Elon Musk isn't just inserting himself into national conversations in democracies around the world - he's taking a flamethrower to them. "Who would have imagined," asked French president Emanuel Macron this week, "that the owner of one of the world's largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections?"

The question encapsulated the growing concern among European leaders about Musk's increasingly aggressive intervention in European politics. But what appears to be Musk’s penchant for spreading digital chaos may actually be a calculated business strategy.

European Leaders React

Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre finds it "worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries. This is not," tutted Støre, "the way things should be between democracies and allies."

Germany's Olaf Scholz says he is trying to "stay cool" despite being labeled "Oaf Schitz," as Musk openly cheers for a far-right, pro-Putin party before next month's federal elections. "The rule is," Scholz told Stern magazine, "don't feed the troll."

Britain's Keir Starmer has had to deal for days with an onslaught of inflammatory posts about historical sexual abuse cases, with Musk using his platform to resurrect decades-old stories about grooming gangs in northern England. He finally bit back, declaring that those “"spreading lies and misinformation” were “not interested in victims,” but “interested in themselves.”

But Italy's Giorgia Meloni broke ranks with her counterparts, praising Musk as a "great figure of our times" while negotiating a $1.6 billion SpaceX deal - after a telling weekend visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago.

Following the Money

Musk’s targeted invective against European leaders isn't just digital trolling - it's a business strategy. He is courting right wing parties, whatever their particular ideologies and rhetorical excesses, because he sees them as less likely to impose regulation, to seek to rein in Big Tech. Despite the concerns of European leaders, though, as long as Musk appears to have president-elect Trump's ear, they will continue to walk on eggshells around him. They will have noted how the outgoing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been celebrated by the global right as an early triumph of the coming Trump-Musk world order. Musk derided Trudeau as an "insufferable tool" just last month and rubbed it in after the latter stepped down. “2025,” Musk announced on X this week, “is looking good.” 

Musk's influence over global discourse, heavily reliant on distortion and half-truths, will likely grow. The question is: who will dare to challenge him? Not Mark Zuckerberg who is abandoning fact-checking to pivot to X-style “community notes”. 

It is true that fact- checking organizations have long been working against impossible odds, swimming against a tidal wave of digital sewage. Meta’s third party fact-checking system was akin, in the words of one content moderator, to “putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier.”  But the system's destruction still signifies a refusal to take even token responsibility for how social media platforms are used. Where once misinformation was a problem to be solved, it is now the primary mechanism of cultural exchange and political discourse.

“I don’t think Meta’s fact-checking program was particularly good; it certainly didn’t seem very successful.” says Bobbie Johnson, media strategist and former editor with MIT Technology Review. “BUT the speed at which Zuckerberg has publicly bent the knee to the incoming regime is still remarkable.”While, as Johnson points out, Big Tech is only too happy to bow down before Trump, it appears the incoming president is in turn putting the interests of Big Tech at the heart of his second term. Ironically, some of the pushback, at least in the case of “first buddy” Elon Musk, may come from within Trump’s MAGA movement. Musk was recently called out for his support of the H1B visa for skilled immigrants, which many of Trump’s base have described as a program that takes American jobs and suppresses American wages. Musk’s response was to deride his critics as “hateful racists.” For Musk, a committed race-baiter, spreading racist tropes is only a problem when it interferes with business.

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The messy episode highlighted the Catholic Church’s dwindling influence in the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, the Vatican has steered clear of condemning Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance similar to the positions of Brazil and China. After a meeting with the Pope in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “any peace proposal must originate from Kyiv, not from the Vatican, China or elsewhere.” 

The Vatican’s limited role as a mediator in the conflict reflects the Pope’s geographical priorities. Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals last week from Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Malaysia. The Pope also promoted Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, who served as a papal ambassador to Ukraine and Belarus, which could be seen as a nod to the challenges of the war. The headline promotions, however, were bishops based in Hong Kong and Israel, where the Catholic community is small.

While previous pontiffs, such as John Paul II, threw their support behind Western powers in times of crisis, John L. Allen Jr., a journalist with the Catholic news website Crux, has written that the changing demographics of the Catholic Church mean that the concerns of Europeans and North Americans are becoming less pressing on the Vatican’s agenda. The majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in Latin America, with the African continent seeing the biggest increase in Catholic congregations. And the Pope “gives great importance to relations with other continents such as Asia,” said Massimiliano Valente, an associate professor of contemporary history at the European University of Rome.

The Vatican infuriated the Ukrainian government last summer by suggesting that Russia’s actions might have been driven by “NATO barking at Russia’s gate.” In another interview, soon after, the Pope said the war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked.” 

According to Nona Mikhelidze at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy, the comments present Ukraine “as a mere pawn.” The Ukrainian government has also questioned the Church's assumptions about Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelenskyy’s advisor, said in June that the Vatican needs to have a “sound understanding of this war.”

Across the region, the influence of the Vatican is being challenged. In Poland, where 91% of people identify as Catholic, the Polish Catholic Church — one of the most powerful institutions in the country— has been at loggerheads with Pope Francis over liberal reforms such as decentralizing power. Next door in Lithuania, Catholics have called for an “inquiry on sexual abuse in the church,” as survivors continue to come forward in the Baltic nation.

The Vatican’s position in Belarus, a nation that acted as a staging ground for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has also been criticized. In a country where Catholic priests are being jailed or exiled for speaking out against Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Vatican has taken a conciliatory tone. The papal ambassador, Ante Jozic, has celebrated the Belarusian government and parroted a line favored by Lukashenko that Minsk could hold peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

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Rehima, a Uyghur woman living in Istanbul, Turkey, whose name has been changed to protect her family, spoke to her husband in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, last week. “They’re trying to kill us,” her husband told her, before saying he felt too hungry and weak to continue talking. “I don’t have the energy to speak,” he said. Rehima described how her husband — who spent three years in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “reeducation” camps before being released earlier this year — was now “devastated” by the lockdown. He has been shut inside his apartment for more than a month and his food supplies are dwindling to nothing. 

As China pursues its zero-Covid policy, Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic group native to the region, are growing increasingly desperate as they report running out of basic needs including medical supplies.  Bypassing strict controls on communication and risking their livelihoods by doing so, Uyghurs have been posting videos on Douyin — the Chinese domestic version of TikTok — highlighting the bleak conditions and the lack of food. 

One video shows a young man lying on the floor. The woman filming him says “he just passed out, saying he was starving, he lay down in the yard and has stayed here ever since.” According to Radio Free Asia, as many as 22 people “died of starvation or a lack of medical attention” on September 15 in Ghulja, the third largest city in Xinjiang.

“The entire city has been silent for 41 days,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, referring to Ghulja. Now, they’re breaking their silence. 

“I’m more than 41 weeks pregnant, 9 days past my due date,” read one post on Weibo. “I waited at the hospital for five hours when they told us they were closing. What are we supposed to do?”

Videos uploaded to the app show mothers caring for feverish babies, locals arguing with police at checkpoints, and people collapsing on the street, apparently from hunger. 

Uyghurs living around the world have been alarmed by the news they are getting, and say they are deeply concerned about their relatives in the region. Activists set up numerous groups to try to collect and verify evidence uploaded to Chinese social media. The Uyghur community in Turkey, the Netherlands, and Australia have held protests against the lockdowns outside Chinese embassies, while more are being planned in the United States. 

As the rest of the world transitions out of the pandemic, China continues to operate a policy of stamping out the virus with the harshest possible measures. When a single case of the virus is detected in a community, vast numbers of people are ordered to test and quarantine. In Shanghai earlier this year, lockdown measures meant people ran out of food, and many reported beginning to starve. 

Now, a similar situation is unfolding in Xinjiang, the severe lockdown measures another trial inflicted on the resident Uyghur population who have endured years of the harshest surveillance crackdown in the world. As many as a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been funneled into concentration camps, with more corralled into forced labor programs. 

“The Chinese government is already committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang in the name of counterterrorism,” said Yaqiu Wang, Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Now, on top of that, the authorities are confining people in their homes in the name of the zero-covid policy, denying many residents access to food, medical care and other life necessities.” 

Elsewhere in China, strict Covid-prevention measures are still in place, with cities across the country frequently placed under quarantine without warning. In the southwestern province of Guizhou, a bus transporting residents to a quarantine center crashed on Sunday, killing 27 people. A photo showed the bus driver driving at night, wearing goggles, gloves, and a full hazmat suit. The crash caused uproar on Chinese social media, which was quickly suppressed by censors. “Our destiny is like that bus, driving into the falling night,” wrote one Weibo user. 

Also circulated widely in China were posts by a group of friends calling on people to “resolutely oppose the national testing regime, lockdowns across the country, and the epidemic prevention measures.”  

In Tibet, authorities in the capital of Lhasa have apologized for their handling of Covid measures, where residents report similar conditions to those in Xinjiang — a lack of food, medical care, and a dysfunctional testing system. Tibetans have taken to social media to complain of crowded, dirty conditions in quarantine facilities, with little access to food or drinking water. 

On Monday, Chinese officials said the number of new Covid infections was decreasing in Xinjiang region, with a total of 153 confirmed cases, and said “the majority of affected countries, cities, and districts have basically resumed normal life,” with thousands of tonnes of flour, oil and rice being delivered to the Yili region, from where the most desperate videos have originated. 

The region is usually under a de facto communication blackout, with very little information available online about daily life in Xinjiang. Uyghurs fear the repercussions, including arrest, of posting about their reality on social media. But as the zero-Covid policy lockdown enters its second month and people have begun to run out of food, they have little left to lose by protesting on social media. 

