Kleptocrats love buying property, partly because it’s a good way to get rid of a lot of money at once, but mainly because it tends to be both a good investment and gives one a nice place to live. So kudos to the authors of this report for showing which countries aren’t doing enough to keep the kleptocrats out. 

“Real estate has long been known as the go-to avenue for criminals and the corrupt for laundering their ill-gotten gains. Seeking security for their investments, they often target the world’s most attractive markets to place their dirty money,” the report states.

Many countries can be a bit lax about cracking down on these purchases, because they see them as useful investment into their economies. In fact, they have a bad habit of offering golden visas alongside the property to further incentivise purchases, although some countries – including, earlier this month, Spain – have begun to realise these are not the convenient source of free money they were presented as, precipitating as they do housing shortages and rising rents.

TI divided its analysis into two halves, highlighting not just flaws in the anti-money laundering architecture, but also in the availability of data. If journalists, analysts or activists can’t see who owns what, then no one can tell if kleptocrats have been allowed to sneak through the net. It’s worth reading in full, particularly because of the way it shows that these two halves of the problem feed off each other, for good and ill. 

South Africa, Singapore and France get singled out for praise, with the worst performers – Australia, the United States and South Korea – losing out because they were marked down dramatically on the weakness of their anti-money-laundering protections. When it came to the opacity of ownership information, the worst offenders were Japan, India and the United Arab Emirates (surprise! Okay, not at all a surprise).

I hope that this report informs national and international discussions about fighting kleptocracy. But I also hope someone points out that TI needs a better acronym before OREO becomes entrenched. My suggestion for a new name, after literally minutes of intense thought, would be Lax Ownership Of Property Hurts Ordinary Law-Abiding Entities (LOOPHOLE). 

Although I concede that “entities” isn’t a great word at the end there. Neither is “lax” at the beginning, to be honest. 

WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE THESE

While on the subject of acronyms, thank you to a reader for alerting me to the existence of the “Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia’s Options for Building Accountability,
Resilience, and Independence” bill, which has been put forward by a bipartisan group of US congresspeople. I am a sucker for a daft acronym, and suspect this is the first time a Georgian word has featured in a proposed piece of American legislation. “Megobari” being, of course, Georgian for “friend”.

Georgia has been suffering from political turbulence for some time, with the Georgian Dream political party – backed by the country’s richest man, the Russophile oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili -- cementing control over the country. Transparency International’s Georgian branch has been publishing a list of high-level officials who hold what it considers to be questionable wealth. There are worrying signs that Western companies are happily enabling what’s happening in the South Caucasus. Georgia used to be a rare success story when it came to combating corruption, as well as a staunch Western ally in a difficult part of the world.

We would be fools to let it slip back to its bad old ways, without at least trying to arrest the slide a little, so I hope the Megobari bill makes some progress. “This bill provides Georgian Dream officials with a choice to abandon the would-be dictator Ivanishvili or face sanctions,” said Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. With the “MEGOBARI” Act now being approved, it marks at least legislative support for Georgia’s EU-leaning democratic aspirations.

WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

And sticking with acronyms, the House and Senate bills put forward to (under-)regulate the stablecoin industry, and which Donald Trump wants rushed through by August, have the acronyms STABLE and GENIUS, which is witty if you like that kind of thing. 

Back in the latter days of Trump’s first term, Representative Brendan Boyle (Democrat of Pennsylvania) introduced the STABLE GENIUS bill, to try to force the president to undergo a mental acuity test. There’s probably some deep lesson in the fact that an acronym that was intended to mock Trump in his first term is being used to flatter him in his second. But frankly it’s all too depressing to contemplate, so let’s move on.

Though onto a topic that’s also depressing. Here’s an interesting column about how Russian oligarchs are apparently back in the market for New York real estate. It’s been a tough few years for rich Russians, since sanctions have forced them to stay away from their traditional playgrounds in London, Manhattan and the south of France.

But, according to real estate brokers in New York at least, they’re back. “We’re seeing a lot of Russian nationals,” a broker said. “I’ve had five Russians look at properties in the $10 million to $20 million range in the past few weeks -- condos and townhouses.” Over the last couple of years, the broker confirmed, “oligarchs couldn’t buy anything in the U.S., and Putin put pressure on Russians not to buy here or in Europe.”

I’m a little bit suspicious of the claim that Russians are once more hunting for NYC real estate, since I think it would be a foolish oligarch who trusted a large amount of money to there being any stability in U.S. policy towards Russia. But if it is the case, it does highlight some of the issues raised by the OREO (ugh!) index, particularly in the light of the Trump White House’s decisions to scrap much of the anti-corruption architecture. 

That said, I wouldn’t expect much dirty money to be coming from Russians at the moment. Russian buyers have been drying up in Turkey and the UAE, which suggest the Russian economy is not generating the kind of cash that leads to property splurges, not least with U.S. tariffs leading to potentially lower oil prices. In my view, real estate brokers might do better to look more towards the old faithful klepto-gushers of South America and China.

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

The post Where kleptocrats go house-hunting appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But until then my ears are still ringing.

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

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

This article is an adapted extract from CAPTURED, our new podcast series with Audible about the secret behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover. Click here to listen.  

We’re moving slowly through the traffic in the heart of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Gleaming office blocks have sprung up in the past few years, looming over the townhouses and shopping malls. We’re with a young man named James Oyange — but everyone who knows him calls him Mojez. He’s peering out the window of our 4x4, staring up at the high-rise building where he used to work. 

Mojez first walked into that building three years ago, as a twenty-five-year-old, thinking he would be working in a customer service role at a call center. As the car crawled along, I asked him what he would say to that young man now. He told me he’d tell his younger self something very simple:

“The world is an evil place, and nobody's coming to save you.”

It wasn't until Mojez started work that he realised what his job really required him to do. And the toll it would take.

It turned out, Mojez's job wasn't in customer service. It wasn't even in a call center. His job was to be a “Content Moderator,” working for social media giants via an outsourcing company. He had to read and watch the most hateful, violent, grotesque content released on the internet and get it taken down so the rest of us didn’t have to see it. And the experience changed the way he thought about the world. 

“You tend to look at people differently,” he said, talking about how he would go down the street and think of the people he had seen in the videos — and wonder if passersby could do the same things, behave in the same ways. “Can you be the person who, you know, defiled this baby? Or I might be sitting down with somebody who has just come from abusing their wife, you know.”

There was a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – when things like child pornography and neo-Nazi propaganda were relegated to the darkest corners of the internet. But with the rise of algorithms that can spread this kind of content to anyone who might click on it, social media companies have scrambled to amass an army of hidden workers to clean up the mess.

These workers are kept hidden for a reason. They say if slaughterhouses had glass walls, the world would stop eating meat. And if tech companies were to reveal what they make these digital workers do, day in and day out, perhaps the world would stop using their platforms.

This isn't just about “filtering content.” It's about the human infrastructure that makes our frictionless digital world possible – the workers who bear witness to humanity's darkest impulses so that the rest of us don't have to.

Mojez is fed up with being invisible. He's trying to organise a union of digital workers to fight for better treatment by the tech companies. “Development should not mean servitude,” he said. “And innovation should not mean exploitation, right?” 

We are now in the outskirts of Nairobi, where Mojez has brought us to meet his friend, Mercy Chimwani. She lives on the ground floor of the half-built house that she rents. There's mud beneath our feet, and above you can see the rain clouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs meet the sky. There’s no electricity, and when it rains, water runs right through the house. Mercy shares a room with her two girls, her mother, and her sister. 

It’s hard to believe, but this informal settlement without a roof is the home of someone who used to work for Meta. 

Mercy is part of the hidden human supply chain that trains AI. She was hired by what’s called a BPO, or a Business Process Outsourcing company, a middleman that finds cheap labour for large Western corporations. Often people like Mercy don’t even know who they’re really working for. But for her, the prospect of a regular wage was a step up, though her salary – $180 a month, or about a dollar an hour – was low, even by Kenyan standards. 

She started out working for an AI company – she did not know the name – training software to be used in self-driving cars. She had to annotate what’s called a “driveable space” – drawing around stop signs and pedestrians, teaching the cars’ artificial intelligence to recognize hazards on its own. 

And then, she switched to working for a different client: Meta. 

“On the first day on the job it was hectic. Like, I was telling myself, like, I wish I didn't go for it, because the first image I got to see, it was a graphic image.” The video, Mercy told me, is imprinted on her memory forever. It was a person being stabbed to death. 

“You could see people committing suicide live. I also saw a video of a very young kid being raped live. And you are here, you have to watch this content. You have kids, you are thinking about them, and here you are at work. You have to like, deal with that content. You have to remove it from the platform. So you can imagine all that piling up within one person. How hard it is,” Mercy said. 

Silicon Valley likes to position itself as the pinnacle of innovation. But what they hide is this incredibly analogue, brute force process where armies of click workers relentlessly correct and train the models to learn. It’s the sausage factory that makes the AI sausage. Every major tech company does this – TikTok, Facebook, Google and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. 

Mercy was saving to move to a house that had a proper roof. She wanted to put her daughters into a better school. So she felt she had to carry on earning her wage. And then she realised that nearly everyone she worked with was in the same situation as her. They all came from the very poorest neighborhoods in Nairobi. “I realised, like, yo, they're really taking advantage of people who are from the slums.” she said. 

After we left Mercy’s house, Mojez took us to the Kibera informal settlement. “Kibera is the largest urban slum area in Africa, and the third largest slum in the entire world,”he told us as we drove carefully through the twisting, crooked streets. There were people everywhere – kids practicing a dance routine, whole families piled onto motorbikes. There were stall holders selling vegetables and live chickens, toys and wooden furniture. Most of the houses had corrugated iron roofs and no running water indoors.

Kibera is where the model of recruiting people from the poorest areas to do tech work was really born. A San Francisco-based organization called Sama started training and hiring young people here to become digital workers for Big Tech clients including Meta and Open AI.

Sama claimed that they offered a way for young Kenyans to be a part of Silicon Valley’s success. Technology, they argued, had the potential to be a profound equalizer, to create opportunities where none existed.

Mojez has brought us into the heart of Kibera to meet his friend Felix. A few years ago Felix heard about the Sama training school - back then it was called Samasource. He heard how they were teaching people to do digital work, and that there were jobs on offer. So, like hundreds of others, Felix signed up.

“This is Africa,” he said, as we sat down in his home. “Everyone is struggling to find a job.” He nodded his head out towards the street. “If right now you go out here, uh, out of 10, seven or eight people have worked with SamaSource.” He was referring to people his age – Gen Z and young millennials – who were recruited by Sama with the promise that they would be lifted out of poverty. 

And for a while, Felix’s life was transformed. He was the main breadwinner for his family, for his mother and two kids, and at last he was earning a regular salary.

But in the end, Felix was left traumatized by the work he did. He was laid off. And now he feels used and abandoned. “There are so many promises. You’re told that your life is going to be changed, that you’re going to be given so many opportunities. But I wouldn't say it's helping anyone, it's just taking advantage of people,” he said.

When we reached out to Sama, a PR representative disputed the notion that Sama was taking advantage and cashing in on Silicon Valley’s headlong rush towards AI. 

Mental health support, the PR insisted, had been provided and the majority of Sama’s staff were happy with the conditions.“Sama,” she said, “has a 16-year track record of delivering meaningful work in Sub-Saharan Africa, lifting nearly 70,000 people out of poverty.” Sama eventually cancelled its contracts with Meta and OpenAI, and says it no longer recruits content moderators. When we spoke to Open AI, which has hired people in Kenya to train their model, they said that they believe data annotation work needed to be done humanely. The efforts of the Kenyan workers were, they said, “immensely valuable.”

You can read Sama’s and Open AI’s response to our questions in full below. Meta did not respond to our requests for comment.

Despite their defense of their record, Sama is facing legal action in Kenya. 

“I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can't work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn't look like lifting people out of poverty to me,” said Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer representing more than 180 content moderators in a lawsuit against Sama and Meta. The workers say they were unfairly laid off when they tried to lobby for better conditions, and then blacklisted.

“You've used them,” Mutemi said. “They're in a very compromised mental health state, and then you've dumped them. So how did you help them?” 

As Mutemi sees it, the result of recruiting from the slum areas is that you have a workforce of disadvantaged people, who’ll be less likely to complain about conditions.

“People who've gone through hardship, people who are desperate, are less likely to make noise at the workplace because then you get to tell them, ‘I will return you to your poverty.’ What we see is again, like a new form of colonization where it's just extraction of resources, and not enough coming back in terms of value whether it's investing in people, investing in their well-being, or just paying decent salaries, investing in skill transfer and helping the economy grow. That's not happening.” 

“This is the next frontier of technology,” she added, “and you're building big tech on the backs of broken African youth.”

At the end of our week in Kenya, Mojez takes us to Karura forest, the green heart of Nairobi. It’s an oasis of calm, where birds, butterflies and monkeys live among the trees, and the rich red earth has that amazing, just-rained-on smell. He comes here to decompress, and to try to forget about all the horrific things he’s seen while working as a content moderator. 

Mojez describes the job he did as a digital worker as a loss of innocence. “It made me think about, you know, life itself, right? And that we are alone and nobody's coming to save us. So nowadays I've gone back to how my ancestors used to do their worship — how they used to give back to nature.” We're making our way towards a waterfall. “There's something about the water hitting the stones and just gliding down the river that is therapeutic.”

For Mojez, one of the most frightening things about the work he was doing was the way that it numbed him, accustomed him to horror. Watching endless videos of people being abused, beheaded, or tortured - while trying to hit performance targets every hour - made him switch off his humanity, he said.

A hundred years from now, will we remember the workers who trained humanity’s first generation of AI? Or will these 21st-century monuments to human achievement bear only the names of the people who profited from their creation?

Artificial intelligence may well go down in history as one of humanity’s greatest triumphs.  Future generations may look back at this moment as the time we truly entered the future.

And just as ancient monuments like the Colosseum endure as a lasting embodiment of the values of their age, AI will embody the values of our time too.  

So, we face a question: what legacy do we want to leave for future generations? We can't redesign systems we refuse to see. We have to acknowledge the reality of the harm we are allowing to happen.  But every story – like that of Mojez, Mercy and Felix –- is an invitation. Not to despair, but to imagine something better for all of us rather than the select few.

Christopher Wylie and Becky Lipscombe contributed reporting. Our new audio series on how Silicon Valley’s AI prophets are choosing our future for us is out now on Audible.

The post In Kenya’s slums, they’re doing our digital dirty work appeared first on Coda Story.

But first, a sincere apology, with the emphasis on sincere.

SORRY

I apologise if Mark Zuckerberg was offended by me calling him an oligarch, as he apparently was when Joe Biden implied it in his valedictory warning. 

Comrade Zuckerberg’s dismay is understandable. Russia’s oligarchs were extremely rich and rapacious. And they have, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, been subject to tens of billions of dollars in sanctions by the U.S., EU, UK and others. Whereas all the lovely Mr. Zuckerberg has done is run a social network that spreads violence, fraud and misinformation and given him a personal fortune currently estimated at $233 billion.

Personally I think we should probably stop using the word oligarch to describe Russia’s super-rich now anyway. Ever since Vladimir Putin cemented his control over the country, not least by arresting the then-very-wealthy Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, Russia’s business leaders do not interfere in politics at all and just do what they’re told. Dictatorships after all only have room for one leader, not a few, no matter how wealthy.

I did wonder, briefly, if I should get in touch with Zuckerberg and explain my position. When I call him an oligarch, I’m not comparing him to people like Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, pals of Putin since childhood. As I said, these days Russia’s wealthiest people, unlike America’s tech billionaires, are cowed functionaries, not strutting kingmakers.

But then I saw a picture of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos sitting in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration, in more prominent positions than his cabinet picks (though many of them are billionaires too).  I’m sure their positioning was intended to make them look like masters of the universe. But they reminded me of those Indian maharajas who were allowed to hold ceremonial positions of honour in the British Empire, as long as they did nothing to threaten London’s control. 

Despite all their ostentatious loyalty, the maharajas ended up being cut off with nothing. So perhaps friend Zuckerberg should actually be grateful that he is being called an oligarch. It assumes that he is, in fact, a strutting kingmaker with his hand on the levers of power, rather than just another brown-nosing billionaire. As Trump posted on his social media network last month: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!”

If you think the comparison to the British Empire is overblown, I’m not the only one making it. As Oxfam pointed out just last week:

“Today’s world remains colonial in many ways. The average Belgian has 180 times more voting power in the World Bank than the average Ethiopian. This system still extracts wealth from the Global South to the superrich 1% in the Global North at a rate of $30million an hour. This must be reversed.”

NOT SORRY

The world was inching towards a sort of redressal, though not a real reversal, of this situation thanks to the global corporate tax deal pushed by the Biden White House which would have required multinational companies to pay a minimum tax rate of 15 percent. The deal ran the gauntlet of all kinds of special interests and finally, albeit in diluted suboptimal form, seemed like it would form the basis of the most significant reform to global taxation since, well, the days of the British Empire. 

But then along came Trump, who has killed it because it’s 2025 and we’re not allowed nice things anymore.

Frustration with the tax minimising antics of U.S. multinationals had already led to unilateral “digital services taxes” in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, India and New Zealand so the failure of a global deal may not enable a complete feeding frenzy for the not-at-all oligarchs of Silicon Valley. But Trump, who has his not-at-all oligarchs’ backs, has already told U.S. officials to draw up “a list of options for protective measures or other actions that the United States should adopt or take,” if foreign countries are found to be “likely to put tax rules in place that are extraterritorial or disproportionately affect American companies.” No doubt there will be threats of more tariffs to come.

Many activists have long argued that the right forum for global tax discussions is the United Nations, which last year launched a tax convention that is due to report back in 2027. An effective tax deal, though, would need the agreement of the world’s richest countries. That is why I supported the process led by Biden, even though it was so unambitious. But now that’s been torpedoed anyway, maybe it’s time to give the UN bodies a chance, as the overwhelming majority of the countries represented in the general assembly have voted to do. In the words of Irene Ovonji-Odida, the chair of the Tax Justice Network:

“We will all negotiate together to set rules that work for everyone. Everyone except the tax abusers.” 

Only nine countries voted against the UN process. Not surprisingly, they are among the world’s richest – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, Argentina and New Zealand. These countries, as a Tax Justice Network report shows, are responsible for a vastly disproportionate loss of global tax revenues due to corporate abuse. So it’s up to the citizens of these countries (and funnily enough, I’m a citizen of two of them), to change their leaders’ minds, because they look unlikely to do it on their own.

Sadly, we recently lost a frontline warrior in this very struggle. Elise Bean did more to expose the inner workings of tax havens, unscrupulous corporations and kleptocrats than all but a tiny number of people worldwide. 

First at the U.S. Department of Justice, then with Senator Carl Levin when he headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and finally for the Levin Center for Legislative Oversight and Democracy, Elise was a source of wisdom, positivity, calm and integrity. She investigated and exposed the secrets of Enron, money launderers, commodity speculators, unfair credit card companies and more, and set an example of cross-party fact-based cooperation that was unrivalled. I was not the only person who relied on her generosity and breadth of experience and knowledge for my books and journalism.
Transparency International U.S. called her “the embodiment of effective civil service and a living example of how our government should work”. It seems particularly cruel that she should have died just when the values she represented are needed more than ever.

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

Header illustration by Teona Tsintsadze/Getty Images.

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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 Oxfam report argues that the “global oligarchy” of the super-rich, make international cooperation on solving issues like climate change and poverty all but impossible. “The immense concentration of wealth, driven significantly by increased monopolistic corporate power, has allowed large corporations and the ultrarich who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else,” the report says. 

Bill Gates is a case in point. Compared to the corrupt, nepotistic, Russian-style oligarchs that we tend to imagine when we think of “oligarchs,” Gates is a good kind of rich guy. The billionaire software engineer has given away more money than anyone else. He runs one of the world’s largest charities and, for years, he has passionately pursued the noble cause of fixing Africa’s severe food security crisis. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established itself as the most influential player in fixing Africa’s food inequality. It is also the largest media funder of journalism on the African continent. But there are concerns that the foundation’s support for both journalism in Africa and for “development journalism” in general have essentially given Bill Gates full monopoly over the narratives on development in Africa. 

“One of the most difficult subjects for African journalists to write about is the work of Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Africa,” writes Simon Allison, International Editor and co-founder of The Continent, an independent digital publication. “This is not to suggest that the foundation is deliberately seeking to influence coverage but given the lack of alternative sources of funding, it doesn’t have to,” Allison says. 

The Continent’s recent investigation into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work in Africa is a rare example of accountability journalism on the Foundation’s work in Africa. Gates–the biggest owner of farmland in the US–centers his work in Africa on the belief that modern industrial agricultural practices can solve world hunger. If you describe it like this, the problem seems easy to fix: “to feed the people, you have to fix the farms.” 

But as The Continent investigation points out, the farms in this case refer to 33-million smallholder farms in Africa that currently grow 70% of the continent’s food with some of the lowest yields in the world. It’s not a small problem to fix, and multiple studies on the region have suggested that the American model of industrialized farming and genetically modified seeds is not working in Africa. There is a real consequential tension between philanthropic approaches and the urgent need for systemic policy reforms to establish equitable food systems and fight poverty

Reactions to The Continent’s investigation highlight the modern day axis of power: oligarchy, disinformation and digital technology. According to Allison, initially the investigation into the Gates Foundation was “widely popular online” among The Continent’s usual audience of policymakers, diplomats and businesspeople. But then “it got picked up and amplified by conspiracy theorists. These are not the people we want to be amplifying our work, and it has the effect of muddying the waters again between what is credible journalism and what is absolute nonsense.” 

One solution is taxation. A report by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, commissioned by Brazil, suggests that billionaires currently pay the equivalent of 0.3% of their wealth in taxes. This is a “phenomenal lost opportunity,” Nabil Ahmed, the director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, said in an interview with the Voice of America. “We know governments, rich and poor, across the world need to claw back these revenues to be able to invest in their people, to be able to meet their rights,” he said. 

Brazil–which currently holds the presidency of the G20–is leading a campaign to impose a 2% minimum tax on the world’s richest billionaires. According to their calculation, it would be possible to raise up to 250 billion dollars from about 3,000 billionaires. Enabling resources for healthcare, education and the needed funding to tackle climate change. South Africa, Spain and France all back the plan. The United States doesn’t. In the most recent G20 meeting in July, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen told reporters: “The tax policy is very difficult to coordinate globally and we don’t see a need or really think it’s desirable to try to negotiate a global agreement on that.”

Correction: The earlier version of this article identified Simon Allison as the Editor in Chief of The Continent. His correct title is International Editor.

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Judy Estrin has been thinking about digital connectivity since the early days of Silicon Valley. As a junior researcher at Stanford in the 1970s she worked on what became the Internet. She built tech companies, became Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer, and served on the board of Disney and FedEx. Now, she’s working to build our understanding of the digital systems that run our lives.

We can’t live without air. We can’t live without water. And now we can’t live without our phones. Yet our digital information systems are failing us. Promises of unlimited connectivity and access have led to a fractionalization of reality and levels of noise that undermine our social cohesion. Without a common understanding and language about what we are facing, we put at risk our democratic elections, the resolution of conflicts, our health and the health of the planet. In order to move beyond just reacting to the next catastrophe, we can learn something from water. We turn on the tap to drink or wash, rarely considering where the water comes from–until a crisis of scarcity or quality alerts us to a breakdown. As AI further infiltrates our digital world, a crisis in our digital information systems necessitates paying more attention to its flow.

Water is life sustaining, yet too much water, or impure water, makes us sick, destroys our environment, or even kills us. A bit of water pollution may not be harmful but we know that if the toxins exceed a certain level the water is no longer potable. We have learned that water systems need to protect quality at the source, that lead from pipes leach into the water, and that separation is critical–we don’t use the same pipes for sourcing drinking water and drainage of waste and sewage.

Today, digital services have become the information pipes of our lives. Many of us do not understand or care how they work. Like water, digital information can have varying levels of drinkability and toxicity–yet we don’t know what we are drinking. Current system designs are corroded by the transactional business models of companies that neither have our best interests in mind, nor the tools that can adequately detect impurities and sound the alarm. Digital platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, don’t differentiate between types of content coming into their systems and they lack the equivalent of effective water filters, purification systems, or valves to stop pollution and flooding. We are both the consumers and the sources of this ‘digital water’ flowing through and shaping our minds and lives. Whether we want to learn, laugh, share, or zone-out, we open our phones and drink from that well. The data we generate fuels increasingly dangerous ad targeting and surveillance of our online movements. Reality, entertainment, satire, facts, opinion, and misinformation all blend together in our feeds. 

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy. We see the news avoidance, extremism, loss of civility, reactionary politics, and conflicts. Less visible are other toxins, including the erosion of trust, critical thinking, and creativity. Those propagating the problems deny responsibility and ignore the punch line of Kranzberg’s first law which states, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." We need fundamental changes to the design of our information distribution systems so that they can benefit society and not just increase profit to a few at our expense.

To start, let us acknowledge the monetary incentives behind the tech industry’s course of action that dragged the public down as they made their fortunes. The foundational Internet infrastructure, developed in the 1970s and 80s, combined public and private players, and different levels of service and sources. Individual data bits traveled in packets down a shared distributed network designed to avoid single points of failure. Necessary separation and differentiation was enforced by the information service applications layered on top of the network. Users proactively navigated the web by following links to new sites and information, choosing for themselves where they sourced their content, be it their favorite newspaper or individual blogs. Content providers relied heavily on links from other sites creating interdependence that incentivized more respectful norms and behaviors, even when there was an abundance of disagreements and rants.

Then the 2000s brought unbridled consolidation as the companies that now make up BigTech focused on maximizing growth through ad-driven marketplaces. As with some privatized water systems, commercial incentives were prioritized above wellness. This was only amplified in the product design around the small screen of mobile phones, social discovery of content, and cloud computing. Today, we drink from a firehose of endless scrolling that has eroded our capacity for any differentiation or discernment. Toxicity is amplified and nuance eliminated by algorithms that curate our timelines based on an obscure blend of likes, shares, and behavioral data. As we access information through a single feed, different sources and types of content–individuals, bots, hyperbolic news headlines, professional journalism, fantasy shows, and human or AI generated–all begin to feel the same.

Toxicity is amplified and nuance eliminated by algorithms that curate our timelines based on an obscure blend of likes, shares, and behavioral data

Social media fractured the very idea of truth by taking control of the distribution of information. Now. Generative AI has upended the production of content through an opaque mixing of vast sources of public and private, licensed, and pirated data. Once again, an incentive for profit and power is driving product choices towards centralized, resource intensive Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLMs are trained to recognize, interpret, and generate language in obscure ways and then spit out, often awe inspiring, text, images, and videos on demand. The artificial sweetener of artificial intelligence entices us to drink, even as we know that something may be wrong. The social media waters are already muddied by algorithms and agents, as we are now seeing “enshittification” (an aptly coined term by Cory Doctorow) of platforms as well as the overall internet, with increasing amounts of AI generated excrement in our feeds and searches.

