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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

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

The post The global battle to control VPNs appeared first on Coda Story.

The speech came back to haunt him on June 29, when Meta’s Oversight Board recommended that the company suspend the prime minister for six months for breaking the platform’s rules against threatening or inciting violence.

Later that day, Hun Sen beat the company to the punch and deleted his own page. It was a stunning move in Cambodia, where the prime minister has used the platform to trumpet his policy positions and lash out at his opponents to the nearly 14 million followers he has amassed since joining Facebook in 2015.

Some of his posts have had immediate real-world consequences. In February 2023, the forced closure of one of Cambodia’s last independent news outlets, Voice of Democracy, played out entirely on Hun Sen’s Facebook over two days. Angered by an article he claimed was erroneous, Hun Sen threatened in a post to revoke VOD’s license if the outlet didn’t apologize promptly.

After VOD expressed “regret” for any confusion the story caused, Hun Sen responded via Facebook that the statement was insufficient and said that the Cambodian Ministry of Information would revoke the outlet’s license.

“Is it acceptable to use words of ‘regret’ and ‘forgiveness’ instead of the word ‘apologize?’ For me, I cannot accept it,” Hun Sen wrote in the post. “Look for jobs elsewhere,” he added. Police and ministry officials arrived at VOD’s office the next morning with an order to cease publishing.

But now the future of Hun Sen’s page is uncertain. A few weeks after he deleted his account, his assistant reinstated it, ahead of the national elections. And Meta, which owns Facebook, has yet to officially decide whether to follow the recommendation of its Oversight Board and proceed with the six-month suspension. This means that the account could go offline again — and take with it a digital archive attesting to the more recent chapters of Hun Sen’s 38-year regime.

“Facebook was the key, important way for him to communicate his political messages to his audience and fans,” said Sokphea Young, a Cambodian research fellow at University College London who has studied the visual messaging of Hun Sen’s Facebook page. “However many people don’t like Prime Minister Hun Sen, the account is very important for the collective memory of Cambodian people and Cambodian history.”

And Cambodia is hardly alone in this. Around the world, speech coming from government officials has increasingly spilled over onto social media platforms. But companies like Meta and Twitter can decide to remove posts or entire accounts at any moment, regardless of how this might affect public access to information about state actors and institutions. Neither company has a policy on archiving state accounts, and, with a few exceptions, states don’t require companies to do this either.

In the mid-1990s, libraries, universities and governments around the world became concerned about losing electronic records to the fast-evolving digital sphere. But archiving from social media platforms has remained an “unloved” area of public policy, even as more and more government data has landed there, said William Kilbride, the executive director of the U.K.-based Digital Preservation Coalition, an advocacy group that works with public and private institutions around the world on archiving. 

Some governments with robust archiving capabilities deal with social media platforms on an individual basis to maintain records. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, for instance, has worked with Twitter to “freeze” previous versions of accounts linked to the presidency on the original platform. The U.K.’s National Archives maintains a social media database with Twitter and YouTube archives.

But major platforms have not created broader global policies around such programs, and they aren’t always transparent about how long they internally retain deleted or suspended accounts or those of deceased people. There are also technical challenges: Meta actively works to prevent scraping, a technique that archivists use to gather and then preserve such data. Finding automated ways to capture pages’ full context — such as comments on posts — is also “really difficult,” Kilbride said. 

Even within existing archival relationships, platforms still have the upper hand. After the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington, D.C., Twitter announced it would not allow a federally preserved version of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump tweets — which the National Archives had been working to preserve — to appear on the site after it “permanently banned” him, as would be typical with other accounts linked to the presidency.

But after Elon Musk bought the company, the account was reinstated on Twitter. In an email exchange, the National Archives would not confirm whether its prior efforts to preserve @realDonaldTrump are ongoing but said to “continue to check back for addition[al] content as it is added in the future.” The handle does not appear alongside other accounts the agency has made separately available on its website.

“The public record has been privatized and now sits on these platforms,” Kilbride said. “Suddenly, it’s the National Archives’ or whoever’s job to try to figure out what on earth to do.”

“They have no duty of transparency,” Kilbride added of the platforms. “There’s no accountability.”

Although most governments have national archiving laws, many lack the resources to enforce them on social media or store mass amounts of data on independent servers, putting them at a further disadvantage in preserving material when accounts — or an entire platform — suddenly go dark.

In June 2021, former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari received a 12-hour suspension on Twitter over a tweet targeting Igbo people, one of the biggest ethnic groups in the country, writing he would “treat them in the language they understand.” Two days later, he blocked access to Twitter countrywide, making his own and other government-related accounts inaccessible within Nigeria.

‘Gbenga Sesan, the executive director of the digital rights group Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, said that in his circles, “nobody cared” at the time about preserving Buhari’s account locally: He was more focused on the thousands of requests for help accessing virtual private networks (VPNs) pouring in from across Nigeria. Plus, digital experts knew that a local block on Twitter didn’t mean the accounts had been lost, he said. 

In fact, as Nigerians continued to access Twitter with VPNs, Buhari’s account — mainly a place to share propaganda and party information — was little-missed for the roughly six months that Twitter was officially blocked. “I don't ever remember going there to check what was said. A few times, I tweeted that silence was a better option for Buhari, because every time he speaks, the country gets angry,” Sesan said.

Still, Sesan wants to see social media platforms create archiving partnerships with governments on a global scale. But the Buhari episode also showed the need for a more expansive view of preservation: On its own, Buhari’s account would provide a slim portrait of Nigeria’s online history at the time. And what’s more, governmental partnerships would only work if both sides had mutual good will to preserve materials.

“You’ll find the digital aides sharing more historical facts than the president himself,” Sesan said.  “That, I think, is the major context when it comes to presidential archives and information: That kind of information also matters.”

Challenges with archiving also arise when it comes to posts that shine light on human rights abuses, war crimes and other atrocities that demand documentation in the service of future legal investigations and historical inquiry, particularly on Meta and YouTube. Last month, Meta’s Oversight Board called on the company to publicly address archiving practices in a decision about a video of Armenian prisoners of war. The video showed the faces of injured and deceased soldiers, raising questions about revealing the identities and locations of prisoners in conflict zones. Although the board agreed Meta was correct to leave up the content with a warning screen, it recommended the company commit to preserving evidence of atrocities, develop public protocols for preservation and explain how long it internally retains data and considers preservation requests. Meta has not yet responded publicly and did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, social media platforms have faced scrutiny for helping to spread hate speech and disinformation in places such as Myanmar, Kenya and India, making the platforms eager to appear quick to remove content or accounts spewing violent rhetoric. 

While deplatforming violent actors can be crucial to limiting offline violence, digital historians and researchers say it also causes public records to disappear from the internet before they have the chance to collect them.

The nonprofit Mnemonic grew out of the civil war in Syria and maintains four archives documenting evidence of potential human rights violations in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Ukraine. As social media platforms have increased their use of automated tools that try to remove harmful content, the group has seen human rights-related material taken down more frequently, according to Maria Mingo, a policy and advocacy manager at Mnemonic. 

The organization stores its archives on independent servers. About one-quarter of the two million YouTube videos it has archived from Syria since 2014 have disappeared from YouTube itself. About one-tenth of the 2,000 Twitter accounts from the same archive have been removed during the same period.

In May 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would begin removing and archiving “inactive” accounts. Mingo said that rule could present a “huge problem” for jailed activists whose accounts, and the information they collected at great personal risk, suddenly disappeared.

“If the content is taken down so, so quickly — unless platforms preserve and are able to engage with relevant stakeholders about the existence of the content — we won’t be able to do anything with it, we won’t be able to request it, we won’t be able to in any way try to use it,” Mingo said. 

“We can’t preserve something that no longer exists, or that we don’t know exists,” she added.

In Cambodia, questions around preservation and collective memory have persisted for decades. During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge genocide wiped out nearly one-quarter of the population. Images of torture, starvation and detention have become irreplaceable to “memorialize how things went wrong in that period,” said researcher Young.

Right now, Hun Sen’s Facebook page provides an unmatched record of the current regime, replete with personal exchanges between Hun Sen and his followers. But it also has a more reflective style. He has long favored posting black-and-white or old photographs of himself or family members, dating back to shortly after the Khmer Rouge era when he came to power. In a recent post after the account was reinstated, he shared an undated photograph of himself as a young man walking in a green, placid background, along with a message about the upcoming one-sided national election, which his party won in a landslide.

“Today is the last day of the party campaign, and also the day of great expectations for the Cambodian People’s Party in the upcoming election. I wish you all, the family of the ‘angel party,’ success countrywide,” the caption read, referring to the ruling party’s logo.

Such photographs have been central to the page for years, according to Young, who, over four years, has tracked the prime minister’s habit of contrasting black-and-white and color photos as a visual representation of his mythical political journey.

The idea is to show himself bringing Cambodia out of the darkness and into the light, a human representation of peace protecting the country from plunging back into civil war.

“As a copy of the history of Cambodia, maybe [his account] should be in a museum somewhere, in the next 40, 50 years, so the new generation can see,” Young said. “This is what Facebook was like, and this is what the prime minister was like, during the new era of digitalization.”

The post When Meta suspends influential political accounts, who loses? appeared first on Coda Story.

Imran Khan is famous in Pakistan for his savvy use of social media. It was instrumental in shaping his political image in the early 2000s and in building the campaign that brought him to power in August 2018. Throughout his premiership, social media was a key tool for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. But today, with Khan at the center of a conflict between political and military powers in Pakistan, social media too has become a space of bitter contention.  

Earlier this month, Khan was arrested on corruption charges by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force, while he was at the Islamabad High Court for a hearing. His arrest, on May 9, triggered nationwide protests and violent clashes between his supporters and the police resulting in at least eight deaths and dozens of injuries. Khan’s supporters had launched an arguably unprecedented attack on the Pakistani army and its institutions. In the city of Lahore, supporters set a mansion belonging to a senior military officer on fire. Since its formation as an independent state in 1947, Pakistan has spent over three decades, at various times, under military rule. Even when civilian governments have been in charge, the military has loomed in the background. Open defiance of the military’s hold on Pakistan is exceedingly rare.

In his latest Twitter Space event, Khan urged his supporters, whom he described as his “social media heroes,” to continue to stay strong in the face of an ongoing crackdown against him and workers from his political party, thousands of whom have faced arrests, been detained or are on the run. Pakistan, Khan said, is being governed by the “law of the jungle.”

Technology has been central to Khan’s emergence as a leading politician. A decade after his PTI party formed in 1996, a group of tech-forward supporters built the party’s website — a first for any political party in Pakistan. At the time, PTI was derisively referred to as the “social media party,” and its leader was dubbed “Facebook Khan,” implying that the party lacked any real influence in a country dominated by the military and by warring political dynasties.

Strategic online campaigning, though, helped Khan’s PTI reach young people eager for change and for relief from the corrupt ruling elite. “Tabdeeli,” or change, trended on social media platforms across Pakistan. Inspired by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the PTI’s social media team were brimming with fresh, inventive ideas for how to leverage technology to market Khan. Soon, he was being referred to as Pakistan’s “Kaptaan,” Urdu for “captain,” a pointed reference to his glorious career as a cricket player.

By 2018, Khan’s social media machine was credited with delivering the party’s first victory in national elections. PTI’s digital politics marked a significant shift from the antiquated way in which Pakistan’s biggest parties conducted elections, from both the pre-poll targeting of voters to on-the-day mobilization of supporters.

It’s not only PTI that benefited from its strong online presence. The military strongly supported Khan. In fact, until Khan was removed from office in 2022, it was hard to distinguish between the online networks of the PTI and the Pakistani military. These digital warriors were easily distinguished by their use of the Pakistani flag to show their patriotism and by the manner in which they organized to promote positive news about Pakistan, highlight criticisms of India and counter Pakistanis they characterized as “traitors” because they dared to dissent from the state’s narrative.

Members of Imran Khan’s digital media team became participants in national security meetings with military advisers. Digital strategy was a key component of foreign policy discussions.