“I think they’re in a desperate position,” said Idris Ayas, 30, a Uyghur activist in Turkey. “ That’s why some of them, even though they face tremendous repression from the local government, are still choosing to resist.” 

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“These are just individuals who are seeking a new life in the U.K.,” said Lucie Audibert, a lawyer at Privacy International. “And so the necessity of surveilling them and monitoring in this way is highly questionable, and I question the effectiveness of it as well.”

The devices, which are bulky ankle bracelets of the same type that have been used in the criminal justice system for decades, monitor migrants’ movements 24/7. Anyone who is on immigration bail in the U.K. can be tagged, for an unlimited amount of time. 

The Home Office unveiled a new 12-month pilot to experiment with tagging people arriving on small boats in June, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson said migrants couldn’t be allowed to simply “vanish” into the country. The Home Office have said they intend to use the tags to stop migrants bound for offshore detention centers in Rwanda from disappearing — despite absconding rates being as low as 1% in 2020, according to a Freedom of Information request by Migrants Organise.

Privacy International argues that the practice of tagging migrants lacks the proper safeguards that are in place when the devices are used in the criminal justice system. They add that the devices can be inaccurate as well as intrusive. The privacy rights charity filed complaints with the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Forensic Science Regulator.

Privacy and migration advocates say the Home Office can use the location data to check up on migrants who claim to remain in the U.K. on the basis of family ties with the country — to assess whether they really do visit their relatives. They also say the surveillance measure leaves migrants traumatized, stigmatized and — in some cases — housebound, afraid to engage with the outside world.   

The use of GPS tagging on migrants has already been trialed extensively in the U.S., under a program known as “Alternatives to Detention,” which has been expanded under President Joe Biden. The U.S. government argues that placing people under electronic surveillance is kinder and less brutal than imprisonment, and keeps more people out of immigration detention centers. But immigrants in the U.S. say the tags are dehumanizing.

“You feel like you’re in prison again,” a U.S. asylum seeker told us in May. He described crying “tears of joy” when the bracelet was removed from his body after three months’ wear. 

The argument that the tags are a humane alternative to detaining migrants has been mirrored in the U.K.’s policy, according to Audibert. But, she says, it’s a false premise: “Every alternative to detention in the criminal justice system has never reduced prison numbers. It has just expanded the size of the population that was controlled.” 

The Home Office recently expanded the criteria for who is eligible to be tagged to include anyone who arrives in the U.K. via irregular routes, such as small boats — a practice which is now a criminal offense in the country. Earlier this month, a report in the Guardian revealed that the Home Office was rolling out new “facial recognition smartwatches” to migrants as a complement to the ankle tags. The smartwatches, though removable, require migrants convicted of a criminal offense to scan their face up to five times per day to ensure they’re still wearing them. 

The Home Office, in a statement, emphasized the tags will be used on “foreign national criminals” but made no mention of its pilot scheme to also tag asylum seekers with GPS ankle bracelets. 

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Since August 2021, the Home Office has successfully tagged over 2,500 foreign criminals, reassuring victims that their perpetrators cannot escape the law and will be removed from the U.K. at the earliest opportunity. Since January 2019, the Government has removed over 10,000 foreign criminals.”

The use of GPS tracking has severe effects on the mental health of the wearer, according to research by Monish Bhatia, a criminology lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. He describes, in a report published last year, how many people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. They say the tag makes them feel like criminals, and that they have to live with the stigma if their tag is spotted.

The tag means they’re often reluctant to engage with their community and do everyday activities like playing sport for fear of revealing their tag, and can end up isolating themselves, in a form of self-inflicted house arrest, because they do not want to be tracked. 

Bhatia argued the practice of tagging had no use other than to wield power over asylum seekers and minority groups. “It’s purely for control — and it is discriminatory. I’ve called it racial surveillance on more than a few occasions and I’ll stick with that term to describe this technology,” he said.

The U.K. has in recent years rolled out a massive program of surveillance and technology to try to deter migrants from crossing the English Channel, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to the British taxpayer. Audibert described how the GPS policy forms part of this strategy of deterrence and is part of the Home Office’s overall intention to stop migrants from making dangerous journeys across the water in small, fragile vessels. 

“They’re pouring millions of pounds into this crazy invasive technology,” said Audibert, who described how most migrants had no interest in breaching their bail conditions. “It’s criminalizing people that aren’t criminals in the first place.”

Frankie Vetch contributed to this report.

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ASPI’s research analyzed online behavior in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and Australia and found evidence of financially driven content farms, coordinated websites and social media accounts producing unoriginal, low quality articles and videos to drive traffic and revenue. 

One of the starkest examples highlighted in the report examines how a hired online campaign in Indonesia in November 2020 flooded Twitter with the hashtag #AdaApaDenganBBC (“What’s up with the BBC)”. The campaign involved hundreds of tweets aimed at discrediting a BBC article that suggested recent fires in Papua in eastern Indonesia had been deliberately lit to clear forests for palm oil plantations, benefiting a Korean company that had been buying local land. 

Researchers analyzed hundreds of tweets using the hashtag and found that a coordinated network of accounts, mainly created in 2020, regularly posted screenshots from Indonesian news articles that contained criticisms of the BBC’s palm oil deforestation story. Twitter has since suspended many of the accounts.

In another example of online manipulation, ASPI and the Taiwan-based civil society organization DoubleThink Lab analyzed a Chinese-language content farm and a news outlet targeting audiences in Australia and Taiwan. Research showed both online entities — Au123.com, a Chinese-language news outlet based in Australia and Qiqis.org, a content farm that targets Taiwanese audiences — regularly published articles that favored Chinese government policies and narratives. 

Jacob Wallis, who directs research on disinformation operations at ASPI, told me that online content farms are becoming an important part of the digital landscape in Asia Pacific countries where cheap digital labor is abundant. “Elections and periods of heightened political engagement are now a business model for operators at the base of the digital economy.”

Disinformation campaigns have become a lucrative sector for digital creators. According to ASPI, independent content writers can earn up to $2,000 a month. Research by the NGO Indonesia Corruption Watch in 2020 found that the Indonesian government has spent $6 million paying influencers to promote government policies on social media.

“There's a really dangerous nexus emerging between financially motivated scammers, content farms and state actors,” said Wallis. “State actors are beginning to understand that if they align with propaganda from the Chinese state, for example, that that will bring them an audience, which will drive revenue.”

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This upbeat tone is in stark contrast with recent reports from a number of Latin American countries who have voiced frustration over large-scale delays to Sputnik deliveries, revealing that Russia’s vaccine diplomacy might be failing to live up to promises.

Guatemala, a country of 18 million, became the latest country to renegotiate its Sputnik contract, cancelling half of its 16 million dose because of delays, the president announced on July 28. Negotiations with The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which markets the vaccine abroad, began at the end of June after deliveries were delayed and new daily cases were rising.

Sputnik has set out an ambitious delivery plan, promising 700 million doses worldwide this year. But supply side issues have halted vaccination drives in a number of countries. In July, India put off its rollout after the Russian producer failed to deliver equal quantities of Sputnik’s two doses. Earlier this month Ghana cancelled its contract of 3.4 million doses after a Dubai-based middleman couldn’t supply more than 20,000 doses. And Argentina, an early Sputnik V champion, hinted at stopping its contract of 30 million doses in a leaked email from a presidential Covid adviser in July, showing Argentine authorities pressuring RDIF to deliver second doses in accordance with their agreement.

“We always responded by doing everything possible to make Sputnik V the greatest success, but you are leaving us with very few options to continue fighting for you and for this project,” said the email.

While RDIF didn’t respond to Coda Story’s request for comment over worldwide shipment delays, Sputnik’s official Twitter page offers an explanation. “Given unprecedented worldwide demand all vaccine producers are experiencing some short-term supply issues. #SputnikV is in enormous demand as it has demonstrated outstanding efficacy and safety while not having any rare side effects that have been linked to other vaccines.”

Sputnik’s delivery problems are being seen as a significant chapter in vaccine diplomacy. “It's reasonable to start wondering whether or not Russia's aggressive vaccine diplomacy from the very beginning is now backfiring,” said Judy Twigg, professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in global health and Russian politics. “The goodwill that was generated by those promises and by the deliveries that have been made so far — at what point does that start to turn into resentment and ill will?”

Sputnik became the world’s first registered vaccine against Covid-19 in August 2020 and began mass vaccinations in December. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to sound ebullient about its efficacy. “As one of the European specialists said, it’s as reliable as a Kalashnikov rifle,” he said at a government meeting in May.

For critics like Olga Dobrovidova of AKSON, the Russian Association for Science Communication, the Sputnik V rollout bears all the hallmarks of a PR stunt. “Russia was able to exploit an opening in the market in late 2020 and early 2021,” she said. “But there were always concerns regarding Sputnik V production capacity and whether RDIF can in fact fulfil all its orders in time. I guess now we know that it can’t.”

Faced with missed deliveries, some governments are getting impatient and have struck deals with other manufacturers. Authorities in Argentina announced last Tuesday they had signed a deal for 20 million doses with Pfizer and agreed on a 20 million dose contract with Moderna earlier in July.

As Russia’s vaccine diplomacy weakens, the U.S. and the UK, countries previously criticized for hoarding surplus doses and failing to deliver on their commitments to Covax, the global vaccine initiative, have now ramped up donations worldwide. Last week the UK pledged to ship millions of vaccines to some of the world’s vulnerable countries, including Kenya, Jamaica and Cambodia. The U.S. plans to send 500 million Pfizer vaccines to over 90 lower income countries.

According to Twigg, Russia capitalized on being the first country to ship vaccines. “Now we're shifting into a very different period,” she said. “Western countries are filling in the vacuum that was there before.”