We require both behavioral change and a new more distributed digital information system–one that combines public and private resources to ensure that neither our basic ‘tap’ water or our fancy bottled water will poison our children. This will require overcoming two incredibly strong sets of incentives. The first is a business culture that demands dominance through maximizing growth by way of speed and scale. Second is our prioritization of convenience with a boundless desire for a frictionless world. The fact that this is truly a “wicked problem” does not relieve us of the responsibility to take steps to improve our condition. We don’t need to let go entirely of either growth or convenience. We do need to recommit to a more balanced set of values.

As with other areas of public safety, mitigating today’s harms requires broad and deep education programs to spur individual and collective responsibility. We have thrown out the societal norms that guide us to not spit in the proverbial drink of the other, or piss in the proverbial pool. Instead of continuing to adapt to the lowest common decency, we need digital hygiene to establish collective norms for kids and adults. Digital literacy must encourage critical thinking and navigation of our digital environments with discernment; in other words, with a blend of trust and mistrust. In the analog world, our senses of smell and taste warn us when something is off. We need to establish the ability to detect rotten content and sources–from sophisticated phishing to deep fakes. Already awash in conspiracy theories and propaganda, conversational AI applications bring new avenues for manipulation as well as a novel set of emotional and ethical challenges. As we have learned from food labeling or terms of service, transparency only works when backed by the education to decipher the facts.

The artificial sweetener of artificial intelligence entices us to drink, even as we know that something may be wrong.

Mitigation is not sufficient. We need entrepreneurs, innovators, and funders who are willing to rethink systems and interface design assumptions and build products that are more proactive, distributed, and reinforcing of human agency. Proactive design must incorporate safety valves or upfront filters. Distributed design approaches can use less data and special purpose models, and the interconnection of diverse systems can provide more resilience than consolidated homogeneous ones. We need not accept the inevitability of general purpose brute force data beasts. Human agency designs would break with current design norms.  The default to everything looking the same leads to homogeneity and flattening. Our cars would be safer if they didn’t distract us like smart phones on wheels. The awe of discovery is healthier than the numbing of infinite scrolls. Questioning design and business model assumptions require us to break out of our current culture of innovation which is too focused on short term transactions and rapid scaling. The changes in innovation culture have influenced other industries and institutions, including journalism that is too often hijacked by today's commercial incentives. We cannot give up on a common understanding and knowledge, or on the importance of trust and common truths.   

We need policy changes to balance private and public sector participation. Many of the proposals on the table today lock in the worst of the problems, with legislation that reinforces inherently bad designs, removes liability, and/or targets specific implementations (redirecting us to equally toxic alternatives). Independent funding for education, innovation, and research is required to break the narrative and value capture of the BigTech ecosystem. We throw around words like safe, reliable, or responsible without a common understanding of what it means to really be safe. How can we ensure our water is safe to drink? Regulation is best targeted at areas where leakage leads to the most immediate harm–like algorithmic amplification, and lack of transparency and accountability. Consolidation into single points of power inevitably leads to broad based failure. A small number of corporations have assumed the authority of massive utilities that act as both public squares and information highways–without any of the responsibility.

Isolation and polarization have evolved from a quest for a frictionless society with extraordinary systems handcrafted to exploit our attention. It is imperative that we create separation, valves, and safeguards in the distribution and access of digital information. I am calling not for a return to incumbent gatekeepers, but instead for the creation of new distribution, curation, and facilitation mechanisms that can be scaled for the diversity of human need. There is no single answer, but the first step is to truly acknowledge the scope and scale of the problem. The level of toxicity in our ‘digital waters’ is now too high to address reactively by trying to fix things after the fact, or lashing out in the wrong way. We must question our assumptions and embrace fundamental changes in both our technology and culture in order to bring toxicity levels back to a level that does not continue to undermine our society.

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Much debate has focused on the many complex causes of the famine. One of the main factors, of course, was war. Britain had declared war on Germany on behalf of its colony India—enraging many nationalist Indian leaders who had not been consulted. After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, Britain was also at war with Japan.

For the masses of rural Bengalis who were struggling to survive in impoverished India, war had already touched their lives. Inflation had made the price of rice—Bengal’s staple food—soar. Once Burma fell to the Japanese in early 1942, Japan’s cheap rice ceased to be imported.

Even before this, the rice supply was greatly curtailed, as hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in Calcutta (now Kolkata) made their way to and from the Asian front fighting the Japanese. They, along with  factory workers in wartime industries, needed to be fed. They had priority status because of their role in the wartime effort.  

With the fall of Burma, the Japanese were on the border of Bengal. Having seen the Japanese’s rapid advance across Southeast Asia, colonial authorities feared that if Japanese forces were to invade British India, they would commandeer local food supplies and transport to fuel their incursion. The empire needed to be defended, so drastic action was taken. Boats from thousands of villages along the Bengal Delta were confiscated or destroyed. So, too, was rice. This was called the “denial” policy: to deny the enemy access to supplies. Not surprisingly, this scorched-earth policy strained the already fragile local economy. Without their tens of thousands of vessels, fishermen could not go to sea, farmers were not able to go upstream to their plots, and artisans were unable to get their goods to market. Critically, rice could not be moved around. The price of rice thus spiraled even further, and it was hoarded, often for profit. Then in October 1942 a devastating cyclone hit one of the main rice-producing regions, and crop disease destroyed much of the rest of the supply.

A famine code was initiated by colonial authorities to prevent mass starvation, but it was wartime, and few abided by it. Famine was never officially declared in Calcutta by the regional government or colonial authorities in Delhi, which would have compelled imperial authorities to send aid to the countryside. In fact, the word “famine” was not allowed to be reported in newspapers or pamphlets because of colonial “Emergency Rules” passed during the war. Britain feared that knowledge of the extent of hunger could be used by its enemies.

However, Indian journalists, photographers, and artists defied the censor. Chittaprosad Bhattacharaya was one. He traveled around Midnapore district using ink to sketch victims of the famine. The images are detailed and harrowing, of bodies being eaten by animals, humans who no longer look like humans. But the artist affords them dignity, writing their names when he could, and giving a sense of who they were, what they did, and where in Bengal they came from. He published the pamphlet in 1943 as “Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapore District.” Nearly all 5,000 copies were immediately confiscated by the British.

It was at this time, too, that Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned Statesman newspaper, was in Calcutta. As head of one of the largest English-language newspapers in India, Stephens faced a supreme moral dilemma: was his job to patriotically support the colonial authority during the war and not report on the famine? Or was his duty to tell his readers the truth about the horror unfolding on Calcutta’s streets, the famine that was sweeping across Bengal?

Stephens made his decision on August 22, 1943. He used a loophole in the censorship rules and published photographs showing emaciated people, close to death, on the streets of Calcutta. Papers soon sold out. It wasn’t long before news of the catastrophe unfolding in British India reached London and Washington. The famine in Bengal was now impossible to contain.

And this is where we get to the heart of the bitter controversy about the Bengal famine: the role of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and whether, once he knew about the famine by the summer of 1943, he did all he could to alleviate it. There are questions over whether his views on Indians—documented particularly by his Secretary of State for India Leo Amery—affected his response to the disaster. Discussions center on whether Churchill and the war cabinet could have released more shipping to send food aid, in the middle of the war, when they were fighting on many fronts. It’s an incendiary debate. Google the words “Bengal famine,” and you’ll see just how divisive the subject is.  

While people argue over the causes of the famine and Churchill’s response—both of which are important and necessary to explore—it has obscured discussion of the three million people who died. Three million. Think about that number. My work has been to excavate the stories of the last remaining survivors who have rarely been asked to tell their own stories. Eighty years on, it is a race against time to record them. There are eyewitnesses, too, who recall the cry of phan dao—asking for the starch water of rice, not even rice itself. They still recall with horror the scenes they saw, their helplessness, and sometimes the guilt they felt over not being able to alleviate all the suffering.

In Britain, the Bengal famine of 1943 is little known. Nor are the other famines that took place during the hundreds of years of Britain’s presence in India. It is an ugly chapter in Britain’s colonial history, one that mars the nation’s righteous narrative of fighting Axis powers. A deeper reckoning with the country’s imperial past has begun, however. The Imperial War Museum in London recently opened new World War Two galleries, and a small corner is dedicated to the Bengal famine, framing it within the context of the war. As of yet, though, the teaching of the Bengal famine does not figure in English students’ curriculum.

In India and Bangladesh, the memory of hunger remains and is relevant in policy-making. The story of the Bengal famine is told in literature and film, sometimes by eyewitnesses, but it has seldom been told by the survivors. One man, 72-year-old Sailen Sarkar, has been trying to record testimonies, pen and paper in hand, of those who endured the worst. Yet there is no official archive in India or Bangladesh for them—as there has been for those who lived through the partition of India, which took place four years later, in 1947, an event that arguably overshadows the famine in collective memory. War and colonial authorities are to blame for the absence of any official commemoration of the famine, but while Indians starved to death on Calcutta’s streets, other Indians never wanted for food, carrying on their lives as normal. Others profited from the situation. For some, this is difficult to acknowledge, even after all this time.

It’s over 80 years on now, and the interview of eyewitnesses compiled for the podcast Three Million has started a conversation in Britain. Within families it is emerging that people were witnesses or British families had ancestors who saw those distressing scenes too. It is a shared history, albeit a difficult one. But we are just at the beginning of coming to terms with it, and seeing it as part of Britain’s imperial presence and our war story. In India and Bangladesh, the famine is remembered as a legacy of Empire, but the survivors’ stories have been almost completely overlooked.

The British left India in 1947. Today, in 2024, we are still just beginning to learn what it meant individually, generationally, and collectively, as well as why it happened, and what were the forces responsible. There is one gaping hole that is probably too late to recover meaningfully, and its absence from the archive will be forever felt: the millions who were lost and survived the famine of 1943, one of the most devastating events of the 20th century. 

Three Million can be heard on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Niratan Bewan

Niratan was married at the age of eight or nine. She believes she was around nineteen at the time of the famine. She was living in Nadia district in a village called Durgapur. 

After the cyclone and floods (in October 1942) everyone stopped eating rice. On good days, we would get boiled red potatoes for lunch. We used to forage greens from the ponds and canal sides and from the forests nearby and eat those as well, boiled and with salt. We were at least better off than many others. We had a bigha or two of land. The men worked on that land, and sometimes on the landlord’s land too. Those were one-anna, two-anna days. Like I said, we were better off than many others. At least we had something saved up. That’s why, even without rice, we had boiled aairi, boiled musoor dal or bhura to eat. It was a kind of grass seed that we threshed until we got little balls like sago and then boiled. That’s what bhura was.

In those days, the children who were born suffered a great deal. Mothers didn’t have any breast milk. Their bodies had become all bones, no flesh. Many children died at birth, their mothers too. Even those that were born healthy died young from hunger. Lots of women committed suicide at that time. Many wives whose husbands could not feed them went back to their father’s houses. If they weren’t taken back, then they killed themselves. Some wives ran off with other men. When their husbands couldn’t feed them, they went with whichever man could. At that time people weren’t so scandalized by these things. When you have no rice in your belly, and no one who can feed you, who is going to judge you anyway?

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen was nine in 1943, living in Santiniketan with his grandparents, 100 miles north of Calcutta. He’d been sent there from Dacca to avoid potential Japanese bombings. 

A couple of my friends and I were told that there is a man who is being teased by some nasty kids. And so, we went there and tried to intervene. He was enormously emaciated, starving for many weeks, and he arrived in search of a little food for our school. Clearly he was not in good shape, mentally. And that is often the case when there is starvation. I hadn’t seen anyone really starving like that before where I would even begin to wonder whether he might suddenly die.

Amartya wanted to do something to stop the suffering. He asked his grandmother if he could give them rice. 

I asked “how much can I give?” So she took her cigarette tin and said up to half of it you can give but if we try to share a larger amount among all the hungry people that you will see in our street, you will not be able to cope with feeding them all. I gave it to people, sometimes even violated the rule of going beyond half a tin. It was a situation of nastiness of a kind that I had never encountered before.

One of those who came to the house was a young boy — just a few years older than Amartya.

He’d walked from his village. His name was Joggeshwar, and he was given some food.

He was an enterprising young boy from a very poor family from an area called Dumkar, that’s about 40 miles. And he said that unless I escape, I’m not going to get any food. And by that time, he was totally exhausted. He sat underneath a tree, with a little utensil and some food and ate it with the greatest of relief. And then he stayed a few days. And then he stayed on. He was a very good friend of mine. Very good friend. Yeah, he lived with us to the age of 88 when he died I think.

Pamela Dowley Wise

Pamela was sixteen and a member of the British colonial class. She lived off the busy Chowringhee Road in a large white art deco building, full of Indian servants. 

The house was an English sort of house, beautifully built and everything. We entertained people there because it had a lovely veranda where we’d have lovely meals and things like that. The Victoria Memorial is where we used to go because of the grounds. We used to have evening picnics there and we would have sandwiches and all things were done very properly, you know.

She remembers Calcutta filling up with Allied soldiers. She became friendly with some of them, as her parents would have an open house for British soldiers. She often took British soldiers by rickshaw to the local market and helped them barter. 

They couldn’t speak Urdu — and I could. And so if they wanted to buy something, I would go with them and bargain for them and help them to buy things. I remember [...] American and British soldiers were in our home and they used to come have dinner with us. And afterwards, we’d play the piano and sing the old songs, and happy days they were.

During the summer of 1943, the city of her birth completely changed, though her life of picnics at the Victoria Memorial, eating in restaurants, and going to her private club was unaltered.

There was no place you could go where you didn’t see dead bodies and vultures, it was revolting, actually. Because the vultures used to come down and eat these dead bodies. No, I mean, you couldn’t say I’m not going to the Victoria Memorial because there are dead people everywhere. There were dead people all over Calcutta. And when they died, they seemed to stay there. 

It was dreadful, dreadful. Yes, poor things. There’s nothing we could do about it. Because it was so vast, you see, but that’s what happened.

The post The Unveiling of a Horror appeared first on Coda Story.

It was during those slow, meandering rooftop conversations that ventured into every aspect of our lives—from crushes and struggles with identity to global politics—that I was handed the gift of a Senegalese lens to re-examine and better understand my own story. 

I grew up in the nation of Georgia, where as a child I lived through the violent collapse of the Soviet Union and learned—primarily from my parents—that instability and chaos were a small price to pay for the triumph of Georgia’s centuries-long struggle for independence. Among many contradictions that laced my childhood was the fact that I learned Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, from my half-Polish, half-Armenian mother, who would force me to read War and Peace in the original, but also insisted that my formal education be conducted in Georgian—and that I was to never trust anything that came from an appointed authority, especially one in Moscow.  

It was not until I sat on that Dakar rooftop that I thought of my mishmashed identity as a byproduct of colonialism. Just like me with Russian, Khadim loved all the opportunities that French, the language of his historical oppressor, had unlocked for him. Like me, he had a native-level appreciation for the language of a country he’s never lived in, and a nuanced understanding of a culture he was never part of. But unlike me, he was acutely aware of the price he had paid for that access. “I never thought of Russian in the same way that Khadim thinks of the French, but I think I also have a love-hate relationship with it,” I wrote in my journal that particular evening. “It is weird how it represents oppression and opportunity at the same time.” 

My old journal documents my awe (or was it envy?) at the deep awareness that Khadim and his friends possessed when it came to understanding how the historic legacy of French colonialism in West Africa affected their personal journeys. It is a record of my delight over the similarities I discovered between the Senegalese saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, and the Georgian orthodox saint and healer Father Gabriel, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the Soviets after he set a 26-foot portrait of Lenin on fire in 1955.

Today, “colonialism,” with all of its many prefixes and subcategories, often feels like an overused term: there is neo-colonialism and tech-colonialism, post-colonialism and eco-colonialism, settler colonialism and internal colonialism. I could go on—the list is so long, it feels tedious. And yet, no other word at our disposal can quite capture the historical continuity of domination and oppression that is the root cause of so many of the world’s current troubles. 

Every one of us is a carrier of a colonial legacy, either as a victim or the beneficiary—or sometimes both. Colonialism is the system of oppression that our world is built on. As we obsess with decolonizing everything from our schools to industries and corporations, it is useful to remember how easily our understanding of colonialism can be manipulated unless we first decolonize ourselves. 

My story is both typical and telling. My parents may have cherished Georgia’s freedom from Moscow, but somehow I had still bought into a widely accepted myth that the Soviet Union was an anti-colonial power. Both at my Soviet school, and later at university in the United States, I was taught that colonialism was something that Western countries did to Africa, Asia, and the Far East. It was only when I went to Senegal and stumbled upon the depth and ease with which I was able to relate to the anti-colonial part of the West African identity that I began to realize that I, too, was a product of “colonialism.” Until then, the struggle of non-Russian Soviet republics for independence was compartmentalized in my mind as something qualitatively different from the plight of formerly colonized people elsewhere.

Like the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States and the reckoning with anti-Black racism that followed, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 triggered a profound reconsideration of colonialism, including demands for restructuring and amends, from across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire;  a backlash from Russia itself followed. 

From Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Poland, activists, academics, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were suddenly digging up long-hidden stories of oppression, deportations, ethnic cleansing and “Russification” policies that the Kremlin had imposed on them over the centuries. Their stories were different, but the point they were making was the same: Russia’s war in Ukraine was a quintessentially colonial conflict, part of the centuries-long cycle of relentless conquest and subjugation.  

Across Russia’s former empire, this struggle to break away from subjugation has defined generation after generation. Today in Georgia, the children of those who in 1989 protested against—and helped end—the Soviet Union are out on the same streets, protesting against the current government’s attempts to take their country off its pro-European course and bring it back into Russia’s fold.

“Do not fear! We will win honorably,” read one poster held up by three women who joined tens of thousands of protesters in May 2024 on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The words are more than a hundred years old and belong to Maro Makashvili, a young Georgian woman who wrote them down over a century ago just as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution helped end Tsarist rule in Russia. For Georgia, the revolution meant freedom from two centuries of domination by  its northern neighbor and, finally, a chance to write its own story.

Few know that in those years, Georgia emerged as one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, a place where women could vote and minorities were granted rights. Young Maro Makashvili watched it all and documented Georgia’s ambitious experiment with democracy in her diaries. The experiment ended, abruptly and tragically, when Bolshviks invaded Georgia in 1921, annihilating the country’s intellectual and political elite, violently forcing Georgia into the USSR and rewriting the country’s history to fit the Soviet narrative. 

“To me, Maro Makashvili lives on in every beautiful, strong, smart, young woman protesting in the streets today,” said Tiko Suladze, a Tbilisi resident who held up Maro Makashvili’s portrait at the recent anti-Russian, anti-government demonstration.

The sentiments Makashvili described in her diaries during this time talk of freedom for women—and her whole country. These are ideas that resonate today with those living in the trenches of the long war against Russian imperialism. Ukraine is its current and bloodiest epicenter, but its frontline stretches across Russia’s vast former empire. You wouldn’t know it, though, listening to mainstream media in the West that explain the war through the prism of a geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington and, inadvertently, diminish the actual struggle of people on the frontline. This happens, in part at least, because we have a narrow definition of what colonialism is.

The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors. While Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top. In 2022, while dropping bombs on Kyiv, Vladimir Putin launched an audaciously counterintuitive campaign that positioned him as the global anti-colonial hero. The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that thematic priorities for state-funded films in 2022 included promotion of “family values,” depiction of cultural “degradation” of Europe, and films on “Anglo-Saxon neo-colonialism.” 

Piggybacking on the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements, and banking on people’s genuine disillusionment with the double standards of American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States. 

The tactic worked. In 2023, I found myself at a small conference in Nairobi that brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the African continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor, and myself. The conference was hosted by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German foundation affiliated with the country’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The foundation, which despite its association is independent from the CDU, is a big player in media development in Africa. And it was concerned about the growing spread of Russian narratives across the continent, which prompted them to organize the conversation. 

In the room in Nairobi, there was plenty of sympathy toward Ukraine and plenty of concern about clearly malicious disinformation campaigns undertaken by influencers across Africa. But there were also compelling explanations as to why Africa is currently finding Moscow’s messages more persuasive than those being pushed by the West.  

Ukraine, my African colleagues explained, was perceived as a “Western project.” Delivered primarily through Western diplomatic and news channels, the Ukrainian message in Africa was met with resistance because of the West’s perceived refusal to account for the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. “You may call it whataboutism, but it is grounded in real questions that no one has answered,” one African editor said. Russia’s message, on the other hand, “lands well and softly,” Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg, told me at the time. The challenge for her team, she explained, was to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine caused the invasion.

During my trip to Nairobi, one of the editors shared an unpublished op-ed sent to him as an email from the Russian Ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maskimychev. It read: “If you look at the leaders of the Soviet Union, you will find two Russians (Lenin, Gorbachev), a Georgian (Stalin), and three Ukrainians (Brezhnev, Khruschev, Chernenko). Some colonialist empire! Can you imagine a Kenyan sitting on the British throne? Make no mistake, what is currently happening in Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.” It is an effective message that lands equally well with many Western intellectuals who continue to argue about the rights and wrongs of NATO enlargement and not the fact that a sovereign country has the right to break away from its colonial masters. 

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities. 

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

“To this very day, the core of decolonization for me is about being able to learn and tell your own full story in your own words and being able to follow the narrative of your choice,” argues my friend, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi, whose book Russian Colonialism 101 is a succinct record of one part of Russia’s colonial adventures: invasions. “This means being able to dissect what is authentic in you and what is programmed by the colonizer.”   

But the process of deconstructing your own narratives can be a fraught and deeply uncomfortable experience. Take well-meaning Western academic institutions, for example, which have traditionally taught history and the languages of Russia’s former colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus within their Russian studies departments. The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in American universities, where professors started debating how to teach imperialism and colonialism in Russia. 

Because of the invasion and Western sanctions, some Russian language studies programs could no longer send their students to Russia, and many reached for an easy solution: send them instead to places where Russian is spoken because it’s the language of the oppressor. It is only now that I learn about Americans coming to Georgia to learn Russian that I feel simultaneously angry at the colonial behavior of supposedly liberal arts institutions And embarrassed that at age 20, I did not once question the decision to go to Senegal to study French. 

It is impossible to paint a singular portrait of colonialism. But it is possible and necessary to listen and respect each of their voices. It is only through listening to the multitude of oppressed voices—from Gaza and Yemen, Georgia and Ukraine, American reservations and former slave plantations—that we will begin to understand the systems of oppression and patterns that run through it.

“Colonialism is about trauma first,” says Maksym Eristavi. “The trauma of your identity being violated, erased, reprogrammed. The trauma of losing your roots, figuratively and quite literally. The goal of the colonizer is to make you feel small and isolated. To ensure that you think that your arrested potential is your own fault.”

“At last my poor country will be blessed with freedom,” the young Georgian Maro Makashvili wrote in her diary in 1918. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, occupying the country for the next seventy years, thousands of Georgians were killed. Among them was Maro. Today, Maro Makashvili is a national hero. But unless her story becomes part of the global anti-colonial narrative, oppressors—in Russia and beyond—will continue to win.

The post When sameness becomes a colonial tool of oppression appeared first on Coda Story.

That was my very first insight into a lesson I’d learn again and again in my life: Good journalism is vital for people who need it.

The world has changed a lot since I sat in that kitchen. The Iron Curtain no longer divides geographies, but its digital successor cuts straight through our communities, polarizing us from within. From Manila to Minneapolis, societies are divided on many of the same issues: changing identities, economic inequity, climate change and lack of reckoning over past injustices, to name just a few. Modern-day authoritarians no longer need to jam shortwave radio signals or shut down journalism organizations (although plenty of them still do). Instead, they flood our digital information systems.

From Budapest to Washington D.C., rising authoritarian populists now share a playbook of digital, legal and narrative tools that they use to manipulate and abuse people’s legitimate grievances. At the heart of their strategy is the same age-old quest for money and power, but their tactics are new, often innovative and designed to confuse, distract and sow doubt. Noise, not just fake news, is the greatest weapon in their arsenal.

Journalism’s existential quagmire

For journalism, this new political reality spells an existential quagmire. Today, a journalist’s ability to grab attention, get through the wall of censorship and deliver vital information that helps people navigate their complex reality is more important than ever. But in our world of algorithmic flooding, where so many are overloaded to the point of zoning out of the news, it’s also becoming an almost impossible role to fulfill.

In the summer of 2024, I arrived at Stanford to take up John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship, convinced that in our digital information era, noise had become the new censorship, and that it was existentially important for journalists to figure out how to punch through the noise and focus people’s attention on stories that matter.

The question of how journalists can be part of the solution instead of complicit in the flooding of information has preoccupied me for years.

My career as a BBC foreign correspondent began with a freelancing gig in West Africa in 2000. By then in the United States, cable news had already created a demand for more content over better stories. But the British broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel was only three years old, and most correspondents in the field were left to focus on stories they published in regularly programmed bulletins, rather than constant live updates.

A few years later, as I became a staff reporter, that dynamic began to change: More media organizations went online and social media entered the scene. Lured by the new horizons of unprecedented, seemingly limitless reach, media companies, including the BBC, jumped on the bandwagon. By 2014, social media emerged as a key distribution platform for all information, including news.

As I went back and forth between covering the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen and the war in eastern Ukraine, my editors started asking me to do regular Facebook Lives along with the rest of the field reporting. Like many of my colleagues, I grumbled. Not because of the extra work, but because the effort inevitably took away from the actual job: talking to real people, finding sources, getting information that those in power were trying to hide and putting stories together in a way that respected their complexity while making them easily accessible to the wide audience.

But what we reporters wanted didn't matter. Human information consumption habits were changing. The distribution channels most of our audiences were migrating to were not designed for complexity and nuance.

I left the BBC because I felt that as a journalist I was no longer effective. I could no longer fulfill that role that I saw on display in my childhood kitchen. The stories I was doing were being stripped of impact, not because they were not important, but because they were competing for dwindling attention spans with everything else in the digital world. Because they no longer lived in the context of an editorial flow or a news program but had instead followed audiences to the bottomless pit of internet algorithms.

Coda: Connecting the dots

But what if there was a better way of using the internet? The BBC, along with the rest of the mainstream media, I thought, was too focused on feeding incremental pieces to its 24-hour news channels and their hyperactive social media platform cousins. I wanted to connect the dots and explain why things mattered, and I wanted to figure out how to use technology to create sustained narratives, to break away from incrementalism, to show context, complexity and nuance that people need to understand the world they live in.

My research showed that audiences wanted that too, and that led to creating Coda Story, a newsroom that focuses on reporting the roots of global crises and connects the dots between local communities and global trends. Coda launched in 2017 as a crowdfunded reporting project and by 2022, it was a bustling newsroom, with a bunch of awards in the bag, a loyal audience, an impressive portfolio of mainstream media partners and a unique thematic approach that was designed to create context and continuity. Our editorial model rejected the noise, focusing on the “why” and “how” instead of “what” and “when.”