In a study published in August 2022, researchers found that the interests of PTI supporters and the Pakistani army converged. “Patterns of Twitter retweets and analysis of Facebook data provide important evidence,” the researchers wrote, “of a de facto coalition between the networks of the military and PTI.” Dissidents, they pointed out, “were largely drowned out by the mainstream political parties and military.”

Now, with the PTI in direct opposition to the Pakistani military, conflict between these institutions and their supporters is playing out actively online. When authorities blocked internet access amid protests earlier this month, it was an admission that it could not contain the outrage of PTI supporters.

After Khan’s arrest on May 9, the Pakistani government blocked access to broadband services and social media platforms for four days. Though the state regularly applies an internet kill switch to ostensibly quell unrest, this was the longest such shutdown in a country of 128 million internet users. The intent was to contain the outrage and perhaps to silence groups critical of the military’s role in Pakistani politics, which it entirely failed to do. 

While criticism of the military’s role in politics is not unprecedented, the scale of the recent wave of anti-military sentiment sparked by Khan’s arrest was extraordinary. And it was generated mostly through social media. After Khan was ousted from office last year, anti-army hashtags began to trend on social media platforms. The growing criticism and anger over the army’s role in removing Khan from office culminated in the violence earlier this month. The Pakistani civilian government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has already declared that protestors who attacked military properties will be tried under army law — draconian legislation that is typically used to try enemies of the state.

The pressure on Khan’s supporters and particularly on members of his political party is taking its toll. In a high-profile departure, Khan’s former human rights minister Shireen Mazari quit the party on May 23. She had been arrested and then arrested again, even after she had been granted bail, an “ordeal,” she said, that “had an impact on my health.”

But silencing PTI is particularly challenging due to its global reach. Regardless of whether coverage of Khan’s public speeches and rallies are censored on mainstream media in Pakistan, PTI posts hourly updates and testimonials from PTI workers with English subtitles across social media platforms, often with the hashtag #ThisWasNotOnTV.

“The whole world is watching, politics is no longer restricted to streets,” said Jibran Ilyas, PTI’s social media lead and a cybersecurity expert based in Chicago. When mobile internet networks were down in Pakistan, Ilyas organized an online campaign to request that residents based in protest areas make their Wi-Fis public to help PTI members upload footage on social media and share updates with the rest of the team.

Though, according to Khan, 10,000 party workers and most of the PTI leadership are under arrest or on the run, PTI’s digital team is still online. Fearing imminent arrest and speaking from an undisclosed location, a PTI worker told me they didn’t sleep for several days after Khan was arrested. “One of our team members was shot in the leg during protests and underwent a six-hour surgery. Even then, they were still posting updates on social media,” said another member of the PTI social media team. On TikTok, in the four days between Khan’s arrest and bail hearing, the PTI’s official account reached over 100 million people and the team put out 164 videos, revealed a recent report.

With its digital support and global reach, can PTI’s online coalition be dismantled? “It is possible PTI can sustain its social media mobilization in the face of censorship, calibrated shutdowns and a general crackdown, which may intensify,” said Asfandyar Mir, an academic who published the 2022 paper noting the existence of  the “de facto coalition” between the army and PTI that led to Khan becoming prime minister. 

As for the military, the country is once again papered with pro-army posters. They have also been successful in coercing some PTI leaders to quit the party and pressuring supporters to issue forced apologies online. The Pakistan defense minister revealed that the government is considering banning the PTI because it has “attacked the very basis of the state.” And there is evidence that the state is shutting down internet services within a five-kilometer radius of Khan’s house in the city of Lahore to make it difficult for him to address his supporters online. “We are in uncharted territory for Pakistani politics and its intersection with digital mobilization,” Mir told me.

The future of Khan and his party is in the balance. But whether he, or his party, withstand the pressure, a key question remains unanswered: The people may be fearful of the state, but are they still respectful of its institutions?

The post Imran Khan is fighting Pakistan’s army with Twitter appeared first on Coda Story.

Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

The post Amid chaos, Pakistan shut down the internet to little effect 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.

It’s September 23, four days after the Iranian government shut down the internet in the northern Kurdish city of Sanandaj. Not long after Mahmoudi and I spoke, the Iranian government blocked access to Instagram and WhatsApp (estimated to be used by 70% of Iranian adults) and shut down the internet for hours each day so that even basic communication, let alone work, became almost impossible.

The internet disruptions followed several days of nationwide, anti-government protests in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in the custody of Iran’s vicious and widely reviled morality police. 

At least 76 people have been killed during the protests, human rights groups say, and over 700 arrested. The police said Amini died of a heart attack. But her father insisted she was healthy. Photos that emerged after her death were gut-wrenching: her eyes were purple and swollen. She appeared to have been tortured.

Mahmoudi is the executive director of United For Iran, a non-profit focused on human rights advocacy within the country that has built an application called Gershad, which first came to prominence in 2016, enabling Iranian women to warn each other about morality police in the vicinity. 

At the time, United For Iran kept their involvement in building Gershad quiet, but they have been open about the value of cell phone apps and web resources in helping to drive progressive change. One example is Nahoft, an app that enables Android users to encrypt their messages before sending them. (Over 90% of mobile phone users in Iran use the Android operating system.) Gershad has been a pivotal tool in this recent round of protests. Its Twitter account — where the group reposts some of the app’s reports on the Morality Police — has exploded, weekly impressions growing from 1,900 to nearly 1.5 million.

The shutting down of Iran’s mobile internet, though, has made the app largely unusable. Limited internet access has drastically narrowed who can use the application, leaving many still-active protesters vulnerable, echoing a similar shutdown in 2019 when an order from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded “Do whatever it takes to stop them.” In the two weeks that followed, close to 1,500 people were killed.

For protesters, a popular app like Gershad serves as a rallying cry, a way to keep spirits up and motivate people to come out onto the streets. This sudden freeze in activity has jeopardized that aspect of the app. “The silence leads to people thinking there's nothing else happening. So it kind of takes the wind out of the sails,” Mahmoudi says. “So people don't go out on the street as much and it kind of fizzles out. And then they kill us.”

When Gershad made its debut in 2016, it spread rapidly. “Within 12 hours, we had to get a new server,” Mahmoudi told me. The group had released the app with no advertising, yet it had a user base of 10,000 people within the first 48 hours. That kind of popularity quickly attracted the attention of the Iranian government, which banned Gershad and its APIs (application programming interface, the software that allows apps to talk to each other) within 24 hours of its release. 

The ban, intended to render the app useless to those who had downloaded it, was quickly circumvented by the development team — building functions into the interface that worked around the censorship. Even in the app’s infancy, its adversarial relationship with Iranian authorities seemed clear. The app was designed to help Iranian citizens retain some control, while the Iranian authorities appear determined to violently repress even the most minor displays of individual agency.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the government is at the forefront of our minds,” Fereidoon Bashar, Executive Director of ASL19, a Canadian technology company focused on civil society and who heads Gershad’s software development, told me. “For us, it's mostly about how we can make the app more secure, more private, but that means the government is certainly an adversary.” 

Iran has a history of using technology to limit the freedom of its citizens. Early this month, Iranian officials announced that facial recognition technology would now be used to identify and fine women who weren’t adhering to the country’s rigid dress code.

Despite the adaptability and flexibility of the Gershad developers, the question for many Iranian developers is whether technology that is largely used to oppress Iranians can also be used to liberate them?

In 2018, for example, in response to Telegram’s growing popularity within the country, Iran banned the application and introduced Telegram Gold, which advertised new features and, most importantly, was actually available. The app became a user-data farm for the Iranian government, which quickly collected close to 14 million users’ private information. 

“If you don't have people familiar with the geopolitical situation on your team, then definitely your tools might be like a weapon in their hands,” said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights at the Texas-based Miaan Group, which provides technical, legal, and research expertise to human rights organizations in Iran and the region.

Bashar, for much of our conversation, seemed barely able to bring himself to speak. Like Mahmoudi, he appeared exhausted and sad. “I’ve seen better days,” he admitted, as soon our call began. For him, his work on Gershad, despite its success and its value to the protests, was no substitute for not being there, for not being out on the streets and actively present.

“Maybe I don't think of it as guilt or maybe I should,” he sighed. “It's definitely a feeling that you're on the outside and there are people that are, you know, being violently brutalized and oppressed. It’s been hard to watch.”

“I don’t necessarily see the internet shutdown as something that concerns the app’s success,” he told me. “The consequences that follow internet shutdowns are faced by actual protesters and people.” 

Despite the shutting down of mobile internet services and the effect on daily life, Iranians have kept coming out onto the streets to make their anger heard. Reports emerging from Iran have suggested that the vans of the morality police — large white-and-green patrol vehicles from which officers kept their eyes on Iranian citizens, particularly women — have disappeared entirely.

Rashidi, who told me that the shutting down of the internet in Iran was his ”biggest fear,” acknowledged that the crowds of people willing to brave police brutality and prison had inspired hope in all those who imagine a less repressive future for Iran. “I mean, we had witnessed police brutality for a long time,” he said, “but this one was different. She was so innocent. There was nothing wrong with her dress and that basically fanned the flames of frustration. That’s why we're seeing all these protests around the country.”

Though experts continue to doubt that these protests will result in the overthrow of the Khamenei regime, the protesters have managed to change the debate. Previous protests had centered around the economy and electoral corruption; now culture and repression are the catalysts.

Mahmoudi told me she has a comment left for Gershad’s team saved on her computer. The message helps remind her that technology can still be a force for good: “Gershad is a successful example of channeling hatred and anger to underground tunnels without the need for leadership or the media. Every minute we are recreating the map of our city…together.” 

The message speaks to Gershad’s ultimate philosophy: it’s about the user base, it’s about collaboration and the lack of hierarchy or singular control, and it’s about access and agency.

“I really like that,” Mahmoudi said, smiling.

The post Stakes turn deadly as Iran’s government threatens the phone apps aiding protesters appeared first on Coda Story.

Mohammed Zubair, who helped found “Alt News,” an Indian fact-checking website, was arrested on June 27 for a joke he tweeted based on a screenshot from a 1983 Hindi movie. Alt News has consistently annoyed the right wing Hindu supremacists who dominate Indian politics and the Indian media, even though the site uncovers and debunks all manner of disinformation. 

That said, Zubair seemed to particularly relish his online battles with supporters of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its infamous “IT Cell” trolls.

In the end, he was undone by the lamest of quips. The gag in the movie was a pun on the word “honeymoon” and the Hindu god “Hanuman,” a gentle jab about the need for a hotel for honeymooners to change its name in smalltown India to suit conservative sensibilities. 

Zubair contemporized it to make the hardly radical point that since 2014, under prime minister Narendra Modi, India has been bullish about its “Hindu first” values. For some onlookers, Zubair’s arrest is further confirmation that Modi’s India is taking a distinctly repressive turn.

What takes this already strange story into Kafkaesque territory is that Zubair had made his joke on March 24, 2018, over four years before any offense was alleged to have been caused.

Sanjay Rajoura, a comedian and part of a three-man group of satirists, told us that “there is no comedy without politics.” He said that while his views have caught the attention of the police, his critics who dish out personal abuse and death threats do so with impunity. 

“We have a right-wing, fascist government,” he told us. “I have friends who are in jail. This is a very difficult country.”

A controversial figure, Rajoura was last year accused of sexual harassment in an anonymous post on Instagram by a woman who said she had been taken in by his image as a progressive and feminist voice. He denied the allegations on Facebook but “Newsclick,” an independent news website “with a focus on progressive movements,” chose to suspend his show until an investigation was completed though it’s unclear if any investigation ever took place. 

Newsclick itself has also been on the receiving end of the BJP’s ire, with a party spokesperson claiming the site “received crores [tens of millions] of rupees from abroad in a suspicious manner with a motive to portray India's system and government as a failed one.”