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The report immediately touched off well defined political hotwires. Conservative pundits decried freedom of speech infringement, painting a picture of the government dictating to social media companies what content they can allow on their platforms. 

The report was couched in the language of togetherness, making suggestions for what we can all do to fight fake news. To pitch in, the social media giants could, Murthy wrote, consider letting academics see how platforms moderate content, and re-jig their recommendation algorithm to stop prioritizing fake news. 

That won’t happen, said David Robert Grimes, a scientist and vaccine advocate who campaigns against misinformation. “I’ve always said social media platforms do not give a continental damn about the ramifications of what’s on their platforms,” he said. “They care about engagement; they are not really going to shut down communities of hundreds of thousands of very active users unless they are forced to do that by legislation.”

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose research was cited in the report, was in agreement. “I’m delighted the White House has acknowledged our research and recognized that the disinformation does pose a public health threat that amounts to a crisis,” he said. “The trouble is that asking people to fix it and relying on voluntary measures by social media companies just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.”

The report also had advice for how to psychologically combat misinformation – Murthy called on people to speak gently to family members about their medical misjudgements, advising them to “stay calm, and don’t expect success from one conversation.” 

Murthy advocated for more research into techniques like “pre-bunking” where falsehoods are pre-emptively quashed before conspiracy theories can gain ground. Psychological studies suggest that priming people to spot fake narratives before they encounter them in the wild is a highly effective way to combat disinformation. “You can immunize people against falsehoods,” Grimes explained. There’s just one problem: “Social media has meant that the falsehoods are already out there. Prebunking is like a very slow vaccine rollout when there’s a raging pandemic that’s highly infectious.” 

Ahmed was also skeptical: “this behavioral change stuff is not enough. We’re not on a level playing field,” he said. “The playing field is tilted toward the bad guys because the algorithm recognizes that conspiracism is highly addictive, so it makes people spend more time on the site and actively serves it up to them.”

The surgeon general also called on the American education system to teach students critical thinking and media and health literacy skills. 

This, Grimes said, would take generations – but will be key to fighting the infodemic once and for all. “We have to treat information as potentially carcinogenic,” he said. “Before you hit share, especially if that information chimes with what you want to be true, you have to question it twice as hard. We’re bad at doing that. And that is why social media is like crack cocaine.”

Erica Hellerstein contributed to reporting.

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The radiation levels of the wastewater from Fukushima, the site of a devastating nuclear disaster in 2011, should fall within the safe standards for drinking water. However, the decision to dump it into the ocean has been heavily criticized by environmental groups and neighboring countries, including China. 

According to new research shared exclusively with Coda Story from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which analyzes global disinformation networks, prominent Chinese journalists, government officials, and a cluster of five pro-China “super-spreader” Twitter accounts are misrepresenting a 2012 simulation of the dispersal of radioactive materials after the Fukushima disaster, in order to claim that the wastewater is dangerous. The simulation, conducted by scientists at the German research institute GEOMAR, is about the long-term impact of the nuclear accident, not Japan’s wastewater disposal plans.

“We are aware that the 2012 study is repeatedly taken out of context and misquoted in social media and by others,” said Jan Steffen, a communications representative at Geomar, in a statement to Coda Story. “A direct transfer of the modeling at that time to current events is therefore not serious from a scientific point of view.”

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s team identified thousands of posts from pro-China social media accounts, including those of state media and government officials, which falsely claim that the GEOMAR research predicts the level of radioactive pollution after Japan releases the Fukushima wastewater. 

At the root of this outpouring of disinformation lies a tweet on April 11 from Shen Shiwei, a journalist at CGTN, a Chinese state media outlet. The post falsely states that GEOMAR’s research found that the U.S. and Canada will be affected by radioactive pollution three years after the wastewater is released into the ocean. Shiwei’s tweet includes a cropped version of GEOMAR’s video simulation, which has been viewed over 346,700 times. Other accounts that appear to be bots have also misquoted the simulation, in addition to promoting pro-Communist Party of China narratives on Hong Kong and detention camps in Xinjiang, all pointing to a coordinated campaign.

This apparently organized network also distributes disinformation using a method familiar to China experts. Pro-China accounts are pushing their narrative in Twitter comments, in order to “piggyback” accounts of Western media outlets with significant reach, explained Daniel Maki, who was part of the team that conducted the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s analysis.  

Shiwei’s Twitter post, which has attracted over 52,000 impressions, has been shared in the comments to tweets by Western media outlets, including Reuters, CNBC and CNN. Often the text of the messages is identical.

Maki believes that citing scientific research out of context, in order to push a specific geopolitical narrative could be a new and effective gambit for pro-China disinformation networks.

“It does signify an evolution in tactics,” he said. “Rather than outright disinformation and propaganda, such as a narrative that is favorable to China or the CCP’s views specifically, they’ve shifted to the appropriation of legitimate research.

“You can take any piece of relatively punchy research, even stuff that’s pretty dated, and you can reuse it in such a way that fits the narrative that you’re trying to promote. Gosh, that becomes really difficult to fact check.” 

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Videos posted to social media by protesters on Sunday have shown hundreds of people marching through Havana and elsewhere in anti-government demonstrations sparked by a worsening economic crisis. Food and medicine shortages, rising prices and Covid restrictions have seen ordinary Cubans unable to work in the island nation’s tourism industry and led to lengthy queues for basic food items. 

One video uploaded to Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles from Havana. 

Recently, shutting down the internet has become the repressive tool of choice for authoritarian governments. In countries throughout Africa, popular elections have occasioned nationwide internet closures. Russia has broadly cracked down on internet freedoms in tandem with attacks on the media. And since the internet was introduced in the country, the Chinese government has used its vast powers to control its digital spaces and censure online speech.

The three or four internet outages began at around 4pm local time on Sunday, according to Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Chile-based Fellow at the digital rights group, Access Now. “This means that there are some places where there is no internet. It is too early for us to know precisely which places are affected but we do know that Havana and places where the protests were more significant yesterday were most affected.”

The rollout of digital connectivity across Cuba has been painfully slow since President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office in 2018. Díaz-Canel, the first Communist Party leader to hold the post outside of the Castro family, looked to increase access to the internet for ordinary Cubans. Since 2018, all Cubans have had access to mobile and Wi-Fi internet services via the state-owned telecommunication company ETECSA.  

The state tightly monitors Cuba’s digital spaces — the island has one of the lowest internet connectivity rates in the Western Hemisphere and connections are poor. The internet is also heavily censored and sites are blocked by the government. Freedom House, an organization that ranks political and digital freedoms around the world, gave Cuba a 22 out of 100 in its 2020 “Freedom on the Net” report. 

Díaz Hernández said the Cuban government’s grip on the internet mirrors other aspects of the Communist Party’s control throughout the country. “We need to remember that this is a small part of a larger structure of control,” she said. “That it is not just that the internet is controlled by the government, it's that everything is controlled by the government. Cubans cannot have independent businesses, they cannot make many decisions by themselves.” 

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of digital network solutions and intelligence, said he first saw declines in internet traffic on Sunday afternoon. He tweeted a graph showing a reduction in internet traffic in and out of Cuba. He said he initially wasn’t sure whether to ascribe the outages to technical difficulties being experienced by the Cuban government. 

“I don’t know if they are having technical problems or if they are trying to shut down portions of the country,” said Madory, who first began tracking internet availability in Cuba in 2013. “This year there have been a number of outages, nothing quite like this. All these shutdowns are new to Cuba. In Cuba, the internet has long been inaccessible, not a lot of people have had access to it, it’s censored.”

In a televised speech on Sunday afternoon, Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, blamed the unrest on the United States, which in recent years tightened its nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba. Diaz-Canel said that the protests were a form of “systemic provocation” by dissidents working with the U.S.

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On the other line, a friend told him he heard Jovenel Moïse, the country's president, may have been assassinated. Louis scoured the news for more information, and the official confirmation came about an hour later. “It was on all the networks, the social networks, everybody interpreting it their own way” recalled Louis, the coordinator of Panos Institute, a Haitian nonprofit that trains journalists and youth on media literacy and identifying disinformation. 

The attack plunged Haiti—which has no functioning parliament and has long been riven by protests calling for Moïse’s resignation over corruption allegations—into a deeper political abyss. 

When I reached Louise by phone on Wednesday night, Haiti’s acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, had imposed martial law, and people were still struggling to make sense of a shocking act of political violence that left Moïse’s body riddled with bullets and signs of torture. “There are still issues that are still not clarified, so there are many unknowns about this assassination,” he told me.

The unresolved circumstances of Moïse’s death have left Haitians with an information void that’s being filled with rumor and conspiracy. In the hours and days after Moïse’s murder, Louise — a former reporter— saw speculation and disinformation abound. “There are so many rumors and so much fake news,” he said, with a weary chuckle. “Everybody is using their own theory to justify what has happened.” 

On Wednesday morning, the acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, said the attack was carried out by an “armed commando group” that included foreigners, and some assailants spoke Spanish—an allegation fueling speculation and fake news, Louis said. Among the rumors circulating are claims that the killers may have been hired assassins from the Dominican Republic, where local officials are investigating if the attackers used the country to escape, according to reports from the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre.

On social media, a video circulated of a man, allegedly near where the attack took place at the president’s home on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, yelling in English over a megaphone: “DEA operation. Everybody stand down.” 

Late Wednesday evening, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, Bocchit Edmond, told the Guardian the men who killed Moïse claimed they were U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration members when they entered his home. Haitian officials told the Miami Herald the attackers were not part of the DEA. Officials with the Biden administration said the DEA was not involved and a U.S. State Department employee called the claim “absolutely false.” But that hasn’t prevented the steady hum of conspiracy. “People are alleging that the president might have done some wrong deal and the DEA guys came for him,” Louis said. “This is not official news,” he added. “This is fake news.” 