We worked hard to get away from the reactive instincts of the news industry, to stop being a slave to the artificial 24-hour news cycle. Our model enabled us to find evergreen stories often missed by others and identify patterns that explained the root causes of big crises before they hit the headlines. Using thematic lenses (e.g., war on science), we deployed journalists to identify stories bubbling under the surface. Again and again, our approach was validated as patterns we detected and focused on, be it certain conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxer movements, surveillance trends or disinformation narratives, would inevitably burst into headlines like they did when Covid paralyzed the world or when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And yet, proud as we were of our model, it was also becoming increasingly clear that producing good journalism was no longer enough.

Our journalism was excellent, but our distribution channels were profoundly, irreparably broken; social media platforms kept rolling out newer and better algorithms for targeting. They favored hate over reason, shouting over discussion and gossip over journalism. Then came advances in AI and the volume of noise spawned the information pollution crisis into stratospheric proportions, making it even harder for journalists to compete for our century’s most precious commodity: human attention.

The incrementalism of our information consumption has broken our conversations and fragmented our societies. Information pollution amplifies humanity’s every crisis, be it wars, racism, inequity, climate or dysfunctional politics. The noise stands in the way of every solution.

There is no singular — or easy — way out of this mess, but the past year as JSK Fellow at Stanford gave me space and time to think about how, if at all, journalism can help. Spoiler alert: I think it can. I am coming away with three practical insights, and, in the spirit of Stanford’s culture of experimentation, a plan to test them through Coda’s work in the next year.

Radical collaboration

The first is radical collaboration. The year at Stanford changed my understanding of who the allies and foes of journalism are and left me convinced that in order to survive in the age of AI, newsrooms — and especially small newsrooms that have been so important to diversifying the media landscape — need to profoundly rethink collaborations. My instinct is that the only way for non-mainstream newsrooms to survive is by building vast, yet agile and cross-disciplinary networks for sharing audiences, content, revenue and expertise.

For Coda, this translates into a two-circle approach to radical collaborations. In our inner circle are other journalists, organizations and individuals, with whom we are going to build closely knit (in some cases merger-like) partnerships that will enable us to share insights, audiences, capacity and revenue.

In the outer circle are much more broad, agile and most importantly cross-disciplinary partnerships that bring different industries into the conversation to feed our journalistic output.

We are currently working with artists, philosophers, historians and select influencers, in ways that aim at bringing them into the process of both production and distribution of stories. Our hope is that the partnerships we are currently testing will generate completely new kinds of media products, services and experiences for the audiences who are curious about the world, yet dissatisfied with what media offers.

Rethink distribution

The second insight concerns distribution. We are in the process of rethinking ways we distribute our journalism and we are making a new commitment to distribute for relationships, not just scale. The reason why distribution is so key is because in the digital age, medium has truly become the message. Over the past decade, media has grown overly dependent on social media and tech platforms. That has come at a huge cost.

It is time to change the power dynamic and stop relying on the middleman. From now on, for us at Coda social media is just a marketing tool, the rest of our distribution will focus on a mix of channels that allow us to build new feedback loops and genuine relationships with our audiences from in-person events to creative online storytelling.

Reimagine growth to scale for impact, not traffic

The third insight is around impact and how we understand and measure the impact of our journalism beyond the number of illusionary views or clicks. In the case of Coda, our impact — that will now inform both our audience and editorial strategies — will focus on attaining narrative change around issues that we cover (after all, every real-life change starts with a new story). As we scale our impact, we will also test new mechanisms of getting and learning from feedback.

Scaling for impact, testing radical, multi-disciplinary collaborations, rethinking distribution and experimenting with new channels that focus on building relations are three ways we can make sure that our journalism punches through the noise, reaching and engaging people who need it.

For the past six years, our readers like you have made our work possible. We are grateful and we hope that with us, you’ll stay on the stories that matter.

Coda is, of course, still a tiny outlet, but we have a huge ambition to lead by example and catalyze a much needed ecosystem change. What’s driving us isn’t really all that different from what made me want to become a journalist all those years ago: a deeply rooted belief that journalism that breaks down walls is a lifeline that our societies both need and deserve.

If you are interested in exploring any of this in more detail, or in teaming up, please get in touch! I’m on antelava@codastory.com.

This piece was originally published as a Stanford University’s John S.Knight Fellowships post.

The post Rising above the noise appeared first on Coda Story.

Historical debates are unusually important in this case, especially between Europe and its former colonies. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party has long identified itself with the Palestinian cause, due in large part to South Africa’s history of apartheid. Germany said its role in the Holocaust obliged it to intervene on Israel’s behalf, describing the South African case as the “political instrumentalization” of the Genocide Convention. That move elicited a swift rebuke from South Africa’s neighbor Namibia, whose Herero and Nama communities were victims of the genocide perpetrated by Germany between 1904 and 1908, three decades before the Nazi Party grabbed power. 

To understand what’s happening at the ICJ, I spoke with A. Dirk Moses, professor of international relations at the City College of New York and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Studies. His book, “The Problems of Genocide,” explores the history of the concept and its shortcomings in preventing states from harming civilians. 

Israeli officials have said that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is morally equivalent to the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, which killed about 25,000 people. The confirmed death toll in Gaza is now roughly the same. What do you make of Israel’s justification?

It's clearly Israeli policy to run that line with the Americans and the British and say, “You did this during the war in fighting the Nazis. We're also fighting Nazis, so, ergo, we can do the same.” That language is prevalent through [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s speeches. The implication is clear: “The Palestinians are the Nazis and they committed genocide on October 7. We're just defending ourselves in the same way as the Allies did in World War II. It wasn't pretty, a lot of German civilians were killed, but these things happen in war.” 

They're trying to avoid the narrative structure where the Israelis are the perpetrators of genocide and are then somehow related to the Nazis by process of association. Associating oneself with Allied bombing does not place you on the side of angels, however, as we now recognize that much — or at least some — of the Allied bombing of German cities like Dresden would be now classed as war crimes. These officials more or less admitted, “Well, we’re committing war crimes but not genocide in what we do in Gaza.”

A senior Israeli lawyer at the hearing said, “The Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population. The convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.” What’s the reason for this distinction? 

Firstly, I think the Israeli lawyer accurately depicted the intention of many state parties when the convention was negotiated, but we’d have different views on the context. Legally, there’s no hierarchy between crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide. But in public opinion, there is — and genocide is seen as “the crime of crimes.” The liberal view is that that's a good thing, that we need this exceptional crime for these most exceptional cases. My view is that this is an extremely problematic situation because "that which shocks the conscience of mankind" — language traditionally used in these humanitarian documents — is something that needs to resemble the Holocaust in order to truly shock us and therefore to trigger the genocide charge. But if the Holocaust is considered unique or exceptional, then, by definition, how many cases are ever going to approximate that? In other words, you define genocide out of realistic existence.  

The aim of the [U.N.] delegates — and they said this, if you read the transcripts of 1948 — in creating this very high threshold of exceptional violence is precisely so states can engage in the kind of warfare that Russia is engaging in, that Israel is engaging in and that America engaged in in Korea in the early 1950s, where they killed 2 million North Koreans and later killed millions with bombing and Agent Orange in Vietnam — and not be prosecuted for genocide. 

The delegates made a very strict distinction between military intention and genocidal intention. The military intention is to defeat, whereas genocidal intention is to “destroy as such.” That “as such” in the [U.N. Genocide Convention] definition means to destroy a group solely because of that group's identity attributes. I call this a nonpolitical reason because the group doesn't have to do anything — it just is. They’re being attacked just for being Jews, for example, not for anything they’ve done. The archetype of genocide is a massive hate crime, whereas the military or security intention is that you attack a group or members of a group that are engaged in a rebellion or an insurgency, like Hamas. 

The Israeli logic is quite consistent with traditions of international thinking: “We're engaged in a security operation and we're entitled to self-defense, and we're not attacking Palestinians as such just for being Palestinian. What we're trying to get at are these Hamas fighters, which have commingled themselves with the population or underneath it in the tunnels. If civilians get in the way, that’s regrettable, but international law allows proportionate collateral damage.” States have gotten away with this reasoning for most post-World War II conflicts.  

Shortly after the hearings began, the world began to take sides. Germany’s already offered to join Israel’s defense, which Namibia — its former colony — has condemned as hypocritical. How is there such disagreement over what constitutes genocide? 

Genocide is a legal concept. Although its archetype is the Holocaust, the purpose of it is to be applicable broadly. But it has an archetype, or an ideal type, known as the Holocaust. Because of this, and because the Genocide Convention was born at a particular time and place with one case in mind, the Holocaust is in the background when people use the concept of genocide. It's entailed, even subconsciously. You can't accuse Israel of genocide because it's the successor victim nation of the biggest genocide in world history. By definition they can't commit genocide. 

There’s a standoff between Global South and Global North in this respect. The Global South has always linked genocide and colonialism, whereas in the Global North, they haven't. Why would they resist the link? Genocide is tethered to the image of the Nazis there. France, Belgium, Britain and Germany were colonial empires, so the last thing they want to do is to say they have genocidal histories. They say: "It was only the Germans who had genocidal history, and now the Russians because of Ukraine, but the rest of us have clean hands historically. Yes, there were some dark sides to our colonial empires, but they were motivated by high-minded humanitarian ideals, bringing progress to people." Whereas people in the Global South, like Namibians, think that's just window dressing on the vicious, extractive, violent project of colonialism. They'll say there were colonial empires in Africa and the Nazis were a colonial empire in Europe — a very radical one, but nonetheless in the same flow of history. So you've got big framing contestations going on here, which you alluded to in your first question.

What's happening in Israel in a sense is the unfinished business of decolonization. In this case, the Indigenous people are still there — a lot of them — and resisting, some of them violently, notwithstanding the Israeli self-understanding that they are the real Indigenous ones. But that's not unique in world history. Name me a nation state in which there wasn't tremendous founding violence. Australia? The United States?

The dilemma for Israel with Gaza was that the refugees from [the Nakba in] 1948 were just pushed across the border. It means they want to come back. Gaza is not home. Neither is the Sinai, obviously. Right-wing Israelis realize that, which is why they want to deport Palestinians from Gaza. 

By bombing orchards, trees and agricultural territory, which have no military value, they are making northern Gaza uninhabitable — by design. I've seen the reports. It is also leading to famine because people can't feed themselves. Israeli forces are corralling people in the south to create a humanitarian catastrophe so that pressure builds up on the international community to do something. At the moment, the political pressure hasn't built up to that extent. Egypt won’t let in Palestinians and neither will other states. But what about in six months’ time, when we’ll have mass starvation if Israel doesn’t abide by the ICJ measures? Given the campaign against [the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees known as the] UNRWA and reports about the rate of aid entry, experts are predicting famine before too long. And right-wing Israeli politicians are openly calling for starvation as an incentive for Palesitnians to “voluntarily emigrate.” There'll be global outcry and pressure applied on Egypt. Because they're a debt-ridden country, their debts will be forgiven. "We'll pay for the city in the Sinai," say the Americans. Then you get the solution that Israel wants, which is to empty Gaza, or at least "thin it out." 

Do you think the archetypal status of the Holocaust drives states to speak in certain ways in order to have serious attention paid to formative national tragedies?

Exactly. In the public consciousness of international law, you have a hierarchy with genocide at the top, so obviously victim groups want to go for the gold standard. This is appalling because crimes against humanity are themselves extremely serious. That’s why they were a major indictment in the Nuremberg trials — they covered what is now called the Holocaust. Genocide wasn't one of the indictments at Nuremberg, it was crimes against peace, aggressive warfare, crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

I’m curious about your idea of “permanent security.” In the current war in Gaza, does this concept apply? How?

Security is legitimate. Permanent security is illegitimate. It's a utopian idea of absolute safety. What makes permanent security aspirations so problematic is that that can only be achieved by violating international law, by indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. To make sure that groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad can never again pose a threat to Israel, the only solution is to remove the population, the entire population, which, of course, is what Israeli government ministers are saying.

The well-known book by Tareq Baconi, “Hamas Contained,” shows how there was a modus vivendi between the Israelis and Hamas. We know that Netanyahu was allowing in money to strengthen Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. The last thing Netanyahu and the majority of the Israeli political class since the second Intifada [between 2000 and 2005] wanted was a functioning Palestinian state-like entity in the West Bank, lest it merge with Gaza into a single state. If Hamas is a monster, its “success” in Gaza is partly a creation of Israeli policy. 

As a scholar of genocide, what do you make of the ICJ case? 

Now that we have the court’s judgment on provisional measures, I think it’s overall a win for South Africa, as it finds their claim plausible that genocide is taking place. 

The U.S. and Germany had claimed that the case was meritless, but the decision referred to clear examples of incitement to genocide from the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, President Isaac Herzog, and then-Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz which had been pointed out by independent experts and members of working groups affiliated with the U.N. Human Rights Council. The court is suggesting these officials should be punished. It will be interesting to see the reaction in Israel.

The court avoids the issue of armed conflict by focusing on genocide. Instead of mentioning South Africa’s request for a ceasefire, it says “The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts” listed in the Genocide Convention, which implies that its armed forces are committing them, namely: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

I see international lawyers interpreting this omission in different ways — either that Israel should cease its campaign other than in directly repelling attacks, or continuing its campaign while allowing in humanitarian aid and reducing civilian casualties. Ultimately, the court is suggesting that Israel’s campaign could be genocidal and thus that it needs to cease those modes. This is an extraordinary judgment whose consequences we are yet to fully understand.

The post Israel and the ‘crime of crimes’ appeared first on Coda Story.

When authorities in Inner Mongolia announced in 2020 that the language would no longer be the language of instruction in schools, ethnic Mongolians — who make up about 18% of the population — feared the loss of their language, one of the last remaining markers of their distinctive identity. The news and then plans for protest flowed across WeChat, China’s largest messaging service. Parents were soon marching by the thousands in the streets of the local capital, demanding that the decision be reversed.

With the remarkable exception of the so-called Zero Covid protests of 2022, demonstrations of any size are incredibly rare in China, partially because online surveillance prevents large numbers of people from openly discussing sensitive issues in Mandarin, much less planning public marches. With automated surveillance technologies having a hard time with Mongolian though, protestors had the advantage of being able to coordinate with relative freedom. 

Most of the world's writing systems have been digitized using centralized standard code (known as Unicode), but the Mongolian script was encoded so sloppily that it is barely usable. Instead, people use a jumble of competing, often incompatible programs when they need to type in Mongolian. WeChat has a Mongolian keyboard, but it’s unwieldy and users often prefer to send each other screenshots of text instead. The constant exchange of images is inconvenient, but it has the unintended benefit of being much more complicated for authorities to monitor and censor.

All but 60 of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages are considered “low-resource” by artificial intelligence researchers. Mongolian belongs to the vast majority of languages barely represented on the internet whose speakers deal with many challenges resulting from the predominance of English on the global internet. As technology improves, automated processes across the internet — from search engines to social media sites — may start to work a lot better for under-resourced languages. This could do a lot of good, giving those language speakers access to all kinds of tools and markets, but it will likely also reduce the degree to which languages like Mongolian fly under the radar of censors. The tradeoff for languages that have historically hovered on the margins of the internet is between safety and convenience on one hand, and freedom from censorship and intrusive eavesdropping on the other.

Back in Inner Mongolia, when parents were posting on WeChat about their plans to protest, it became clear that the app’s algorithms couldn’t make sense of the jpegs of Mongolian cursive, said Soyonbo Borjgin, a local journalist who covered the protests. The images and the long voice messages that protesters would exchange were protected by the Chinese state’s ignorance — there were no AI resources available to monitor them, and overworked police translators had little chance of surveilling all possibly subversive communication. 

China’s efforts to stifle the Mongolian language within its borders have only intensified since the protests. Keen on the technological dimensions of the battle, Borjgin began looking into a machine learning system that was being developed at Inner Mongolia University. The system would allow computers to read images of the Mongolian script, after being fed and trained on digital reams of printed material that had been published when Mongolian still had Chinese state support. While reporting the story, Borjgin was told by the lead researcher that the project had received state money. Borjgin took this as a clear signal: The researchers were getting funding because what they were doing amounted to a state security project. The technology would likely be used to prevent future dissident organizing.

Until recently, AI has only worked well for the vanishingly small number of languages with large bodies of texts to train the technology on. Even national languages with hundreds of millions of speakers, like Bangla, have largely remained outside the priorities of tech companies. Last year, though, both Google and Meta announced projects to develop AI for under-resourced languages. But while newer AI models are able to generate some output in a wide set of languages, there’s not much evidence to suggest that it’s high quality. 

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, explained that once tech companies have established the capacity to process a new language, they have a tendency to congratulate themselves and then move on. A market dominated by “big” languages gives them little incentive to keep investing in improvements. Hellina Nigatu, a computer science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, added that low-resource languages face the risk of “constantly trying to catch up” — or even losing speakers — to English.

Researchers also warn that even as the accuracy of machine translation improves, language models miss out on important, culturally specific details that can have real-world consequences. Companies like Meta, which partially rely on AI to review social media posts for things like hate speech and violence, have run into problems when they try to use the technology for under-resourced languages. Because they’ve been trained on just the few texts available, their AI systems too often have an incomplete picture of what words mean and how they’re used.

Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist who specializes in digital censorship, said that one problem with using AI to moderate social media content in under-resourced languages is the “lack of understanding of cultural, historical, political nuances in the way the language is being used on these platforms.” In Azerbaijan, where violence against Armenians is regularly celebrated online, the word “Armenian” itself is often used as a slur to attack dissidents. Because the term is innocuous in most other contexts, it’s easy for AI and even non-specialist human moderators to overlook its use. She also noted that AI used by social media platforms often lumps the Azerbaijani language together with languages spoken in neighboring countries: Azerbaijanis frequently send her screenshots of automated replies in Russian or Turkish to the hate speech reports they’d submitted in Azerbaijani.

But Geybulla believes improving AI for monitoring hate speech and incitement in Azerbaijani will lock in an essentially defective system. “I’m totally against training the algorithm,” she told me. “Content moderation needs to be done by humans in all contexts.” In the hands of an authoritarian government, sophisticated AI for previously neglected languages can become a tool for censorship. 

According to Geybulla, Azerbaijani currently has such “an old school system of surveillance and authoritarianism that I wouldn't be surprised if they still rely on Soviet methods.” Given the government’s demonstrated willingness to jail people for what they say online and to engage in mass online astroturfing, she believes that improving automated flagging for the Azerbaijani language would only make the repression worse. Instead of strengthening these easily abusable technologies, she argues that companies should invest in human moderators. “If I can identify inauthentic accounts on Facebook, surely someone at Facebook can do that too, and faster than I do,” she said. 

Different languages require different approaches when building AI. Indigenous languages in the Americas, for instance, show forms of complexity that are hard to account for without either large amounts of data — which they currently do not have — or diligent expert supervision. 

One such expert is Michael Running Wolf, founder of the First Languages AI Reality initiative, who says developers underestimate the challenge of American languages. While working as a researcher on Amazon’s Alexa, he began to wonder what was keeping him from building speech recognition for Cheyenne, his mother’s language. Part of the problem, he realized, was computer scientists’ unwillingness to recognize that American languages might present challenges that their algorithms couldn’t understand. “All languages are seen through the lens of English,” he told me.

Running Wolf thinks Anglocentrism is mostly to blame for the neglect that Indigenous languages have faced in the tech world. “The AI field, like any other space, is occupied by people who are set in their ways and unintentionally have a very colonial perspective,” he told me. “It's not as if we haven't had the ability to create AI for Indigenous languages until today. It's just no one cares.” 

American languages were put in this position deliberately. Until well into the 20th century, the U.S. government’s policy position on Indigenous American languages was eradication. From 1860 to 1978, tens of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their parents and kept in boarding schools where speaking their mother tongues brought beatings or worse. Nearly all Indigenous American languages today are at immediate risk of extinction. Running Wolf hopes AI tools like machine translation will make Indigenous languages easier to learn to fluency, making up for the current lack of materials and teachers and reviving the languages as primary means of communication.

His project also relies on training young Indigenous people in machine learning — he’s already held a coding boot camp on the Lakota reservation. If his efforts succeed, he said, “we'll have Indigenous peoples who are the experts in natural language processing.” Running Wolf said he hopes this will help tribal nations to build up much-needed wealth within the booming tech industry.

The idea of his research allowing automated surveillance of Indigenous languages doesn’t scare Running Wolf so much, he told me. He compared their future online to their current status in the high school basketball games that take place across North and South Dakota. Indigenous teams use Lakota to call plays without their opponents understanding. “And guess what? The non-Indigenous teams are learning Lakota so that they know what the Lakota are doing,” Running Wolf explained. “I think that's actually a good thing.”

The problem of surveillance, he said, is “a problem of success.” He hopes for a future in which Indigenous computer scientists are “dealing with surveillance risk because the technology's so prevalent and so many people speak Chickasaw, so many people speak Lakota or Cree, or Ute — there's so many speakers that the NSA now needs to have the AI so that they can monitor us,” referring to the U.S. National Security Agency, infamous for its snooping on communications at home and abroad.

Not everyone wishes for that future. The Cheyenne Nation, for instance, wants little to do with outsiders, he told me, and isn’t currently interested in using the systems he’s building. “I don’t begrudge that perspective because that’s a perfectly healthy response to decades, generations of exploitation,” he said.

Like Running Wolf, Borjgin believes that in some cases, opening a language up to online surveillance is a sacrifice necessary to keep it alive in the digital era. “I somewhat don’t exist on the internet,” he said. Because their language has such a small online culture, he said, “there’s an identity crisis for Mongols who grew up in the city,” pushing them instead towards Mandarin. 

Despite the intense political repression that some of China’s other ethnic minorities face, Borjgin said, “one thing I envy about Tibetan and Uyghur is once I ask them something they will just google it with their own input system and they can find the result in one second.” Even though he knows that it will be used to stifle dissent, Borjgin still supports improving the digitization of the Mongol script: “If you don't have the advanced technology, if it only stays to the print books, then the language will be eradicated. I think the tradeoff is okay for me.”

The post When AI doesn’t speak your language appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens if the workers actually win?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Advertising erectile dysfunction pills? No problem. Breast health? Try again appeared first on Coda Story.

“I once had an idea in the back of my mind to leave this place and go abroad,” Besmir Billa told me earlier this year as we sipped tea in the town of Kukes, not far from Albania’s Accursed Mountains. “Of course, like everybody else, I’ve thought about it.”

The mountains rose up all around us like a great black wall. Across the valley, we could see a half-constructed, rusty bridge, suspended in mid-air. Above it stood an abandoned, blackened building that served during Albania’s 45-year period of communist rule as a state-run summer camp for workers on holiday. 

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Kukes has lost roughly half of its population. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork. 

Fifteen years ago, people would come to Kukes from all over the region for market day, where they would sell animals and produce. The streets once rang with their voices. Those who’ve lived in Kukes for decades remember it well. Nowadays, it’s much quieter.

Billa, 32, chose not to leave. He found a job in his hometown and stayed with his family. But for a person his age, he’s unusual.

You can feel the emptiness everywhere you go, he told me. “Doctors all go abroad. The restaurants are always looking for bartenders or waiters. If you want a plumber, you can’t find one.” Billa’s car broke down recently. Luckily, he loves fixing things himself — because it’s difficult to find a mechanic.

All the while, there is a parallel reality playing out far from home, one that the people of Kukes see in glimpses on TikTok and Instagram. Their feeds show them a highly curated view of what their lives might look like if they left this place: good jobs, plenty of money, shopping at designer stores and riding around London in fast cars. 

In Kukes, by comparison, times are tough. Salaries are low, prices are rising every week and there are frequent power outages. Many families can barely afford to heat their homes or pay their rent. For young people growing up in the town, it’s difficult to persuade them that there’s a future here.

Three days before I met Billa, a gaggle of teenage boys chased a convoy of flashy cars down the street. A Ferrari, an Audi and a Mercedes had pulled into town, revving their engines and honking triumphantly. The videos were uploaded to TikTok, where they were viewed and reposted tens of thousands of times.

Behind the wheel were TikTok stars Dijonis Biba and Aleks Vishaj, on a victory lap around the remote region. They’re local heroes: They left Albania for the U.K. years ago, became influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, and now they’re back, equipped with cars, money and notoriety.

Vishaj, dubbed the “King of TikTok” by the British tabloids, was reportedly convicted of robbery in the U.K. and deported in 2021. Biba, a rapper, made headlines in the British right-wing press the same year for posting instructions to YouTube on how to enter the U.K. with false documents. Police then found him working in a secret cannabis house in Coventry. He was eventually sentenced to 15 months in prison. 

The pair now travel the world, uploading TikTok videos of their high-end lifestyle: jet skiing in Dubai, hanging out in high-rise hotels, driving their Ferrari with the needle touching 300 kilometers per hour (180 mph) through the tunnel outside Kukes. 

Billa’s nephews, who are seven and 11, were keen to meet him and get a selfie when they came to town, like every other kid in Kukes. 

“Young people are so affected by these models, and they’re addicted to social media. Emigrants come back for a holiday, just for a few days, and it’s really hard for us,” Billa said. 

Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them. They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. “They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,” he said.

Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real. “I’m very concerned about it. There’s this emphasis for kids and teenagers to get rich quickly by emigrating. It’s ruining society. It’s a source of misinformation because it’s not real life. It’s just an illusion, to get likes and attention.”

And he knows that the TikTok videos that his nephews watch every day aren’t representative of what life is really like in the U.K. “They don’t tell the darker story,” he said.

In 2022, the number of people leaving Albania for the U.K. ticked up dramatically, as well as the number of those seeking asylum, at around 16,000, more than triple the previous year. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, one reason for the uptick in claims may be that Albanians who lack proper immigration status are more likely to be identified, leading them to claim asylum in order to delay being deported. But Albanians claiming asylum are also often victims of blood feuds — long-standing disputes between communities, often resulting in cycles of revenge — and viciously exploitative trafficking networks that threaten them and their families if they return to Albania.

By 2022, Albanian criminal gangs in Britain were in control of the country’s illegal marijuana-growing trade, taking over from Vietnamese gangs who had previously dominated the market. The U.K.’s lockdown — with its quiet streets and newly empty businesses and buildings — likely created the perfect conditions for setting up new cannabis farms all over the country. During lockdown, these gangs expanded production and needed an ever-growing labor force to tend the plants — growing them under high-wattage lamps, watering them and treating them with chemicals and fertilizers. So they started recruiting. 

Everyone in Kukes remembers it: The price of passage from Albania to the U.K. on a truck or small boat suddenly dropped when Covid-19 restrictions began to ease. Before the pandemic, smugglers typically charged 18,000 pounds (around $22,800) to take Albanians across the channel. But last year, posts started popping up on TikTok advertising knock-down prices to Britain starting at around 4,000 pounds (around $5,000). 