Despite the general feeling that the BJP is eager to jail people for fairly tame social media criticism, and that there’s a Twitter mob of right-wing Hindu nationalists ever willing to claim that their “sentiments” have been hurt and file reports, there is no exact figure to show how many arrests are being made as a result of social media posts.

What is clear, though, is that the government is seeking more control over social media, and demanding more compliance with requests to remove content and prevent Indian users from accessing content the government does not like.

Twitter has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Karnataka High Court, describing its demands to take down or limit content as “disproportionate” and a form of censorship.

Zubair’s arrest indicates the arbitrary nature of the police response. It took just one complaint from an anonymous Twitter user, whose account has since become defunct, for the Delhi police to act. 

The account holder, who had only one follower before Zubair’s arrest, had made only one tweet, tagging the Delhi police on June 19 and urging it to take action against Zubair because “Linking our God Hanuman ji with Honey Moon is direct insult of Hindus.”

After Zubair’s arrest, the Delhi police sent a team to Bangalore to seize “electronic evidence,” including his laptop and hard drives though there was no dispute that he was the author of the tweet. In court, Zubair’s lawyer described the police as going on a “fishing and roving” expedition. 

The solicitor general of India, representing the state, argued that the first information report prompting Zubair’s arrest was only an “initiation of proceedings” and that charges could be added as more evidence was gathered. Zubair is now being held for 14 days “in judicial custody,” as the police investigate a slew of charges.

It’s worth reiterating here that the catalyst for this convoluted legal drama was a joke Zubair made on social media four years ago.

Indian social media, perhaps more than ever, is rife with claims of hurt religious sentiments but also calls for people to be arrested for run of the mill mockery of public figures. Examples abound of ordinary Indians finding themselves mired in legal trouble, including spells in prison, for jokes and satire aimed at politicians across parties. 

On the day Zubair was arrested, ostensibly for making a joke, Anirban Roy was in court in Kolkata, learning to his relief that he was being granted bail after three weeks in jail for comments he had made in a Facebook live session that were construed to be offensive to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. 

A regional leader of growing national status, Banerjee often accuses Modi of using national investigating agencies to intimidate his critics and opponents. The report which led to Roy’s arrest in Goa by a team from the “anti-rowdy” department of the Kolkata police was filed by a spokesperson for Banerjee's All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) party.

In his popular videos, Roy, whose stage name is Roddur Roy (“roddur” can be translated from Bengali as “sunshine”) adopts the persona of a profane streetside prophet, a poet of disdain who delights in his own spittle-flecked performative rage.

He has hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers on Facebook and YouTube and his content is deliberately designed to prick the pomposity and shibboleths of Bengali polite society. 

For instance, among his most celebrated and controversial videos is his expletive-ridden version of a love song by Rabindranath Tagore, the towering figure in Bengal’s cultural imagination, becoming in 1913 the first Indian, indeed non-European, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Roy has covered many canonical Tagore songs, usually in a peculiar accent, with much atonal yowling and inept strumming on an ukulele. These patently absurd covers were also the subject of an information report filed with the Kolkata police, as was a 2020 video in which he swears repeatedly and extravagantly at Modi.

A condition of Roy’s bail is that he make a video apologizing for his alleged slurs against the Indian constitution and flag by the time he makes his next court appearance on August 2. “They don’t understand art,” Roy yelled at bystanders as the police led him away for the apparent crime of épater le bourgeois.

When we contacted Roy’s friends, they were reluctant to speak about his weeks in custody, saying it was “not a good time” and that they feared reprisals. Saket Gokhale, a national spokesperson for the TMC with a large social media presence, did not respond when we asked him to specify his party’s position on satire.

Back in 2012, not long after Mamata Banerjee became chief minister of West Bengal, a professor was arrested for forwarding a cartoon about Banerjee. The section, 66-A, of India’s “Information Technology Act” which the police cited has since been struck down by the Supreme Court for its disproportionate interference in free speech and expression.

Activists point out that though the section was ruled to be unconstitutional in 2015, hundreds of cases remain pending in the courts. In 2017, Zakir Ali Tyagi, then still a teenager, was arrested for a set of sarcastic Facebook posts he had made about the BJP-appointed Hindu nationalist chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a monk who goes by the name Yogi Adityanath.

Among the statutes the police invoked when they arrested Tyagi, including sedition, was the already discredited section 66-A. “They scoured my Facebook timeline and days later the police started following me home,” Tyagi told us.

“They showed me screenshots of my social media posts and took me to the station, saying I’d be let off in a few hours, but I was jailed for 42 days.” A journalist and a human rights campaigner, the now 23-year-old Tyagi told us that Zubair’s arrest was a reminder that even if the Supreme Court had declared section 66-A unconstitutional its spirit lingers.

In May, an actor, Ketaki Chitale, was arrested in Maharashtra for posting a satirical poem on Facebook that mocked the powerful, exceedingly well connected National Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar. The phrases (translated from Marathi) reported in the Indian media to be the basis for the arrest include “hell is waiting” and “you hate Brahmins.”

Chitale says she didn’t even write the poem. After she was released on bail, she told the Indian news station NDTV that she was “behind bars for 51 days for no rhyme or reason because Pawar is not a religion.”

Bombay High Court lawyer, Anirudh Ganu, who represented a 22-year-old student brought before judges last month for also making offensive posts about Pawar, told us that there were key differences between the arrests of his client, of Chitale and of Zubair. 

“Ridiculing someone’s religion,” he said, referring to Zubair, is not the same as throwing barbs, however pointed, at a politician. “Causing a rift between communities,” he said, is an offense that warrants police action.

Last year, in a case that garnered international attention, Munawar Faruqui, a young Muslim comedian, was arrested during a show by police in Indore, a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The arrests were made at the behest of the son of a BJP legislator. 

Faruqui was supposedly making jokes about Hindu gods, though the superintendent of the Indore police told news website “Article 14” that no such jokes had actually been made during the performance. Instead, the police acted on “oral evidence” that the jokes were “going to” be made.

That is, someone had complained to the police that they heard Faruqui making the jokes backstage. Despite receiving widespread support, including from comedians in the Indian diaspora, Faruqui said he would be quitting comedy after a dozen upcoming shows were canceled as a result of his arrest.

“Hate won and the artist lost,” he said to a newspaper reporter. He has since recovered a measure of minor celebrity, albeit through his appearance on a reality show rather than through politically-tinged comedy. Among the other comedians arrested alongside Faruqui at the show was Nalin Yadav.

He spent 57 days in jail before he got bail. “And we didn’t even crack the jokes they said we did,” he told us. “There is no line,” Yadav says, “there is no way of knowing when you’ve gone too far.” For instance, on May 17, a 50-year-old professor at a Delhi college was arrested — the Delhi police knocking on his door late at night — for a joke he made on Facebook. 

His crime was being sarcastic about the supposed discovery of a “Shivling” — a symbol of the Hindu god Shiva with phallic connotations — in a 17th-century mosque. When granting him bail, a judge said there were 1.3 billion potential opinions in India. 

“The feeling of hurt felt by an individual,” he said, “cannot represent the entire group or community.”  

But even at the time of writing, the offense-taking continues to rise to a single high-pitched screech, a note of such keening intensity that it drowns out all the other noise in India’s once proudly noisy, argumentative democracy.

UPDATE: A BJP state legislator was so angered by the prospect of Faruqui performing in Hyderabad on August 20 that he threatened to burn down the venue. “Let them see what will happen if he is invited to stage a show in Hyderabad,” the legislator said, referring to the state government which had earlier said it had no objections to Faruqui performing in Hyderabad. “Wherever the programme is held, we shall beat him up.” 

Mohammed Zubair was released on bail a little over three weeks after being arrested. The court also refused to consider a request from the Uttar Pradesh government – which moved with alacrity to file six cases in local courts once Zubair was arrested in Delhi – to stop him from tweeting.  

Related Articles

Comedy is no laughing matter for authoritarian states

Mariam Kiparoidze

How healthcare workers in India fought a surveillance regime and won

Varsha Bansal

Letter from Delhi: Trolls will enforce India’s new media censorship laws

Aman Sethi

The post Jailed for Jokes appeared first on Coda Story.

This was 2014, during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. After the Ukrainian army pushed Russian-backed forces out of the city, Garmash joined a group of volunteers who quickly got to work, scrubbing and fixing their hometown. But one thing they couldn’t fix was the fallen television tower that had once overlooked the city. Russian-backed militants used it to beam the Kremlin’s message at residents of Slovyansk during the three month long occupation and destroyed it before they left. 

“How will we get the local news?” Garmash remembers asking a local journalist as they cleaned up a street in Slovyansk that July. “There will be no local news,” she replied. 

She was wrong. Within weeks of that conversation, Garmash launched a new media site and named it 6262.com.ua, a reference to Slovyansk’s city code. 

“People really needed local news. And all I needed to provide it was the internet and social media,” Garmash tells me.

By the time Russia invaded again, in February of 2022, Garmash was running the city’s most popular, most trusted local news site. But as Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv and Western sanctions kicked in, local journalism in Slovyansk was silenced once again. This time, it seems that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — not Russia — was to blame.  

“People we serve no longer get our news in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. In that sense what is happening with Facebook is not all that different from what happened with the TV tower back in 2014,” Garmash tells me.

‘WE CAN’T GET THEIR VOICES OUT’

Meta has mobilized resources in response to the war in Ukraine, and the company says it is taking the issue of disinformation around the war seriously. Staffers sent us this statement two weeks ago:

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

I read it to Andrey Boborykin, who manages some of the biggest Facebook publishers in Ukraine, in addition to serving as the executive director of Ukrayinska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s largest dailies. He laughs.

The organic reach of Russian propaganda voices in the West has indeed been curbed — Facebook is blocking pages for RT and Sputnik in the EU, as noted above. But for Ukrainian publishers, none of this makes much difference. 

Ukrainian newsrooms are being flooded by graphic images from the frontlines of the war. It’s newsworthy, at times vital content that is in public interest but it is impossible for editors to know what they are allowed to publish on Facebook and Instagram because Meta, Boborykin says, “never made attempts to identify key controversial topics and provide additional guidance to publishers on how to treat these topics on their platform.” 

And even where there are rules, they are confusing and inconsistent. Here is just one example: it is impossible to cover the war in Ukraine without mentioning Azov Battalion, a key group fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine. But a mere mention of Azov Battalion can be considered a violation of community standards. The punishment for such a violation is a “strike” and several strikes could result in their accounts being blocked or suspended. 

Recently, Meta made a temporary change to its hate speech policy, allowing calls for violence against Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion. But when Ukrayinska Pravda posted stories about Azov Battalion cheering after hitting the enemy targets in Mariupol their pages got “strikes.” 

Things are especially dire for publishers on the frontlines: dozens of small, independent newsrooms in eastern Ukraine, who have recently lost their ability to promote their posts to their communities. 

“We woke up one day to the news of invasion, and the next day to the news of all of our Facebook and Google ad accounts being blocked. We contacted both. Google fixed the issue within twelve days. We are still waiting for Facebook,” Garmash told me. 

Boborykin says restricting advertisement is normally used by Meta to curb what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” of state-backed accounts who use ads to promote propaganda, hatred and fake news. Blocking ad capabilities is part of Meta’s effort to combat disinformation on its platform. But what is happening in eastern Ukraine illustrates something else. It is an example, Boborykin says, of platforms applying a “one-fits-all” policy without any attempt to understand the local context. 

“If you are a small publisher from eastern Ukraine, there is a high chance that right now you don’t have any advertising capabilities and you have your pages blocked,” says Boborykin. 

As a result, Boborykin says 31 newsrooms, including 6262.com.ua, are experiencing a massive drop in Facebook revenue and audience. In addition to his day job, Boborykin works with the Media Development Foundation and is currently running emergency fundraisers for local Ukrainian newsrooms. Limits that Facebook has imposed on them, he says, are affecting wartime fundraising too. 

“We can’t promote their pages, we can’t get their voices out,” Boborykin says. “It’s crazy because it means that [local publishers] are cut off from their communities. And many of them are already cut off physically, because they’ve had to flee. If they don’t flee they work under shelling. It’s crazy that they have to be dealing with technical constraints imposed by Facebook on top of it all,” he says. 