On Facebook, a Haitian radio and “media personality” with more than 41,000 followers wrote Moïse was “assassinated in his private residence by a Venezuelan and Colombian commando.” Louis shared a post of unknown origin circulating on WhatsApp claiming the unit that killed Moïse included two members of the Haitian National Police. He said he also saw speculation online questioning the role of the country’s national intelligence service and why it was unable to prevent the attack.

The disinformation over Wednesday’s events spread to people monitoring events from afar. U.S.-based Brian Concannon, founder of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, a coalition of Haitian and U.S. human rights advocates, said he came across a WhatsApp post that had been reshared from someone who said they believed the attack was a DEA operation gone bad. “Not saying that’s true, just what people are reporting,” he told me. “I'm seeing a lot of stuff. Some of the things I think are people trying to get the best information, and then there's some that's probably intentional disinformation.”

The prevalence of disinformation in Haiti’s digital ecosystem predated Moïse’s attack. Louis said fake news is primarily spread on WhatsApp, which people prefer using because they are able to send voice memos. In the summer of 2020, Panos surveyed 288 Haitians on their media consumption habits, and more than half said they used WhatsApp and Facebook as their primary means of accessing news. 62 percent of people surveyed said disinformation eroded their trust in local leaders and the media. 

“There are many people who think everything said on WhatsApp is true and they forward it without analyzing it and that’s an issue,” Louis said. “Social media is an information tool but at the same time it can destroy you.”

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The new revelations were published in a sweeping new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, which examined how a network of federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service, used controversial facial recognition technologies with little to no oversight and regulation. 

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law specializing in privacy, civil rights, and surveillance, called the first-of-its-kind study a “red flag” that exposed “how ad hoc and happenstance the adoption of all of these technologies are.” 

The report surveyed 42 federal agencies employing law enforcement officials about their use of facial recognition systems from January 2015 through March 2020. Nearly half of those surveyed — 20 — reported using the technology, investigators found. Those included the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, among others, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. 

Ten agencies reported using the controversial facial recognition start-up Clearview A.I., which the New York Times called the “secretive company that might end privacy as we know it.” 

Facial recognition has long been criticized by rights groups for misidentifying minorities and women at a higher rate. In April, a man sued the city of Detroit after he was falsely arrested — his driver’s license photo was erroneously matched to surveillance video of a shoplifter.

According to the GAO report, the majority of respondents said they use private companies to conduct facial recognition searches on their behalf. 13 agencies using third-party vendors admitted they did not know which privately-owned facial recognition systems their employees are using — a revelation that Ferguson said “speaks of the dangers of an unregulated landscape where agencies can just get an idea and go with it without anyone watching.” 

Of particular concern to Ferguson was numerous agencies’ acknowledgment that they used facial recognition technology during last summer’s protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd. The report revealed that six federal agencies — including the U.S. Capitol Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Marshals Service — used the technology on people who took part in the protests and were suspected of criminal activity. “All six agencies reported that these searches were on images of individuals suspected of violating the law,” the GAO said.

Ferguson said the use of facial recognition during protests highlighted the need for greater accountability measures. “One of the most shocking and troubling aspects of the report was the admission that this was used for First Amendment-protected activities,” he said.

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The study connects the dots between some of Europe’s most high-profile anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion campaigns of the past decade and funding from international oligarchs, aristocrats, and religious organizations.

EPF found that over $700 million in funding to the European groups in over a dozen countries came from just 54 organizations in America, Russia and the European Union between 2009-2018. Over half of that came from organizations and figures in the EU. While previous reports have cataloged the funding streams of American entities, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Charles Koch Foundation, in this arena across Europe, the extent of EU-grown funding was previously unknown. 

“We're at the beginning stage where European anti-gender groups are going to internationalize in the way that American groups have done for a decade or so,” said Neil Datta, Secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

Datta pointed to Poland’s rightward shift over the past decade as evidence of where this spending has been most effective. The transnational Catholic movement Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which originated in Brazil, and its Poland-based organization Ordo Iuris have been behind some of the most extreme recent anti-gender-rights initiatives, including the 2016 bill to ban abortion, a law to criminalize sexuality education, and so-called “LGBTQ-free zones.” The TFP network has raised over $113 million between 2009 and 2018, according to the report. 

The report also highlights the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation in France which is well-known for its advocacy around children’s disabilities. The report lays out how in 2013, the Foundation formalized an international anti-abortion movement called One of Us into an NGO and began organizing activities around Europe including marches and forums. One of Us has generated over $31 million between 2009 and 2018, according to the report.

“This is one that tends to go under the radar. They have a very good reputation because they do a lot of work which supports valid issues,” Datta says. 

The report concludes that these foundations, wealthy donors and religious actors are coalescing around multiple “mutually-reinforcing projects” to advance an anti-gender-rights agenda.

“What struck me was the multiple interrelationships between so many of the anti-gender movements which are really on the extremist fringe of the political discourse and aren’t grounded in values of human rights and democracy,” said Datta. “It's not normal to see these groups interact with each other, but it does look like they have been forging consensus around a common enemy.”

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“It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” said Amal de Chickera, co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and an author of the document. “Where governments have failed to protect their citizens, they have tried to pin the blame on minority communities.”

De Chickera outlined how Rohingya Muslim settlements in India have been attacked by Islamophobic mobs, spurred on by the belief that refugees were responsible for rising infection rates. 

“These people were seen as other, and therefore it was easier to be fearful of contracting the virus off them,” he said.

In the Western Balkans, Roma communities, among which thousands are stateless, have also been blamed for the spread of the virus. People like Nevenka Kapičić —  project coordinator at Phiren Amenca, a network of activists working to combat the marginalization of Roma people — believe that this has led to Roma communities being ostracized, cast as a threat to public health and subjected to more stringent treatment than those of the wider population. 

Kapičić described how the pandemic has revealed “an extreme anti-gypsyism” in the region, which draws heavily on stereotypes of Roma people as being unsanitary. 

Online, Kapičić’s team have watched as comments flooded the internet with “spontaneous and  dangerous narratives,” stigmatizing Roma people and blaming their communities for the regional spread of the disease. They were cast as having too many children, described as “more infectious” than others, and it was stated that they would not adhere to the same pandemic restrictions as everyone else. 

In March and April 2020, Roma neighborhoods in Slovakia and Bulgaria were sealed off from the rest of the population with police checkpoints. Activists condemned the measures as excessive, aggressive and unregulated.

“I haven't seen any really serious efforts to justify this treatment,” said De Chickera. 

In Croatia, migrants attempting to cross the border from Bosnia and Herzegovina were similarly victimized: border patrols sprayed red crosses on their heads, reportedly telling them it was a “cure” for the virus, and destroying their identity documents. 

The report also looks at how some of these prejudices have been addressed. The government of the Balkan nation of Montenegro initially viewed the Roma community as a potential threat, but lobbying from advocacy groups has led to a recognition that stateless people, who often live in densely populated areas and lack access to healthcare, are more vulnerable to the virus and, therefore, should be prioritized for vaccination.

Elsewhere in the world, the report highlighted how millions of stateless people have been excluded from access to immunization programs. Rohingya communities in India, Bangladesh and Malaysia are still waiting to be allocated shots, and stateless people in Lebanon — many of whom are born to foreign fathers and Lebanese mothers, who cannot legally pass citizenship on to their children — are struggling to register through the nation’s online portal. On Tuesday, the U.N. Refugee Agency warned that stateless people around the world might miss out on vaccinations as a result of their lack of identity documents or nationality. 

“The pandemic has brought to light a lot of hidden, simmering tensions and prejudice,” said De Chickera. “It's very disheartening to see people being thought about as statistics, and being excluded, just because they don't have a particular legal status.”

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The study outlines the dark underbelly of a tech-forward culture that boasts the highest rate of smartphone ownership in the world. A wave of abuses is battering women through covert spy cams and the distribution of nonconsensual images. The phenomenon has inflicted lifelong trauma on victims, researchers found, forcing some women to flee the country, forgo intimate relationships, defect from the internet, contemplate self-harm, or end their lives. 

The CEO of a company working with women to take down unwanted digital content estimated that about four of his clients die by suicide each year. 

“I was really shocked by how many of the women talked about killing themselves,” said report author Heather Barr, the interim co-director of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch. Barr based the report on interviews with 38 subjects, including digital sex crime survivors, government officials, activists, and direct service providers for online abuse victims, as well as an online survey distributed to hundreds of women. “I think that’s an illustration of what the impact is for people. There’s something unique about this particular crime and I think it’s because it never ends.”

In the South Korean context, digital sex crimes involve capturing and sharing intimate footage of people — almost always, women and girls — without their consent. Perpetrators harness a number of methods to record and distribute the footage, from spy cameras hidden in public places like restrooms and hotels to surreptitiously filming women without their consent, to the publication of manipulated or nonconsensual intimate images. The phenomenon has exploded over the last decade. From 2008 to 2020, the percentage of sex crime prosecutions in South Korea involving illegal filming rose from four to 20%.

While the motives of perpetrators vary — some do it to make a profit, selling footage to websites and platforms, while others do it for pleasure or to exact revenge on ex-partners — the impact can leave victims with profound trauma. The psychological damage is often exacerbated by negative experiences with police officers and the legal system, the report found, with prosecutors dropping more than 40 percent of digital sex crime cases. 