People in Kukes told me that even if they weren’t interested in being smuggled abroad, TikTok’s algorithm would feed them smuggling content — so while they were watching other unrelated videos, suddenly an anonymous post advertising cheap passage to the U.K. would appear on their “For You” feed.

TikTok became an important recruitment tool. Videos advertising “Black Friday sales” offered special discounts after Boris Johnson’s resignation, telling people to hurry before a new prime minister took office, or when the U.K. Home Office announced its policy to relocate migrants to Rwanda. People remember one post that even encouraged Albanians to come and pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II when she died in September last year. There was a sense of urgency to the posts, motivating people to move to the U.K. while they still could, lest the opportunity slip away. 

The videos didn’t go into detail about what lay just beneath the surface. Criminal gangs offered to pay for people’s passage to Britain, on the condition they worked for them when they arrived. They were then typically forced to work on cannabis farms to pay off the money they owed, according to anti-human trafficking advocacy groups and the families that I met in Kukes. 

“I imagined my first steps in England to be so different,” said David, 33, who first left Albania for Britain in 2014 after years of struggling to find a steady job. He could barely support his son, then a toddler, or his mother, who was having health problems and couldn’t afford her medicine. He successfully made the trip across the channel by stowing away in a truck from northern France. 

He still remembers the frightened face of the Polish driver who discovered him hiding in the wheel well of the truck, having already reached the outskirts of London. David made his way into the city and slept rough for several weeks. “I looked at everyone walking by, sometimes recognizing Albanians in the crowd and asking them to buy me bread. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.” 

He found himself half-hoping the police might catch him and send him home. “I was so desperate. But another part of me said to myself, ‘You went through all of these struggles, and now you’re going to give up?’”

David, who asked us to identify him with a pseudonym to protect his safety, found work in a car wash. He was paid 35 pounds (about $44) a day. “To me, it felt like a lot,” he said. “I concentrated on saving money every moment of the day, with every bite of food I took,” he told me, describing how he would live for three or four days on a tub of yogurt and a package of bread from the grocery chain Lidl, so that he could send money home to his family.

At the car wash, his boss told him to smile at the customers to earn tips. “That’s not something we’re used to in Albania,” he said. “I would give them the keys and try to smile, but it was like this fake, frozen, hard smile.”

Like David, many Albanians begin their lives in the U.K. by working in the shadow economy, often at car washes or construction sites where they’re paid in cash. While there, they can be targeted by criminal gangs with offers of more lucrative work in the drug trade. In recent years, gangs have funneled Albanian workers from the informal labor market into cannabis grow houses. 

David said he was careful to avoid the lure of gangsters. At the French border, someone recognized him as Albanian and approached, offering him a “lucky ticket” to England with free accommodation when he arrived. He knew what price he would have to pay — and ran. “You have to make deals with them and work for them,” he told me, “and then you get sucked into a criminal life forever.”

It’s a structure that traps people in a cycle of crime and debt: Once in the U.K., they have no documents and are at the mercy of their bosses, who threaten to report them to the police or turn them into the immigration authorities if they don’t do as they say. 

Gang leaders manipulate and intimidate their workers, said Anxhela Bruci, Albania coordinator at the anti-trafficking foundation Arise, who I met in Tirana, the Albanian capital. “They use deception, telling people, ‘You don’t have any documents, I’m going to report you to the police, I have evidence you have been working here.’ There’s that fear of going to prison and never seeing your family again.” 

Gangs, Bruci told me, will also make personal threats against the safety of their victims’ families. “They would say, ‘I'm going to kill your family. I'm going to kill your brother. I know where he lives.’ So you’re trapped, you’re not able to escape.”

She described how workers often aren’t allowed to leave the cannabis houses they’re working in, and are given no access to Wi-Fi or internet. Some are paid salaries of 600-800 pounds (about $760-$1,010) a month. Others, she added, are effectively bonded labor, working to pay back the money they owe for their passage to Britain. It’s a stark difference from the lavish lifestyles they were promised.

As for telling their friends and family back home about their situation, it’s all but impossible. “It becomes extremely dangerous to speak up,” said Bruci. Instead, once they do get online, they feel obliged to post a success story. “They want to be seen as brave. We still view the man as the savior of the family,” said Bruci, who is herself Albanian.

Bruci believes that some people posting on TikTok about their positive experience going to the U.K. could be “soldiers” for traffickers. “Some of them are also victims of modern slavery themselves and then they have to recruit people in order to get out of their own trafficking situation.”

As I was reporting this story, summer was just around the bend and open season for recruitment had begun. A quick search in Albanian on TikTok brought up a mass of new videos advertising crossings to the U.K. If you typed in "Angli" — Albanian for “England” — on TikTok the top three videos to appear all involved people making their way into the UK. One was a post advertising cheap crossings, and the other two were Albanians recording videos of their journeys across the channel. After we flagged this to TikTok, those particular posts were removed. New posts, however, still pop up every day.

With the British government laser-focused on small boat crossings, and drones buzzing over the beaches of northern France, traveling by truck was being promoted at a reduced price of 3,000 pounds (about $3,800). And a new luxury option was also on offer — speedboat crossings from Belgium to Britain that cost around 10,000 pounds (about $12,650) per person.

Kevin Morgan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety for Africa, Europe and the Middle East, said the company has a “zero tolerance approach to human smuggling and trafficking,” and permanently bans offending accounts. TikTok told me it had Albanian-speaking moderators working for the platform, but would not specify how many. 

In March, TikTok announced a new policy as part of this zero-tolerance approach. The company said it would automatically redirect users who searched for particular keywords and phrases to anti-trafficking sites. In June, the U.K.’s Border Force told the Times that they believed TikTok’s controls had helped lower the numbers of small boat crossings into Britain. Some videos used typos on purpose to get around TikTok’s controls. As recently as mid-August, a search on TikTok brought up a video with a menu of options to enter Britain — via truck, plane or dinghy.

In Kukes, residents follow British immigration policy with the same zeal as they do TikTok videos from Britain. They trade stories and anecdotes about their friends, brothers and husbands. Though their TikTok feeds rarely show the reality of life in London, some young people in Kukes know all is not as it seems.

“The conditions are very miserable, they don’t eat very well, they don’t wash their clothes, they don’t have much time to live their lives,” said Evis Zeneli, 26, as we scrolled through TikTok videos posted by her friends in the U.K., showing a constant stream of designer shopping trips to Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

It’s the same for a 19-year-old woman I met whose former classmate left last year. Going by his social media posts, life looks great — all fast cars and piles of British banknotes. But during private conversations, they talk about how difficult his life really is. The videos don’t show it, she told me, but he is working in a cannabis grow house. 

“He’s not feeling very happy. Because he doesn’t have papers, he’s obliged to work in this illegal way. But he says life is still better over there than it is here,” she said.

 “It’s like the boys have gone extinct,” she added. At her local park, which used to be a hangout spot for teenagers, she only sees old people now.

“There’s this huge silence,” agreed Albiona Thaçi, 33, whose husband traveled to the U.K. nine months ago in a small boat. When he left, she brought her two daughters to the seaside to try to take their mind off of the terrifying journey that their father had undertaken. Traveling across the English Channel in a fragile dinghy, he dropped his phone in the water, and they didn’t hear from him for days. “Everything went black,” Thaçi said. Eventually, her husband called from the U.K., having arrived safely. But she still doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. 

In her 12-apartment building, all the men have left. “Now we have this very communal feeling. Before, we used to knock on each others’ doors. Now, we just walk in and out.” But Thaçi’s friends have noticed that when they get together for coffee in the mornings, she’s often checked out of their conversation. “My heart, my mind, is in England,” she said. She plans to join her husband if he can get papers for her and their daughters. 

The absence of men hangs over everything. In the village of Shishtavec, in the mountains above Kukes, five women crowded around the television one afternoon when I visited. It was spring, but it still felt like winter. They were streaming a YouTube video of dozens of men from their village, all doing a traditional dance at a wedding — in London. 

“They’re doing the dance of men,” said Adelie Molla, 22. She had just come in from the cold, having collected water from the well up by the town mosque. The women told me that the weather had been mild this year. “The winter has gone to England,” laughed Molla’s mother Yaldeze, 53, whose son left for the U.K. seven months ago. Many people in their village have Bulgarian heritage, meaning they can apply for European passports and travel to Britain by plane, without needing to resort to small boats.

The whole family plans to eventually migrate to Britain and reunite. “For better or worse I have to follow my children,” said Yaldeze, who has lived in the village her whole life. She doesn’t speak a word of English. “I’m going to be like a bird in a cage.” 

Around the town, some buildings are falling into disrepair while others are half-finished, the empty window-frames covered in plastic sheeting. A few houses look brand new, but the windows are dark. Adelie explained that once people go to the U.K., they use the money they make there to build houses in their villages. The houses lie empty, except when the emigrants come to visit. And when they come back to visit their hometown, they drive so that they can show off cars with U.K. license plates — proof they’ve made it. 

 “This village is emptying out,” Molla said, describing the profound boredom that had overtaken her life. “Maybe after five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London.”

The oldest settlements of Kukes date back to the fourth century. In the 1960s, when Albania’s communist government decided to build a hydropower dam, the residents of Kukes all had to leave their homes and relocate further up the mountain to build a new city, while the ancient city was flooded beneath an enormous reservoir. And in the early 1970s, under Enver Hoxha’s paranoid communist regime, an urban planner was tasked with building an underground version of Kukes, where 10,000 people could live in bunkers for six months in the event of an invasion. A vast network of tunnels still lies beneath the city today. 

“Really, there are three Kukeses,” one local man told me: the Kukes where we were walking around, the subterranean Kukes beneath our feet, and the Kukes underwater. But even the Kukes of today is a shadow of its former self, a town buried in the memories of the few residents who remain.

David was deported from Britain in 2019 after police stopped him at a London train station. He tried to return to the U.K. in December 2022 by hiding in a truck but couldn’t get past the high-tech, high-security border in northern France. He is now back in Kukes, struggling to find work. 

He wanted me to know he was a patriotic person who, given the chance to have a good life, would live in Albania forever. But, he added, “You don’t understand how much I miss England. I talk in English, I sing in English, I cook English food, and I don’t want my soul to depart this earth without going one more time to England.”

He still watches social media reels of Albanians living in the U.K. “Some people get lucky and get rich. But when you see it on TikTok or Instagram, it might not even be real.” 

Besmir Billa, whose nephews worry him with their TikTok aspirations, has set himself a challenge. He showed me his own TikTok account, which he started last summer.

The grid is full of videos showcasing the beauty of Kukes: clips of his friends walking through velvety green mountains, picking flowers and petting wild horses. “I’m testing myself to see if TikTok can be used for a good thing,” he told me. 

“The idea I had is to express something valuable, not something silly. I think this is something people actually need,” he said. During the spring festival, a national holiday in Albania when the whole country pours onto the streets to celebrate the end of winter, he posted a video showing young people in the town giving flowers to older residents. 

At first, his nephews were “not impressed” by their uncle’s page. But then, the older boy clocked the total number of views on the spring festival video: 40,000 and counting. 

The post The Albanian town that TikTok emptied appeared first on Coda Story.

It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct. Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”

“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. 

Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers, then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers, bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.

Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when everyone was having lunch.

He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.” Over the years, Schwab has bred beavers and helped numerous communities across Europe with reintroductions — always in partnership with local wildlife management schemes. Rubbers showed Schwab some official-looking papers, all stamped and in French. Schwab had no idea that Rubbers was introducing the beavers into their new surroundings without local approval. 

“I had all the authorizations I needed,” Rubbers said. “Which, in my mind, meant no authorization.”

“He bombs quite a bit,” Schwab admitted about Rubbers. “He wanted to do something for nature.” 

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.

Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. 

Some, like Rubbers, have no background in conservation. Others have scientific credentials and feel an urgent need to restore nature’s ecosystems by taking matters into their own hands.

The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were on the verge of extinction in Europe. They were hunted for their prized pelts and scent glands, and by 1900, there were just 1,200 left. Now, beavers are back from the brink, with the current European population estimated at about 1.5 million — and conservationists and rewilders agree that beaver bombers are partly to thank.

Floods, wildfires and droughts have become multi-trillion-dollar problems in the 21st century, ravaging the landscape from Bangladesh to Belgium. As the world burns and biodiversity hits a crisis point, rewilding — the process of letting nature restore itself — can feel like a hopeful refuge. Beavers, ecologists say, may be part of the solution.

The healthy wetland systems beavers create can sequester large amounts of carbon, according to climate scientists. Slowing down river flow helps the land act like a sponge, storing and holding more water, so it is more resilient to flooding and drought.

“Beavers work for free, they work weekends, they work round the clock increasing the groundwater and being a motor for biodiversity,” Schwab said. 

In the U.S., after Oregon’s devastating forest fires in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks in the land. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

“I think beaver bombers are the heroes of our time,” said Ben Goldsmith, a British financier, writer and environmentalist who is a passionate supporter of rewilding. “A human lifetime is short — why should I not be the one that gets to see wildcats back on Dartmoor? Why should I not live in a country with beavers when they’re supposed to be there?”

I asked Goldsmith if he’d participated in rogue reintroductions. “Had I been involved in beaver bombing more widely,” he said, “I don’t think I’d tell you.” Until last year, Goldsmith served as a director for the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His older brother, Zac, is a former member of parliament and the U.K.’s current international environment minister.

For ecologist and author Alex Morss, the fringe of the rewilding movement and its powerful backers are a problem. “Who cleans up the bill for illegal anonymous rogue rewilding if things go wrong?” she wrote to me in an email. Alongside a number of scientists working in ecology and conservation, Morss worries about the pitfalls ahead if people are encouraged to take matters into their own hands to address species loss. 

Maverick rewilding, she says, could increase the chances of conflicts between humans and wildlife, spread disease and actively harm biodiversity by introducing the wrong animals into the wrong environments. “There are also releasers who are skirting around the law or outright breaking it,” Morss added. “Or making decisions based on personal bias rather than ecological expertise, rather than lawful, professional and evidence-based conservation done carefully and less glamorously.” 

Beavers are capable of destroying valuable trees, eating crops and flooding farmland. In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there. It was, as one ecologist explained to me, a “wild west.”

Morss said she welcomes “true” rewilding but is concerned that the movement is being co-opted by a privileged few who want to turn nature’s last refuges into “eco Disneyland.”

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding.

Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. 

“The British government and European governments are foot-dragging,” said Tim Kendall, who wrote a book about beaver bombing with his wife, Fiona Mathews, the chair of Mammals Conservation Europe and a professor of environmental biology at Sussex University. “You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.” 

Goldsmith is vocal about what he sees as a reactionary fifth column within the nature conservation movement. “There are these gray figures that lurk in the background of government agencies and other bodies, who kill off these projects before they have a chance to happen,” he said. “These are people who are governed by caution and say, ‘We’ve got to make sure every possible angle is researched to death.’ They don’t feel the urgency.”

The rewilding fringe believes that something more radical than scientific reintroduction and conservation programs that are implemented at a sloth-like pace is necessary. According to Mathews, there is a “grudging acknowledgment” among scientists that without the maverick rewilders, “we’d just get nowhere. We’ve been talking about reintroducing beavers in many countries for years and years, and basically, nothing happens.”

Derek Gow told me that he believes change will never come if the rules are always followed. Gow, 58, worked for a decade as a sheep farmer in Devon, in southern England, but is now one of the loudest voices in the maverick rewilding movement. He had his moment of reckoning when a pair of curlews — a European wading bird species — disappeared from his farm. They died, Gow says, because there was nowhere left for them to take cover, feed or breed. “How solemn and how sad that is,” he said. “They died because we had mowed everything to a bowling green with the sheep.” 

After the birds were gone, Gow began to see his farm work as a model for perfect destruction. He observed the men alongside him, who had worked in agriculture all their lives. “They can remember the last of the gray partridge or the glow worms. And even though they’ve done nothing for nature, they’ve done nothing other than continue their destruction; when their time finishes, that’s the thing they’ll remember.”

Gow now runs a 300-acre rewilding project in Devon with financial support from Goldsmith, among others. He spends his days among wildcats, Iron-Age pigs, wild horses, beavers and storks. He wakes up every morning to a cacophony of birds singing from the trees. He describes them to me as we talk on the phone: bluetits and stonechats flit above him, a water shrew runs past his feet.

Gow is resolute: He thinks the time has passed for doing things slowly and carefully. “I do wonder how the people who administer these things — who display the most incredible caution and naivety and a lack of willingness to do anything — really feel when they finish a long, long career and have achieved absolutely fuck all.”

I ask if he sees himself as a beaver-bomber, a maverick or a rogue rewilder. “I would describe myself as a human being concerned about the fate of the natural world,” he said, “at this time of colossal extinction, crisis and ecological collapse. I’m not interested in any other titles.”

Gow recently gifted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson a beaver pelt. Johnson has been vocal and enthusiastic about rewilding. “We’re going to rewild parts of the country and consecrate a total of 30% to nature,” he said in 2021 to rousing applause during his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back. And if that isn’t conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is.”

“Build Back Beaver!” he added. Johnson tried to give his father Stanley a pair of beavers for his Somerset farm but was reportedly thwarted by his own government’s regulations. 

Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite. The medieval 3,500-acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, owned by Baronet Sir Charles Burrell, is perhaps the country’s most famous rewilding project. King Charles III has a wildlife retreat in Transylvania, a rewilding mecca known as “Europe’s Yellowstone.”

Goldsmith jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I've got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”

This is a sticking point for Morss. “Is it healthy that a class of elite unelected people are using their wealth and privilege and influence to make changes to places, rather than with places and their communities of ‘plebs’ who live and work there and don't get a say?” she said. “It feels like a form of ecocolonialism.”

In Scotland, a cohort of millionaires, billionaires and corporations known as the “green lairds” have bought up huge swathes of the Highlands for rewilding and carbon-offsetting nature restoration programs. Among them is fast-fashion Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Swedish Tetra Pak heiresses Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing and pension funds Aviva and Standard Life. The green laird movement has been criticized as “a greenwashed land-grab” that’s pushing up the price of land in the country and shutting out local communities. The Scottish Land Commission has reported to the Scottish government that the ownership of land by so few people in Scotland is tantamount to a monopoly.

“It is not democratic or always particularly wise when restoration ‘'rewilding’ is led by unqualified, rich hobbyists,” said Morss.

Across Holch Povlsen’s land, forests are beginning to regenerate. The project has been praised by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as “Scotland’s most exciting and celebrated forest recovery project.” There have been increased reported sightings of ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels and pine martens — all incredibly rare creatures in modern Britain. The manifesto for Holch Povlsen’s project, Wildland, says it aims to build “a culture of mutual respect with our communities” and “to support the viability of the local economy and improve quality of life.” But British online retail giant ASOS, the company that helped Holch Povlsen make his billions, has been criticized in the past for having an entirely different mission, with investigations revealing how the brand has used child sweatshops and contributed to the fast-fashion industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

Holch Povlsen and the Rausing sisters have contributed funding for a study exploring the implications of reintroducing the lynx to the Highlands, a predator that hasn’t been seen in Scotland since the Middle Ages. They’re still known in Holch Povlsen and the Rausings’ native Scandinavia as “the ghosts of the forest,” moving silently through the land while they hunt their prey. 

Reintroducing the lynx could well be in the plans of rogue rewilders too. “I wouldn't be surprised,” said Goldsmith, “if we started seeing lynx popping up in different parts of Europe where they've been absent.”

The hope in bringing back the lynx to the Highlands would be to see it help naturally control Scotland’s deer population and restore the overgrazed landscape, with minimal human interaction. 

Thomas Cameron, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Essex, is skeptical. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land, scientifically speaking,” he said. “It sounds nice. It's really pretty. It's a good story. It attracts lots of money, but it's not going to reduce deer numbers.” He added that it would take hundreds of years to have an effect — “and we need less deer tomorrow.”

Cameron works on an above-the-table beaver reintroduction project in Essex, which he said is already helping to reduce flooding in the local area. But he said he is wary of “false promises” made by advocates for species reintroduction. “Beavers aren't going to save biodiversity. They're not going to stop climate change by improving carbon sequestration,” he said.

Species reintroduction has limits — and it’s not going to fix the planet’s problems, he said. “The idea that that’s somehow some kind of utopia to get to is also quite dangerous.” The science, he insisted, “tells us that it's simply not true. And the science tells us we’re at a crisis point.” 

Cameron, who hails from northeastern Scotland, is also frustrated by how much Scotland, rather than England, features in the imagination of the people who want to reintroduce predators to the ecosystem. “It’s always about Scotland — ‘Oh it’s wild, let’s go to Scotland’ — despite the fact that people are poorer there than they are in the south. They lead shorter lives. Making a living from the rural environment is more challenging. We've got people with limited opportunities, and we want to put it on them.” 

In continental Europe, rifts are emerging between rewilding projects and local agricultural communities. In Asturias, in northwestern Spain, some farmers are furious about the presence of wolves among them. Spain’s wolf population, once close to being wiped out, has grown since the 1970s to become the largest in Europe at around 2,500 wolves. They kill around 11,000 livestock a year, for which farmers are compensated by the state. But when the government introduced a law banning people from shooting or hunting the wolves, it led to outrage. In May, a protest culminated with locals dumping two decapitated wolf heads on the steps of a town hall. 

“The human-wildlife conflict isn’t far away,” tweeted local wildlife photographer Luke Massey with a photo of the bloody heads. 

In Italy, the far-right government is busy dismantling hunting regulations and laws protecting wildlife. When a rewilded bear in Trentino mauled a jogger to death in April, the right-wing governor of the region took a reactionary stance: cull the bear. The governor has since embarked on a one-man mission to deport 70 more bears from the region. There were wider calls for rewilding projects to be scrapped. “We need to kill them all and close the discussion,” wrote one Twitter user when the jogger was attacked. “Fuck bears and animals,” said another. Viewers on Italian TV were invited to answer “yes” or “no” to the question, “Should the bear be put to death?” 

In May, news spread that beavers had turned up on the River Tiber, upstream from Rome. “They must be removed,” said Claudio Barbaro, the Italian undersecretary for the environment. He added that the beavers had “entered illegally,” using language that surreally echoed the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, up by the Belarusian border, beavers and humans are working together. Ukrainian military commanders say beaver-made wetland systems, with their swampy terrain and waterlogged landscape, are helping to protect the country from Russian attacks, creating a natural barrier along the frontier that’s difficult for tanks and infantry to traverse.

With his bandana and grizzled white beard, Gerhard Schwab stands out among the dark-suited crowd of business travelers at the Munich airport arrivals gate. We drive straight out into the Bavarian countryside. Swinging on his keyring in the ignition is a fat little cuddly-toy beaver. 

“When I was a child, there were a lot more edges between the fields,” he says, as we drive past huge, featureless pastureland, the neat green crops rippling in the early summer sunshine. “Now it’s just fucking green. Back then you had everything. All kinds of wild plants. All the small ditches, all the small creeks — they’re all gone.” 

He takes me to a rare scrap of wilderness. The pocket of meadow, right next to a busy autobahn, has been transformed into a vibrant wetland. Bright blue dragonflies dip across the water, and the air seems to vibrate with birdsong. Schwab points to something in the distance, and I can see a pile of sticks: a beaver lodge.

We hear the two-note call of a cuckoo. I’ve never heard it before, though it was a familiar sound for my mother, who grew up in Surrey in the 1960s. Europe has lost 550 million birds since she was a child, and in Britain, cuckoo numbers have crashed by 70%. The cuckoo’s distinctive call is a traditional symbol of the start of summer. But most children in the U.K. will grow up never hearing it. 

The strange sorrow we feel when we confront this world without our fellow creatures has a name: “species loneliness.” Isolated from nature, we feel an existential loss for how the world once looked and sounded.

For Ben Goldsmith, his despair over the destruction of our wild places intersects with his own grief over the sudden loss of his teenage daughter, Iris. A lifelong lover of nature, she died, aged 15, in a farm vehicle accident in 2019. He has since given his farm over to rewilding. The spot where Iris died is marked with a stone circle. Not far off, along the stream threading through his land, a family of beavers has appeared.

“The family on my land happened to make their own way there, which is sort of a beautiful irony,” Goldsmith said. “They appeared by magic at a time in my life when I really needed and wanted that. It was one of the happiest events of my life.”

Beavers are resilient creatures. When the Khakova dam collapsed in Ukraine in May, it unleashed a torrent of chemicals and toxic oil into the surrounding landscape, with untold amounts of debris flowing into the Black Sea. But amid the waterlogged wreckage of Kherson, a lone beaver was seen wandering the streets. “OK, I’ve got work to do!” one British tabloid quipped in a caption of the video. Beavers are used to rebuilding, restoring and fixing what’s been broken.

Schwab feels sure beavers will long outlive us. After all, they have roamed the Earth far longer than humans — the oldest fossil is around 30 million years old. “When my bones and your bones are gone,” he says, “the beaver will still be here.”

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This poses problems for governments as they grapple with the prospect of integrating AI into the way they operate. It’s likely that AI will soon touch many parts of our lives, but it doesn’t need to be an AI controlled by the likes of OpenAI and Google.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a London-based think tank, recently began advocating for the U.K. to create its own sovereign AI model — an initiative that some British media outlets have dubbed “ChatGB.” The idea is to create a British-flavored tech backbone that underpins large swaths of public services, free from the control of major U.S.-based platforms. Being “entirely dependent on external providers,” says the Institute, would be a “risk to our national security and economic competitiveness.”

Sovereign AIs stand in stark contrast to the most prominent tools of the moment. The large language models that underpin tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built using data scraped from across the internet, and their inner workings are controlled by private enterprises.

In a 100-page “technical report” accompanying the release of GPT-4, its latest large language model, OpenAI declined to share information about how its model was trained or what information it was trained on, citing safety risks and “the competitive landscape” (read: “we don’t want competitors to see how we built our tech”). The decision was widely criticized. Indeed, the company could put its code out there and cleanse data sets to avoid posing any risk to individuals’ data privacy or safety. This kind of transparency would allow experts to audit the model and identify any risks it might pose.

Developing a sovereign AI would allow countries to know how their model was trained and what data it was trained on, according to Benedict Macon-Cooney, the chief policy strategist at the Tony Blair Institute.

“It allows you to — to some extent — instill your values in the model,” said Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at HuggingFace, an open source AI platform and research group. “Each model does encode values.” Indeed, while 96% of the planet lives outside the United States, most big tech products are developed by a tiny, relatively elite group of people in the U.S. who tend to build technology encoded with libertarian, Silicon Valley-style ideals.

That’s been true for social media historically, and it is also coming through with AI: A 2022 academic paper by researchers from HuggingFace showed that the ghost in the AI machine has an American accent — meaning that most of the training data, and most of the people coding the model itself, are American. “The cultural stereotypes that are encoded are very, very American,” said Luccioni. But with a sovereign AI model, Luccioni says, “you can choose sources that come from your country, and you can choose the dialects that come from your country.”