In early March, in order to continue operations, Valerii Garmash moved most of his 14-strong team away from the frontline in eastern Ukraine, keeping only a few journalists in Slovyansk. “In extreme times like this, people need information more than ever. But they are no longer seeing us on their feeds,” he says.

On Facebook, in what appears to be the result of new company policies on Ukraine, 6262.com.ua has seen an 80% drop in audience since the war began. The numbers are similar on Instagram. Financing independent journalism is never easy, but Garmash has taken a unique approach, providing spin-off services like video production and social media consulting to local businesses.

Garmash says his team runs 25 business pages on Facebook alone. The local vet clinic, the city’s pharmacy and a clothing shop are among 6262.com.ua’s clients. But now they can’t get on the feeds of their community members either.

I asked Meta staffers I am in touch with whether they are aware of the huge losses that their company’s policy brought to small and struggling independent publishers in Ukraine. Their reply reads that “Meta remains committed to building systems that promote and protect news content on our platforms, in order to help news publishers, large and small, better make money and serve their local communities.”

“We can't respond to the specific claims reported on by Coda Story as these details were not shared with us prior to publication,” the statement goes on “but we do partner with international institutions such as Reuters and ICFJ as well as regional and local organizations — including in Ukraine — to train journalists and newsroom professionals and get a better understanding of the challenges they face.”

In the last two months, staffers at 6262.com.ua have contacted Meta at least 40 times. They have yet to receive a response. 

NO ANSWER: A GLOBAL PROBLEM

The experience of the team of 6262.com.ua is playing out for independent media across eastern Ukraine, and even beyond its borders. 

We recently profiled two independent newsrooms in Georgia, a country also partly occupied by Russia, that saw their audiences decline by as much as 90%t after Facebook blocked some of their posts about the war in Ukraine. The reasons why the posts were blocked are unclear, but both newsrooms suspect that they were reported by Russian trolls. 

After the piece was published, a Facebook representative asked me to pass on his personal details to the journalists we profiled and promised to review their cases. I did and journalists followed up with Facebook directly. Two weeks have gone by, and neither television station has gotten a clear answer from Facebook. 

An estimated 26 million people in Ukraine use Facebook every month. “These platforms are crucial for us,” Boborykin says. Having worked across the African continent and closely watched Facebook’s controversies in places like Myanmar, Boborykin says he has no illusions about Meta’s business model, or any issues with it, for that matter. The problem, he says, is the way that Meta deals with people and organizations they like to call partners. 

“What they have done in the case of Ukraine is 1% of what they could have done,” Boborykin says. “Have better news partnerships, reach out to local publishers, make lists of people and media organizations that you trust. Reply to their messages.” 

What would you say to Mark Zuckerberg if you met him? I ask Valerii Garmash, the founder of 6262.ua before we hang up. 

“I’d tell him that in Ukraine he is violating his own mission,” Garmash says. “He set up Facebook to give people power to build communities. He is destroying ours.”

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

Related Articles

Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife

Ellery Roberts Biddle

How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war

Natalia Antelava

How changing a 26-word US internet law could impact online expression everywhere

Erica Hellerstein

The post Fleeing Russian bombs while battling Facebook. A Meta problem Ukrainian journalists did not need appeared first on Coda Story.

What would happen in countries vulnerable to social unrest and communal violence if the company threw its content rules out the window and embraced an absolute commitment to free speech?

Elon Musk wants to find out. In his recent bid to buy the company, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote of his belief in Twitter’s “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.” Musk pledged to “unlock” that potential, implying that he would ditch the company’s content rules and simply let the tweets flow.

In case you missed it: Musk bought 9% of shares in the company in mid-March, a figure that only became public last week, prompting Twitter’s leadership to offer him a seat on its board of directors. Musk entertained the offer, but then had a second thought: Why not just buy the whole company? The board opted to deploy a so-called “poison pill” strategy, effectively preventing a Musk takeover.

But there was still time to wonder what might happen if the world’s wealthiest person got his way. Academic experts cautioned that an absolute free speech policy would turn the platform into a cesspool of hate speech, spam, and porn. Veteran tech critics pointed out that Musk’s ideas about content moderation were popular in the earlier days of the internet, and that time has proven that they really don’t work at scale. Across the political spectrum in the U.S., pundits speculated on whether this would pave the way for Donald Trump to return to the platform.

What would it mean for the majority of Twitter users, who live outside the U.S.?

“That just doesn’t work in a country like India,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a tech expert and founder of Medianama, an India-focused tech policy publication based in New Delhi. India is Twitter’s third-largest market after the U.S. and Japan.

“We have real world consequences from the kind of speech that Twitter enables. Our political parties are really, really adept at understanding how the algorithms work, how to create trends, how to make something shareable,” Pahwa said. “What they excel at is essentially fueling hate.”

In recent years, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and other hardline Hindu nationalist groups have made Twitter, alongside Facebook and WhatsApp, an essential platform for promoting their agendas, sometimes inciting violence against religious minorities, Muslims in particular.

“I think we’re in a situation where we need more moderation of hateful content and not less. I don’t think Musk understands or cares for whether people are getting polarized or killed in India,” Pahwa told me.

While more than 20 million Indians use Twitter on a regular basis, others have left or avoided the platform for exactly these reasons. A female researcher I spoke with, who studies gender-based harassment online, declined to be quoted for this story, citing concern that she would be attacked as a result.

Twitter’s policies prohibit hate speech, harassment, and incitement to violence, but it has a poor track record of enforcing these rules, especially for posts that are not in English.

“Everyone thinks they know how to do content moderation until it becomes their job,” said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a tech policy group in New Delhi.

“I am not sure how [Musk] plans to address censorship by proxy that countries like India demand,” she wrote in a message.

The Modi government is known for pressuring the company to remove certain posts and reinstate others. In 2021, officials updated India’s IT Rules and began requiring large foreign tech platforms to create locally-staffed grievance programs for content removal and related disputes. It took several months, and a police visit to Twitter’s local offices, before the company complied.

Twitter has faced similar kinds of pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, where it plays a significant role in national politics in the region’s largest markets, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

In Nigeria, Twitter in 2020 became the digital ground zero for #EndSARS, a social movement protesting police brutality that played out both online and in cities across the country.

“Twitter created a special emoji for the EndSARS protest, and also verified some major handles that promoted the protests. [Former CEO Jack Dorsey] himself raised some money for them via Bitcoin,” said Nwachukwu Egbunike, a media and communications scholar at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos. 

“The feeling around government quarters is that Twitter really sided with protesters,” he said.

Less than a year later, the government banned Twitter altogether, after moderators took down a tweet posted by President Muhammadu Buhari that contained a veiled threat against Igbos, one of the country’s largest ethnic groups.

This went on for seven months. When they lifted the ban, officials announced that they had reached an agreement with Twitter, under which the company would “act with a respectful acknowledgement of Nigerian laws and the national culture and history,” and alluded to a code of conduct meant to govern the relationship. This document has not been made public.

“One has the impression that Twitter gave in or compromised Nigerian digital rights in order to get unbanned,” said Egbunike. “If this agreement is true, and the Nigerian government has the power to pull down tweets, where does that leave Nigerians?” he asked.

Egbunike’s question would be a good one for Elon Musk. The governments of both Nigeria and India have demonstrated that if companies like Twitter want to stay accessible in their countries, they need to be prepared to comply with censorship demands and the whims of whichever party is in power. 

In theory, regular people can still say whatever they like online, but between rules like these and political parties’ online influence operations and troll armies, the costs of doing so can be pretty high. 

Victims of violence stoked on the platforms pay the highest price of all. Endalk Chala, a communications professor at Hamline University and former blogger, described the role Twitter has come to play in Ethiopia’s ongoing civil conflict. Twitter has made some efforts to curb problematic speech coming from pro-government voices, Chala explained, but different ethnic groups continue to promote violence and hate on the platform.

“On Twitter, if a person from one ethnolinguistic group makes fun of a person from another, and that speech is available for people who feel attacked and derided, [members of the target group] will be harmed,” said Chala. “People are dying every day now for things like this,” he said.

“There is really bad content, in English, Amharic and in other Ethiopian languages. The content moderation on Twitter doesn’t work really well,” he said.

What if, as Musk advocates, the company simply stopped trying to moderate speech in Ethiopia?

“I am all for free speech,” Chala said. “But if it’s this messy now, you can’t imagine what would happen without it.”

Related Articles

How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war

Natalia Antelava

Platforms like Twitch have tried to combat harassment against women. It’s not working

Katia Patin

Warnings to Journalists Blur Twitter’s Transparency in Pakistan

Umer Ali

The post Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife appeared first on Coda Story.

But on March 26, Domozhifoff was blocked. He wasn’t surprised. 

“This is another bad sign in a series of bad signs,” he said. 

Online censorship in Russia is escalating at breakneck speed. Russia has clamped down on access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram since the country invaded Ukraine Feb. 24. This has narrowed online social media choices to homegrown options like VKontakte, also called VK. With a dominant position in Russia –80% of Russians online use VK– the winnowing of competitive options is an opportunity for VK, but as Domozhiroff discovered, domestic platforms have moved quickly to squelch any criticism of Kremlin policy.  

The latest expulsions of foreign social media occurred suddenly, but for years the Russian government had been diminishing the role of platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where media-savvy political opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny encouraged dissent and promoted protests. 

The Kremlin’s dedication to establish a sovereign internet, which would allow authorities to monitor and censor online traffic in and out of the country, vacillated and was sometimes tepid. LinkedIn was banned from the country in 2017, but that platform had only 6 million Russian users at the time. In 2017, the Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor threatened to block Facebook unless the company complied with a law requiring the storing of Russian personal data on servers physically located in the country. But when Facebook refused to comply, it was hit with a miniscule $53,000 fine. Roskomnadzor also went after Twitter last year by slowing down access to it in Russia. 

The Kremlin’s bid to control social media is no longer indecisive. Since February 24, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube were blocked in rapid succession. Roskomnadzor classified Meta, the corporation that owns Facebook and Instagram, an extremist organization. Meanwhile, the last of Russian independent media,TV-Rain and Ekho Moskvy radio, liquidated their operations in Russia, and access to foreign media like the BBC was restricted. 

The Kremlin’s hope was that by blocking foreign social media, “people would turn to local options which are easier to police and control,” said Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in Digital Media and Society at Dublin City University.

To some extent, it worked. From February 24 to March 15, VKontakte, used by over 50 million people, saw an increase of 4 million users.

The U.S. has sanctioned VK, which was bought by a company that is partly owned by the state and partly owned by a close associate of Putin. 

VK “is a digital playground for whoever controls the company,” said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of DFRLab, a disinformation think tank. 

As with the banning of foreign social media sites, the invasion of Ukraine has accelerated a crackdown on speech occurring on domestic social media that run counter to the Kremlin’s approved narratives. “VK censorship is escalating,” warned Lokot. 

On March 10, the VK blocked the pages of Voice of America’s Russian service, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service, and Current Time, a 24-hour Russian-language television and digital news network. On March 22, Navalny, who is imprisoned, and opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s pages were blocked for VKontakte users in Russia because of anti-war messages. 

The logic behind which pages get blocked has been unclear. “We do not have extensive knowledge on how exactly VK censorship works. It is pretty much a wild wild west out there,” said Andriukaitis. Certainly, posts about the war in Ukraine are especially risky, and using banned language to describe the conflict, such as “war,” is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. 

With accurate news on VK about the war nonexistent, Russians are turning to VPNs to access blocked social media and news sites. A VPN or “virtual private network” is a digital tool that masks your online activity, so that it can’t be tracked or blocked at the local level. Russians have used the services to continue to access some foreign social media. Instagram, the most popular Western platform in Russia, still had on March 24 around 34 million daily users, only a 16% decrease since it was blocked the day before. 