The placement of spy cameras in public toilets was so pervasive that the Seoul government, in 2018, unveiled a program to inspect the city’s 20,000-plus restrooms daily. “This huge commitment of human resources was indicative of just how out of control the problem of people filming and trying to film intimate images of women and girls in public toilets—and other public locations—had become,” the report stated.

The spy cameras are often hidden in everyday objects like toothpaste tubes, coat hangers, or coffee cups, Barr explained, with the ability to stream footage directly to a user’s smartphone. The report recounted a chilling example of a victim whose boss gifted her a clock. The object, she later discovered, had been streaming footage from her bedroom to his cell phone for more than a month. When she approached him about it, he asked: “Is that the thing you stayed up all night to Google?” The experience affected her mental health; she now takes medication to manage her anxiety and depression.

Another subject learned a neighbor had been covertly filming her through her window. The police later found that he had images of seven other women stored on his electronic devices, and was charged a few years earlier for the same crime. Despite that, he received a suspended offense, underscoring criticism that perpetrators are not adequately punished for their crimes. In 2019, according to the report, prosecutors dropped 43.5 percent of sexual digital crime cases, while 79% percent of people convicted of recording nonconsensual intimate images were given a suspended sentence or fine in 2020.

“At the heart of the government response is a failure to appreciate how deep the impact of digital sex crimes is on survivors,” the report concludes. “Once a non-consensual image has been shared once, or the victim simply fears it might be shared, the fear of the image appearing or reappearing hangs over the survivor indefinitely.”

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The announcement, which affects high schools across the country, comes amid India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19, which has seen around 27 million infections and a chronic shortage of hospital beds, medicines and vaccines. The scale of the crisis has prompted criticism of the government both at home and abroad for its mishandling of the pandemic.

Soon after Tuesday’s announcement, the Twitter accounts of government-run state schools managed by a federal body, Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), flooded the platform with videos of students thanking Modi for the cancellations, using the hashtag #ThankYouModiSir. Some of the posts were shared by the official accounts of the Ministry of Education and Education Minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank.

“After months of uncertainty our Prime Minister's decision has come in as a ray of hope for not just us students but also for the people associated with us,” said a student in one of the clips.

In another, a student from Uttar Pradesh said Modi’s decision had highlighted a concern for the welfare of young people. “His decision to cancel the board exams, prioritizing physical and mental health of the students across the nation has once again demonstrated his concern for our wellbeing. On behalf of all my classmates, I thank you with all my heart.”

“The decision of cancelling the exam has definitely given us and parents a very big sense of relief,” said another.

Indian social media has also been flooded with screen grabs of WhatsApp messages sent to groups comprising both teachers and students, asking schools to record videos applauding the government’s decision.

Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of the Ahmedabad-based fact-checking website AltNews, helped me confirm the authenticity of the messages. Zubair has also made a video featuring young people commending the announcement.

“I got in touch with a few students who had received WhatsApp messages from their teachers asking them to send videos praising the center's decision of cancelling CBSE class 12 exams,” he told me. “Schools and their staff have been made to indulge in similar PR activities before, however, this is probably the first time when even the students were made part of a PR drive to promote the PM.”

While the origins of the social media campaign and #ThankYouModiSir hashtag remain unclear, not everyone has welcomed the videos. Some social media users openly accused the government of using children to bolster Modi’s image. “Many kids who study in KVS are not from well to do families. I can't even imagine what they might have went through during the pandemic. But this just rubs salt on their wounds,” said one Twitter account holder. 

M B Agrawal, general secretary of the All India Kendriya Vidyalaya Teachers' Association, said that no instructions to post the videos were issued to teachers or students. In an emailed response to questions for this article, he stated, “I want to bring in your notice that Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, the Ministry of Education the Prime Minister’s office has not given any directions or guidelines to any teachers to motivate the students to do such kind of activities online or to thank prime minister or so as per my knowledge.”

Rajneil Kamath, the founder and director of Newschecker, a fact checking website based in Delhi, explained that while it is hard to determine the origins of the messages, research pointed to a coordinated campaign. 

Kamath shared his team’s conclusions via WhatsApp, saying, “There has to be some sort of coordination for this otherwise it's hard to digest that all of these students have thanked Modi voluntarily, or out of zeal. Moreover, the official Twitter handle of KVS headquarters is tagged in all these tweets. This cannot be a coincidence.”

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The document, signed by groups and individuals including Amnesty International and the Internet Freedom Foundation, demands a halt in all public investment in uses of technologies enabling mass surveillance and advocates for their prohibition in all public spaces.

The coalition was convened by the digital rights group Access Now, and the letter was drafted by European Digital Rights, Human Rights Watch, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor and a number of other organizations. Signatories from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America include Big Brother Watch and Privacy International.

Biometric technologies have the capacity to identify and profile both individuals and populations around the world. Coda Story has previously reported on the use of facial recognition in Hyderabad, India and Moscow, and fingerprint and iris scans in Kenya.

The letter cites the threat of biometrics systems to human rights and civil liberties. It also warns of untrained staff at private facial recognition providers compiling databases of “suspicious” individuals, shared by private companies, which are not subject to official oversight, and the discrimination such practices could lead to.

“The use of these technologies to surveil people in city parks, schools, libraries, workplaces, transport hubs, sports stadiums, housing developments, and even in online spaces such as social media platforms, constitutes an existential threat to our human rights and civil liberties and must be stopped,” says the letter.

Daniel Leufer, a Brussels based Europe policy analyst at Access Now, told me that the window for regulating such technologies has passed. “If we have cameras capable of running live facial recognition or live gait or voice analysis to detect aggressive behavior littered throughout public spaces, our belief is that there is no way to safely and adequately regulate that and keep it in check,” he said. 

The years-long debate on the use of surveillance tools has included appeals for a moratorium on its use in the U.S. and recommendations for an outright ban by the EU privacy watchdog the European Data Protection Supervisor. In 2019, David Kaye, the then U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, published a report calling for an immediate pause on the use and sale of surveillance tools and software. Kaye, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, recommended that countries exporting surveillance technology like malware should sign up to the Wassenaar Arrangement, formally established in 1996 to promote transparency and greater responsibility in sales of conventional weapons.

Leufer added that pausing the use of biometric  would be inadequate. “We can’t have a situation where these technologies are in place in public spaces, they could be on, they could be off, that already creates a chilling effect,” he said.

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The Center for Digital Hate, based in Washington D.C., has called on social media companies to deplatform leading anti-vaxxers, who are responsible for the majority of vaccine misinformation generated online. The Center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said that the $36 million estimate was conservative and that their real profits could be much higher. 

In March, the Center identified a “disinformation dozen” of influencers who have been responsible for almost two-thirds of all anti-vaccine social media content shared or posted in February and March. According to Ahmed, influencers’ confidence in spreading propaganda online comes from “years of impunity,” during which they have been allowed to broadcast their message without consequences. 

A Facebook company spokesperson disputed the report’s estimates about advertising revenue generated by anti-vaxxers, adding: “We are running the world’s largest online vaccine information campaign, labelling every post regarding the vaccines with accurate information and we’ve removed profiles, pages and content identified in these reports. During the pandemic we’ve removed 18 million pieces of harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and worked with 80 fact-checking organizations to label over 167m posts as false.” 

“Anti-vaxxers are dependent on Big Tech’s failure to take enforcement action against them, despite serially breaking the community standards of the major platforms,” said Ahmed. “We need government authorities, including regulators and prosecutors, to take rapid action to establish the scale of their malignant activity and then clamp down on criminal profiteering from health misinformation.”

The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s investigation also found that influencers’ attempts to push their followers onto “lifeboat” accounts on smaller platforms such as Telegram has had limited success, while deplatforming is successful in preventing them gaining wider audiences. The report states that leading anti-vaccine organizations led by big names in the industry, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and Larry Cook, have admitted in legal filings that they need mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, in order to make money and spread their ideas. 

“Deplatforming disinformation superspreaders doesn’t mean they move elsewhere and carry on as normal — in their own words, it has ‘demolished’ their ability to spread misinformation,” Ahmed said. 

The report also delves into the complex web of marketing and profiteering that makes up the anti-vaccine industry, highlighting how influencers often collaborate to promote each others’ content and sell products via affiliate links. One example highlights the case of the U.S.-based anti-vaccination entrepreneurs Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who claimed to have paid out $14 million to others who promoted their digital and physical products online. 

Covid-19 has provided a marketing bonanza for anti-vaccine influencers, according to Ahmed. “Throughout this pandemic, people around the world took unprecedented steps to keep each other safe, but it was Christmas morning for anti-vaxxers, who profited at the expense of public health,” he said.

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Vaccine hesitancy in individuals takes many forms, including a fear of side effects, skepticism about their efficacy and the misguided belief that the coronavirus does not pose a significant danger to health. Initiatives to increase vaccine uptake are not surprising, even in countries where denialism is relatively low. In the UK, where acceptance rates remain high, one recent study published in The Lancet found that around 10% of British adults have said that they will never take a Covid-19 vaccine, or will avoid doing so for as long as possible.

Many of the announced schemes aim to reboot ailing economic sectors, such as tourism, hospitality and retail, and to boost worker morale. Earlier this month, the Russian airline Aeroflot launched a dedicated program for flight and cabin crew, offering each fully vaccinated employee one additional paid vacation day.

In New York, vaccinated members of the public can claim a free serving of french fries from the gourmet burger chain Shake Shack, as publicized in an excruciating video featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio. Other food and drinks companies jumping on the bandwagon include Krispy Kreme, White Castle, Nathan’s Famous, Budweiser and Sam Adams.

The state of West Virginia has announced it will give out $100 savings bonds to all 16-to-35-year-olds who get vaccinated against Covid-19, including people who have already received a shot.