That’s vital given the preponderance of English-language models and the paucity of AI models in other languages. While there are more than 7,000 languages spoken and written worldwide, the vast majority of the internet, upon which these models are trained, is written in English. “English is the dominant language, because of British imperialism and because of American trade,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who recently published a paper on the issue. “These models are trained on a predominant model of English language data and carry over these assumptions and values that are encoded into the English language, specifically the American English language.”

A big exception, of course, is China. Models developed by Chinese companies are sovereign almost by default because they are built using data that is drawn primarily from the internet in China, where the information ecosystem is heavily influenced by the state and the Communist party. Nevertheless, China’s economy is big enough that it is able to sustain independent development of robust tools. “I think the goal isn't necessarily that everything be made in China or innovated in China, but it's to avoid reliance on foreign countries,” said Graham Webster, a research scholar and the editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

There are lots of ways to develop such models, according to Macon-Cooney, of the Blair Institute, some of which could become highly specific to government interests. “You can actually build large language models around specific ideas,” he explained. “One practical example where a government might want to do that is building a policy Al.” The model would be fed previously published policy papers going back decades, many of which are often scrapped only to be brought back by a successive government, thus building up the model’s understanding of policy that could then be used to reduce the workload on public servants. Similar models could be developed for education or health, says Macon-Cooney. “You just need to find a use case for your actual specific outcome, which the government needs to do,” he said. “Then begin to build up that capability, feed in the right learnings, and build that expertise up in-house.”

The European Union is a prime example of a supranational organization that could benefit from its vast data reserves to make its own sovereign AI, says Luccioni. “They have a lot of underexploited data,” she said, pointing to the multilingual corpus of the European Parliament’s hearings, for instance. The same is true of India, where the controversial Aadhaar digital identification system could put the vast volumes of data it collects to use to develop an AI model. India’s ministers have already hinted they are doing just that and have confirmed in interviews that AI will soon be layered into the Aadhaar system. In a multilingual country like India, that comes with its own problems. “We're seeing a large push towards Hindi becoming a national language, at the expense of the regional and linguistic diversity of the country,” said Bhatia.

Developing your own AI costs a lot of money — which Macon-Cooney says governments might struggle with. “If you look at the economics side of this, I think there is a deep question of whether a government can actually begin to spend, let alone actually begin to get that expertise, in house,” he said. The U.K. announced, in its March 2023 budget, a plan to spend $1.1 billion on a new exascale supercomputer that would be put to work developing AI. A month later, it topped that up with an additional $124 million to fund an AI taskforce that will be supported by the Alan Turing Institute, a government-affiliated research center that gets its name from one of the first innovators of AI.

One solution to the money problem is to collaborate. “Sovereign initiatives can’t really work because any one nation or one organization is, unless they're very, very rich, going to have trouble getting the talent to compute and the data necessary for training language models,”  Luccioni said. “It really makes a lot of sense for people to pool resources.” 

But working together can nullify the reason sovereign AIs are so attractive in the first place.

Luccioni believes that the European Union will struggle to develop a sovereign AI because of the number of stakeholders involved who would have to coalesce around a single position to develop the model in the first place. “What happens if there’s 13% Basque in the data and 21% Finnish?” she asked. “It’s going to come with a lot of red tape that companies don’t have, and so it’s going to be hard to be as agile as OpenAI.” Finland for its part has developed a sovereign AI project, called Aurora, that is meant to streamline processes for providing a range of services for citizens. But progress has been slow, mostly due to the project’s scale.

There’s also the challenge of securing the underlying hardware. While the U.K. has announced $1 billion in funding for the development of its exascale computer, it pales in comparison with what OpenAI has. “They have 27 times the size just to run ChatGPT than the whole of the British state has itself,” Macon-Cooney said. “So one private lab is many, many magnitudes bigger than the government.” That could force governments looking to develop sovereign models into the arms of the same old tech companies under the guise of supplying cloud computing to train the models — which comes with its own problems.

And even if you can bring down the computing power — and the associated costs — needed to run a sovereign AI model, you still need the expertise. Governments may struggle to attract talent in an industry dominated by private sector companies that can likely pay more and offer more opportunities to innovate.

“The U.K. will be blown out of the water unless it begins to think quite deliberately about how it builds this up,” said Macon-Cooney.

Luccioni sees some signs of promise for countries looking to develop their own AIs, with talented developers wanting to work differently. “I know a lot of my friends who are working at big research companies and big tech companies are getting really frustrated by the closed nature of them,” she said. “A lot of them are talking about going back to academia — or even government.”

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

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“Yes, it’s disturbing,” admitted Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s general manager of AI programs, when news of the patent hit the headlines. For some, the notion of talking to a loved one from beyond the grave elicited feelings of revulsion and fear, something that philosophy researchers Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler call “the ick factor.” In October 2022, the U.K. researchers, based at Exeter and Cardiff universities respectively, published “Communing with the Dead Online,” a research paper that looks at the role that chatbots could play in the grieving process. Since then, the capabilities of artificial intelligence large language models have snowballed — and their influence on our lives. Krueger and Osler say we should consider how chatbots might help us in our darkest days by continuing our relationship with loved ones after they’ve died. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What role could a chatbot potentially play after a person has died?

Lucy: Sadly, Joe's dad died while we were researching this, which added a very different texture to the writing experience. It changed a lot of the conversations we were having around it.

Joel: I started thinking more carefully about some of the ways I wanted not just to preserve his memory but to create more active, and maybe dynamic, ways of maintaining his presence in my life. I started thinking about what role chatbots and more sophisticated technologies might play  in maintaining a continuing bond with him. 

For what it's worth, I'm still undecided. I'm not sure I'd want a chatbot of my father. But I started thinking more about this issue in that very real context, as I was negotiating my own grief. 

Tell me about the ‘ick factor’ — this response that I’m even having right now, thinking about talking to a family member via a chatbot from beyond the grave.

Lucy: If someone turns around and says, ‘Did you know that we can now create a chatbot of the dead that impersonates someone's style of voice?’ A very common reaction is: ‘gross,’ ‘ew,’ ‘that's really scary.’ There’s that kind of knee-jerk reaction. But we think that there might be interesting and complicated things to unpack there. People have this instinctive ick factor when it comes to conversing with the dead. There’s an old Chinese ritual, where there would be a paid impersonator of the dead person at a funeral who would play the role of the deceased, and I think lots of Western ears find that kind of startling and a bit strange. Historically, we recognize that. But because something’s unfamiliar is not a reason to say well, that’s got no worth at all. Grieving practices come in all shapes and forms. 

Do you think talking with a chatbot, after someone has died, would interrupt the natural grieving process? Or the stages of grief like denial, bargaining and acceptance?

Lucy: Using a chatbot of the dead isn’t about denying someone has died. It's about readjusting to a world where you're very aware that they have died, without letting go of various habits of intimacy. You don't have to just move on in a very stark sense. We can have a kind of nuanced and ongoing adjustment to someone's death and take time to emotionally adjust to the absence we now feel, as we learn to inhabit the world without them.

Joel: We've always employed various technologies to find ways to maintain a connection with the dead, and this is just one new form of these technologies. There are lots of ways of getting stuck, and certainly, we can get trapped in those patterns of not accepting the loss. For instance, someone could wake up each day, go through the same pictures, watch the same videos, scroll the same Facebook page. It's unclear to me whether there's any greater threat when it comes to chatbots. Chatbots do provide a much richer form of reciprocity, a kind of back-and-forth in which the person may feel more present than if we're just looking at a picture of them. 

Yes — and there are now AI programs that allow you to talk and interact with a video or hologram version of the person that has died. 

Joel: Yes! Since our research came out late last year, the world has already moved on so much. And some of the grief technology now already seems worlds ahead of a chatbot that's confined to some little textbox on a screen or a phone. 

Lucy: If you think about the “Be Right Back” episode of “Black Mirror,” it has some interesting implications for what the near future might look like. But I think we should be able to say that a chatbot and a living robot replica of a dead partner are different things. 

What are things you worry about with tech companies offering these so-called ‘chatbots of the dead’? 

Lucy: I am much more concerned, for instance, about data being sold from these programs. Or about these things being created as to be deliberately addictive. 

Joel: Or targeted advertising used on them, when you’re grieving. Imagine if you had a chatbot of your dead father, let's say, that you could activate anytime you want. You might say, ‘Dad, I’m feeling kind of low today. I really miss you.’ And he says, ‘I'm really sorry to hear that sweetheart. Why don't you go get the new frappuccino at Starbucks for lunch, and that will help elevate your mood?’

Funnily enough, that’s something my dad probably would say. 

Joel: You can imagine those kinds of targeted ads being built into the technology or very subtle, algorithmically calibrated ways to kind of keep you engaged and potentially keeping you stuck in the grief process as a way of driving user engagement. 

I think our concern is more about the people who are designing the chatbots than it is about the individuals who are using them. The real focus needs to be on issues of transparency, privacy and regulation. The motivations that people have for designing this sort of tech should be as a tool, as a continuing bond, instead of something that they want you to come back to again and again and again. And I realize that sounds a bit hopelessly naive when you're talking about companies that are driven first and foremost by driving profit.

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In the U.S., one special breed of telehealth companies tends to focus on “wellness” issues common among people in their 20s and 30s: Companies like Cerebral, Hims & Hers, Keeps and Mindbloom offer a quick path to prescription medications for anxiety, depression, sexual health and skin-related issues. They also tend to feature a sleek, Instagram-friendly aesthetic.

Hims, launched in 2017, uses the tagline: “Telehealth for a healthy, handsome you.” For years, I’d noticed ads for Hers, its sister brand, dotting my social media feeds and featuring on the walls of subway cars. I finally visited the Hers website and found a banner stretched across the homepage: “Anxiety treatment, no insurance required. START YOUR FREE ASSESSMENT,” it read. Curious to learn more, I clicked on the link.

After a short intake assessment, the platform told me to wait for a provider evaluation that would also take place entirely online. If prescribed, the medication would be delivered to my door, as soon as possible. In the meantime, I could browse the site to see what kinds of drugs they prescribe. Brand names like Lexapro, Wellbutrin and Zoloft float across the sections for medication featuring the website’s calming, sage-green color palette. The site also sells health and sex-adjacent products like melatonin gummies (to help you “get the sleep of your dreams”) and USB-rechargeable vibrators (because “life’s too short for boring sex”). The familiar shopping cart icon in the upper right corner of the site reinforced the idea that I was here to buy something, not to seek a professional medical consultation.

It felt almost too easy. I didn’t see it through — I see a regular doctor at a regular brick-and-mortar clinic. But it left me wondering how other people might understand — or misunderstand — what the service really offers. Hims & Hers and companies like it often adopt the language of telehealth that we see coming from established healthcare providers, a practice that might give consumers the impression that the company has their best interests at heart. But these companies aren’t regulated in the same way that traditional healthcare providers are. And they are out to make money. In the first half of 2021 alone, venture capitalists invested nearly $15 billion into digital health companies.

In the eyes of Dr. Adrianne Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology researcher at Georgetown University, “there's real telehealth and there's fake telehealth.” Real telehealth, she explained, was an asset during the worst periods of the pandemic. And for years, it has helped people with limited mobility, or those who live in far-flung places, get access to specialist clinicians who tend to work in big city hospitals.

But then there are fake telehealth outfits, which Fugh-Berman described as “companies who are really just bypassing clinicians to provide drugs to patients.” 

“There's a prescriber involved,” she said, and that clinician does provide some level of safety. But she cautioned that they ultimately answer to the telehealth company, not to a traditional medical institution. “Their job is to prescribe you drugs,” said Fugh-Berman. If they deny a lot of people drugs, “they are not going to keep that job.” 

In traditional healthcare, patients typically see a primary care provider who can recommend treatment, medication or otherwise, with their full health status and history in mind. Although traditional healthcare institutions have been caught bending to the interests of big pharma — a major factor in the U.S. opioid crisis — there are regulatory measures in place to prevent this. New-fangled telehealth companies do not have the same guardrails.

Fugh-Berman runs Georgetown's PharmedOut program, a project to help educate healthcare professionals on pharmaceutical marketing practices. According to PharmedOut's resources, companies that use direct-to-consumer advertising are not subject to FDA regulations if they provide “disease awareness,” even though these sorts of campaigns can “lead to the overuse of marginally effective or potentially dangerous drugs for minor conditions.” PharmedOut warns that this practice can harm public health, especially as more companies rely on social media ads to get in front of potential customers.

Although it’s rare, plenty of the antidepressants that these companies prescribe can cause serotonin syndrome, a serious and potentially fatal response. The anxiety drug propranolol, described by Hims & Hers as a medication that can help you ace “a public speaking engagement, interview, or audition,” can trigger asthma attacks for people with the disease. Last year, Bloomberg investigated the telehealth company Cerebral, which focuses on mental health treatment, and found that patients were prescribed medications that led to complications and even death from overdoses. In short, the actual health risks that these companies might present for consumers are real.

Then there’s the matter of the telehealth companies’ business model. Alongside payments for the services they provide, companies like Hims & Hers also collect a good deal of customer data. We all know what it’s like to be asked to consent to the terms of service of data privacy agreements. They’re incredibly long, written in legalese and impossible to negotiate with. If you want the service, you select “I agree” and hope for the best.

The mere fact that these companies deal with people’s health data might make customers think that it will be covered by HIPAA, the U.S. federal law that requires healthcare and insurance providers to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent. But just because you’re sharing your health data does not mean it’s protected. In fact, Hims & Hers’ privacy policy mentions that it is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA. This suggests that the company is collecting demographic data and medical information, as well as images and messages, all on behalf of the diagnosing providers and with no guarantee of privacy protection under U.S. law. We asked Hims & Hers for more information about their business and how they handle customer data but did not receive a response prior to publication.

What happens to your data after it is collected? Researchers have shown that it can be bought and sold by third-party data brokers. Last year, The Markup reported that private information about the medications prescribed through telehealth services (Hims & Hers was among those they tested) had been shared with Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Snapchat. This data is often used to improve ad-targeting and prompt customers to purchase even more products or services based on their browsing habits. But it could be used or abused in other ways, too.

The lack of HIPAA oversight over some telehealth companies is a concern for Keith Porcaro, who researches law and technology at Duke University. He explained that these kinds of companies can get around privacy protections that traditional healthcare companies would otherwise be subject to and said that regulations need to catch up with the market.

“Companies like this are changing people's expectations about healthcare,” he said. “There's an assumption, especially if you talk to doctors, that there's sort of one model of getting care: You go to your doctor and rely on doctors for everything. Putting doctor shortages aside, there’s a lot of evidence that says that most people take care of most of their health problems on their own,” Porcaro told me.

Bypassing traditional healthcare routes in favor of for-profit, start-up companies may be making consumers more vulnerable to medical misinformation. Influenced by a growing self-care movement that has popularized the idea that “you know your situation best,” consumers increasingly turn to these companies. 

Porcaro puts some of this on people’s legitimate “mistrust of the medical establishment,” based on their negative experiences with traditional healthcare. In a 2022 Pew research study on race and disparities in healthcare, more than 70% of Black female respondents between the ages of 18 and 49 said that they had had a negative experience with healthcare providers, ranging from pain they reported not being taken seriously to being treated with less respect than other patients. The same report found that most Black Americans were skeptical of “medical researchers when it comes to issues of openness and accountability” and suspected that misconduct in medical research remains just as likely to happen today as in the past. Long-standing stigma may drive prospective patients to seek alternative routes to healthcare. But people looking for quick solutions might be willing to accept help from just about anyone. 

“People who are going to services like this, especially mental health or addiction treatment, are vulnerable,” Porcaro said. And they’re not just vulnerable to misinformation, he said, “they're vulnerable to actual harm.”

The convenience and branding of telehealth start-ups may have plenty of appeal for Gen Zers and people with legitimate reservations about the medical establishment. But they come with some serious trade-offs that could affect your health data — and your health itself.

CORRECTION [05/15/2023 11:08 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said Duke University lawyer and technologist Keith Porcaro. Keith Porcaro researches law and technology at Duke University.

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Writer Brett Scott has been covering how the banks are working towards a cashless world and what’s in it for them. His 2022 book, Cloudmoney, chronicles “cash, cards, cryptocurrency — and the war for our wallets.” He’s skeptical about the idea that the world is heading, irrevocably, for a future where cash doesn’t exist, where we can pay for everything with the swipe of a smartwatch or the blink of an eye.

Scott argues that a cashless society would sound the death knell for small businesses, and wipe out any remaining privacy we have, paving the way for a fully-fledged surveillance system. He’s campaigning for us to hold on to cash —- old, slow, and dirty as it may seem — if we want to hold onto our freedom.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment in your personal life where you were suddenly switched on to the implications of a cashless future?

I've had a high degree of tech skepticism since I was very young. I was always suspicious of being told that I had to endlessly update. I was then working in finance and I also had a background in economic anthropology. I noticed a lot of the conversation around cashless societies was deeply inaccurate. People had internalized this idea that digital money was an upgrade to cash. They say things like — “my grandmother still likes cash, but she’ll eventually have to get with the times.” But really, they’re two systems that work in parallel. 

Are you saying people shouldn’t use digital money?

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if you didn’t have another option, the digital payments system would become very oppressive. Think of it like Uber versus bicycles. So we might like the Uber system and find it convenient, but we don't want our entire transport under the control of Uber, right? Uber can be a positive thing — so long as you have the choice to not use it. Bikes can’t take you on long trips, they’re more localized. But they have their advantages. You can get around when there are traffic jams, you have autonomy over a bike, you control it yourself — and you can’t be tracked while riding them. 

Have you been following what Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been doing recently? She’s had quite a lot of backlash for saying cash is still king. 

Well, she's actually — bizarrely enough — the only politician that I know right now who is channeling a pretty left-wing take on money. And she’s absolutely right in the sense that all digital money is private. Cash is a public form of money issued by central banks or state entities. Whereas anything you see in a bank account is privately issued by the bank. Think of bank deposits like digital casino chips. And I've almost never seen a politician that actually understands that. So when Meloni says that the “cashless society is like the privatization of payments,” it's absolutely true.

But she has had a lot of criticism. People are claiming she’s helping uphold Italy’s black market and all the criminality and tax evasion that goes with it.

If you want to create a hygienic society and destroy all forms of black market deviance, whether it's criminal or not, you’ll end up with corporate domination. Let's say you try to crush all forms of shitty behavior by forcing everybody to use the banking sector. Well, now you’ve created a whole bunch of new problems. You've created serious resilience problems in the economy. You’ve created credible new vectors for inequality. Your banking elites, your tech elite, suddenly now control everything: all access to economic interaction in your society. If you suddenly defer control of the entire system to an oligopoly of private sector players, that gives them enormous power. You have to maintain the cash system if you want to create counter-power to that.

Now all those players and a bunch of other people are going to argue that the cash system is allowing various forms of black market crime to exist. But the fact is, the cash economy has always been associated historically with the most marginal people in society. And a cashless society probably wouldn’t actually solve the problem of crime — it’s well known that the banking center is extensively used for crime all the time. 

What does a cashless society mean for the surveillance industry?

A cashless world leaves these huge data trails. There are well-known examples of intelligence agencies spying on payment networks. Right now, the worst excesses of that type of surveillance are dampened because there is an alternative, right?

You mean there’s currently a way to fly under the radar by using cash. 

Right. The thing about the cash system is that you can't steer people's behavior. Once it's out of the system, cash becomes far more localized and has a much more organic way that it moves around. But let's say there's a total implosion in the cash system, and it's allowed to happen. Maybe the world wouldn't necessarily immediately become some giant surveillance state –– but the potential for that outcome becomes much much greater. A cashless world has crazy potential for surveillance. And crazy potential for censorship.

What does a cashless society have to do with censorship?

It's about the ability to control people through their behavior. People’s activities can be monitored — but they can also be blocked by simply freezing their accounts. Think about the crazy levels of trauma faced by someone who can't get access to the banking sector in a society that won't take cash. Think about the crazy levels of economic terror that a person would face if they got excluded from the payment system in a cashless society. Right now we have a buffer against us if we get locked out of the banking sector, like if our cards are lost or stolen. We always have cash as a backup. 

What do you think will happen if no one starts to engage with the arguments against a cashless society?

I don’t think most people want a cashless society. If you ask people if they like digital payments, most people will say yes. But if you ask them if they want cash to be taken away from them most people will say no. People don't like having options removed from them. But many people aren’t able to articulate this, say, in the bougie coffee shop that only accepts digital payments. Many people feel a bit weirded out by the fact that they can't use cash — but often, they don't have an argument. They can't articulate it. And they have no ideological support from the political class and the business class. So they'll just think “oh, well, I guess I'm a bit old school or something.”

So how does a cashless society take shape?

It’s kind of a feedback loop. The bank stops taking cash, meaning small businesses can't deposit cash, which means they're less likely to accept cash. So then access to cash goes down. ATMs start closing. And so on. In order to stop this feedback loop, you have to actually act against it — and start putting in access to cash laws, like what Meloni is doing. And you also have to actually build a cultural movement that says it's totally okay to demand a non-automated form of payment. It has to go against this narrative that we all want a cashless world because it’s so convenient because it's cleaner, because it's faster, and so on. Because the reality is, for all this so-called convenience, people are more burnt out than they’ve ever been before. We have less time than we’ve ever had before. We’re more confused and disorientated than we’ve ever been. And this is what happens in an accelerating capitalist system. And if you don't sync up, you get thrown off the edge.

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“Something that happened to me and was beyond my control has left me like a machine that’s been switched off – disabled – unable to do anything that a 21-year-old of my intelligence and interests might want or need to do,” she wrote.

That young correspondent, Maeve Boothby O’Neill, spoke Russian, listened to jazz and read constantly. She loved musical theater, especially the shows “Wicked,” “Billy Eliot” and “Into the Woods.” She was plotting out a series of 1920s mystery novels set in the villages of Dartmoor, an upland expanse of bogs and rivers and rocky hills in southwest England where Maeve and her mother had once lived.

Maeve died on October 3, 2021. She was 27. On the death certificate, her physician noted “myalgic encephalomyelitis” — an alternate name for the illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome — as the cause. It is rare for a death to be attributed to either ME or CFS. 

An inquest into the circumstances, including the actions (and inactions) of clinicians and administrators at the local arm of the National Health Service, or NHS, is expected to be held later this year. Maeve was diagnosed with the illness in 2012, after several years of poor health. She fought hard to access appropriate medical care and social service support from institutions and bureaucracies that did not seem to understand the disease.

“She did everything she could to survive,” wrote Sarah Boothby, Maeve’s mother, in a statement she prepared for the upcoming inquest. The NHS “did not respond to the severity of Maeve’s presentation, and failed in its duty of care,” wrote Boothby, adding that her death was “premature and wholly preventable.”

Maeve’s father and Boothby’s ex-husband, Sean O’Neill, a journalist at The Times, brought widespread attention to ME in a series of articles, including one last year about Maeve. His “creative, courageous” daughter, wrote O’Neill, “struggled not just with the debilitating, disabling effects of ME but also with the disbelief, apathy and stigma of the medical profession, the NHS and wider society.”

Myalgic encephalomyelitis is frequently triggered by an acute viral or other infectious illness, although it has also been associated with exposure to environmental toxins, including mold. Patients have been found to suffer from a range of immunological, metabolic, neurological and other dysfunctions. Core symptoms include profound exhaustion, a pattern of relapses after minimal exertion known as post-exertional malaise, brain fog, poor sleep and heart rate irregularities that lead to dizziness or nausea when in a standing position. Standard therapies have focused on symptomatic relief since the underlying causes remain unknown and there are no diagnostic medical tests.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 836,000 and 2.5 million people in the country have what it refers to as ME/CFS, and most remain undiagnosed. In the U.K., the estimates range from 125,000 to 250,000. Many patients are unable to work, climb stairs or even perform basic daily functions without assistance. 

As a journalist and public health academic, I have been investigating and writing about ME for several years. I have learned how it can devastate the lives of patients and their families, not least because mainstream medicine has framed it as largely psychosomatic — a modern version of what would once have been diagnosed as hysteria or conversion disorder. 

From the start of my project in 2015, I found it to be enormously intellectually and emotionally rewarding. But no one besides desperately ill patients took much notice. Editors at major news organizations couldn’t be bothered. Academic colleagues were polite but perplexed at my dedication to this obscure domain. At gatherings with friends, I could tell they’d had enough after the fifth or eighth time I’d mention the latest developments in the field. 

Viral epidemics always leave in their wake a small percentage of people experiencing chronic complications that have no identified cause. And the prolonged medical complaints being reported by millions of people around the world after acute coronavirus infection include some of the key symptoms that define ME. 

Patients, clinicians, scientists and journalists are debating and investigating the overlaps between the two conditions. While long Covid is a grab-bag term for an extremely diverse group of patients, some are receiving clinical diagnoses of ME or ME/CFS, as it is often called these days. 

And just as ME patients have long felt dismissed or misunderstood, long Covid patients have had similar experiences. As I reported last year for Coda, for example, doctors unable to continue working because of long Covid have been dismayed that their medical colleagues often tell them their cognitive impairment and repeated relapses are physical expressions of pandemic-related trauma. Conditions like ME and others that lack definitive medical tests — such as irritable bowel syndrome, Gulf War Illness, fibromyalgia and various forms of pain — are often lumped together into a category called “functional” disorders or “medically unexplained symptoms,” known as MUS.

The emergence of long Covid has focused widespread attention on a long-simmering debate that has previously been confined largely to academic and medical circles: Do these functional and medically unexplained ailments arise mainly from ongoing disease processes or from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and related psychiatric conditions?

All around the world, leading scientists and clinicians regard long Covid as a heterogeneous disease. They are seeking to elucidate its many pathophysiological pathways and find drug targets for therapy. In December 2022, the CDC reported that long Covid “played a part” in 3,544 deaths in the U.S. from the start of the pandemic through June 2022.

Another camp is applying the psychosomatic lens to long Covid. The experts in this group also hold impressive academic status, receive significant research funding and publish in respected journals. They witness the same phenomenon and see something completely different: A global tsunami of mass hysteria leading to paralysis, gait disorders, memory loss, inability to remain upright without feeling sick, repeated flu-like relapses and a list of other complaints.

Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system. Physicians frequently prescribe psychotherapy and exercise programs based on their presumption that emotional or mental distress, negative or unhelpful thoughts and/or unhealthy behavior patterns are causing the persistent problems.

It goes without saying that stress, anxiety and related factors can have negative health impacts and exacerbate underlying ailments and that psychological support and lifestyle adaptations can help alleviate distress, including among people with chronic conditions. But when it comes to medically unexplained illnesses, mistakes in interpreting symptoms can visit trauma and despair upon patients and families. 

Last May, an Irish court ordered a hospital to pay a young man 6 million euros for having failed to diagnose a brain tumor, an error that delayed necessary surgery by months. Doctors had misdiagnosed his headaches, concentration problems and hand numbness as “psychological and functional” and referred him to “the mental health services and physiotherapy,” according to the Irish Independent.

Physicians can be quick to default to psychological explanations when they don’t understand what is causing a patient’s problems, noted Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of Galway, in a blog post about the case. (Professor Hughes is a friend and colleague.) 

