as the only possible explanation for his defeat, and has suggested he won’t concede the election if that happens. “I have three alternatives for my future,” Bolsonaro explained of his electoral prospects in August. “Being arrested, killed, or victory.” 

Israel

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded downright Trumpy in June as a coalition of opposition lawmakers were poised to remove him from office. “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in the history of the country,” he declared, arguing the coalition that later succeeded in ousting him was in league with the “deep state” and the journalists covering the news were “taking part in a propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” The rhetoric became so heated in the country’s online spaces in the lead-up to Netanyhau’s ouster that the directory of the country’s security agency, the Shin Bet, released an exceedingly rare statement warning of “ a serious rise and radicalization in violent and inciting discourse” that could lead to political violence, drawing comparisons to the warnings that preceded the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Although Netanyahu did eventually step aside for his replacement and the country was spared from the alarming prospect of an Israeli version of the QAnon Shaman, the former prime minister has yet to walk back his earlier allegations of election fraud.

Germany

Even Germany hasn’t been spared from the abyss of election conspiracies. As Coda reported in the fall, the Big Lie found an eager audience among a number of leaders within the country’s far-right movement, who have amplified Trump-inspired false claims about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the country’s 2021 parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, some of the conspiracies were well outside reality. While the country doesn’t use voting machines, one researcher found U.S-originated conspiracies about rigged voting machines circulating through the country’s right-wing social media outlets over the summer. “These alternative realities that are created in the United States, and are really popular there, have a huge impact on countries that the U.S. is allied with,” he explained. At a campaign event in eastern Germany, a politician with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party urged supporters to vote in person rather than by mail, citing the possibility of election fraud and warning them to “stay alert.” The election, a voter told Schultheis, “is going to be manipulated.”

Peru

Keiko Fujimori promotes the election fraud myth that just wouldn’t quit. In June, Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, lost the country’s presidential election to leftist rival Pedro Castillo, and then refused to concede the race, leveling unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and demanding tens of thousands of ballots be thrown out, leading to massive pro-Fujimori rallies in which supporters donned bullet-proof vests and prophesied about civil war. 

Though Washington and the European Union called the election fair and international observers found no evidence of fraud, the claims delayed the country’s election certification process by a nail-biting six weeks. Castillo was eventually declared the winner, but experts worry Fujimori’s Big Lie amplification has deeply damaged faith in the country’s democratic institutions and radicalized elements of the country’s right. Consider this disturbing New York Times dispatch a month after the election:

“In the crowd at one recent Fujimori rally, a group of young men wearing bulletproof vests and helmets marched with makeshift shields painted with the Cross of Burgundy, a symbol of the Spanish empire popular among those who celebrate their European heritage. One man flashed what looked like a Nazi salute.

Ms. Fujimori, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, part of a larger Peruvian-Japanese community, has allied herself closely with the country’s often European-descended elite, just as her father eventually did.

A number of her supporters have talked casually about their hope that the military will intervene.

“Just for a moment, until the military can say: ‘You know what? New elections,’” said Marco Antonio Centeno, 54, a school administrator. “The alternative is totalitarianism.”

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The post The year the Big Lie went global appeared first on Coda Story.

There was barely a mask in sight. 

Bolsonaro’s TikTok audience is exploding. His followers on the youth-dominated site grew to more than 340,000 people  at a rate of almost 50% in the past month alone. Bolsonaro tries to make authoritarianism look cool. In his TikTok profile created last June, the populist, far-right president posts videos where he goes on diplomatic missions, visits his mother, plays around with his staff, and engages in the traditional politics of hugging children and giving long motivational speeches. 

Bolsonaro is known as the “Tropical Trump”. Besides similar governing styles, both leaders rode to power attacking the press as fake news and Big Tech for persecuting them. While Trump was in office, Bolsonaro made no secret of his admiration, and looked to the American for direction. Since Trump’s failure to win re-election, however, Bolsonaro has gone role model shopping. 

He has found what he’s looking for in the young men’s aisle. 

With elections coming up in October, Bolsonaro is adjusting his strategy to mimic the social media tactics of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Salvadoran researcher Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez coined the term “millennial authoritarianism” to explain the rise to power of the 40-year-old Bukele.

Bolsonaro is 66 years old. Still, the term applies to him, too, argues Vitor Machado, a political researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, in southern Brazil. Millennial authoritarianism is a political strategy, says Machado, that encompasses authoritarian behavior, populist appeals, and a modern and youthful personal brand built mainly via social media. Bolsonaro has associated his online identity with his millennial sons –who are themselves politicians– while, says Machado, fine-tuning his social media discourse to resonate with millennials. 