Meanwhile, one enterprising marijuana dispensary in Walled Lake, Michigan, is giving any vaccinated person over the age of 21 a free pre-rolled joint, in a campaign called “Pot for Shots.”

Perhaps the most generous offer so far is Ohio Republican governor Mike DeWine’s Vax-a-Million lottery initiative, in which vaccinated adult residents could win one of five $1 million lottery prizes. Ohio is also offering younger people the opportunity to win one full four-year college scholarship — so far, over 104,000 have registered. 

Earlier this month, a new vaccination site at a shooting range in Sparta, Illinois, announced it will give 100 free target rounds to those who are vaccinated there. “If you come and get vaccinated at the World Shooting Recreational Complex vax site — which is already completely free — you’ll get 100 FREE targets of trap, skeet, or sporting clays, to use any time before the end of October,” said Illinois’ Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker. “These vaccines are incredibly effective and protective for the person who gets them, but just as important, they make the whole community safer."

In less wealthy countries, special offers are being aimed at communities that have been hit hard by the economic effects of the pandemic. A town of 43,000 in northern Thailand has launched a raffle for vaccinated residents to win one live cow per week for the rest of 2021. “Our vaccine registration numbers have gone from hundreds to thousands in a couple of days," district chief Boonlue Thamtharanurak told Reuters. "The villagers love cows. Cows can be sold for cash."

Not everyone agrees that incentivization works. Anna Baker, senior lecturer in health psychology at London Metropolitan University, believes that cash incentives or prizes are “unlikely to pick up all of those people who are resistant.” 

“It depends on who is being targeted, because it may not get over those psychological barriers by giving someone a financial reward,” she said.

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The findings of seven months of research were published in a study by the Oxford Internet Institute last week, analyzing every tweet and Facebook post by Chinese diplomats and 10 of the nation’s largest state-controlled media outlets between June 2020 and January 2021. 

The researchers examined 189 accounts attributed to China’s embassies, ambassadors, consuls, and other embassy staff. It discovered an extraordinarily high level of engagement on social media: Chinese diplomats tweeted 201,382 times, averaging 778 times a day for a nine-month period. Their posts were liked nearly seven million times and retweeted 1.3 million times. Many of the shared posts helped amplify content from China’s state-backed media, enabling the diplomats to act as bridges between state media and local communities. 

The investigation has also found evidence showing that social media audiences engage with Chinese diplomatic Twitter accounts in large numbers. Chinese diplomatic accounts were retweeted more than 735,664 times between June 2020 and January 2021. Moreover, this engagement is dominated by a small number of “super-spreader” accounts, which rapidly engage with content posted by Chinese diplomats.

At least 270 Chinese envoys in 126 countries are active on Twitter and Facebook. 

In a separate collaboration with the Associated Press, Oxford Internet Institute researchers uncovered evidence of a pro-China amplification machine based in the U.K., with a coordinated inauthentic network of 62 accounts dedicated to promoting content by Chinese diplomats stationed in London. Between June 2020 and January 2021, it accounted for nearly half of all retweets of China’s ambassador to the U.K.

“The network nearly doubled the ambassador's retweet counts, lending him a false sense of popularity and artificial support, which may make his positions seem more credible,” said Marcel Schliebs, the report’s lead researcher. 

Many of the accounts impersonate British citizens by claiming they support football clubs in London or Manchester, and frequently use language suggesting they are U.K.-based. While some accounts showed obvious signs of coordination, the researchers said they could not definitively conclude whether the 62 in question were controlled by one or more operators. 

While Twitter last year disclosed the takedown of nearly 29,000 accounts linked to a China-backed information campaign between August 2019 and June 2020, the process can take months. “Twitter should establish clear criteria of what constitutes coordinated inauthentic behavior and monitor accounts with suspicious engagement more closely,” said Schliebs. 

In response to the Associated Press findings, the Chinese embassy in London said it was aware of concerns about posting on Twitter. “If it is against the rules of social media to retweet the Chinese embassy’s tweets, then shouldn’t these rules be more applicable to retweets of malicious rumours, smears and false information against China? We hope relevant companies will not adopt double standards,” it said in a statement.

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Access to Covid-19 vaccinations is heavily dependent on users registering for vaccines through an English language digital portal, CoWin, launched in January. Although authorities allow people over 45 to walk into vaccination stations, the only option for 18-44 year-olds is to register for shots via CoWin. 

The push to vaccinate large numbers of people through the portal has excluded millions of Indians who don’t have access to the internet or electronic devices. According to a report by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India from last month, only 34.6 percent of the rural population has access to the internet. 

“People who are on the other side of the digital divide are excluded from creating vaccination slots,” says Anushka Jain, of Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization in India. 

Jain says the problem of digital exclusion extends to cities as well. “Even people who live in urban areas, there are many people who don't know English, who don't know how to register on this portal and because of that, they are also being excluded from getting access to vaccines.”

Ordinary Indians who can access CoWin have spoken about the challenges involved in booking vaccine appointments. Faced with high demand for vaccines, many city residents have traveled to rural areas to get immunized, stoking anger among local populations who are disadvantaged because of a lack of internet access or knowledge about how to navigate the system. 

Some tech savvy Indians have managed to hack into the government site’s code to book themselves vaccination appointments. But as millions struggle to get online, the vaccine remains out of reach for many. “Not everyone will have access to those tech tools,” Jain said.

Like many countries around the world, India has turned to technology to battle the pandemic. It launched a Covid tracing app last year, Aarogya Setu, which received widespread criticism from privacy advocates. In April, the National Health Authority chair suggested the government was planning to incorporate a facial authentication system to vaccination drives, based on Aadhaar, the country’s centralized biometric identity program. 

Technology experts argue that the drive for a universal digital solution to the pandemic in India can often exclude those who are most vulnerable. “We have a very diverse country, we have a lot of poverty,” said Srinivas Kodali, a Hyderabad-based researcher working on data and governance. “And in a population like this where you want to do universal vaccination, technology can be a hindrance to it.”

Update: A few hours after the initial publication of this article, India’s Health Ministry announced that by the following week CoWin will be available in Hindi and 14 other regional languages.

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If technology is sold on the basis of this law, said Caitlin Bishop, a campaign manager at Privacy International, “that’s a problem.”

Critical reaction to the European Commission’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act was sparked on April 14 by a leak in Politico. The draft law is the first legal framework on the use of AI in the world, and it also creates standards for the use of remote biometric mass surveillance tools in public spaces. However, there are significant exemptions and it does not outlaw facial recognition, as many had deemed essential to be effective.

An important advisor to the European Commission on privacy issues, known as the European Data Protection Supervisor, called for an outright ban on facial recognition. 

Experts argue that the draft legislation is not sufficiently focused on privacy rights. “It feels to us that the regulation, more than anything, determines what AI can be sold, and focuses more on the relationship between the people that are kind of developing the AI and deploying the AI than the people who will be surveilled,” said Bishop. 

The legislation does not cover private companies’ use of facial recognition, for example. 

“Face recognition isn't less concerning, invasive or harmful when it's being used by private companies,” Bishop said. “In fact, sometimes it's more so, because you have fewer rights when it comes to your interactions with those companies.” 

It is also unclear whether biometric surveillance tools like facial recognition, gait recognition (technology that identifies people by their walk) or emotion recognition can be used by public entities other than law enforcement, like welfare services or transportation authorities.

The European Commission’s proposal only provides narrow restrictions in live, real-time facial recognition, explained Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of Surveillance Transparency Oversight Project. 

“But there is no ban on historical facial recognition where you take a crime scene photo or CCTV photo and run it through facial recognition, which is the dominant form of facial recognition being used around the world,” he explained. 

The proposal has been met with frustration by member states, as well. 

In a letter addressed to the European Commission, 40 Members of the European Parliament criticized an important exemption that allows public authorities, and potentially private companies acting on their behalf, to use AI-enabled biometric surveillance tools “in order to safeguard public security.” 

European regulations have been used as a yardstick for other privacy legislation from California to Uganda. Similar conversations about regulating facial recognition are happening in parallel around the world. On May 7, a court in São Paolo, Brazil blocked the use of the technology on the city’s metro. 

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The study, published in April by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank researching extremism, analyzed Amazon’s book recommendation algorithms for literature about white nationalist and far-right content, coronavirus denialism, and conspiracies about QAnon and fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

The analysis found that the platform’s recommendation algorithms, which suggest titles and authors to people browsing through books on the platform — while relatively harmless for most users — can create a disturbing pipeline into extremist literature, directing customers toward conspiracy theories and white nationalist literature.

The study found Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations “could serve as a gateway into a broader universe of conspiracy theories and misinformation, or to increasingly radical far-right and white nationalist content."

Amazon’s recommendation algorithm suggests books to users by telling them what other customers who clicked on the book bought and viewed. This algorithm, according to the ISD, creates a feedback loop. People who click on a book about a conspiracy are fed recommendations for the same and other conspiracies, including books about QAnon, debunked claims about vaccines and fraud in the U.S. 2020 presidential election.

A descent into this algorithmic dystopia could take you to the book page for The Hammer is the Key to the Coup: How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else, written by the proponents of a debunked election fraud conspiracy about the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The page suggests links to books about the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the “Scamdemic,” Pizzagate, and aliens.

“I was shocked by the cornucopia of weirdness in the recommendations,” Elise Thomas, the author of the report and an ISD analyst, told me. She was especially alarmed to see books on the platform by the founder of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a UK-based Nazi satanic group that has been tied to a number of terror offences, prompting calls to outlaw it as a terrorist organization. 

“These beliefs are very extreme, and I was genuinely quite taken aback to see them just sitting on Amazon,” she said. “As a result of doing this research, I learned about other 09A texts I didn’t previously know about because of Amazon’s recommendations. I think that’s an example of the potential harm here.”