“It would be nice if the doctors concerned could perhaps try to be a little less hasty, and a bit more humble,” he wrote in the post. “The phrase ‘Medically Unexplained’ does not mean ‘Medically Unexplainable.’ Just because you don’t know what’s wrong with a patient doesn’t mean that nothing is wrong with them.”

Maeve Boothby O’Neill was born in 1994 in London. Her parents divorced when she was five, and from then on she lived with her mom in southwest England — first in Dartmoor, and then in Exeter, a major university town.

In pulling together the following account, I spoke multiple times with Maeve’s mother, Sarah Boothby, via social media as well as in her cozy flat on a quiet road a few blocks from Exeter’s High Street — the same flat where Maeve had struggled with her declining health and where she’d died the previous fall. While there, I reviewed three fat clip binders stuffed with copies of Maeve’s medical and social service records, voluminous correspondence, reams of handwritten notes and journal-type entries, applications for social benefits and related documents and writings.

The Royal Devon University Health NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital where Maeve sought care during the last months of her life, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

From an early age, Boothby told me, Maeve adored “storytelling” in all its forms and loved being surrounded by books. She wrote her first play — or rather, she dictated it — when she was seven. “She played happily in her imagination for days on end,” said Boothby.

Maeve expressed her opinions early. During a family vacation to southern Spain, Boothby recalled, Maeve, then four years old, declared: “What’s the point of Spain? It’s too hot!” At 10, she became a vegetarian out of both principle and gustatory preference.

In the summer of 2007, when Maeve was 12, both she and Boothby came down with what felt like a mild viral illness. Boothby recovered completely after four weeks. But according to Maeve’s diary from that time, she still felt exhausted weeks after the acute sickness.

(Boothby read the diary after Maeve’s death. It opened with this advisory: “The writing beyond this page is strictly private and is only to be viewed with the express permission of Maeve.” Boothby posted the following snippets and others from the diary on Twitter. )

“God I am TIRED,” Maeve wrote on August 7. On August 11: “Oooohh . . . tired . . .” August 12: “I am still vair [very] tired! Why?! Mum has said she wants me to stay in bed all day and rest :¿ (got a tiredness headache too. Ow ow ow ow).”  August 17: “in bed - still tired :(”

Besides the references to exhaustion that pepper the diary, Maeve also expressed delight about compelling personal matters — celebrating her birthday, getting a new dollhouse, visiting her dad in London.

Just after 11 p.m. on August 25, the night before her birthday, she wrote:

“It is 53 minutes until I'm 13! OMG! We (me & dad) went shopping today…the plan tomorrow is to have a nice breakfast then a picnic with PINK CHAMP [champagne].” And at midnight: “I am officially 13 years old and have made it to TEENAGERDOM!” 12:01 p.m.: “Wow! I’m 13!”

Over the next few years, Maeve’s exhaustion increased, sometimes accompanied by punishing headaches. She began fainting while engaged in gym class, school sports, dancing and even walking. Her social life dropped off significantly and she reduced her school attendance to essential classes only, although she managed to keep up her grades.

Two general practitioners examined Maeve, found nothing wrong and dismissed her symptoms as “normal for a girl of her age,” said Boothby. A pediatrician referred Maeve to psychological services while telling her “the symptoms were all in her mind,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

“She was only 15 and doubted herself for years afterwards,” Boothby told me.

Spontaneous remission from ME is relatively rare, although the disease is known to fluctuate. Many patients remain more or less stable for years, and some improve slowly. Others, like Maeve, experience a gradual decline, for reasons that remain unclear. It is estimated that about a quarter of patients are home-bound or even bed-bound. 

In 2012, despite her reduced class attendance, Maeve graduated from high school in Bristol, where she and her mother were living for a year. She earned top grades in Russian, biology and English literature. She’d long imagined a career involving travel, foreign languages and international relations.

In a photo of Maeve on her 18th birthday, she glows with good humor. Her bright face is graced by a half-moon smile and framed by a tangled mane of brown hair. Her eyes are focused on some point to the left of the camera. She seems, like many her age, to be brimming with ideas and secrets and vital insights. Unlike her peers, she was too sick to attend university and explore her future.

That year, Maeve was finally referred for assessment to a clinic specializing in CFS/ME, as the illness was then often called, at a hospital in Bristol. Although the intake and diagnostic process dragged on for nine months, a specialist at last confirmed that she had the illness. In a subsequent email to the specialist, Maeve expressed relief at getting the news.

“It feels very empowering to finally have a diagnosis and some external recognition of my symptoms, to know that it’s not all in my head!” she wrote.

Shortly afterwards, Maeve and her mother returned to Exeter, where she contacted the local CFS/ME clinical service and reviewed their guidelines for treatment and care. These guidelines recommended a behavioral and psychological approach to recovery based on the hypothesis that patients like Maeve were extremely out of shape from remaining sedentary and harbored dysfunctional beliefs about having an organic disease that caused them to relapse when they did too much.

For decades, two related interventions were viewed as the standard-of-care for ME. A specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy was designed to alter patients’ faulty beliefs so they would do more. An approach to increasing activity called graded exercise therapy (GET) was designed to reverse their physical deconditioning so they would do more. A major British study called the PACE trial, with the first results published in 2011 in the Lancet, appeared to demonstrate that these treatments led to significant improvement and even recovery.

The information Maeve received in 2012 conformed to this approach. Leaflets advised her that “many people with CFS/ME have unhelpful thoughts,” which include “catastrophizing,” “eliminating the positive” and “all-or-nothing-thinking.” Instead of adopting these patterns, the leaflets advised, patients should ask themselves questions like: “What alternative views are there?” and “How would someone else view this situation?” and “Am I focusing on the negative?”

Maeve found this approach useless but did see a specialist in Mickel therapy, a cognitive approach popular in the U.K.. In a journal entry, Maeve wrote that, according to the therapist, “I should have more fun and be more childlike” and “my body’s ‘message’ is: my symptoms are here to tell me to stop containing my emotions and start expressing them honestly now.” 

She dropped the therapy after a couple of sessions. “It isn’t working for me,” she wrote. “If anything it’s making me worse, because I’m worrying about not having fun.”

As advised by the CFS/ME service, Maeve kept a meticulous activity diary in an effort to determine her “baseline” — the amount she could do without triggering the relapses that characterize post-exertional malaise. The goal was to increase the amount over time in order to nudge her body to improve. Maeve regularly struggled to stay within her limits.

In an email to the doctor who diagnosed her, she expressed concern that her legs ached after any physical activity. “Don’t worry about the aching of the legs,” the doctor replied. “That will not go until you enter a phase of sustained improvement — then it will, I promise you!”

“I’m looking forward to entering a period of sustained improvement so I can have my legs back!” Maeve responded in a follow-up email.

The doctor’s promise proved to be illusory. Maeve never entered a period of “sustained improvement.” Eventually, she realized her baseline was around 30 minutes of activity a day. If she exceeded it, she suffered a relapse — or a “crash,” as patients called it. And as she struggled to accept this restriction, she crashed again and again.

In the years since the Lancet and other journals published findings from the PACE trial, medical and public health experts — including me — have documented that the study includes egregious methodological and ethical missteps. Related research has also been shown to be poorly designed and fraught with bias. In 2015, I wrote a 15,000-word exposé of the PACE trial that garnered significant media and scientific attention, and I have continued to criticize research in the field. 

In 2017, the CDC rescinded its recommendations for CBT and GET as treatments for the condition. The CDC website now flatly declares: “ME/CFS is a biological illness, not a psychologic [sic] disorder...These patients have multiple pathophysiological changes that affect multiple systems.”

On October 31, 2021 — less than a month after Maeve’s death — the U.K.’s National institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, issued new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS that reversed the agency’s own prior recommendations for the two treatments. In a review of studies, NICE assessed the quality of evidence in favor of GET and CBT, including from the PACE trial, as either “very low” or merely “low.”

The new guidelines highlighted the symptom of post-exertional malaise, which it called post-exertional symptom exacerbation, and warned of possible harms from graded exercise. The guidelines approved of psychotherapy for supportive care only — not as a curative treatment.

Maeve read everything she could discover about her illness and sought out whatever she thought might help. She found yoga and meditation helpful. She explored the possibility that she suffered from a deficiency of carnitine, an amino acid essential to energy metabolism. At various times, turmeric, B12, aspirin, the gastrointestinal drug famotidine and the gout drug colchicine seemed to provide some symptomatic relief.

She had to fill out exhaustive applications in order to obtain funds for basic expenses like buying a wheelchair and hiring care personnel. In her London Review of Books essay, she protested at the indignity of having to prove to a “mean and punitive government” that she was not malingering or faking it but was actually very sick and reliant upon benefits to survive.

“To access my right to this welfare payment,” she wrote, “I am required to prove my life has been devastated, presenting it as a collection of medico-historical facts about all the things I can’t do, which reminds me of all the things I might have wanted to do and makes my existence sound abject and pitiful.”

Records of correspondence with medical and social service agencies show multiple occasions of missed calls and misunderstandings about appointments. In a journal entry, Maeve expressed irritation at the inefficiencies and delays involved in dealing with the public institutions responsible for ensuring that everyone could access care and assistance. “It makes me angry that I’m supposed to get free treatment at the point of need, AND I FUCKING NEED IT NOW AND IT TAKES A MONTH FOR ANYONE TO LIFT A FINGER TO EVEN THINK ABOUT HELPING ME,” she wrote at one point.

At other times, her comments conveyed a sense of hope, however fragile. “I am still young and will get better,” she wrote in one application for benefits. “But no one can tell me how long it will take.”

Such hope notwithstanding, the scope of activities Maeve could perform gradually dwindled. “Over time, she became unable to cook, wash up, change her bedlinen, clean her room, apply for and renew her welfare benefit entitlements, make or attend appointments or go outdoors without assistance,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

Maeve also experienced challenges with food intake. “Sometimes I have to wait for enough energy to eat — lifting a fork to my mouth requires energy I don’t have,” she wrote in one social service questionnaire.

ME or CFS has only rarely been cited as a cause of death. In England and Wales, the illness was cited as the underlying cause or as a “contributory factor” in only 88 deaths from 2001 to 2016, according to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. Malnutrition is among the most serious possible life-threatening complications. In very severe cases, patients can become unable to ingest sufficient nutrition because they have difficulty chewing and swallowing. 

At that point, tube-feeding — via a tube inserted down the throat or directly into the stomach through the abdomen — can be necessary to prevent death from malnutrition. William Weir, an infectious disease and ME specialist in London, has treated several patients who have been tube-fed for extended periods before improving enough to be able to eat on their own. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Weir told me, doctors who don’t understand ME often view malnutrition in severe patients as if it were a psychiatric issue like anorexia. “Patients with this illness are frequently regarded as having a psychological disorder that causes them to be deliberately and perversely inactive without any regard for the possibility that their inactivity actually has a physical basis,” he said.

By early 2021, Maeve’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she was unable to consume enough food, even with her mother preparing liquified meals. Boothby and Maeve’s GP at the time advocated for her to be hospitalized so she could have a feeding tube inserted. In mid-March, Maeve was admitted to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Noting that her tests appeared to be normal, the staff physician refused the tube-feeding request. 

“They kept treating her as if she was making it up,” said Boothby.

Maeve was discharged without a plan for providing her with sufficient nutrition at home, Boothby noted in a chronology of events of the last months of Maeve’s life that she prepared for the inquest. She was “unable to sit up, hold a cup to her lips, or chew,” wrote Boothby, and “all her symptoms were now highly exacerbated.”

Further deterioration in Maeve’s condition led to a second hospitalization in May. By then, Dr. Weir had examined her and found her to be extremely debilitated. In a phone call and a follow-up letter, he recalled, he urged the hospital physician overseeing Maeve’s care to insert a feeding tube.

The hospital did not follow Dr. Weir’s advice. The doctor, Boothby wrote, was “adamant she would not tube feed Maeve and told Maeve she would ‘feel much better if you gave your hair a wash.’” 

Again, Maeve was discharged without a plan for home care, according to Boothby. “She was completely immobilized except for being able to turn her head from side to side,” she wrote. “Her voice could not rise above a whisper. She was unable to reposition in bed or to lie on her side.”

During a third hospital admission that summer, a naso-gastric tube was finally inserted. But by that point Maeve’s body was unable to tolerate the hospital’s tube-feeding regimen. She responded with bouts of pain and constipation, which caused crashes and further exacerbated her condition. The tube was removed, and she was again discharged. 

On August 27, 2021, Maeve turned 27.

When tube-feeding fails, another possible option is total parenteral nutrition, in which the digestive system is bypassed and patients are infused through a vein. In a letter dated September 9, 2021, Dr. Weir warned the chief executive of the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that Maeve’s situation looked dire if this approach was not adopted.

“I have experience of similar cases leading to death and Maeve’s current clinical status shows all the initial hallmarks of this,” he wrote. “I am not exaggerating the issue when I say that this [total parenteral nutrition] may well save Maeve’s life.” 

Maeve ultimately refused to be readmitted because the hospital would not guarantee that she would receive total parenteral nutrition, according to Boothby’s written chronology. Maeve knew that without nutritional support she was going to die, Boothby told me, and she wanted to die at home — not in the hospital while being denied care. 

“She said, ‘At least we tried, mum,’” said Boothby.

Maeve continued to deteriorate throughout September and received morphine for pain. On October 1, according to Boothby’s written chronology, Maeve “said she was experiencing mild hallucinations.” On October 2, she exhibited “rapid shallow breathing, racing heart, eyes rolling.” 

At 1:45 a.m. on October 3, “Maeve was awake but incapable of utterance or focusing.” At 3 a.m., she was found dead. Doctors confirmed her death at 11 a.m., and her body was removed to a funeral home in the early afternoon. 

That evening, Maeve’s GP visited Boothby. “She said she had never had a patient so poorly treated by the NHS,” wrote Boothby. 

The inquest, which is not yet scheduled, will presumably shed light on the events that led to Maeve’s death and on the hospital’s actions in the matter. Philip Spinney, the senior coroner for Exeter and Greater Devon, declined to be interviewed but noted in an email that the process is at the “evidence gathering stage” and that the inquest itself could last at least two days. 

Given the prominence of Maeve’s case, the inquest and its findings could receive significant publicity. Boothby told me she would like the investigation to “expose as many facts as possible to public scrutiny.” 

Beyond that, she hopes it will demonstrate “how socially, morally and ethically unjust it is to deny a biomedical cause to ME” and will lead to recommendations for preventing more deaths like Maeve’s. “She died by the incomprehension and disbelief of an acute hospital,” said Boothby.

The post When the doctor doesn’t listen appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

THE BACKGROUND

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

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

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

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

WHAT ARE THE STAKES IN A POST-ROE AMERICA?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second woman, Tunisha Sharma, a 20-year-old actor, allegedly hung herself on December 24 on the set of a TV show that she was working on with her boyfriend. They had apparently broken up shortly before her death. After Sharma’s death, her boyfriend was arrested for “abetment to suicide.”

What links the otherwise unconnected deaths of these two young women is that they were Hindu and their boyfriends were Muslim. Predictably, both cases were reported in the mainstream Indian media, particularly on television, as examples of “love jihad” — a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that vulnerable Hindu women are being groomed by Muslim men and converted to Islam.   

Asif Khan, a resident of Dindori, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, married Sakshi Sahu in April. They were in their early 20s. As the news spread through their village of a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, local Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) groups mobilized to “rescue” Sakshi.

The law was on the side of the vigilantes. The police booked Asif for wrongful confinement and kidnapping, based on a complaint by Sakshi’s brother. A local BJP unit blocked a nearby highway to protest the marriage and the district administration demolished Asif’s family home and three shops they owned.

Still, the couple refused to break up, leaving their village to live a quieter married life elsewhere. But news of Walkar’s murder, and the associated national talk of love jihad, reintroduced stresses and fears into their marriage. “We have been reassuring Sakshi that she doesn’t need to be afraid,” Asif’s father, Halim Khan, told me. “But she is scared.” Asif told me that he had told Sakshi “society would never accept [their] relationship” but that she had said she would “throw herself in front of a train” if they broke up because of their religion.

But the anger evident in the media coverage of Walkar’s death shook the couple. Asif told Sakshi that “she is not a captive, that she can go back to her parents if she wants.” 

According to Charu Gupta, a history professor at Delhi University, love jihad “produces a master narrative of Muslim male aggression and Hindu woman’s seizure.” This, she wrote, is “critically linked to the fictive demographic fear of Hindus being outnumbered by others, which is central to Hindutva politics,” and makes it possible for a still overwhelming majority that controls all the levers of power to “portray itself as an ‘endangered’ minority.”

Several politicians, particularly from the BJP, the party that controls India’s federal government, have referred to the deaths of Walkar and Sharma in terms of love jihad. In Karnataka — the Indian state that contains Bengaluru, a city that is, by some estimates, second only to Silicon Valley as a global hub for tech — a BJP member of parliament began the new year by telling party workers that, when campaigning for local elections scheduled in the spring, they should not “speak about minor issues like roads and sewage.” Instead, they should impress on voters that “if you are worried about your children’s future and if you want to stop love jihad, then we need BJP… To get rid of love jihad, we need BJP.”

Just last month, Karnataka’s home minister told reporters that he had received a petition from Hindutva groups demanding that a special task force be formed to investigate love jihad. He added that in his view, the state’s anti-conversion laws were sufficient to deter and deal with cases of love jihad. Karnataka, governed by the BJP, has so far resisted joining other BJP-governed states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, in specifically legislating to make interfaith marriage more difficult. 

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with over 200 million people, the chief minister, a Hindu monk notorious for hate speech, told a crowd in a campaign speech that he would “protect the honor and dignity of women” from love jihad “at any cost.” In February 2021, Uttar Pradesh introduced a law that criminalized religious conversion “through marriage, deceit, coercion, or enticement.” Those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to a decade.

And in Madhya Pradesh, which sprawls across the center of India, the chief minister referred to Walkar’s murder in December, at an event to celebrate a local 19th-century freedom fighter. The hero was a tribal, a term used in India to refer to ethnic minorities, officially designated in the Indian constitution as Scheduled Tribes, who remain some of the most economically underprivileged people in the country. “I will not allow this game of love jihad to continue,” the chief minister said. “Someone cheats our daughters in the name of love, marries them, and cuts them into 35 pieces. Such acts will not be allowed in Madhya Pradesh.” This, even though Walkar was not murdered in the state and was not a tribal.  

Statements such as these, made by powerful politicians, have put even more pressure on the few people brave enough to enter into interfaith marriages in India. Even before the right-wing, Hindu supremacist bogeyman of love jihad became widespread, interfaith relationships in India were rare. Now they are dangerous. 

Just over 2% of marriages in India are interfaith. A Pew Research Center report in 2021 indicated that 99% of Hindus in India said they were married to someone from their own religious background, as did 98% of Muslims, 97% of Sikhs and Buddhists and 95% of Christians. These statistics underscore the ideological impetus behind the legislation in BJP-ruled states that seek to tackle religious conversion, and specifically love jihad, when the phenomenon clearly appears to be a figment of the imagination.

In Uttar Pradesh, where you can be imprisoned if the authorities deem your marriage to be one in which the primary motivation was religious conversion, Rashid Khan, a Muslim man, married Pinki, a Hindu woman. They married in 2020, the year that the state’s draconian anti-conversion law was formulated though not yet passed. Pinki told me she knew their future was fraught with danger but she went ahead and asked for Rashid’s phone number anyway. 

Both Pinki and Rashid worked in Dehradun, a city nestled in the picturesque foothills of the Himalayas, and they grew close over long conversations and stolen moments between shifts. Three years later, Rashid said he wanted to marry her, and he was willing to marry her according to Hindu custom and ritual. Pinki said she had long been drawn to Islam and wanted to have a Muslim wedding and to convert. On July 24, their marriage was solemnized in a nikah in a Dehradun mosque. Pinki changed her name to Muskan.

Initially, Muskan tried to get her family to accept their marriage, but her mother beat her and threw her out of the house. Still, the early months of their marriage were happy and soon Muskan was pregnant with their first child.

When the couple decided to get their marriage officially recorded in a court in Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh, where Rashid was from, their petition was noticed by a local unit of the Bajrang Dal — a group of Hindutva militants which is part of the broader Sangh Parivar, the Hindutva “family” that includes the BJP. The couple suspects that their lawyer tipped off the Bajrang Dal. Rashid and Muskan were attacked on their way to the courthouse.

The mob beat up Rashid and his brother and took them to the police station. Meanwhile, Muskan, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy, was severely beaten and dumped outside a government-run shelter for women and children. “I was in trauma and extreme pain. I thought I would never see Rashid again,” Muskan told me, adding that there were other women  who were romantically involved with Muslim men being held at the shelter. “We were all tortured,” she alleged. “Made to work, cooking and cleaning continuously. I spent the days crying and in pain.” 

Muskan was eventually moved to a hospital, where she says she was injected by a doctor with undisclosed medicines. Shortly after, she suffered a miscarriage and was discharged the next day.

When Rashid was brought to court, Muskan said she loved him and that she had married him of her own free will. Her testimony convinced the court to release Rashid. The couple moved back to Dehradun to restart their lives in a single room. “This is the safest place we could find,” she told me. They have had a child since the miscarriage, and Muskan is breastfeeding her on the double bed that takes up most of the space in the room. Rashid, and his sister with her husband and son, were also sitting on the same bed. In another corner, a gas stove perched on a table served as the kitchen.

Since Narendra Modi swept into office in 2014 and was reelected with an even stronger mandate in 2019, almost every Muslim action is freighted with the word “jihad.” The mainstream Indian media have used this shorthand with relish. On March 11, 2020, Sudhir Chaudhary, a prominent and popular Indian journalist, presented his viewers with a chart outlining the various kinds of jihad to which India’s Hindus were subject. He talked about “hard” jihad and “soft” jihad, about the jihad being waged by the media, about the jihad being waged on history, on land rights, on the Indian economy, on affairs of the heart. The media even attempted to pin the spread of Covid in India to a single superspreader event connected to an Islamic conclave in a Delhi neighborhood, labeling it “corona jihad.” 

Another prominent Indian television journalist described an attempt by Muslims to “infiltrate” the civil services by passing a nationwide exam as the “UPSC jihad.” Muslims are drastically underrepresented in India’s civil services, and the number is dwindling, with only 3% qualifying to join the services in 2021, even though Muslims make up an estimated 14% of the population. Meanwhile, the 2021 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report shows that Muslims comprise more than 30% of India’s prison population.

Last year, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, said during a U.S congressional briefing that Modi was an “extremist who has taken over the government.” Stanton, a credible and highly respected scholar, said: “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India.”

Aasif Mujtaba, the founder of a nonprofit organization, Miles2Smile, told me that Muslims had already been effectively demeaned in India and were now being openly persecuted. He said that the word “jihad” had been weaponized, that it had been used to create an “us versus them narrative, in which the ‘them’ are Muslims who are considered to be lesser humans.” They are trying, now, Mujtaba added, to “delegitimize Muslims as citizens of the land.”

He is, in part, referring to the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act which led to weeks of protests until Covid-related lockdowns forced protesters off the street. The United Nations described the act — which offers a path to citizenship to everyone except Muslims who fled to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh before 2014 because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs — as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.” But Mujtaba is also referring to a general atmosphere in which drastic, even illegal measures can be taken to punish Muslims for alleged crimes, including bulldozing their homes, breaking up their relationships and boycotting or shutting down their businesses. In October, Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The authorities in several Indian states are carrying out violence against Muslims as a kind of summary punishment… [they] are sending a message to the public that Muslims can be discriminated against and attacked.”

But Muskan, who told a court in Uttar Pradesh of her love for Rashid, remains defiant. “Even though they say that Muslim men manipulate Hindu girls,” she told me, “it was me who initiated our relationship. I made a choice. They might call it jihad but people like us won’t stop loving each other.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Meghan never stood a chance against the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.

The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.

In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.

When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”

A girl sitting in the back stood up. “No, it’s probably not true,” she said. “I’ve heard that people took on fake identities to kill innocent Cambodian people.” A tall boy in the row behind her agreed: “The Vietnamese faked their identities as Cambodian people. But the journalists all broadcast that Cambodian people killed other Cambodians.”

The journalists had it right in this case. When the Khmer Rouge officially ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, its leaders orchestrated the genocide of roughly a quarter of the country’s population of 7.8 million people. Regime leaders were hyper-focused on exterminating educated people and minorities, leading to mass atrocities that politicians and historians today still struggle to make sense of.

Although the Khmer Rouge movement was considered the “younger brother” of Northern Vietnamese communists and initially received their support, the reality was more complicated. Fearful that Vietnam — a historical enemy — intended to gobble up their land, Khmer Rouge leaders officially broke diplomatic relations with the larger neighbor in 1977 as border disputes escalated.

In most of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 when Vietnamese troops toppled the regime. The Vietnamese occupied most of the country throughout the 1980s, hailed by some as liberators and others as oppressors. But in this remote, 60,000-person district called Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge retained its political power for nearly 20 more years. Today, most families still include former cadres for whom guerilla warfare is a not-so-distant memory. And anti-Vietnamese sentiment, handed down from Khmer Rouge leaders over decades, remains strong.

“It helps to compartmentalize the idea that somehow we screwed up and we did this to ourselves,” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the Arizona State University whose family fled the regime when he was a child. “It’s the narrative that permeates anti-Vietnamese sentiment and re-appropriates the whole Khmer Rouge episode of Cambodia as like, ‘No, no, no, this was all Vietnamese-done. We were victims. The genocide was Vietnamese killing Cambodians.’”

Anti-Vietnamese racism is nothing new in Cambodia, where many resent both France, for ceding contested land to Vietnam in 1949, and the Vietnam-installed government that took over Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. Opposition leaders have long relied on anti-Vietnamese rhetoric for support, even when it has led to violence.

On a national scale, the country has struggled to confront the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, and formal education about the regime was practically nonexistent for decades. Current Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself who defected to Vietnam, famously said that Cambodians should “dig a hole and bury the past” and has been accused of interfering with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

In Anlong Veng, aging troops aren’t a political party or even a re-emerging insurgency looking to launch a new movement. But their ahistorical telling of the genocide plays into Cambodia’s worst tropes about its old enemy, exacerbating tensions and pushing a confrontation with the country’s own past further out of reach.

But some are trying to provide a counterweight. Ly Sok Kheang works for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an organization that serves as the main keeper of the country’s Khmer Rouge documents and archives, with support from Yale University and both the Cambodian and U.S. governments. A few years ago, the Center launched a program teaching kids in Anlong Veng about the genocide, hoping to spur a more candid reckoning between generations.

When the teens cast doubt on what they saw in the video of the Tuol Sleng Prison, Kheang didn’t correct them. Instead, he gestured towards the thick history booklets he had passed out. It was time to read.

A small country nestled between Vietnam and Thailand, Cambodia spent most of the 20th century mired in a series of power struggles. It was a French protectorate for nearly a century until 1953, when Prince Norodom Sihanouk led a successful bid for independence. Then in 1970, a U.S.-backed military leader overthrew Sihanouk, and American troops invaded the country to fight against alleged Vietnamese strongholds.