Speaking the same language as young people has become a key tactic for many Latin American leaders regardless of ideological leanings — from leftists such as newly-elected Gabriel Boric in Chile to authoritarians such as Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras. 

For Brazil, where Bolsonaro is widely viewed by political scientists as a threat to the future of democracy, the president’s ability to manipulate youth sentiment with his newfound social media hipness has radically changed the election calculus. 

“I see only three options: prison, death, or victory,” said Bolsonaro when questioned about the upcoming election during a meeting of religious leaders last September. More than once, the president has threatened a military coup if he loses his mandate. Though after recent confrontations with the Supreme Court — which is currently considering five criminal inquiries into the president — he has downplayed his threat. “Who never told a little lie to their girlfriend? If you didn’t, the night wouldn’t end well,” he said to the laughter of an audience of allies. 

The Bolsonaro Family on TikTok 

When searching “Bolsonaro” on TikTok, dozens of related hashtags appeared, including “bolsonaro2022” and its less popular counterpart “bolsonarocorrupt.” The total posts with the “Bolsonaro” tag have, collectively, more than five billion views. And, although TikTok has a delicate relationship with political content because of its moderation guidelines, Bolsonaro does not seem to be dividing opinions. 

The platform appears to be on his side: the first 15 hashtags that pop up are either positive or neutral. 

“Populist discourse is easy to understand and offers easy solutions,” says Veridiana Cordeiro, one of the lead researchers of Digital Sociology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of São Paulo. According to Cordeiro, millennials seek unconventional forms of political and civic engagement, and being active on social media is among them. “Flashy and performative posts are what bring adherence on social networks. Bolsonaro has managed to gain popularity with this type of political strategy.”. 

Bolsonaro follows only four people on TikTok: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro who joined the platform last May and is known in Brazil as “son 01”; city councilor Carlos Bolsonaro who joined last October and is known as “son 02”; a Wolverine cosplay; and a Brazilian magician. 

Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, “son 03”, does not have a TikTok profile and has even argued in favor of banning the app in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the president does not follow 23-year-old “son 04.” This is puzzling because Jair Renan was the first in his family to create a TikTok account, last March, and has the largest number of followers: almost 430,000. In his posts, he is an ardent proponent of his father’s politics.  

In one video, he makes fun of products from China and criticizes their quality. In another, he appears in a shooting range, playing with rifles of different models.

“Not only Jair Renan, but the entire family fuels millennial authoritarianism,” explains Machado. Jair Renan’s half-brothers, Flávio and Carlos, also have their share of popular posts. Flávio regularly shows videos of Bolsonaro engaged in “cool activities” such as riding a sports car that belongs to the Federal Police and playing football with Arab sheiks. 

Brazil has 160 million social media users, more than any other non-Asian country except the United States. Brazilians also score high in terms of time dedicated to social media, reaching almost 4 hours a day, behind the Philippines and Columbia, according to We Are Social. 

The amount of time that Brazilians spend on social media has helped Bolsonaro in the past. In 2018, the year he won the election, the Supreme Electoral Court gave him only 48 seconds per week of unpaid electoral advertisements on public radio and television. Bolsonaro was affiliated with the Social Liberal Party, and, because of the party’s low representation rates, was granted less exposure time than his main opponents — lefist Fernando Haddad, from the Worker’s Party, and centrist Ciro Gomes, from the Democratic Labour Party. 

As a result of these disadvantages on broadcast media, Bolsonaro took his presidential campaign to social media and won. He now has social media accounts in conservative social networks such as Gettr and Parler. In fact, he is the only world leader active on both outlier platforms. 

These apps have grown rapidly in Brazil by promising a hands-off approach on censorship and the spread of misinformation. According to data company Sensor Tower, downloads of Gettr and Parler in Brazil are the second-highest of any country, just behind the United States.

Still, they are tiny compared to the number of Brazilians using Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, and the other major apps in Brazil. TikTok alone has almost 5 million users. Millennial authoritarianism, therefore, has become a crucial component of his re-election bid. 

This puts Bolsonaro in something of a vice, says Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the the University of São Paulo specialized in social media. While hostile to the biggest social media platforms, he depends on them to mainstream his online engagement. Karhawi says that Bolsonaro and his family have built a social media juggernaut around themselves — a community that started with 8 million followers and that now, four years later, amounts to over 42 million, almost twice as many as his five main potential opponents in the upcoming election.

Bolsonaro’s brand of politics comes at an opportune time for capturing Brazil’s youth vote. Research suggests that millennials are disillusioned with liberal democracy and increasingly open to non-democratic forms of government. “Unlike their parents who experienced an authoritarian regime, millennials grew up in a democratic government and find themselves politically disillusioned and disengaged,” argues Cordeiro, the digital sociology expert at the University of São Paulo, who says the absence of a living memory of military dictatorship is decisive in Brazil. 