Other examples directing readers to extremist literature abound. Click on the book Whiteness: The Original Sin, and recommendations include titles about European ethnostates, “white identity politics,” and New World Order conspiracies.

Amazon recently removed the 1978 white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, but a search for the book will now direct people to The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a bomb-making guide published in 1971 by William Powell that has been linked to acts of violence including the Columbine shooting and the Oklahoma City bombing.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company takes “concerns from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue seriously and are committed to providing a positive experience for our customers. Similar to other stores that sell books, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints and our shopping and discovery tools are not designed to generate results oriented to a specific point of view."

While any conversation about banning books is complex, Thomas says an overhaul of Amazon’s algorithm for extremist books could offer one solution. This would involve turning off the automatic recommendation of books promoting conspiracy theories, disinformation, or extremist views. 

“The books are still on the platform, you can find them if you search for them, but if you search for one and go to that page it’s not going to recommend you 20 others,” she said. 

The ISD report marks the most recent investigation into Amazon’s search algorithms. Previous analyses have also examined the role played by the digital giant's search algorithms in leading customers into conspiracies and misinformation. A January 2021 study by researchers at the University of Washington, for example, revealed that nearly 10.5% of searches involving the term “vaccine” promote books containing anti-vaccine conspiracies and health misinformation.

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Last week, Joseph Mercola, the U.S.-based multi-millionaire behind mercola.com, announced his decision to remove all articles on his site that claimed certain vitamins and supplements could treat, prevent or cure the virus. 

Anti-misinformation groups see the move as an important step towards holding anti-science influencers to account. Mercola, who has over a million followers on Facebook, has promoted a number of unproven treatments or cures for Covid-19, including the inhalation of bleach.

“Joseph Mercola is a superspreader of anti-vaccine and Covid disinformation,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “The fact that he has said he will self-censor shows the impact of penalizing anti-vaccine propagandists.” 

Mercola is also a prominent backer of the anti-vaccination movement — over the past decade, he has donated a total of $4 million to anti-science groups, including the U.S.-based National Vaccine Information Center, a leading anti-vaccine organization. 

The millionaire announced his decision following the publication of a damning report about Mercola and 11 other anti-vaccine influencers by the CCDH in March. The CCDH, alongside U.S. lawmakers and 12 state attorneys general also pressured social media companies to act on the influencers. In March, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to Mercola, warning him to stop promoting dietary supplements as treatments for the virus. 

The CCDH identifies Mercola as one of a “disinformation dozen” of popular influencers who have peddled harmful anti-science content during the pandemic and are responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine material on Facebook and Twitter. Over the past month, 19 Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts operated by the anti-vaxxers have been removed — though Mercola’s all remain active. 

The anti-science movement has surged on social media during the pandemic, and the CCDH estimates 31 million people follow anti-vaccine groups on Facebook. 

Announcing his decision to remove the articles, Mercola, whose latest book “The Truth About Covid-19” is currently at #12 on Amazon’s bestseller list, called the Center for Countering Digital Hate a “progressive cancel-culture leader,” and blamed Bill Gates and big pharma for having to delete his content. “You’d think we could have a debate and be protected under free speech but, no, we’re not allowed. These lunatics are dangerously unhinged,” he added in a post on Mercola.com.

Responding to a request for comment on this article, a Mercola representative defended the accuracy of Mercola's positions and said his critics are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry.

This article has been updated to include a response from a Mercola spokesperson.

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Record numbers of more than 300,000 new Covid-19 cases are being reported daily, hospitals are so overwhelmed they are unable to accept new patients, oxygen and medicine supplies are depleted, and people are dying without medical care.

Over the past few weeks, as the nation’s death toll has exceeded 200,000 people, many have taken to social media to ask for help and seek information about intensive care beds and vital oxygen supplies. Others have volunteered their time, putting in long hours to disseminate reliable information that can help desperate patients and relatives. 

However, online misinformation has received a corresponding boost. Rajneil Kamath of the fact-checking initiative NewsChecker says that the organization’s workload has doubled in the past month and that it is receiving dozens of false claims to debunk every day. 

As with many other places in the world, India has witnessed an explosion of junk science and conspiracy theories related to 5G. One extensively shared WhatsApp message stated that radiation from cell phone towers “mixes with the air and makes it poisonous and that’s why people are facing difficulty in breathing and are dying.”

Another video, in which a doctor suggests using nebulizers as a substitute for oxygen, has had tens of thousands of views and was even shown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a YouTube version of his monthly radio show Mann Ki Baat. Medical professionals have said that nebulizers, which allow patients to inhale liquid medicine as a mist, are useless for increasing oxygen intake and could worsen the condition of people with coronavirus.

According to Kamath, the internet is also rife with vaccine disinformation. India’s vaccine stocks are running out and the country is struggling to inoculate its 1.4 billion population. At the same time, widely viewed online posts claim that the shots reduce the human body’s natural immunity and advise women not to get injected at certain points in their menstrual cycle. As millions of people attempt to protect themselves against the virus, fake and unproven cures are gaining renewed traction, including inhaling camphor or using steam therapies. 

“A lot of claims that were viral and debunked last year came back,” Kamath said. “It’s surprising that we’re already a year into this, but even now people are circulating these things.”

Meanwhile, the national government and states across India have been criticized for mishandling the crisis by allowing thousands to attend political rallies and religious festivals, and ignoring pre-existing needs for better health infrastructure. There have also been accusations of widespread underreporting of deaths, following news stories featuring overwhelmed cremation sites, which appear to indicate that official numbers are being downplayed. 

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The legislation, signed into law by Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador on April 16, adds Mexico to a list of 18 countries globally — including China, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the United Arab Emirates — that mandate biometric data collection for people with mobile phones. Critics say the law puts users’ sensitive personal information at risk of being leaked to criminal groups in a country with a troubling history of deploying spyware to surveil human rights defenders, journalists, and activists.

“Almost no democratic country requires its citizens to provide biometric data to buy a SIM card,” said Luis Fernando García, the executive director of the Mexican digital rights group R3D. “It's not unreasonable to fear that the information provided to the database would end up being used by, if not by this administration, by future administrations that are not committed to human rights at all.”

Under the law, anyone with a cell phone or seeking to buy a SIM card would have to register their personal information — such as their name, nationality, and address — as well as their biometric data to include in a sprawling government database that would be managed by the country’s telecommunications regulator. While the law does not specify what kind of biometric data would be collected, Fernando García said it could include fingerprints, iris scans, or images of a person’s face. The law also gives companies two years to collect the data and make it accessible to the government. Anyone who refuses to comply will lose access to their phone lines. 

Human rights groups, including R3D, have vowed to challenge the law in court.

Supporters say the law is intended to root out organized crimes, such as kidnappings and extortion rackets, which often take place over the phone. They argue that authorities could use the government database to access information about cell phones in order to track down the perpetrators.

Critics point out that sophisticated criminal groups would be highly unlikely to commit crimes over phones they know are registered to their personal information and biometric data. They also warn that the new law does not require authorities to have a warrant to access user information and could be exploited by corrupt officials with connections to criminal groups. “In Mexico, unfortunately, the line that divides organized crime and security authorities, it's many times blurry or nonexistent” Fernando García said. “It's not an irrational fear that these databases would end up in the hands of organized crime.”

Finally, critics caution that the government’s ability to look up sensitive information poses significant risks to journalists, human rights defenders, activists, and political opponents. Mexico is the world’s most dangerous place to be a journalist and a 2017 investigation revealed that the government was using spyware to monitor journalists, anti-corruption activists, and human rights lawyers.

The database “creates a huge risk for groups that have been surveilled by other governments,” said Verónica Arroyo, a Peru-based policy associate with the digital rights group Access Now. “For journalists and activists that are doing a lot of work in Mexico, for some of them it’s quite important to maintain their privacy and anonymity.”

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In response, thousands of Gen-Z Indians have come together on Twitter to help them. “All the infrastructure is basically collapsing at the moment,” said Sankul Sonawane, 18, a high school student from the western Indian city of Pune. “It’s basically a last gasp of asking for help from strangers on the internet to save their loved ones.” 

Sonawane described how he and his classmates have been working round the clock for the past two weeks to contact hospitals and suppliers, posting the crowdsourced, verified information online. He spends much of his day on hold to hospital receptions in his home city, asking if they have spare ICU beds. He believes there are tens of thousands of young people like him across the country doing the same work. A search for “Covid Delhi ICU or Plasma” on Twitter brings up a wall of information and offers of assistance from people like Sonawane. 

On Friday, India reported a record 332,730 cases, the world’s highest one-day tally for the second day in a row. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been criticized for his handling of the pandemic, said the current situation was “like a storm.” 

Modi was widely condemned by politicians in India this week for addressing vast state election rallies in West Bengal, where he is hoping to win power from the incumbent regional party.

“I see huge crowds of people in every direction... Today, you have shown your power,” he said in a jubilant address to a crowd of tens of thousands in Asansol in West Bengal on Saturday.  On Twitter, #SuperSpreaderModi has been trending over the past few days as India grapples with the world’s fastest-growing Covid-19 caseload. 

Much of “desi Twitter,” which has long been a platform for lively political discourse in India, has now been taken up by offers of Covid assistance from young Indians, and has become a vital tool to fight the virus. Prior to this week, “ranting” was the main purpose of Twitter for Aditi Parikh, 25, an IT professional from Udaipur. "We used to interact, we used to talk about politics," she said. That all changed a few days ago when she saw a tweet from someone who said they couldn’t find any oxygen for their father. “That particular tweet was a triggering point,” she said. Parikh is now working with an online team of 70 people to source and verify information about Covid supplies. “I have genuinely never met these people in my life,” she said of her team.