Those chaotic years set the stage for the Khmer Rouge to take over in 1975. The movement — led by a Paris-educated man known as Pol Pot — claimed to return Cambodia to “Year Zero,” an agrarian society free from colonialism and foreign influence, which had dominated for decades. 

In reality, well-educated and middle-class people were targeted for torture and killing. Troops ordered everyone out of Phnom Penh and sent them to forced labor camps in the countryside for “re-education” where they dug ditches and toiled in rice fields. Some died from starvation and disease. Others were simply executed.

A zone leader called Ta Mok ruled the country’s southwest. Although he wasn’t in Pol Pot’s inner circle, Mok was both ruthless and charismatic, with a kind of “earthiness” that won the loyalty of farmers, said Andrew Mertha, a Khmer Rouge historian and director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Mok’s troops were responsible for “cleaning up” other zones after purges, including hauling off, interrogating and killing so-called traitors — which came to include just about anyone as the regime became increasingly paranoid and violent. 

“He had a reputation for burning people alive in ovens,” Mertha said. “When he was tasked with eliminating a group of people for a political or material incentive, he was more than happy to do it.”

Mok also hated Vietnam with a passion. In the only known interview with Mok, conducted in 1997 by American journalist Nate Thayer, he defended the murder of another zone leader and his thousands of followers on the grounds that they were secretly Vietnamese. "I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us," he said.

After the regime fell and a new Vietnam-backed government was established in 1979, Mok fled north to the Thai border and led guerilla warfare in Anlong Veng, then a thicket of jungle at the base of a mountain range. Now, a roundabout marks the town’s center at the junction of two country roads, surrounded by cassava and rice fields that glowed green from rain when our team visited in July.

After Vietnamese troops exited Cambodia in 1989, Ta Mok assumed full political control over Anlong Veng. Even today, his fingerprints are all over the town. Up the street from the roundabout is the town bridge, constructed over the river where tuk-tuks and motorbikes stream toward the central market. Here, Mok oversaw construction of a damming system that feeds into an amoeba-shaped lake — a plentiful source of fish. 

Nearby, the red-roofed hospital and local school were also built under his watch. His grave is marked with a giant glittering mausoleum, and a guesthouse bears his name. 

Residents’ stories about Mok evoke a different leader: Kind, generous and hardworking. One woman remembered knocking on his door when she was heavily pregnant and walking away with fistfuls of cash. Another man said Mok liked to sit with his legs dangling over the riverbank as he directed soldiers in construction projects. Anyone passing by his compound hungry got rice, salt, fish or sugar, no questions asked.

“Everyone here in Anlong Veng thought of Ta Mok as a second father,” one former soldier told us. “He took very good care of them.”

Mok was finally arrested in 1999 and the district was reunited with the rest of Cambodia. When he died in 2006 — before he could be tried for war crimes — hundreds poured into the streets of Anlong Veng to mourn. “He was a direct person and did everything himself,” said another soldier’s son. “That’s why most people in Anlong Veng really love him.”

Out of the roughly 15,000 people held in the Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison in Phnom Penh — now home to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — only about a dozen survived. Prisoners were electrocuted and waterboarded. They were tortured with metal rods and pliers. They had their fingernails and toenails ripped out and their wounds doused with acid.

Norn Chantha discovered Tuol Sleng for the first time in 12th grade. On a whim, he opened a history book a nonprofit had given his school. “I wasn’t really interested in reading the book because I thought that since I was a Khmer Rouge soldier’s kid, I’d already heard quite a lot about the Khmer Rouge story,” said Chantha, now 29, from the office of the Anlong Veng high school where he teaches English. The book was lined with photos of victims being maimed with long metal wires — the first inkling there might be more to the story than what he had been told. 

“It shocked me,” he said.

Until 2011, the same year that Chantha graduated, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education avoided teaching Khmer Rouge history in schools, in part to skirt criticism from Prime Minister Hun Sen, who ordered that 12th grade social studies textbooks be withdrawn from classrooms in 2002 on the grounds that Khmer Rouge sections needed to be “rechecked.” After defecting from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese-installed government and has resisted a public reckoning with the regime during his 37 years as prime minister. He has even gone so far as to say that trying Khmer Rouge leaders would lead to civil war. For kids in school today, curricula about the regime are based on a short history volume produced by DC-Cam and vary greatly in their thoroughness.

Many families have come to see their personal histories as the whole truth of what happened. In Anlong Veng, where people still live in villages known by their Khmer Rouge-era numeric military names, those histories are often inverted versions of what other Cambodians believe, with Khmer Rouge soldiers presented as protagonists instead of perpetrators. Until 12th grade, Chantha never thought twice about his parents being soldiers. “It was normal in Anlong Veng,” he said.

Now as an adult, a combination of internet searches and the school’s teaching materials have led Chantha to believe “the entire regime was horrible, because so many people were killed.” But his north star is still his mom’s stories — which tend to come back to the same refrain about why some people suffered while others were spared.

“She said in any places where the Vietnamese were secretly involved, the food and the living situation in that area would be difficult,” Chantha said. “If there were no Vietnamese masquerading as Khmer, people living in the area would live a normal life.”

One example goes like this: In 1977, his mother was helping to build a dam near the Vietnamese border. At a nearby Khmer Rouge hospital that she often passed by, patients were dying so often that it was considered a local mystery among soldiers. Once, when Chantha’s mother visited herself, she saw patients so thin “they didn’t even look human,” she told him.

The deaths were so frequent because the doctors were secretly Vietnamese, she said, and they were injecting Khmer patients with poison or water on purpose to make them sick. When Khmer Rouge leaders “discovered” the charade, they killed or disappeared the doctors for re-education, and the hospital was shut down.

“I think what my mother told me seemed reasonable,” Chantha said as he recounted the tale. “There were spies, and that’s why patients like soldiers and civilians were killed.”

Khmer Rouge hospitals were notoriously plagued by starvation and disease and lacking in basic care. Historian Stephen Heder, who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and is now a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while it’s plausible that incompetent medics killed patients either inadvertently or on purpose in some instances, there is “zero evidence” of Vietnamese spies having been involved.

When we asked how Chantha squares his mom’s viewpoint with the facts he’s picked up elsewhere, he said he has decided not to view the regime as entirely good or entirely bad.

“If people weren’t lucky, and they lived in an area that wasn’t good, they experienced bad things,” he said. “For me personally, I can’t differentiate whether Ta Mok was a good or bad person because my parents’ experience was good compared to other people’s.”

But he’s certain of one thing: “If any unit had a Vietnamese spy, people would definitely be massacred.”

Chantha’s mother Mong Tim first met Ta Mok in 1993, when he invited a group of soldiers’ wives to his home. Cambodia had just hosted its first general elections under the United Nations, and the rest of the country was moving on from the Khmer Rouge — but Ta Mok was determined to keep control of the district.

As the women sat in a big circle around him, Ta Mok paced around the living room and drew up  plans to protect Anlong Veng’s borders on a blackboard. He wore a simple cloth and addressed the women in a quiet voice. Afterward, the group ate a lunch of beef and pork together at long tables, sharing tips on how to raise chickens and cows. 

In all, the women spent 10 days like this at Mok’s home, the daily blackboard sessions only interrupted for big meals prepared by a chef.

“He said if we didn’t do our best to protect our land, the Vietnamese would take our land and it would end in misery,” Mong Tim recalled. “What he told me inspired me to survive for my children’s future. I didn’t want to lose our land or have another government to govern us. If we lost the battle with the Vietnamese, they would abuse us.”

We spoke with Mong Tim, now 63, in the living room of her wooden home, where framed photos displayed her six adult children along the mantle and a talking bird screeched out Khmer greetings in the garden. The wives’ meeting sparked a yearslong friendship: Ta Mok regularly gifted her rice and seasonings and even taught her to sew.

In the early 1990s, Khmer Rouge soldiers flooding into Anlong Veng were pulled into his system, working together to raise farm animals and sharing goods amongst themselves. Many soldiers had lost their own parents or families. “Cambodians relocated from every part of the country. We learned to love each other like a family in order to help each other and to survive,” Tim said.

It was a big improvement from her life before. During the 1980s, when Vietnam occupied Cambodia, fighting dragged out in Anlong Veng, even though the Khmer Rouge movement was effectively dead. Tim moved daily between different parts of the jungle, and while she tried to seek refuge in Thailand, “people didn’t allow us to enter their village,” she said. Instead, she built a hut and lived there for a year, surviving off bitter roots. She lost all her hair.

Still, she doesn’t blame Ta Mok or other Khmer Rouge leaders for refusing to capitulate.

“I felt pain when thinking that the Vietnamese invaded us​​ and abused us. I felt pain because we could not settle anywhere,” she said. “We kept running because the Vietnamese army kept chasing us. We ran all the time, and we ran while exhausted and starving. We slept mostly on the ground, anywhere we could.”

“I didn’t suffer with Ta Mok, but I did with the Vietnamese invasion,” Tim said. 

In recent years, Tim has come across Facebook and YouTube videos that say Ta Mok murdered people in the country’s southwest, but that was before she knew him. Under his rule, she told us, people had rice and fish. The forest was protected. He even traded small bits of gold at the Thai border to bring back noodles and rice. 

We asked if her feelings about him have changed at all since they first met, and she said no.

How Anlong Veng residents should grapple with the past has been a point of debate for years. Back in 2003, the government said it wanted to memorialize the district as a tourist destination, prompting local outcry and a slew of articles stereotyping it as the “Wild West” of Cambodia. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia where Kheang works, rejected the plan on the grounds that it would commercialize memory.

Complicating matters was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that sought to try war criminals through a joint Cambodian and international court. Although the tribunal was only meant to focus on high-level architects of the genocide — and struggled to even do that — it had a chilling effect in Anlong Veng. One researcher recalled villagers physically running from his white car during a visit, scared that a U.N. vehicle had arrived to take them away.

By 2015, the tribunal had stalled, and Youk established the program in Anlong Veng to teach kids about Khmer Rouge history. The sessions bring 15 kids from local high schools to a day-long workshop — led by Kheang — to explain the basic history of the regime and visit historical sites like Ta Mok’s compound and Pol Pot’s grave.

In a Zoom call, I told Youk about Chantha and his mother and asked how he saw the organization’s role in interpreting the older generation’s narratives for young people.

Youk himself straddles seemingly contradictory positions. As a child, he survived being tortured in a Khmer Rouge work camp and eventually fled to the United States. His extended family is from Ta Mok’s home province of Takeo and lost all but two relatives there. And yet to do his work effectively, he must defend the humanity of Anlong Veng to outsiders.

In 2011, researchers found that both soldiers and high schoolers in Anlong Veng tended to view themselves within a victim-hero mindset against the Vietnamese, bolstered by poverty, intergenerational trauma and isolation. All told, this led to “difficulty in observing the emergence of coherent narratives,” they wrote.

That lack of cohesion, along with omissions or outright lies, doesn’t matter, Youk told me, so long as people are talking in the first place. “I don’t expect one narrative,” he said. “The more complex the history, the more we learn.”

Historians themselves are not settled on much of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime and the precise role Ta Mok played. While it is clear that he would have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, his reputation for having orchestrated huge massacres has been exaggerated over the years, Heder, the historian who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, said.

“What we know among us about what happened under this regime is not one thousandth of one percent of what we know about the Holocaust, maybe one percent of what we know about what happened in the Soviet Union, and a hundredth of one percent of what we know about China under Mao,” Heder said. “We’re all wandering around in the dark grabbing onto little beams of light trying to put together a coherent picture.” 

Youk said his long-term goal isn’t to adjudicate specific beliefs or memories in Anlong Veng. Eventually, he’d like to see the district reconnect culturally with the rest of Cambodia — but first that means helping kids talk to their parents and grandparents about why they think what they do. “They have to reconcile within their own family first before they can reconcile with their neighbors, the community, outside,” he said.

Youk said he doesn’t expect that to happen right away, especially through a single workshop.

“In the beginning, I only expect them to learn the word genocide, that’s all,” he said. “If you can just say that, that’s fine.” But when kids grow up, “they have the responsibility to find their truth.”

Not everyone in Anlong Veng is nostalgic for Ta Mok’s rule. An Horn, a slight, wiry cassava and rice farmer who we met outside his wooden home on a winding dirt road, quickly brushed aside the idea that the leader was anything special.

In fact, only the higher-level Khmer Rouge benefited from the food and unlimited handfuls of money that other residents had ascribed to Ta Mok. “I never dared to go near him,” Horn said with a shake of his head. “He was one of the top leaders and I was a low-ranking soldier. I wouldn’t go near him.”

Horn was around 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into his rural province. Troops separated him from his parents and forced him into a camp with other kids, where he was trained as a child soldier. His first job was carrying older boys’ food and drink and then hauling soil to construct dams. “We didn’t have any freedom at all. They forced small kids to work as hard as elders,” he said.

As he became a teenager and started moving between provinces in a mobile unit, Horn’s life consisted of staying up for hours on night watch and stealing sleep on the ground “like an animal.” By 1980, he was sent to the mountain range above Anlong Veng, where soldiers had more clothing and food than he’d ever seen before. But the luxuries didn’t win him over. 

“At that point, I just prayed that the war would end,” he said. “I was so scared I would die.”

Horn remains unimpressed with the things that people often point out as generous acts by the Khmer Rouge regime. Leaders built roads to connect Anlong Veng’s villages and the mountain to move their own supplies, not help residents, he said. And bridges and schools are simply what should be expected from any government. In his own village, “the majority of people prayed the war would end so we could live a normal life, reunite with our family, make a living.”

If that was the case, we asked, why did some people in the district remain so loyal to Ta Mok? “You supported [the] group to which you belonged,” Horn said. “If you were under the shade of a tree, you admired that tree.” 

Sorpong Peou, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who likewise survived the Khmer Rouge, calls this mentality the “politics of survival” that still plagues Cambodia today. Opposition leaders, frustrated with Hun Sen’s longtime authoritarian rule, have continued to trot out anti-Vietnamese racism, using the slur yuon and accusing the prime minister of being a Vietnamese puppet. 

“Cambodian politics is very deeply personalized, not institutionalized. Everything is personal,” Peou said. “The court is Hun Sen’s court, the armies are Hun Sen’s armies. Everything is personal, and because of that, personal attacks are the norm, demonizing your opponent is the norm.”

But it’s also “self-defeating,” he said. “You destroy your country by not being able to move toward reconciliation.”

As the house across the street from Horn’s kicked off an evening karaoke session, we realized it was too late to call a motorbike back to town. Horn said he couldn’t ask his neighbors for a ride because people in the village still don’t trust each other after dark.

We made small talk while waiting for another pickup. Had Horn visited any of the local sites the memory organization was fitting with plaques and guides, like Ta Mok’s old compound? Horn said he hadn’t. He wants kids to know what happened, but the places from the past don’t interest him.

By the end of the Ly Sok Kheang’s workshop, the high schoolers were getting antsy. We had watched them sit through Kheang’s morning talk, a movie and history tour on the mountainside, plus a break to take selfies on the cliff overlooking Anlong Veng’s lush farmland.

Now we stood in a small muddy clearing, where under a mound of dirt, protected by a rusting roof and a sagging wire fence, lay Pol Pot’s remains.

It was an unassuming resting place compared to Ta Mok’s towering shrine. Across the street, a casino with a busted-out window and a graying facade loomed over the mountaintop. As the kids stood around the grave, an elderly woman who works as its unofficial cleaner tottered up the path and started talking. She joined the Khmer Rouge, she told them, because she “believed that it was a good thing to do.”

“If you all persist both mentally and physically to do something like I did in the past — if the next generation persists in expanding and protecting our land from the neighboring countries — I believe we will have a sustainable country,” she said, a hand resting on the wire fence. “If we’re all weak, the neighboring countries will interfere, and we will lose our land bit by bit until it is all gone.”

The kids tossed out questions: How long have you looked after the grave? “Twenty years.” Do people celebrate here? “Sometimes.” As is their custom, the workshop leaders didn’t try to intervene, letting the kids take in as much or as little as they wanted: Kheang, who had swapped his button-down for a T-shirt during the mountainside excursion, said that the cleaner always makes an appearance during visits. “Kids can feel the narrative themselves,” he told me later.

We rode down the mountain to our final destination, Ta Mok’s compound. Overlooking the lake dotted with lilypads, we sat near the storerooms where the Khmer Rouge had once squirreled away records and artifacts, talking to the 17-year-old Phal Rampha as the other kids crowded around.

His grandpa sells palm cakes to make a living, but before that, he was a bodyguard to one of Ta Mok’s right-hand men. Sometimes, a bite of palm cake reminds him of a specific story: Once, Rampha said, his grandpa dodged a bullet that bent the tree behind him all the way back. 

“Before, I thought that the Khmer Rouge regime was rescuing the nation from war,” he told us. “From today’s session I learned that there was torture, which made me sad. It seemed atrocious.”

Rampha said that didn’t think his grandpa would have lied about Ta Mok being a kind person who gave people everything he had to help them. His eyebrows knitted together as he spoke.

“I think he couldn’t have been the one who did all of those brutal things to people,” Rampha said. “I believe there were spies in the government.” But it also seemed clear that Ta Mok and other Khmer Rouge leaders had caused internal fighting and divided people into groups.

“I want to know more,” he said. “How cruel was it? Where were the mass graves?”

I asked if he had specific questions for his grandpa. Not yet, he said. “But I want to tell my grandpa that the Khmer Rouge regime was more horrible than what he told me,” Rampha said.

How would he feel bringing that up?

“Hean,” Rampha said, using the Khmer word meaning “brave enough.” “Hean. Hean.”

The post In the Khmer Rouge’s last stronghold, myths from the Cambodian genocide still reign appeared first on Coda Story.

“You do not know the plight of the poor,” the girl told reporters, referring to the high priests and seers who argue that eggs violate the vegetarianism supposedly intrinsic to the practice of Hinduism. “We need eggs… who are you to tell us [what to eat]?”

In July, the howls of indignation from upper caste communities and even legislators notwithstanding, Karnataka’s department of education announced that it would provide eggs in all districts on 46 days of the 2022-23 school year.

Only half of India’s 28 states and eight union territories provide eggs as part of the midday meal scheme. And in those states that do provide eggs, the frequency ranges from daily to once a week to even once a month. These free school lunches feed well over 100 million of the poorest children in the country, ensuring they get at least one balanced, nutritious meal every day. The scheme began as an incentive for poor parents to send their children to school, if only to guarantee lunch, but is now a widely acknowledged bulwark against the persistent malnutrition that afflicts children in India.

Rates of stunting and severe stunting remain stubbornly high in India, despite decades of economic growth. The children most affected are those under five years old, but even among school-going children over 30% are underweight and undernourished.

Covid has exacerbated concerns, with government figures between 2020 and 2021 showing a sharp rise in the number of acutely malnourished children, even in prosperous states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat. According to this year’s Global Hunger Index, India ranks 107 out of 121 countries, faring worse than poorer neighbors such as Bangladesh.

Nutrient-rich eggs, packed with protein, would substantially improve India’s nutritional outcomes. In Karnataka, a study commissioned by the government showed that 13-year-old to 14-year-old girls who had access to eggs as part of a midday meal program gained 71% more weight than girls of the same age and socioeconomic background who did not get eggs.

Still, Karnataka’s apparently sensible decision to make eggs available to schoolchildren who wanted them met with disapproval in influential circles. Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, the vice president of Karnataka’s BJP chapter and widow of a former minister in the Narendra Modi government, tweeted that eggs were “not the only source of nutrition.” She added that the decision to serve eggs in school might be considered “exclusionary to many students who are vegetarians.”

The BJP is the political party in government at state-level in Karnataka and federally, with Modi arguably the most popular and powerful prime minister in decades. Its prevailing ideology is Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist movement that has disdain for India’s constitutional secularism, believing India ought to be a Hindu nation — in the same way that countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan are Islamic nations.

Karnataka is now one of very few BJP-ruled states that are offering eggs to schoolchildren. States such as Gujarat, where Modi comes from and where he was chief minister between 2001 and 2014 before becoming prime minister for the whole country, don’t offer eggs as part of school lunch even though large numbers of children suffer from chronic malnutrition.   

Sylvia Karpagam, a doctor and public health researcher based in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, told me that the “myth about India being vegetarian is strongly pushed by those with an ideological agenda. It is far from the truth. And it is reinforced by the mostly dominant caste, English-speaking, Indian-origin diaspora in the West. It feeds the stereotype that India is a largely mystical, yoga-practicing, peace-loving country.” Karpagam, who has written extensively on India’s nutrition problems and its links to caste and class inequalities, noted that this dominant class influence “manifests itself in the kind of decisions about food that are being made in the country.”

A 2020 paper published by experts whose findings were intended to help shape India’s new national education policy claimed that “animal-based foods interfere with hormonal functions in humans.” Just a few lines before this conclusion, the authors noted that “[g]iven the small body frame of Indians, any extra energy provided through cholesterol by regular consumption of egg and meat leads to lifestyle disorders.”

Widely criticized on social media, the paper was deemed further proof of an unscientific, state-sanctioned effort to portray vegetarianism as somehow more Indian than the meat-eating commonly associated with lower caste Hindus and Muslims. In its ugliest manifestation, this endorsement of vegetarianism spills out of conference rooms and academic position papers and onto the streets in the form of lynchings of mostly Muslim cattle traders.

According to Human Rights Watch, between 2015 and 2018, 44 Indians, including 36 Muslims, have been killed by cow vigilantes. In another analysis, 97% of attacks by self-styled “gau rakshaks,” literally “the providers of protection and security to cows,” between 2010 and 2017 occurred since the ascension of Modi to power in Delhi. As recently as April 2022, there were reports of a man dying after he and two other men were severely beaten by vigilantes who suspected the men of slaughtering cows.

“There is a contempt for meat,” Sylvia Karpagam, the doctor from Bangalore, told me. “And for meat eaters who are viewed and projected as more violent, as sexually aggressive, lustful and criminal.” She stressed that these behavioral associations were linked to casteist notions of “purity and pollution.” Brahmins, she said, flaunted vegetarianism as pure and meat-eating as impure. “This idea is fed early to children,” she explained. “Meat-eaters often experience shame for their food choices and tend to hide what they eat in their homes.”

In recent years, this cultural shaming has been abetted and encouraged by the government. Four years ago, India’s health ministry tweeted an image explicitly associating extra weight and lack of health with the eating of meat and eggs. A backlash led to the ministry deleting the tweet, but the mindset, Karpagam insists, remains.

Vegetarianism and veganism have become increasingly popular in the West, where these dietary choices are seen as not just beneficial for health reasons but also for the environment. But, Karpagam argues, “the vegetarianism that is being pushed here, in our context, is top-down, caste and class-based. It is totally unscientific. For example, if a woman goes to a hospital with anemia, she will be given iron tablets and told to eat vegetables. But it is unlikely she will be told that liver and red meats are good for her. This is vegetarianism by erasure. The government is not endorsing vegetarianism for ethical reasons or scientific ones. In fact, our knowledge of healthy vegetarianism is also poor.”

According to Karpagam, “enforced vegetarianism” harms the poor. “When the poor eat a cereal-heavy and nutrient-deficient diet they are more likely to suffer from malnutrition. Children are more likely to have stunting and to be undernourished,” she said. Yet most national health surveys show that up to 70% of Indians are meat-eating, that for poor people food such as the meat from water buffaloes (classified as beef by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making India ironically one of the world’s largest exporters of beef alongside the likes of Brazil and Australia) are a major part of their diets.

Dipa Sinha, an economics professor at Delhi’s Ambedkar University, said that “if meat and eggs were incorporated into public food programs then obviously supplementary nutrition would be better and that could have an effect on our malnutrition crisis.” But, she conceded, “the resistance to such a move comes largely from the upper castes. Vegetarianism is an upper caste idea and it is the dominant castes that exert the most influence on public programs.” These programs mostly help those whose diets have traditionally included meat and eggs and who are ill-served by the growing distaste with which the government views people who do not follow vegetarian diets.

The Right to Food Campaign describes itself as an “informal network of organizations and individuals” who recognize that “everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and undernutrition.” Swati Narayan, a scholar and activist who works with the Campaign, told me that while India “has achieved scale with the universalization of school meals, we’ve still not achieved nutrition, as is evident in the government data.” Eggs, she pointed out, “are nutrient dense, so why not achieve adequate nutrition by adding eggs to school meals?”

As inflation bites, poor people in India often go without, eating flatbread and pickles as a meal, or going without basic vegetables. In such circumstances, school midday meals are a lifeline.

It seems wholly unreasonable that a simple and inexpensive fix such as adding a single egg to free lunches for poverty-stricken children must meet such virulent cultural opposition that it falls upon straight-talking schoolgirls to show community leaders, priests and government ministers the error of their ways.

The post Eggs in school lunches can fix India’s malnutrition crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Dr. Babu, an ophthalmologist by training, was horrified. “How can they treat double vision with some drops!!” he exclaimed incredulously on Twitter. Retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, has no known cure, and cataracts cannot be treated without surgery, he told me over the phone from his home in Kannur, in the south Indian state of Kerala.

“There are no clear cut studies to substantiate that advertisement,” he said, expressing concern that patients might opt for the eye drops instead of clinically proven treatments or surgeries. “People will be denied proper treatment, which will lead to blindness.”

After spotting several similar adverts from Patanjali claiming that their Ayurvedic medicines could cure, among other things, diabetes, blood pressure issues and goiter, Dr. Babu filed a legal complaint. Last month, the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a notice to the company for misleading advertising.

Endorsing unscientific cures

In April, at a convention center in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi sat next to the World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as they celebrated the growing global impact of traditional Indian medicine.

Together they inaugurated the WHO Global Center for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, Gujarat — built with a $250 million investment from the Indian government as a standard bearer for the shared vision with WHO that “harnessing the potential of traditional medicine would be a game changer for health when founded on evidence, innovation and sustainability.” According to the WHO, over “40% of pharmaceutical formulations are based on natural products and landmark drugs, including aspirin and artemisinin, originated from traditional medicine,” with an estimated 88% of countries using traditional therapies, such as herbal medicines, acupuncture, yoga, and others. 

For Modi, the promotion of Indian traditional medicine is essential to both his economic and ideological agenda. The export of Indian-made herbal medicines is worth several hundred billion dollars already and the industry is growing at nearly 9% each year, with demand exploding during the Covid-19 pandemic as people sought natural remedies and “immunity boosters” for the virus.

On October 23, at an event to mark “Ayurveda Day,” the minister of state for Ayush (the traditional medicines ministry created by the Modi government in 2014 when he became prime minister) claimed that Ayurveda was now accepted as a traditional system of medicine in 30 countries and that Ayush medicines were being exported to 100 countries.