But in most of the country, the severing of foreign social media has been effective. “Even though those tech-savvy urban dwellers will most likely be able to bypass the restrictions using VPN, they are not the majority of Russia,” said Andriukaitis.

In the past, the Kremlin has been able to prevent Russians from accessing VPNs. It had successfully banned six popular VPNs, and regulated others.

That still leaves Telegram. The messaging platform played an important role for both dissenters and government-affiliated actors in the 2021 civil strife in Myanmar and during protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020. Telegram has been a pivotal channel in Russia too, where the number of users increased by 46% between February 24 and March 15. It remains one of the last independent news sources. Groups fearful of getting shut out of VKontakte are posting in Telegram channels.

Telegram’s position, however, is tenuous. Roskomnadzor tried to block the platform in 2018, only to lift the ban two years later. Rashid Gabdulhakov at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands warns that Telegram faces a grim future.

“The most important question, of course, is what will happen once everyone moves their activities to Telegram? Will the state deem it extremist also or will it use the opportunity to spy on everyone?” said Gabdulhakov.

Domozhiroff, the local opposition politician, is not optimistic. “I think that unblocking and resuming full-fledged work is possible only after a radical regime change and the restoration of Russia's democratic path of development,” he said.

The post Russians face grim options on social media appeared first on Coda Story.

It was 2016, and lawmakers in Pakistan had passed a sweeping and controversial internet law granting the government the power to censor online content, including criminalizing hate speech and defamation. The bill, part of a national plan to combat terrorism, came in the wake of a 2014 terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar that killed more than 130 children. 

Authorities said its implementation would help defend the country against threats to national security and cybercrime; critics argued that its broadly defined provisions could be used to muzzle online expression and content critical of the government. One prominent Pakistani legal expert, who has helped a number of other countries draft internet laws, said it was “the worst piece of cybercrime legislation in the world.”

Aziz, co-founder of the Pakistani digital rights group Bolo Bhi, campaigned against the law as it was being debated, speaking out against its potential impact on freedom of speech. Five years after the passing of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), Aziz said it has been used against journalists and dissidents, as well as women who have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment online, but then been charged with defamation.

The outcome, Aziz said, “just confirms and validates the apprehensions we raised when the law was being introduced.” The U.S. State Department echoed critics’ concerns, concluding in a 2021 human rights report on Pakistan that it “gives the government sweeping powers to censor content on the internet, which authorities used as a tool for the continued clampdown on civil society.” Between 2016 and 2020, Pakistan’s ranking in the global internet freedom index fell from 31st to 26th, according to the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House. 

Pakistan’s assault on digital freedom is once again on Aziz’s mind, as U.S. politicians threaten to change a landmark internet law that could affect the bounds of online expression well outside of their country’s borders. The 1996 law, Section 230, shields websites from legal liability for the content users post online. The 26-word mandate, signed by President Bill Clinton and widely referred to as the “digital Magna Carta,” has allowed tech giants like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to flourish without worrying about legal liability. 

Yet Section 230 has come under fire from American lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as a bipartisan appetite to regulate large technology companies has grown, especially following the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the deplatforming of former President Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter. Both events have ratcheted up calls on the right and the left to hold social media platforms accountable for their content moderation decisions, with Republicans principally concerned about biases against conservative voices on social media, and Democrats focused on the role of platforms in spreading disinformation and extremism. 

Section 230 has become a flashpoint in American politics and the subject of numerous attempted legislative reforms in the past two years. Since 2020, roughly two-dozen bills have been introduced, by Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike, to slash or chip away at it. Some would repeal the law altogether; others would strip away platforms’ liability shield for posted content involving civil rights, harassment, child sexual abuse and more. 

While the proposals vary and reflect a broad range of concerns, from censorship to cyberstalking, it’s unclear which, if any, will pass. But what is obvious is that there is significant political will to eliminate or reconfigure Section 230. In a January 2020 interview, Joe Biden — now President of the United States — stated that it should be “immediately” revoked, while former president Donald Trump repeatedly called to repeal the law during his time in office.

Yet, while much of the debate in the U.S. has focused on the domestic impact of a post-Section 230 internet, lawyers, human rights campaigners, and digital rights activists around the world predict that eliminating the law could have global consequences. Among their fears are that scrapping or significantly amending the law could set a precedent for countries from Asia to Latin America to introduce new policies that place severe restrictions on digital speech or make platforms liable for the material posted on their sites, causing them to aggressively remove content that could expose them to lawsuits. 

Eric Goldman is a professor focusing on internet law at California’s Santa Clara University School of Law and has written extensively about Section 230. As he put it, “To the extent that the U.S. stops trying to fight for free speech online, every other country in the world is going to fall even further on the censorship scale.”

Farieha Aziz expects a U.S. decision on Section 230 to influence the conversation on tech regulation in Pakistan, where the government has repeatedly tightened control of the internet in recent years. In addition to the cybercrime law, authorities have banned dating applications over concerns about “immoral” content and unveiled regulations imposing penalties, including hefty fines and potential bans, on social media platforms that violate government requests to take down content. 

“The first thing that happens over here is the government tends to borrow from the narrative of, ‘Oh, but this happens elsewhere as well, this happens in democracies,” she said. If the U.S. changes Section 230, Aziz predicts that Pakistani authorities are “immediately going to draw from it and use this as a justification that, “Look, even in the U.S. they believe the companies need to be held liable.’”

Internet reform and global consequences

So, how could scrapping a U.S. internet law affect how people around the world engage with digital platforms? 

Section 230 protects websites and platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube from lawsuits over the content users create, like comments on online news stories, restaurant reviews on Yelp, videos on YouTube, social media posts and more. 

One of Section 230’s foremost experts, Jeff Kosseff, an assistant professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy's Cyber Science Department, describes it as the “26 words that created the internet.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy and free speech, refers to it as “the most important law protecting internet speech.” 

For critics, however — including U.S. lawmakers — Section 230 has given social media giants too much legal protection and shielded them from accountability for their approach to content moderation. Democrats who have spoken out against it say that the legal shield removes the incentive for platforms to moderate harmful content, including disinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and extremism. Republicans opponents, meanwhile, argue that it provides cover for social media companies to censor voices on the right. 

Though the two sides have both embraced reform, they have different objectives, underscoring how legislation scaling back platform immunity can be used to advance vastly different political agendas. Democrats want companies to more aggressively moderate harmful content, such as hate speech and misinformation, while Republicans want to limit the abilities of the same social media companies to moderate postings on their platforms.

While most countries have yet to pass local liability legislation, Section 230 has acted as the “law across the world,” according to Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in international tech regulation. The European Union has taken a similar, but less sweeping approach, passing legislation in 2000 shielding platforms from liability if they are unaware of illegal content or quickly comply with requests to take it down.

Chander says a change to Section 230 will have “ripple effects across the world.” It could license other countries to introduce policies making platforms liable for content hosted on their sites, forcing them to more aggressively moderate and remove material that could expose them to litigation or violate local laws.

“There's a lot of speech that might lead to liability across the world. And I think that is a risk of 230 changes,” Chander said. “The precedent it will set for the most free-speech-promoting democracy in the world to hold platforms responsible for the millions of speech messages that they offer each day is really quite stunning.”

Latin America and deplatforming

In Latin America, the U.S debate on Section 230 is already influencing conversations about platform liability. A recently proposed draft bill in Mexico would give the country’s telecommunications regulator (IFT) the power to overrule social media networks in decisions about content moderation. It would also require platforms with more than one million users to get authorization from the IFT to operate in the country and impose fines of up to $4.4 million on digital platforms for non-compliance. Human Rights Watch said the legislation would “place the harshest restrictions on free speech that Mexico has seen in decades.”

Mexico’s draft bill came a month after Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook and Twitter, a decision that infuriated President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had a warm relationship with the former U.S. president, and vowed to lead an international campaign against social media censorship. 

Javier Pallero, an Argentina-based policy director for the digital rights group Access Now, draws a line connecting Mexico’s proposal, which was drafted by a member of Lopez Obrador’s party, Trump’s social media suspension and bipartisan support for Section 230 reform. 

“If the country that used to champion this limitation of liability is now questioning it, then that generates the space for other countries and lawmakers to spark proposals of reform,” he said.

In Brazil, too, it appears that U.S. wrangling over Section 230 has fast-tracked efforts at internet reform. At least four bills related to content moderation and platform liability have been proposed since the U.S. Capitol riot, including two that explicitly reference Trump’s deplatforming from social media outlets. 

Like Republicans in the U.S., conservative politicians in Brazil have set their sights on what they see as excessive censorship of right-leaning voices. One proposal would ban platforms like Facebook and Twitter from moderating content unless they received a court order; another would make platforms liable for financial damages when they censor or ban content that expresses a user’s opinion.

The bills — all introduced by Congressional members of the right-wing Partido Social Liberal, which was President Jair Bolsonaro's party before he split from it in 2019 — mirror Republican lawmakers’ concerns in the U.S. about suppression of right-wing voices on social networks. 

Artur Pericles, head of research at InternetLab, a technology-focused research center in the capital, Sao Paulo, told me that he had noted similarities between the Brazilian platform liability bill for opinion-related content moderation and legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, in June 2020. Hawley’s bill — the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act — would only extend Section 230 protections to companies that are able to prove political neutrality by getting an immunity certification from the Federal Trade Commission. 

“Both the left and right agree that platforms have too much power,” Pericles explained. “But then the left thinks that platforms should be more accountable to combat misinformation and hate speech. The right thinks that the platforms should have less power so they are not able to censor people on the right.”

Bolsonaro has also thrown his weight behind the push to regulate content moderation. In mid-May, the government published a draft executive order that would bar platforms from taking down content unless they have a court order, an option that could bypass Congressional efforts, and become law with the swipe of Bolsonaro’s pen. 

Though Pericles suggested the proposals would be unlikely to survive legal challenges, he said the executive order, in particular, has already had an impact on public discourse, highlighting platform liability and drawing attention to politicians’ efforts to limit content moderation. “Even if it doesn't make it into law, it definitely has changed the conversation and has given it a new sense of urgency,” he said. “People on the right who support the president have been drawing on the conversation in the United States for a while now.”

Illustration by Teona Tsintsadze

The post How changing a 26-word US internet law could impact online expression everywhere appeared first on Coda Story.

The 34-year-old, who had struggled with alcoholism for much of his life, was broke and in hospital with alcohol poisoning after a particularly heavy binge.

“I was going through a difficult time,” said Samovolkin, from his home in Yaroslavl, a historic, church-studded city of 600,000 that straddles a bend in the Volga river, 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

Salvation — of a sort — came when an old friend rang, inviting Vladimir, who had just been discharged from hospital, to appear on his live stream, drinking and partying in exchange for financial contributions from viewers.

“I didn’t even know what a stream was, but I went along anyway,” he said.

It was the start of Samovolkin’s career in trash streaming, an underground online subculture on Russia’s still largely uncensored internet, featuring physical abuse, sexual assault and even manslaughter.

Russia’s raucous internet

The idea behind trash streaming, which emerged on the Russian-language internet in the mid-2010s, is simple yet lucrative. Invite some friends over, get drunk, broadcast the proceedings live and invite viewers to donate small sums of money in exchange for dares of their choosing. The outrageous nature of the phenomenon has prompted heated discussion in parliament and calls for it to be banned.

For Samovolkin, who has drunk to excess, fought in bare knuckle brawls and jumped from third-floor balconies on webcam, the subculture represents an unvarnished depiction of life on the margins of Russian society, with the promise of instant money from paying customers.

“Trash is just the stuff that you wouldn’t show to kids,” he said. 

“Everything is about interaction. When a customer pays for a task and a streamer performs it, there’s an element of power.”

Initially taking advantage of loopholes on Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte — which thoroughly suppresses anti-Kremlin political posts, while largely declining to enforce other community standards or copyright laws — trash has since expanded onto new platforms, including the encrypted messaging service Telegram.