Parikh described how they’d made online spreadsheets for collecting information about oxygen supplies, medicine, and ICU beds. The team also built an online bot that retweets verified data. “We can’t find many resources for plasma right now, it’s getting really difficult,” she said. 

Parikh said she is concerned about the stress experienced by younger members of her team, some of whom are barely 16. “They are quite young for their age to be doing all these things and taking all this pressure mentally,” she said. “The youth is doing what the government should have done.”

For Akshaya Dixit, 18, a political science student at the University of Delhi, the open source work is a counterpoint to the fake news she’s seen online throughout the pandemic. “When someone shares false news on WhatsApp, I get really annoyed,” she said. 

The teens' efforts are working. They have been inundated with messages from patients and their families, thanking them for helping to find hospital beds, plasma or supplies.  

Dixit showed me a message she had just received from someone she helped: “Hi Akshaya,” the text said. “We were able to arrange an oxygen cylinder for my grandfather with the lead you shared. You saved his life. God bless you everything :)." 

A previous version of this article misspelled Aditi Parikh's last name. It is Parikh, not Barikh. It has since been updated.

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“If symptoms appear, go to the hospital immediately, do not lie at home. Our doctors have found a way to cure the disease in a day or two at the initial stage,” read a caption attached to a video of people apparently labeling bottles of the preparation.

To date, Kyrgyzstan has registered over 92,600 coronavirus cases and 1,561 deaths.

Known locally as issyk-kul root, aconite has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine and homeopathy. Some studies suggest that chemical compounds found in the plant might have some health benefits, but the research is scant. The overwhelming majority of medical experts consider it to be highly toxic and warn against its use in any form. 

“People use aconite in folk medicine, primarily against cancer,” said Egor Borisov, a doctor at the Emergency Medicine Center in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek . “Mainstream medicine does not support or use such treatments. Aconite is primarily a poison.”

Following widespread media criticism, the original post on Japarov’s Instagram was deleted. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz service, Facebook also removed a similar post for disseminating “incorrect information that may pose a threat to human health, including on the treatment of COVID-19 or its prevention.” However the president's office stated that it had removed the posts independently. 

Four aconite poisonings have already been reported in Kyrgyzstan. The country’s health minister Alymkadyr Beishenaliyev told the independent Kyrgiz news site 24.kg that the incidents involved cancer patients and were not connected to Covid-19. He also suggested that they had been self-medicating and had probably made mistakes with the dosage. At a press conference on April 16, he publicly drank the tincture.

World Health Organization representatives in Kyrgyzstan have said that there is no data to suggest that aconite has any beneficial effect against Covid-19 and have warned strongly against the use of unproven and untested treatments. 

Japarov’s statements have come as a surprise. Until recently, he had called for people to wear masks and get vaccinated against the virus. Now, it appears that he is just one of many leaders — from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Turkmenistan’s Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov — who have embraced dangerous pseudoscience during the pandemic.

The post Kyrgyzstan’s president says that a deadly plant can cure coronavirus appeared first on Coda Story.

The government’s powerful internet watchdog Roskomnadzor, which has expansive jurisdiction in investigating and punishing nearly any internet user, platform or organization online in Russia, is leading the campaign to quash Navalny’s anti-corruption investigations and network of regional offices around the country. 

Moscow’s chief prosecutor is seeking to designate Navalny’s foundation as an “extremist group” which would effectively shut down the organization in Russia. This looming designation has spread fear among supporters who could potentially be charged with supporting an extremist organization for posting pro-Navalny messages on social media.

A Moscow court will rule on the extremism charge on April 26. Two close associates of Navalny, Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov, have told team members they are certain the decision will not go in their favor and to prepare to shut down operations and some social media accounts.

The prosecutor’s investigation comes on the heels of a leak of hundreds of thousands of email addresses that have subscribed to a Navalny office newsletter, spurring fears that the addresses are already in the possession of authorities. The internet regulator is holding Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation responsible for violating laws on personal data security in relation to the leak. Anonymous hackers behind the data breach sent messages to the email addresses that read “this will help you remember the moment when you put your data in the hands of losers.”

Roskomnadzor is taking several preemptive measures to clamp down on the planned April 21 protests in support of Navalny. On YouTube, where Navalny’s channel has well over a billion views, the agency filed a takedown request for a video urging people to join protests. In a message to Navalny’s channel, YouTube wrote that it had received notice from Roskomnadzor that the video violated Russian law and if the video wasn’t removed, “Google may be required to block the content.” Google, YouTube’s parent company, has a history of bowing to Russian pressure but the relationship is complicated. This summer, YouTube blocked a number of pro-government channels as part of its campaign to fight fake news and hate speech, leading the Russian government to threaten to block the site altogether.

There are also cases underway against Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Telegram.

Why it matters: “I’ve already started getting calls from people who are concerned that because they are subscribers on Navalny’s site or have made donations, they could now be called in for financing extremist activity,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of the Moscow-based Digital Rights Center, “The level of fear is high.”

Darbinyan says that the leaked emails essentially handed the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs a working list that can easily be combined with other data leaks to identify people by name. In the past, Russians photographed or identified as attending pro-Navalny demonstrations have faced arrest and have been fired from their jobs.

The big picture: Over the years the government has tried a number of methods to silence Navalny supporters, from mass arrests at protests to even using the military draft to snatch up close allies of Navalny. But in recent weeks, its propaganda tactics across pro-government media channels have shifted and Roskomnadzor, the internet censorship agency, is acting more boldly than ever before. Once an obscure oversight agency, Roskomnadzor has evolved into Russia’s chief cyberspace censor and one of the government’s most powerful tools of control.

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After the pictures made headlines, the López Obrador campaign scoffed at the suggestion of a Venezuelan connection and accused opponents of engineering the whole thing. The incident was just one example of how misleading political content proliferated across social media in the run-up to the election. One analysis found that bots and influencers generated nearly one-fifth of content on Twitter in Mexico in March 2018. 

Nearly three years later, Mexican journalists are gearing up for a localized fight against political disinformation ahead of the country’s June midterm elections, where voters will pick candidates in Congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

The election season has journalists on alert. Expecting a fresh surge of political disinformation, the independent Mexican digital media outlet Animal Político is teaming up with six newsrooms in the states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa to monitor and verify election-related information. The project is the latest iteration in a multi-newsroom fact-checking initiative called Verificado 2018, which worked throughout the 2018 election period to debunk false claims and then stopped publishing when the race came to a close.

Tania L. Montalvo, Animal Político’s deputy editorial director, says disinformation was “key” in the 2018 campaign. False rumors about voter registration requirements and Pope Francis’ distaste for a leading candidate proliferated online; campaigns accused opponents of bankrolling troll armies to push political smears; and former U.S. national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster even weighed in on the race, alluding to a possible Kremlin effort to sway the election.

This time around, the election is less nationalized than the 2018 presidential race — with voters casting their ballots for governors and state officials, among others, so Montalvo expects a more local flavor of political disinformation. “In 2018, with Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a candidate, all the disinformation was about him,” she told me. “That was very national. And right now this election, it's very local. We have a lot of local candidates and disinformation is about those movements.” 

The Animal Político team collaborated with newsrooms in Chihuahua and Sinaloa because they are regions with high levels of organized crime and violence against journalists, Montalvo explained — pressures that can make fact-checking especially difficult for local reporters.

Additional challenges for fact-checkers involve allegations that candidates are engaged in drug trafficking, Montalvo said — which can be impossible to verify — or when the government spreads information journalists can’t confirm. She cited an example from the 2018 presidential race, when the government of then-president Enrique Peña Nieto opened an investigation into an opposition candidate, Ricardo Anaya, over money laundering — allegations Anaya categorically denied as a political hit job to discredit his campaign. 

Nieto’s administration ultimately closed the investigation after the election, Montalvo said, but by then, “it was too late for journalists. It was impossible to verify. Access to the investigation, access to any proof, it was completely closed. And I think that investigation really affected the election."

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In an interview last week, chair of the National Health Authority chair R.S. Sharma said that the government is testing the system in the state of Jharkhand. He added that facial recognition, as opposed to the fingerprint and iris scans currently being used, would make the entrance to vaccination centers “contactless” and reduce the spread of infection.

Aadhaar now contains the biometric data of over 1.2 billion people. Sharma added that, should the vaccine identification project be rolled out, the use of facial recognition would not be mandatory and that individuals seeking immunization could confirm their identity by other means. Still, the proposal has prompted 10 rights and digital freedom advocating organizations to sign a statement highlighting their a number of concerns. 

“What we are concerned with is that, firstly, it would lead to exclusions. The second issue is that the right to privacy of Indian citizens will be harmed if this initiative is put into place,” said Anushka Jain of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group and publisher of the document. 

Launched in 2009, Aadhaar centers on an unique identity number, connected to a person’s biometric data. It was meant to decrease bureaucratic hurdles to various state services and enrollment is not mandatory. Over the years, however, registration has become vital to access a wide range of welfare and medical services. Since its inception, Aadhaar has been criticised for privacy violations, security issues and even making life harder for individuals who cannot be enrolled in the program, including the elderly or children in poverty.

“People are not registering for Aadhaar because they're already worried that it is a surveillance project by the government that should not be expanded,” said Jain. She then explained that the need for coronavirus vaccines will likely make large numbers of people feel that they have little choice but to hand over their data.

“As India careens into a “second wave” of COVID-19, it is crucial that the government’s focus stays on increasing the speed, range and efficacy of vaccine delivery, and not use it to test out privacy harming technologies,” the statement reads.

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