Bolsonaro uses this “foggy memory” to push country-first, socially conservative, and ethnically majoritarian policies and posts and is able to leverage the divisiveness common to both social networks and populist politics. “If we continue to observe the prevalence of polarized attitudes among millennials, we can increasingly have fertile ground for populist policies,” Cordeiro said. 

Fake news as a strategy 

Discrediting legitimate media reports as “fake news” has been a central component of Bolsonaro’s administration. The president frequently encourages his supporters to follow him on his social media channels so he can bypass the press, control his image, and shape the political narrative around himself while disavowing democratic institutions.

He is also accused of spreading disinformation and misinformation. A Federal Police case is looking into the so-called “Office of Hate”: a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus allegedly led by Bolsonaro’s sons and a group of young supporters committed to attacking government opponents and journalists. 

In the congress, legislators have tried to find solutions, presenting at least 45 bills aimed at curbing the spread of fake news. The measures proposed are diverse. Some would allow users who share fake news to be prosecuted as criminals; and some pressure tech platforms to ban Bolsonaro, his family, and his supporters — similar to what happened with Trump in early 2021. 

Aware of the possibility of losing his profiles on key social media channels, Bolsonaro is taking countermeasures of his own. In September 2021, he signed a decree forbidding social media platforms from banning users or taking down their content without a court order. It marked the first time social media companies had been stopped by a national government from taking down users’ content from their own platforms. 

The decree was ruled unconstitutional just a few days later but it set Bolsonaro on a path to use all tools and maneuvers at his disposal to protect himself and his allies on social media.

The researcher also says that even though Bolsonaro has had a good run on social media, his strategy is dangerous. “When we see a president communicating almost exclusively on social media, we slowly observe a disavowal of democratic institutions, more specifically of the media, both traditional media and institutional or governmental media,” says Karhawi. “There is no such thing as an individual capable of embodying politics, the media and the truth.”

The post Millennial authoritarianism rises in Brazil as Bolsonaro takes on TikTok appeared first on Coda Story.

1. In 2001, Saudi Arabia’s leading clerical body issued a fatwa banning not just Pokémon cartoons, but the entire franchise, including cards and video games in which players collect little creatures who then become stronger and develop powers. The decree said that Pokémon was unacceptable to Islam, as the special powers possessed by the characters were blasphemous and their transformation over time taught children about evolution. It also disapproved of the symbols used in the game, stating they promoted religions such as Shinto and Christianity, along with Freemasonry and Zionism. The edict was revived in 2016, owing to the popularity of the Pokémon Go mobile app. 

2. Despite U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s widely publicized pride in the much-loved British children’s show, “Peppa Pig” has its detractors. In 2018 China banned the cartoon and hashtags referencing it because of its popularity within the country’s Shehuiren (slacker) subculture, which has been described by the state-affiliated Global Times as “the antithesis of the young generation the Communist Party tries to cultivate.” One episode of the show was also removed from Australian TV  in 2012. Featuring friendly spiders, it was deemed dangerous to children, since many species in the country are highly poisonous.

3. Launched in 2013, “Steven Universe” was the first show created by a woman, Rebecca Sugar, for the kids’ TV channel Cartoon Network. The animated adventure series’ central themes included family, friendship and relationships — including LGBTQ ones. That was enough to get it banned in Kenya. In 2017, the country’s Film Classification Board prohibited the broadcast of six cartoons, including Steven Universe, saying that they “intended to introduce children to deviant behavior.”

4. Winnie the Pooh has been a children’s favorite for almost a century and rose to even greater popularity, thanks to a series of 1960s Disney cartoons. In 2013, Chinese social media users began to create memes that compared President Xi Jinping to the honey-loving bear. In the one above, Xi, filmed giving a speech from a luxury car during a military parade is likened to the chubby cartoon character. Not only did the Chinese government ban Pooh cartoons, in 2018 it blocked the website of the U.S. TV channel HBO after comedian John Oliver made fun of its heavy-handed censorship.

5. After running for just a few days in 2019, the animated movie “Abominable” was abruptly pulled from Vietnamese theaters. The film — part of a Chinese partnership with the Hollywood studio Dreamworks — is about a young girl helping a Yeti to get back home to Mount Everest, but one scene met with popular uproar and swift action from Vietnamese authorities. It featured a map that showed disputed South China Sea territories as belonging to China. The Philippines and Malaysia also banned the movie for the same reason.

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The post That’s all folks: cartoons that got on the wrong side of the censors appeared first on Coda Story.