With many of its first stars emerging from pre-existing video game livestreams, trash streaming was in many ways simply a new and extreme take on long-established fashions for DIY broadcasting on Russia’s often raucous internet. Precedents were also set for it by a number of U.S.-based vloggers and phenomena such as the “Jackass” TV and movie franchise in the early 2000s.

“Trash streaming, or something like it, has always been around,” said Katya Kolpinets, a lecturer in internet culture at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “It’s the essence of the internet. It was even there in YouTube’s original slogan: broadcast yourself.”

Though the world of online trash had been pioneered initially by established, successful streamers like VJ Link, a popular gamer and YouTuber with 433,000 subscribers, its biggest celebrities are now invariably from humbler backgrounds.

“We’re all on the margins of society,” said Samovolkin, who had drifted between casual jobs for several years before devoting himself full-time to streaming.

“Most of us are alcoholics, and a lot of us are gay. Trash streamers tend to be people who don’t have many other options.” 

In Russia’s economically depressed provincial towns, the promise of money has proved highly attractive to a demographic of streamers who have rarely been able to hold down formal employment.

Even a trash streamer with only a few thousand subscribers can expect to earn up to 8,000 rubles ($108) a day, around half the average monthly salary in the Russian provinces.

For Samovolkin, who had mostly lived a hand-to-mouth existence, the stability that trash streaming offered was transformative.

This year, he was able to save enough money to marry his girlfriend in a wedding that was livestreamed to his followers, raising 15,000 rubles ($202).

Meanwhile, the trash streaming community in Yaroslavl, into which Samovolkin had stumbled, swelled into one of Russia’s largest. He and his co-stars would invite friends onto their broadcasts to drink and party, before they, in turn, spun off their own channels.

“For viewers, who are seeing the same characters in each stream, it becomes kind of like a serial,” said Samovolkin. “They get to know us personally, and they start to wonder what will happen next.”

For many trash streamers, the performative aspect of their work, in which shock value is all and dramatic twists can bring rich financial rewards, has cultivated a sense of professional pride. Many of them view their work as an entirely unscripted, purified take on reality television formats.

“Not everyone can do what I do,” said German Vasiliyenko, a St Petersburg-based streamer who has previously worked as an actor, a reality TV contestant and pornstar.

“I have a talent for interacting with people,” said the former student of Moscow’s prestigious GITIS drama school, his elocution crisp and precise. “Viewers can see that.”

Other trash streamers take a similar view of the profession. For Samovolkin, the subculture’s unfiltered displays of debauchery are less a distasteful byproduct of the internet age than an active social good, warning young viewers of the perils of a dissolute life.

“I actually think what we do has an educational element,” said Samovolkin. “When people watch us, it’s like saying to them ‘Hey guys, this what will happen if you drink and take drugs’”.

Livestreaming violence against women

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded in 2020, trash streaming began to attract mainstream media attention.

With the entire country cloistered at home, the audience for trash — never more than a few thousand at a time, according to streamers — began to grow. Samovolkin’s Yaroslavl trash collective’s YouTube channel notched up over 30,000 subscribers and 8,500,000 total views by May 2021.

That year, Alexander Timartsev, a businessman and rapper, launched sosed.tv, a formalized, round-the-clock trash stream, with around 10 participants living for weeks at a time in a dilapidated, camera-filled house in St Petersburg. Viewers were invited to donate cash to view a sanitized version of trash, with sex, violence and drug-related dares banned.

Elsewhere, however, trash streaming’s growth has shone a light on the worst facets of the subculture.

In October 2020, Andrey Burim, a 22-year-old Belarusian national who streams under the name of Mellstroy, was broadcast repeatedly smashing 21-year-old Instagram model Alyona Yefremova’s head against a table, during a party he had livestreamed from a luxury Moscow apartment. Burim is now awaiting trial for assault.

In April 2021, video blogger Stanislav Reshetnyak — known to the streaming community as Reeflay — was sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, after his girlfriend Valentina Grigoryeva froze to death as a result of him locking out on the street in sub-zero temperatures dressed only in her underwear. His arrest, after carrying her dead body back into the flat and vainly calling an ambulance, was streamed live on YouTube.

Trash streaming is a tight-knit world. For Samovolkin, who had got to know Reshetnyak well, with both appearing on each other’s streams, the news came as a shock.

“This was extreme stuff, at the very limit of what we do,” he said.

But, according to Katya Kolpinets, violent misogyny has been built into trash streaming from the start.

“Violence against women is just streamers responding to market incentives. There is always a section of the internet that enjoys seeing women humiliated and demeaned,” she said. “It’s a way to get attention.”

Incident by incident, dark clouds of scandal drew closer to Samovolkin’s trash streaming base in Yaroslavl.

In March 2021, two 18-year-old men in the city — both of whom had been introduced to the subculture by Samovolkin’s own live streams — were accused of raping a 30-year-old woman, after they streamed themselves ransacking her flat on live camera in return for viewer donations.

Police in the western city of Bryansk have also opened an investigation into the treatment of Valentin Ganichev, a man with learning difficulties who featured on a number of different streamers’ broadcasts over a period of four years, often being beaten and humiliated on camera. In one stream, he was filmed being buried alive on camera, pleading for his life as the money flowed in.

For Samovolkin — whose band of trash streamers was instrumental in Ganichev’s rise to trash streaming fame, dressing him in a suit and flag pin and introducing him to unsuspecting passers-by as a legislator in Russia’s State Duma — the story is a matter of some regret. It has also hit his own streaming livelihood hard.

“It’s very sad what happened to Valentin,” he said. “What happened in Bryansk has definitely reduced the demand for trash. We’re seeing fewer viewers now.”

“Banning trash is like trying to ban fake news”

For many in Russia’s political establishment, however, the decline in demand is not enough. 

A number of political figures, including Alexey Pushkov, an influential member of the Federation Council — the upper house of Russia’s legislature — have publicly thrown their weight behind a ban on trash streaming.

It’s part of a wider turn towards internet censorship by the Russian authorities, who in recent months have been increasingly vocal about the perceived excesses of the free internet. 

In recent weeks, Russia’s internet watchdog RosKomNadzor has announced legal probes into YouTube and deliberately slowed down Twitter, accusing the platforms of hosting criminal material, including content promoting teenage suicide. 

In an unusually emotional March television appearance, President Vladimir Putin referred to social media users who share illegal content as “bastards” and “monsters.”

Meanwhile, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has mulled ending online anonymity by requiring Russian internet users to register using their passport details.

Even so, few experts believe that a ban on trash streaming has much chance of success.

“The only way to ban trash streaming would be to convert Russia’s internet into something more like Cuba’s or North Korea’s,” said German Klimenko, a digital entrepreneur and former adviser to Putin.

Even those in favor of a ban admit that internet trash is most likely here to stay, as streamers will simply migrate to new and less readily controllable platforms if they are banned from mainstream spaces.

Anton Orlov, director of a Moscow-based think tank named the Institute for Investigation of Problems of Modern Politics, recently proposed the extension of a law against xenophobic hate speech to cover livestreamed trash. 

“Of course you can’t fully eradicate this stuff from the internet,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight it.”

Others note that a prohibition on trash — itself an internet era neologism — is so vague as to defy any meaningful legal definition.

“Banning trash is like trying to ban fake news,” said German Klimenko. “No one can even agree on a definition of what this stuff is.”

And yet, regardless of official crackdowns and grim headlines, at home in Yaroslavl, Vladimir Samovolkin has no plans to quit.

Having recently secured a job as an optician — his original career path — but still struggling with alcoholism, he plans to combine the trash-streaming that provided him with a stable income at his lowest ebb with his new professional life.

“I’ll probably keep streaming once a week, just out of habit,” said Samovolkin. “I kind of got used to always having my life on show.”

This article was supported by Russian Language News Exchange

The post Taking out the ‘trash streamers’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The Chinese government has tolerated little criticism of its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, but internet users within the country have found a variety of innovative ways to beat online censorship. Almost immediately after the Ren Wu piece was blocked, people began to repost versions of it on the social media platforms Weibo and WeChat, using Morse code, QR codes and ancient Chinese symbols. Some translated the article into foreign languages, including Korean, Japanese, English and German, while others peppered it with emojis, making the text harder for censorship programs to track down. 

"I was looking at all the people posting different versions of the article while lying in my bed,” one internet user, who wished only to be named as Turtledove, told Coda Story via a message on WeChat. "Then I got up and started translating it into ancient Chinese writing."

Turtledove used a combination of the earliest known forms of Chinese text, usually seen inscribed on ritual bronzes and oracle bones. They then posted the new version of the piece on WeChat. It attracted more than 40,000 views in just one hour before it was spotted and taken down.

“I think the article [about Ai Fen] is good for the country and the people. Letting more people know the information helps in containing the coronavirus outbreak,” said Turtledove.

“These are very creative ways being used to circumvent the censorship system,” said King-wa Fu, a professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong, in a phone interview with Coda Story. “Even though at the end of the day you will be censored, these posts increase the survival time of the article.”

The strategy of rewriting censored articles in forms other than standard simplified Chinese script has been deployed by social media users in the past. However, Fu says that translating the original magazine piece into foreign languages shows an impressive level of dedication. He added that even if those posts are detected and pulled down, a much bigger point is being made.

“It’s a protest. People just want to express that they are angry about the censorship,” Fu said. “People want to circumvent it. They might be unsuccessful in the end, but that’s not the point.”

While most of the rewritten articles have been removed from both Weibo and WeChat, thousands of people continue to create and share them, fueled by anger at the way the government has tackled the coronavirus crisis. A major source of resentment is the treatment by Chinese authorities of Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist from Wuhan who tried to warn the public about the virus. In January, one month before he died from the disease, Li was forced to sign a document retracting his statements as alarmist and “illegal.” 

“We feel powerless,” Turtledove said of the Chinese state’s ongoing censorship campaign. “It ultimately hurts the people, for sure. The government realized Dr Li Wenliang was right after, but it was too late. If they had acted earlier, the situation would have been better.” 

The post Chinese citizens fight coronavirus censorship with emojis and ancient languages appeared first on Coda Story.

Not much good, according to human rights groups and civil society activists in Singapore, the Asian nation that has become the latest country on track to pass a law about fake news.

The new bill before the Singaporean parliament, described by the Asia Internet Coalition as the “most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date,” embodies all the worries voiced by academics, lawyers and democracy activists in other countries. As consensus builds that social media needs some kind of external oversight in the wake of scandals such as Russian manipulation of Facebook in the U.S. elections and disinformation leading to mob violence in India — Singapore raises a thorny question of what kind of regulation is enough to preserve democracy from disinformation, and when does government intervention hinder democracy even more?

Singapore’s draft law, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill, tabled at the beginning of April, proposes sweeping powers for government ministers to demand corrections, the removal of content and the censoring of websites and social media pages if the official decides that the offending content is “false or misleading, whether wholly or in part”, and that it’s in the public interest to do so.

Ministers do not require any judicial review before issuing an order to block an online site or platform, meaning that the definition of fake news becomes the personal decision of Singapore’s regime. The concept of “public interest” is very broad, spanning from securing “public tranquility,” to preserving “friendly relations” between Singapore and other countries and preventing “a diminution of public confidence” in the government or state organs. Refusal to comply with directives can result in fines and jail terms of up to 12 months for individuals, or fines of up to $1 million Singaporean dollars for platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Singapore’s tiny opposition movement and independent media believe that the law isn’t intended to target disinformation, but rather their critical voices in a strict law-and-order state.

The bill allows for appeal to the High Court to get the ban overturned, but journalists and publishers say the check on power is meaningless because their businesses would almost certainly die during such a lengthy legal process. A media outlet penalized three times in six months could be banned from generating revenue through advertisements or subscriptions.

“As a site that relies heavily on advertising and donor support, the bill is a killer,” said Terry Xu, chief editor of The Online Citizen, currently Singapore’s oldest independent news website.