Ayurveda dates back some 4,000 years and its foundational texts emphasize ideas of balance and harmony. While the economic reasons to promote Ayurveda, like yoga, as an Indian gift to the world are apparent, it also fits with the Modi government’s Hindu supremacist agenda and with feeding a sense of grievance that India’s colonial history has meant Indian knowledge systems are frequently dismissed as inferior to Western science.

The second sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Ayurveda declares that the “theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.” This so incensed the Ayurvedic Medicine Manufacturers Organization of India that it complained to the Supreme Court that the entry was defamatory, prompting the bench, as it dismissed the case on October 21, to observe acerbically that “you can edit the Wikipedia article.”

Yet allegations of pseudoscience and low testing and quality control standards continue to dog Ayush medicines. Patanjali is far from the only company peddling unproven medical cures. And the nationalist agenda to promote traditional Indian medicines has prompted a slew of endorsements from prominent religious or political figures for treatments which have never been scientifically proven to work.

For instance, Ashwini Choubey, ex-Minister of State for Health, extolled the use of cow urine as a cure for cancer. The cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism, and cow urine has been used in Ayurvedic treatments for centuries. Another Union Minister of State, Shripad Naik, claimed that Ayurvedic treatments “have already reached a stage where just like chemotherapy, we can treat cancer, but without the side effects.” There is no reliable evidence to support the use of any Ayurvedic medicine as a treatment for cancer.

Choubey and Naik are among a growing number of voices on the Hindu right pushing for the integration of traditional Indian therapies with modern medicine. The Ministry of Ayush — Ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy — was set up to oversee and promote traditional Indian medicine. But the ministry has also helped promote medical cures which are not backed by evidence. In an advisory on preventative measures against Covid-19, for instance, the ministry suggested the use of Arsenicum album 30C, a homeopathic drug, as a prophylactic against the virus, alongside other measures such as inserting sesame oil in each nostril every morning.

Not only is there no evidence that these treatments can help to prevent Covid-19, but homeopathy as a whole has been widely debunked.

Critics are keen to emphasize that while not all alternative treatments are ineffective — indeed, many modern medicines drew originally on traditional medicinal knowledge — all treatments should undergo rigorous clinical trials before being promoted in the public sphere.

“It doesn't matter what form of therapy you suggest is working. It has to be grounded in evidence,” said Anant Bhan, a researcher in bioethics and health policy. “If you can't show that, then such claims should not be made, because then you're potentially putting human lives at risk.”

A violation of the right to life?

Misinformation surrounding alternative therapies in India has already proven deadly. One study from 2019 published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Hepatology, which compared patients with alcoholic hepatitis who were taking alternative medicines with a control group who received standard care, found that the patients using alternative medicines had significantly higher short-term mortality rates; only 18% survived to 6 months, compared to 52% of patients receiving standard care.

Concerns that the attempt to integrate traditional medicine with modern science may negatively impact health outcomes have also been voiced by the Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), a group of doctors in Mumbai. Earlier this year, they filed a petition against two new bills which would allow Ayurvedic doctors to practice various types of surgery. The government claims the scheme will address the country’s chronic shortage of doctors, and has set up a six-month-long bridge course which aims to train the Ayurvedic practitioners.

But the AMC contested that the new bills constitute a “violation of the right to life” as laid out by the Constitution of India. “The government steps to try and integrate the Indian system of medicine with the contemporary modern system of medicine is fraught with danger,” said Dr. Sudhir Naik, an obstetrician and past president of the AMC who was involved in filing the petition.

“We understand the government's limitations as far as the workforce is concerned. But there are no shortcuts,” he said. “You can’t give them six months training and say, okay, now go ahead, go into the field and do these procedures. That's not practical, that's highly dangerous. You can't use our rural population as guinea pigs.”

Questions remain, too, about the use of essential anesthetic drugs and post-surgery antibiotics, which fall outside the scope of Ayurvedic practice.

“If there is a claim that an Ayurvedic surgeon, for example, can do surgeries of a particular kind, then it has to be based on some kind of comparative evidence generation,” said Bhan. “Ultimately, it comes down to public health and to patient safety.”

Government-led misinformation

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a strong proponent of science, initiating reforms to promote higher education and inaugurating several new scientific research and educational institutes. Today, India has a huge tech industry, its own space program, and is the world’s largest exporter of pharmaceuticals — as well as supplying over half of the vaccines produced worldwide.

The rise of pseudoscience seems to signal a shift however in the priorities of the current leadership, rejecting scientific rigor in pursuit instead of a Hindu nationalist ideology.

Sumaiya Shaikh, a researcher studying the neurobiological underpinnings of violent extremism, has spent years advocating for evidence-based medicine and critiquing misinformation in public health policies in India. There has been a “definite increase” in unscientific claims in recent years, she said — including in the promotion of alternative medicines.

“The government has used it as a strategy to push out untested remedies,” she said. From a neuroscience perspective, misinformation which backs up a person’s existing belief system is very effective because “it's less taxing for your brain than to actually read the evidence or fact check,” she said. “The way that it captures your brain is often highly emotive.”

This means that not only do adverts like Patanjali’s appeal to people on an ideological basis — the conglomerate’s brand ambassador, Baba Ramdev, is a popular Hindu spiritual leader and vocal supporter of the BJP — but they also bank on simplicity. 

People tend to be drawn to the quick fixes, said Shaikh, “where there are bigger promises made. For example, a person who's an expert in, say, diabetes is never going to claim that we're going to completely rid you of diabetes — but somebody who is an expert in homeopathy will make that promise to you.” The result, she said, is that many end up opting for therapies which have little evidence of efficacy.

Dr. Cyriac Abby Philips is a liver specialist who actively campaigns against what he sees as a dangerous lack of regulation of alternative medicines. He believes that the current leadership is unwilling to correct misinformation, because it would directly contradict some of the core tenets of Hinduism.

For example, Tinospora cordifolia, commonly known as Giloy, is a shrub native to India which appears in ancient Hindu texts, and has been used by Ayurvedic practitioners to treat various medical ailments for centuries. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have linked its use to liver damage, however. The results of some of these studies have been strongly disputed by the Ministry of Ayush, which called one paper and the media reports which followed its publication “misleading” and questioned whether the active ingredient has been mistaken for a “similar looking herb.” The ministry did not respond to my requests for comment on this article.

Dr. Philips, who has also published a paper linking Giloy usage to liver damage, believes that the ministry’s strong rebuttal of the research is due to the “cultural, traditional and political values” attached to Ayurvedic treatments such as Giloy. “It's not so simple saying that this Ayurvedic drug or this Ayurvedic practice is wrong. if you say that, it's like you are hitting at the foundation of India,” said Philips.

Capitalizing on fear

The promotion of alternative treatments with limited evidence of efficacy increased drastically with the arrival of Covid-19 in India in early 2020. Fear of the virus, combined with a lack of consensus from the scientific community on how it was spread, resulted in a marked increase in misinformation.

“There was this sense of urgency of getting something which works. So when you get any source of information which seems credible, then of course, you would jump at it,” said Bhan.

At the peak of the pandemic in June 2020, Patanjali launched Coronil, advertising it as the “first evidence-based medicine for Covid-19” at an event also attended by India’s then Minister of Health, Harsh Vardhan. After a backlash and widespread doubt over the veracity of the data, Coronil was later downgraded to an “immunity booster,” a claim which was endorsed by the Ministry of Ayush. A lab test carried out by the University of Birmingham found that the pills offered no protection against the virus.

Despite this, Patanjali sold 2.5 million Coronil kits in the four months since its launch, grossing $30 million, according to the company. Sales of some other “immunity boosters” manufactured by Ayurvedic companies rose by as much as 700% during the first few months of the pandemic.

“There is cultural supremacy that the medicines bring, but at the same time, there's a huge financial gain here,” said Shaikh. “The alternative health industry knows that they're making a large amount of money out of this. And of course, the government knows that too — the government is equally to blame here, in not containing the misinformation, in promoting it from their own channels.”

A lack of regulation

While alternative medicine manufacturers in India must comply with the same Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) as pharmaceutical companies under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, factory inspections are conducted by different departments for each school of medicine. As such, the production of alternative medicines is often subject to less stringent regulations, said Akash Sathyanandan, a lawyer at the High Court of Kerala, with “different yardsticks for different schools of medicine.”

With public scrutiny lower than in the pharmaceutical industry, Sathyanandan said that substandard manufacturing processes often go unnoticed and underreported. “There is a lot of data that is below sea level,” he said.

Many alternative formulations have been found to contain contaminants, some of which are harmful to human health. Several studies conducted in the U.S. for example, found that a significant percentage of imported Ayurvedic supplements contained lead and other heavy metals, at quantities which would result in intake above regulatory standards if consumed as recommended by manufacturers.

Dr. Cyriac Philips has first-hand experience of the danger this poses. At his clinic in Kerala, many of the patients have liver injuries which have been caused or exacerbated by the consumption of alternative medicines.

In one case, a 16-year-old girl who presented to the clinic in urgent need of a liver transplant was found to have spent the past three years consuming alternative medicines for a seizure disorder. When a laboratory analysis of the medicines was done, it was found that they contained high quantities of arsenic.

“She had arsenic detectable in her nails and hairs. And she also developed a very special type of liver disease due to arsenic toxicity known as non-cirrhotic portal hypertension,” said Dr. Philips. He estimates that he has conducted laboratory tests on around 250 different alternative medicines, all brought to him by his patients, and has found many of them to contain contaminants such as mercury in levels “more than 100,000 times the upper limit of what is ideally recommended.”

Tampering with the processes of good science

Dr. Philips’s work has often been seen as an attack on alternative medicines, and he has faced a heavy backlash, with his laboratory being attacked twice. On social media, he said, he regularly receives threats when he posts anything critical of Ayurveda. “They send me messages, derogatory and vulgar messages, threatening me that my life is gone,” he said.

Silencing criticism is a broader problem, said Shaikh. “If you're a non-Ayush clinician, you do not have the right to talk about Ayush,” she said. “They're actively stopping peer review.”

In the long run, she believes that this approach to scientific research will only damage the global reputation of India in the health industry.

“It's harming, what they want to do,” she says. “If you want to establish India as the main provider of service, whether it's manufacturing or health service, then you've got to have scrutiny in place for every single step, and listen to what the scientists are saying.”

Others, such as Dr. Babu, are more hopeful that regulations surrounding alternative treatments will slowly catch up with modern medicine as the industry grows. He believes that the success of his legal complaint against Patanjali’s advertisements marks a turning point in the battle against pseudoscience.

“There'll be some concrete action from [regulatory bodies] to prevent such misleading advertisements in future, I'm sure,” he says. “I am trusting the legal system of my country.”

But India’s legal system will have to contend with the determination of a powerful prime minister intent on ushering in, as he put it in April, alongside the WHO director general, “a new era of traditional medicine in the next 25 years.” And with the pop cultural appeal of figures like Baba Ramdev who has built a multi-billion-dollar yoga and Ayurveda empire with Patanjali, dubious treatments notwithstanding, at its heart. 

The post Modi wants to export traditional Indian medicine to the world, but doctors warn against pseudoscience and quack cures appeared first on Coda Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Violence between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan reveals authoritarianism’s communication paralysis appeared first on Coda Story.

Up here, on a hill in the Aravalli Range, mountains so ancient that they trace their origins to a Precambrian event, Pooja was finally able to get her smartphone to connect to the internet.

We are about an eight-hour drive from Delhi, in a village in Ajmer, a district in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Pooja is an official, or “mate,” responsible for helping to log the attendance of workers in a national employment scheme.

The rural workers who resort to this scheme — the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA) — are so desperate for jobs that the government guarantees them 100 days of unskilled manual labor in a year at barely subsistence wages. A day’s work, usually about four hours in a baking field, earns a worker less than three dollars.

Once keeping track of workers enrolled in this massive welfare project meant making manual entries into logbooks. Now, as with most things involving an Indian government keen to appear tech savvy, there’s an app for that.

India’s federal government announced in May that the app – with its unlovely, rather alarming name, the “National Mobile Monitoring System” (NMMS) – is mandatory. Manual logs of worker attendance will no longer be kept. If there are teething problems, government functionaries breezily asserted, they will be addressed and remedied. 

The Ministry of Rural Development has said the app — developed by the National Informatics Center, which has an annual budget of around $150 million — would lead to “more transparency and ensure proper monitoring.” With the use of “geo-tagged photographs” taken of the workers on arrival and departure, the app would apparently help “in increasing citizen oversight of the program.”

Chakradhar Buddha, a researcher at LibTech India, which advocates accountability and transparency in governance, scoffs: “If they think the app is so efficient, why don’t they put it in the public domain for everyone to see?”

Instead, he says, by being so dogmatically technocratic and centralized, the government has opted “for a top-down approach in which workers cannot hold public officials accountable.” Social audits and an engaged citizenry, he adds, are far better ways to improve transparency. 

Pooja has had to walk to the top of this hill nearly every day since the government made it mandatory to register workers in the scheme through the app, 

“If I don’t do this,” Pooja says about her daily trudge up the hill, “the workers won’t get paid.”

On the day we met, despite finally getting her phone to work, Pooja couldn’t access the app. She walked back downhill to the village council but no one could help. “Now,” said a frustrated Pooja, “the workers are going to come after me. This is the third day I have not been able to register them and they’re going to blame me for their lost wages.”

Until a month ago, she says, she’d never touched a smartphone and had barely heard of Facebook and WhatsApp.

Her area has only one mobile network tower. It belongs to Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, better known as Jio, India’s largest mobile network operator. Jio is the telecom arm of a giant conglomerate run by Mukesh Ambani, on some days Asia’s richest man (a title he swaps back and forth with an Indian rival in an ongoing battle of the billionaires).

Jio bid over $11 billion last week to dominate a 5G spectrum auction by the Indian government, enabling the company to build, it said, “the world’s most advanced 5G network.” Right now, though, despite Jio’s 426.2 million users and its pan-India coverage, it appeared India’s smartphone revolution had not reached Pooja’s village. My phone showed no bars; making a call was not an option, let alone surfing the internet.

Another MGNREGA mate, Leila Devi, told me she had spent 13,000 rupees (a little over $160) on her smartphone — the equivalent of about 55 days of earnings. The average price of a smartphone in India is 16,323 rupees (over $200), which equals 75 days of wages, or three-quarters of the entire wage guaranteed by the program in a given year.

On top of Leila’s investment in her phone, she pays about $5 every month for her data package. The government does not even partially reimburse mates for either the cost of their phones or their bills. Many mates I spoke to also pointed out that in order to run the NMMS app effectively they had to buy smartphones with specifications that add to the price. The cheapest phones available in the market will not do.

Then there’s the cost of repairs. One mate, Bina, told me she had dropped her phone and that it no longer worked as it should. “I can’t afford to get it fixed,” she says, “or get a new one because I’m still paying off this phone.” The now damaged phone cost Bina about $140, the bulk of which she still owes in monthly installments.

Bina now worries that her malfunctioning phone will mean that she loses her job.

After the pandemic wreaked havoc on construction and other labor-intensive urban jobs in India, over 150 million people have turned to MGNREGA to top up their meager incomes. India’s federal government is struggling to cope.

In June alone, more than 30 million people sought work through the scheme. The current demand for work is unprecedented in the decade and a half since MGNREGA was established in 2006. The numbers reflect an unemployment crisis in India that is belied by the country’s relatively high economic growth. A private research organization, the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, reported that in June 43.7% of young Indians from the ages of 20 to 24 were unemployed.

Millions of people in Rajasthan have little option but to do the low-paid manual labor that is typically demanded of MGNREGA workers.

The chronic underestimating of costs and the subsequent drip-feeding of funds to state governments means payments to workers are routinely delayed. This even though the actual cost of the entire program represents — as the Belgian-born economist Jean Drèze, an architect of MGNREGA, has written — less than 1% of India’s three-trillion-dollar economy, the fifth largest in the world.

Shockingly, the Indian government still owes over $1.5 billion in unpaid wages to workers who are living hand to mouth. Yet almost nothing can be done to recover lost pay.

Standing in a muddy field in rural Rajasthan watching laborers toil in the heat, it’s hard to imagine that all this work might go unpaid and unacknowledged because the government mandates the use of a glitchy app in rural areas with patchy network coverage.

By six in the morning, the workers are assembled to have their attendance recorded on the app. Pooja tries to get her phone to cooperate.

She fumbles as she takes pictures, trying two or three times before she is satisfied. This morning, she is faced with 100 workers divided into groups of five. It would normally, she says, take her about half an hour to register them manually in the “muster roll” but with the app it takes her at least an hour.

When the workers are finally able to address their tasks, the heat is already stultifying. On the day I visited the site, the workers were mostly women, dressed in traditional Rajasthani clothing — long, brightly patterned skirts and tunics and vivid veils that they wore over their heads and with which they sometimes partly covered their faces.

MGNREGA has long been a bastion for women in a culture that does not support working women. Recent data from the World Bank shows that women make up only 20.3% of the Indian workforce. But women made up 54.5% of MGNREGA workers last year.

As if to illustrate these workplace dynamics, there is a makeshift creche at the site. Under a tin roof, held up by metal poles rather than walls, were six or seven children playing with mud. The temperatures, as the day wears on, reach up to 104. In other sites I visited, there were tents for the children. Mostly, though, I saw even very small children help their mothers with their assigned tasks rather than take shelter from the heat. The children filled pans with mud that their mothers then carried away on their heads. 

Maya Ramu, a graduate student and union worker, told me that even the small sum of money the women earned doing such work was “an opportunity for economic freedom. They do not have to wait for their husbands to send money.” The husbands generally go to the cities to look for work, though this is changing in the wake of the pandemic as jobs grow scarce.

It's strange, Ramu adds, that despite progressive employment practices, including reserving a third of MGNREGA jobs for women, the authorities did not stop to consider the effect that a smartphone requirement might have on employing women as site supervisors.

A 2020 survey by a trade body of mobile network operators showed that Indian women were 28% less likely than Indian men to own any kind of mobile phone and 56% less likely to access mobile internet. In Rajasthan only 50.2% of women, revealed the comprehensive National Family Health survey, even own a phone. Inevitably, poorer women and women from traditionally marginalized castes are even less likely to own or have access to any kind of phone, let alone a smartphone.

By eleven, five hours after the workers assembled for Pooja to photograph them on her phone, they are finished and ready to leave. They have barely had a break. When the workers rest, Pooja reminds them to finish the task at hand so that their already inexcusable wage is not reduced further. At the end, she stands with a measuring tape to ensure that the day’s work is complete.

Tamanna has walked two miles to get to the site. She left at dawn, while her children were still sleeping. Two days ago, she tells me, she and 97 other women had to wait for hours after work beneath the unforgiving afternoon sun because servers were down. Yesterday, monsoon rains meant the internet was down again. 

Pooja keeps her phone wrapped in plastic during the rainy season, fishing it out only to access the app but it’s rare that her phone has any service. She must walk again to a spot where her phone actually works.

Just weeks ago, mates across Rajasthan could not access the app because internet services had been suspended. India leads the world in terms of frequency of shutdowns and disruptions. While violence in an increasingly polarized country cannot be blamed on the app, every day lost is a calamity for MGNREGA workers.

In Rajasthan, the internet shutdown in late-June lasted for four days.

One MGNREGA worker told me that by the fourth day she could no longer put food on the table, unable to buy even the “atta,” the flour with which to make rotis. “Both my sons slept on empty stomachs that night.” But, she said, “we will fight this app.”

Thousands of MGNREGA workers from 15 states gathered on August 2 in Jantar Mantar, the traditional site for protests in the Indian capital New Delhi. They will be there for three days as they give vent to a range of dissatisfactions, including unpaid wages and broad underfunding.

The app, many at the protest said, is exemplary of the government’s arrogance. “There’s no app that records attendance for ministers and officials,” a protestor remarked, “so why do they need to keep tabs on us?”

The post A mobile app is costing India’s poorest workers their wages appeared first on Coda Story.

To mark the occasion, European Union flags are flying above all government buildings in the capital Tbilisi — the Georgian government, although criticized for its meek response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, did apply for EU membership two years ahead of schedule — and the city spent much of the week preparing for annual festivities. 

But away from all the usual fanfare, a small, privately organized exhibition in one of Tbilisi’s hip venues reflected the lack of historic reckoning that makes Georgia’s independence ever so fragile.

The idea for the exhibition was hatched after a group of Ukrainian journalists contacted their colleagues at Tabula magazine in Tbilisi. The Ukrainians asked them for evidence of atrocities committed by Russians in the early 1990s during the internecine conflict in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, when Georgian troops and paramilitaries, Abkhaz forces, local civilians, as well as fighters from the Russian Federation fought a brutal war strafed by massive human rights abuses on all sides.

“It took the massacre in Bucha for us to dig into our own past,” says Tamara Chergoleishvili, founder of Tabula and the organizer of the exhibition called “Before Bucha there was Abkhazia.” “I was shocked by what we found, but even more so by how little we know and understand.”

Chergoleishvili discovered that in 1994, Georgia had set up a national investigative commission to look into whether atrocities committed against the Georgians amounted to a genocide. The commission interviewed nearly 25,000 victims of the war and identified 800 people, including members of the Russian military, who participated in human rights violations in Abkhazia. Tabula obtained and shared with me a summary of the findings that detail many of the horrific atrocities that took place. In 1999, the Georgian prosecutors office, using the commission’s report, launched an investigation into the war and sent the report’s summary to the UN in Geneva. But nothing came out of either.

Several people featured in the exhibition testify to what happened in 1993 in a village called Akhaldaba, where 300 ethnic-Georgian residents were held hostage in a local school. Militiamen separated men from women and children. Many of the men have never been seen since, while women and girls were tortured and raped.

“I felt ashamed. These people, the refugees from that war, still live among us, with enormous trauma of what they have been through, and yet, we never acknowledge it, never ask them whether they are okay,” Chergoleishvili said. 

The war in Georgia’s Black Sea province of Abkhazia flared up in the wake of the Soviet collapse: ethnic Abkhaz did not want to be part of an independent Georgia, while the province's predominantly Georgian population did. In villages like Akhalba, situated in the Abkhazia region but inhabited mostly by ethnic Georgians, this brought violent confrontations of the worst kind.

Moscow promoted this rivalry, fanned the flames of ethnic tensions and — once the fighting began — provided weapons, military personnel and propaganda support to the Abkhaz side.  

In years to come, the Kremlin’s role in Abkhazia would become a blueprint for Russia’s approach to conflicts from Moldova’s Transnistria to Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Donbas in Ukraine. “Remember the little green men in Crimea?” asks Malkhaz Pataraia, a refugee still living in Tbilisi who co-founded “Abkhaz Council,” an umbrella platform for many organizations that represent victims of the war. “I have met them in Abkhazia.”

The “little green men” were Russian soldiers Vladimir Putin sent to Crimea without insignia so that he could unofficially establish (and lie about) Russian military presence in the peninsula. Moscow has always denied their soldiers fought in that war, but unlike Ukraine, Russian disinformation about Abkhazia went unchecked and unchallenged for years.

By the time most international organizations arrived in Abkhazia at the end of 1993, Georgian forces and nearly 250,000 Georgian residents had been driven out and nearly 10,000 people had been killed on both sides. Numerous UN fact-finding missions and international investigations like this one by Human Rights Watch all came to similar conclusions: horrible atrocities were committed by both sides, including bombardment of civilian targets by the Russian air force. In subsequent years, the ethnic cleansing and massacres of Georgians were officially recognized by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conventions during the Budapest, Lisbon and Istanbul summits. 

But unlike the war in Ukraine, which has been meticulously documented and full of compelling human stories delivered straight to our feeds, the narrative around Abkhazia is still weaved with the mind-numbing language of international organization reports.  

The geopolitical mood was also radically different. Until very recently, Western policies towards Russia were underpinned by a belief in a possibility of a democratic, Western-friendly Kremlin. Reluctance to undermine that possibility meant that slagging off Moscow was frowned upon. 

“No one wanted to hear about things Russians were doing to us,” said Pataraia, the refugee from Abkhazia. But his definition of “nobody” includes Georgians — both the government and citizens. While it is today a widely accepted truism that Georgians have not been able to face the terrible atrocities that their side committed in Abkhazia, the war in Ukraine suggests that Georgians also have been unable to face their own trauma. 

Pataraia believes that inertia and Russia both played a role in ensuring that stories of suffering and questions of responsibility remained buried. And today, it is clear how this lack of historic reckoning backfired and played into the Kremlin’s hand. Sweeping the stories of victims under a proverbial carpet and locking memories into the furthest corners of consciousness created a vacuum, an ambiguity that the Kremlin masterfully exploited.

For both Abkhaz and Georgians, the conflict became a wound that oozed instability, crime and violence. As politicians failed, survivors suffered. Many of their stories had been collected but never properly told.

Venera Mishveliani, a Georgian refugee from Akhaldaba, told Tabula that some of those who held her hostage in the school were Russian. In a 2009 documentary called “Russian Lessons” filmmaker Andrey Nekrasov featured both victims from the school and a Russian who claims to have been there. 

In the film, Naira Kalandia, a doctor, describes being stopped by “blonde men” speaking Russian “with no accent” who emptied their magazine into her 17-year-old son. She was taken hostage and held, for nine days, along with others, in a building of a local kindergarten. “They used an electrical wire to hang me upside down from the ceiling in a library room, and underneath they burned children’s books,” she tells the camera. The scenes she describes are horrific: one day, she says, soldiers forced her to swallow an eye removed from one of the corpses. Another, she was forced to watch how militia threw hostages into a deep well.

“We were mostly Russian and Armenian, maybe 20% of us in the unit were Abkhaz,” says a man who describes himself as a Russian soldier, who volunteered to join a unit of “ground troops” because he wanted to “help the small Abkhaz nation.” He says he was quickly disillusioned.

“Seeing people thrown into a well was really unpleasant,” he says “I did not like it. I did not like how naked girls, ages 12, 15 would be brought to our base.”

Akhaldaba is next to a town where I spent much of my childhood. My grandmother was among 250,000 Georgian refugees who eventually fled the war in Abkhazia. To her very last days, she talked about her dreams of returning to her house by the sea, or visiting my grandfather’s grave in the hills above it. But we never spoke about the horrors that took place in villages we both considered home. There was an awareness of them, but never a conversation — not in my family and not in the larger society. “Everyone deals with trauma differently, we buried it,” Chergoleishvili said. 

This burial, Pataraia told me, brought the horrors of the war back in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, slicing away more territory both in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Georgia has pushed for justice for the victims of the 2008 war, filing and winning a case in the International Criminal Court. They also fought and won a case in Strasbourg Court of Human Rights over forcible deportations of Georgians from Moscow in 2006. But the search for justice for the victims of the Abkhazia war has not even begun. 

Could the war in Ukraine jumpstart the process? Pataraia’s organization is campaigning for the Georgian parliament to adopt a declaration deeming abuses against Georgians in Abkhazia a “genocide” just like Ukrainians have done. He also wants the prosecutors office to resume an investigation into the war crimes committed in Abkhazia and then, eventually to push for international justice.

 “We owe it to the victims,” he says.

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