His fears aren’t fanciful; Xu is already facing charges for criminal defamation for publishing a letter from a reader that referred to “multiple policy and foreign screw-ups, tampering of the Constitution, corruption at the highest echelons and apparent lack of respect from foreign powers ever since the demise of founding father Lee Kuan Yew.” The author of the letter is facing similar charges.

When the Singapore government unveiled the bill on April 1, it sought to frame the legislation simply as part of a trend of mature democracies attempting to regulate social media.

“Singapore is not the only one which has taken legislation on this issue,” Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told journalists. “The French have done so, the Germans have done so. The Australians have just done so, something similar and very draconian. The British are also thinking of doing this as well. So Singapore had to do this and we had a long process,” said Lee. “Finally we have this bill and it will be debated in the house and I hope eventually it will become legislation.”

Regulations in other nations have triggered controversy in their respective countries. But, unlike Singapore, each of these nations is having a robust debate about the pros and cons the laws have on democracy.

Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, better known as NetzDG, was passed in 2017 and applies to social media platforms with over 2 million users, requiring them to check complaints and remove illegal content within seven days, or “manifestly unlawful” content without 24 hours. An unintended consequence is that far-right groups have built political capital with claims of victimhood.

A year later, the French passed a law that allows candidates and political parties to apply to a judge to get “false information” removed, raising concerns of censorship as social media platforms err on the side of legal caution and take down non-fake news.

Following the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Australian Parliament pushed through a law that requires content service providers to notify the authorities and swiftly remove violent content on their platforms. Some have criticized the law as being too rushed for proper consultation.

Earlier this month, the British government released the Online Harms White Paper, outlining its plans to hold tech companies accountable for harmful content on their platforms. In it, the government proposes establishing a “a new statutory duty of care” that would require companies to “tackle harm caused by content or activity on their services.” The government has a mandatory time period for interested groups and citizens to respond to the policy before it moves to parliament.

In Singapore, consultation was perfunctory at best. Last year, Parliament convened the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, ostensibly to solicit public feedback. The hearings were criticized by civil society groups as “hardly open or consultative.” There has been no public consultation since the bill was made public.

Social media in Singapore hasn’t been viewed with the same urgent concern as it has in Myanmar, where Facebook has seen its reputation plummet for failing to act against pages believed to have whipped up violence against the Rohingya minority. In the Philippines, independent news website Rappler has been sounding the alarm about the use of troll armies to drive misinformation campaigns to the benefit of the country’s president.

Singapore’s bill — which is likely to pass as the ruling party controls 82 of the 100 seats in parliament —  comes in sharp contrast with what’s happening in neighboring Malaysia, where a new government is seeking to repeal its own so-called Anti-Fake News Law, which was rammed through parliament by the former ruling coalition. The Malaysian parliament has voted to repeal the law — which sets out harsh penalties for reporting “wholly or partly false news” — but the opposition-held Senate blocked the move, sending it back to the lower house for another vote.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad says his nation needs to find a different solution to fake news, one that doesn’t involve trampling free speech. “When we have laws that prevent people from airing their views, then we are afraid the government may abuse the law, as it has happened in the last government,” he said during a joint press conference with his Singaporean counterpart in April.

Other Southeast Asian countries might fall more on Singapore’s side than Malaysia’s. The Cambodian government has claimed to be fighting “fake news” alongside crackdowns on independent news outlets, while cybersecurity laws that allow the government to compel companies to remove content have come into force in Vietnam.

This leaves free speech and democracy advocates in the region fearful that rather than help democratic societies — which is what European nations are trying to legislate — the new Asian anti fake-news trend will end up weakening such institutions in this region.

“Without a doubt the Bill [in Singapore] ups the ante for repression across the region, where the number of legislation intended to stifle dissent is rising at an alarming rate, and where there is clearly no letup in state crackdowns on the media and other independent voices, using every means possible to achieve their sinister ends,” says Tess Bacalla, executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance.

The post Singapore fake-news bill raises fears of censorship appeared first on Coda Story.

Her apparent crime? A social media post attributing the killing of American missionary, Charles Wesco, to the Cameroonian military.

“I was in shock,” Mefo told me. “I was really in shock. But not surprised, in the sense that we are in a country where journalists are thrown into jail for doing their job.”

The bigger surprise was the charge laid against her: propagating “false information,” according to her lawyer. Or, to put it more bluntly, spreading fake news.

Mefo had become another victim of a growing worldwide trend, of authoritarian governments exploiting the global crusade against disinformation as a pretext for going after the media and clamping down on dissent.

Cameroon has, in effect, become one of the testing grounds. The west African state has been an unsafe place for journalists for many years. But amid a spiralling civil war, the government has become especially keen to intimidate the media, with more than 12 journalists detained or questioned in the past year.

“It’s a terrible problem for us — fake news, disinformation, poisoning,” said Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the country’s communications minister, as he sought to defend Mefo’s arrest to the Washington Post.

“At least 28 journalists worldwide were in jail on “false information” charges by the end of 2018.” 

The Committee to Protect Journalists

By the end of last year, at least 28 journalists worldwide had reportedly been jailed on “false information” charges, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a sharp rise from previous years. Cases have included efforts by the authorities in Myanmar to silence investigative reporting they considered inconvenient. A growing list of governments have now passed or are in process of drawing up laws against fake news, albeit with widely differing mindsets and motives.

Among the first to act was Germany, in 2017, concerned about the threat of Russian-inspired disinformation fueling its widening internal divisions. Belarus, Kenya, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Egypt have since passed their own laws — but they have been widely criticized as efforts to censor freedom of expression. Russia is currently debating its own version, even as the country is accused of helping to foment the global disinformation panic.

In total, at least 17 governments have now taken legal action against disinformation, including passing restrictive laws, forcing social media companies to censor, arresting bloggers, shutting down the internet, or opening investigations against citizens, according to the Poynter Institute of Media Studies.

An Old Fear

You have likely heard this story: On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast an adaptation of  H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel “The War of the Worlds” on an American radio network. In the days that followed, newspapers reported that it had sparked widespread panic.

The nation, they said, had been “terrorized” by what people thought was a real news broadcast and they pointedly blamed their still fledgling competitor. "Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses,” the New York Times declared. It may not have been called “fake news” then, but historians now believe newspapers wildly exaggerated the effect of the broadcast on Americans.

Thus, the War of the Worlds drama is a story not just of how fake news can mislead the public, but of how powerful institutions can exploit the fear of fake news. And just as US press barons jumped on an opportunity to further their interests in the 1930s, groups such as Freedom House fear that authoritarian leaders are exploiting today’s legitimate fears about fake news for their own ends.

Initially regretful over accusations his broadcast had caused panic, Welles reportedly later embraced the story as part of his personal narrative. And if 1930s America helped create a model for the use and abuse of fake news, it has played a similar role this time round.

The War of the Worlds drama is a story not just of how fake news can mislead the public, but of how powerful institutions can exploit the fear of fake news.

It’s hard to remember now, but current fears about fake news actually began to spread before the November 2016 US election, with Buzzfeed helping things along with a blockbuster feature about teenagers in Macedonia getting rich by duping Trump supporters with hoax stories.

Then came the first of an avalanche of reports on Russia’s efforts to influence the vote with fake news. It was “pretty crazy” to think Facebook had played any role in this, said Mark Zuckerberg in the days after the election. By the following week, he had been forced to unveil a plan to tackle fake news on his platform. Before November 2016 was out, it had become conventional wisdom in the West that fake news was an “epidemic” or a “cancerous trend.”

Concerned at the potential threat inside its borders, the German government was quick to react. “We need to fully utilise all the legal authority at our disposal” to fight fake news, Germany’s justice minister said in December, a month after Trump’s won the presidency.

That same month, The Straits Times, widely seen as the mouthpiece of the Singaporean government, started writing about ways to fight the “scourge of fake news.”  By the time Donald Trump first tweeted the phrase "fake news" to refer to his critics in December 2016, the phrase had already caught on worldwide.

The German government has found itself on the defensive, by becoming the first to pass so-called “anti-fake news” laws. Conscious of the country’s history, it believed it needed to update its methods of protecting against online hate speech and the new legislation imposed stringent rules on internet platforms, requiring them to delete content deemed illegal or defamatory under its existing criminal code. But that led to criticism that it was bringing in "overbroad censorship,” and that this would also serve as encouragement to other, less-democratic, governments to follow suit.

Sure enough, Russian lawmakers cited Germany’s example to justify bringing its own anti-fake news restrictions, which critics say is simply another censorship tool. So too did

Singapore's Ministry of Information, as it lobbied for similar restrictions, highlighting pro-Trump fake news as a cautionary tale. Singapore is set to introduce a fake news law later this year.

When the US first began talking about fake news, and contemplating ways to deal with it, some commentators on the Right warned it would lead to “censorship” by the left.

Instead, this approach has been exported abroad, where authoritarians happily adopted the language of combating informational threats. "The real danger is blowing up countries from within,” said Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, justifying Egypt’s new fake news legislation.

The fake news scare “started in the United States of America. It came to Africa and it extended to Cameroon.”

Mimi Mefo Takambou, Cameroonian journalist jailed on “false information” charges

Some analysts say the media should take some of the blame for allowing concerns about disinformation to be abused in this way. "We did this to ourselves, and by 'we', I mean the media," Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute told the BBC, referring to what he sees as the overuse of the term “fake news” in the US and wider Western press.

Back in Cameroon, journalist Mimi Mefo Takambou is working again. Her case garnered widespread attention, leading to the charges against her being dropped. She walked free after just a week in jail, and sounded defiant when we spoke. “They cannot threaten me, because I have an assignment, I have an obligation to the audience, to the population of Cameroon, to inform them.”

Yet the threat has not gone away. Three other Cameroonian journalists remain in prison on “false news” charges. And Mefo said the government continues its crusade against “fake news,” widely seen as code for any coverage it doesn’t like.

She is now speaking out on behalf of the jailed journalists. But Mefo is clear where this current threat began. “I can say that it started from the United States of America. It came to Africa and it extended to Cameroon.”

The post From Fake News To Real Censorship appeared first on Coda Story.

Most Google services were down too, for all Russian internet users. That mean not only search, Gmail and YouTube, but less high-profile but nonetheless critical services such as CAPTCHA — the widely-used system for verifying that a log-on comes from a real human rather than a bot. With this out of action, many websites were effectively locked shut.

Services provided by other foreign online giants such as Amazon were offline too. The list went on and on. Car dealerships couldn’t process insurance payments. Passengers had trouble checking in for flights. Video-gamers were locked out of their favorite daily addiction.

In the process, Russians were also getting an insight into some of the internet’s more obscure inner workings — and how dependent they were on services outside their borders. The editor of the country’s most popular sports news site announced that they had lost all their type fonts, because the are provided and hosted externally by Google. The internet was literally disappearing in front of the eyes of Russian users.

In all, an estimated 20 million different links, websites and online services had become unavailable within Russia. Codaru.com, Coda Story’s sister website, was among them, because its hosting service was one of the sites affected.

But it wasn’t a technical failure that had caused all this online chaos. It was the Russian government — specifically its media watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor. And all because it wanted to ban a single messaging app, Telegram.

It was the culmination of a battle going back several years. The FSB, Russia’s main domestic intelligence service, has been leading the charge, accusing Telegram of giving the Islamic State and other extremists free reign to use its channels to communicate and inspire attacks.

What has really sparked the FSB’s ire, though, is the refusal of Telegram bosses to grant access to users’ communications. And when it refused to comply with a court ruling earlier this year, demanding that it hand over the necessary encryption keys, the government began its cyber-offensive to try to close the app down.

But while the Russian government is accused of all kinds of high-tech cleverness in interfering in elections and information warfare abroad, it hasn’t lived up to that image on the home front. In fact, its battle with Telegram has turned into a humiliating own-goal, making it look incompetent while also inflicting billions of rubles of losses on Russian business.

Blatant hypocrisy

Faced with a barrage of criticism and outright scorn, Roskomnadzor threw in the towel in early May and started unblocking large groups of IP (internet protocol) addresses. And after all this, Telegram itself is still available, albeit with a sometimes spotty connection.

Along the way, it has exposed the weaknesses of the Russian censorship machine, as well as the government’s blatant hypocrisy. Russian Telegram users barely make up 10 percent of its global base, but it is used by everyone of any importance in the country.

Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

When a Russian parliamentarian asked her Facebook followers not to contact her on Telegram — because the messages weren’t getting through — the spokeswoman for the Russian prime minister, Natalya Timakova, responded with a note saying they could install a VPN (a virtual private network service) to circumvent the ban, because “it’s just so easy.” She later claimed she had meant this as a joke.

Opposition channel

The story of Telegram has been one of relentless friction with the Russian government, since the app was first launched by its founder Pavel Durov. Russian lawmakers first floated the idea of banning it in 2015, on the grounds its channels were being used by the self-styled Islamic State. Durov famously retorted: “I suggest banning words. Reportedly, they are used by terrorists to communicate.”

Telegram does indeed have a history of being used by IS to recruit and train, and in at least one confirmed instance, to coordinate attacks. The FSB goes further, saying that the app has been used in almost every recent terror incident on Russian soil.

But Telegram is also the communication channel of choice for many Russian opposition groups, something that also irks the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies.

Two years ago, the government started turning up the heat. It introduced an amendment to Russia’s anti-terrorism legislation requiring any service involved in the “dissemination of information” to decrypt customer messages at the request of the FSB.

Durov refused, telling the Russian authorities that he would wipe out the extremists’ channels himself, without compromising Telegram users’ privacy.

But that did not sit well with the FSB, and the case went all the way to Russia’s Supreme Court. And in March, it ruled in the government’s favor. Durov again refused to hand over his encryption keys, and so in April Roskomnadzor began trying to block Telegram in Russia

It wasn’t so straightforward. For one thing, Russia’s online watchdog is not as powerful as you might think. It can’t block websites on its own. Instead, it is more like a go-between, following the orders of law enforcement agencies and then passing them on to internet service providers (ISPs), telling them to bar certain IP addresses.

The larger, federally-owned providers usually act on these orders immediately. Smaller, regional providers take longer though, and sometimes ignore the orders completely, which is why supposedly banned websites can remain online for hours and even days.

But Roskomnadzor compounded its own weaknesses by showing an amateurish level of understanding of how Telegram works. It is an app, not a website, which means that it is not bound to a single IP address.

Yet the online censor initially targeted it by ordering ISPs to block addresses directly associated with Telegram, including its home page and the web version of its chat service. But that did little to hamper the messenger service’s functionality. Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

For its part, Telegram immediately launched a deft campaign of counter measures — embarrassing the government still further. It sent new settings to users, allowing them to circumvent the ban, and started using a technique called “domain fronting,” which made it appear as though users were accessing entirely different services when they were actually on Telegram.

That is when the collateral damage started to spread across the Russian internet.

When Roskomnadzor realized it was being outfoxed, it reacted by ordering the cyber-equivalent of carpet-bombing, ordering ISPs to block entire subnets, or groups of IP addresses, which Telegram was using for domain fronting.

Even Russian IT giants close to the government, such as Yandex and Mail.ru, were hit. Initially reluctant to oppose the campaign against Telegram publicly, they lost patience when Roskomnadzor briefly added them to its “black list.”

The agency tried to save face by saying that it wasn’t actually attempting to ban the app, but only to “degrade” it. In fact, Telegram was actually growing, gaining thousands of new Russian users as a result of the government’s very public effort to squash it.

One of Telegram’s defining features is its “channels.” In essence, it is a simple blogging platform that allows anyone to broadcast their views and messages to an audience of their choosing. There are channels specializing in feminist writing, history and cooking, and more general political commentary groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

There are also numerous pro-Kremlin channels, both promoting government policy and attacking the opposition. Pro-Kremlin figures also run their own Telegram channels. The editor-in-chief of the government-owned RT network, Margarita Simonyan, has 13,000 subscribers, while RT Russian has almost 50,000 — and both channels have remained active even after the ban.

Telegram has also become an important advertising platform for Russian businesses, with many using popular channels to promote their products and services. So the attempt to ban the service has hit hard, causing losses estimated as high as $2 billion dollars.

The debacle has also been a blow to the government’s long-held hopes of exerting greater control over the internet. The Russian authorities have long toyed with the idea of copying the Chinese model and establishing “online sovereignty” — that is, cutting Russia off almost entirely from the global internet.

But the Kremlin was always going to struggle to achieve this, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services and author of “The Red Web,” a book on the country’s digital battles.

China built up its internet infrastructure “with total state control in mind,” he said in an interview, “while Russia only introduced content filtration in 2012.” What is more, Soldatov added, “a whole segment of China’s tech industry is aimed at controlling the online behaviour of individual users.” And all Chinese have to have a surveillance app on their phones. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory.” — Sergey Smirnov

Russia, by contrast, is using “the same age-old methods” to try to exert control on the internet, argues Soldatov. And it does not have the equivalent of China’s “Great Firewall,” with the capacity to isolate itself from the rest of the world.

Another crucial difference is that China’s domestic online market is big enough (the biggest in the world, in fact) to be almost entirely self-sufficient. While Russia has homegrown online giants such as Yandex or Vkontakte, it is still deeply dependent on outside services.

So what happens next? Anton Merkurov, an internet expert, says this is a strategic defeat for the Russian government. “The Digital Resistance [a phrase coined by Pavel Durov] did really shine while the state’s impotence couldn’t be more obvious.” As much as the government wants to censor more, Merkurov adds, they’re simply not technically competent enough to do so.

Merkurov predicts a increasing conflict between the state and what he believes is a growing community of tech-savvy individuals who reject censorship, and he says the state will lose.

But not everyone is so optimistic. Sergey Smirnov, the editor in chief of Mediazona, a crowdfunded website that covers political trials and the prison system, is wary. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory. This time they weren’t prepared from a technical standpoint, but they’ll draw conclusions for the next time.”

The post Why did Russia just attack its own internet? appeared first on Coda Story.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like | Episode Six: The Lucky One Percent appeared first on Coda Story.

We spoke to Elena Chingina, the mother of 22-year-old Ruslan Sokolvksy, while he awaited his trial date in pre-trial detention in a Yekaterinburg prison. On August 11, 2016 Ruslan uploaded a video of himself playing Pokemon Go in a church. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested at home and charged with offending the religious feelings of believers. In May 2017, Sokolovsky was given a three and a half year suspended sentence for "inciting hatred" and "breaching the right to freedom of religion. A main part of Sokolovsky’s guilty verdict rested on his “denial of the existence of God” said the judge when she read the verdict.

Jailed for a Like | Episode Two: When Caring Becomes a Crime

This is a story of young mother from Russia’s Kurgan region who was sentenced to six months in prison in 2016 for sharing a video on the Russian social media platform Vkontake. On March 6, 2016 the Kurgan regional court released Evgeniya from prison, one month before the end of her sentencing. The case of Evgeniya Chudnovets sparked debate across Russia about how Russians should behave on social media.

Jailed for a Like | Episode Three: Silencing the Poet

This is a story of Alexandr Byvshev, a poet and a schoolteacher from Russia’s Oryol region who was sentenced to 300 hours of labor for posting a poem about Ukraine that criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2015. His poem was added to Russia's list of extremist materials and a second case was opened regarding a second poem he had written about Ukraine.

Jailed for a Like | Episode Four: A Family Accused of Extremism

This is the story of an electrical engineer from the city of Tver who was arrested in 2015 for extremism and sentenced to two years in prison for his social media posts. The "evidence" of his extremism was a series of articles he shared about Russian forces in Ukraine. After his release, the family moved to Ukraine.

Jailed for a Like | Episode Five: Criticism or Terrorism?

This is the story of Aleksey Kungurov, a blogger from the city of Tyumen sentenced to two years in prison in 2016 for his post which criticized Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria.

Jailed for a Like | Episode Six: The Lucky One Percent

This is the story of Natalia Vahonina, a journalist from the city of Nizhny Tagil who says that Russia’s laws on extremism on social media were used to try and silence her investigation into local corruption in 2018.

The post Full mini-doc series: Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like | Episode Five: Criticism or Terrorism? appeared first on Coda Story.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like | Episode Four: A Family Accused of Extremism appeared first on Coda Story.

Officials in Kiev say the restrictions are needed to fight Russia’s propaganda machine and to prevent its security services from spying on the millions of Ukrainians who use Russian-owned sites.

But by resorting to internet censorship, Kiev is “emulating Russia’s repression” says Kenneth Roth of U.S.-based Human Rights Watch in a Twitter post.

The Ukrainian government maintains it had to take tougher measures because of concerns that the Kremlin is expanding hacking and other information-war activities worldwide. It is a reversal of past policy.

While it barred Russian television broadcasts several years ago — since the Kremlin first began stirring up the conflict in eastern Ukraine — President Poroshenko and his officials had been trying to use Russian-controlled sites to get their message out. It was hard to ignore them, as almost 80 percent of Ukrainian internet users are signed up to Vkontakte. Odnoklassniki is Ukraine’s second most popular social network after Vkontakte.

Both sites though belong to Mail.ru which is owned by the Kremlin-friendly oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Vkontakte’s founder, Pavel Durov, sold his last shares in 2014 after losing a battle with the Russian security services over access to the accounts of EuroMaidan protesters using the site.

Now though, President Poroshenko says he is logging off, ordering the nearly 21 million Ukrainian users of those two sites to do likewise. In what he called his last Vkontakte post, he said: “with the global scale of Russia’s cyber attacks, including in the recent French elections, the time has come to take more decisive action.”

But it puts Ukraine into a select club, along with China, Turkey and Russia, that bans certain social networking sites. The blocked sites were added to a list of hundreds of companies and individuals already banned by Ukraine in sanctions which were renewed by Ukraine’s National Security Council in April.

The secretary of the council, Oleksandr Turchynov, said social networking sites had been included because the Russian security services were using them to collect information illegally.

“These sites are even being used as recruitment networks for Russian security services and many other related problems,” Turchynov said.

Announced with little warning, the internet ban has sparked widespread disruption and criticism. An estimated 80 percent of Ukrainian companies use a Russian accounting program called 1C that is now officially off limits. And the Yandex search engine is Ukraine’s second most popular after Google.

Maksym Stepenko, who runs a Vkontakte group called “NoModels” which relies on traffic-based advertising, told Coda that the ban could “destroy” his Ukrainian market, which makes up nearly a third of his 280,000 followers.

The ban could also have deadly consequences in eastern Ukraine, according to Bellingcat journalist Aric Toler, who said on Twitter that both residents and the authorities rely on Vkontakte posts to disseminate the latest reports on the fighting.

Journalist-turned-lawmaker Mustafa Nayyem wrote on Facebook that the ban won’t work. “Such measures in the fight against propaganda only benefit the enemy,” Nayyem wrote, noting that in separatist-controlled territories media outlets are already mostly under Russian or separatist control.

“We’re talking about our citizens, our GDP, employment and the most important part of the economy — medium and small businesses that can’t afford to develop their own software.”

Nayyem’s parliamentary ally, Svitlana Zalishchuk, accused the president of using the ban to deflect attention from his failure to prosecute the allies of former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. It does nothing, she said, to counter lawmakers who spread pro-Kremlin messages from the protection of Ukraine’s parliament.

In any case, pro-Kremlin voices will increasingly move to Facebook, predicted Artur Orujaliyev, founder of a tech news website called of Ain.ua. “I wouldn’t be surprised if soon the authorities want to block Facebook too,” Orujaliyev told the Ukrainian Media Network.

It is hard to cut off access entirely — and some Russian sites are still accessible through Kyiv Star and Volia, two of Ukraine’s largest internet providers.

As news of the ban made headlines, Vkontakte sent its Ukrainian users a link to a website where they could download their account information and a message saying,“We love our Ukrainians users and want you to always stay connected with your friends and loved ones.”

The Ukrainian authorities intentionally gave no warning in order to avoid retaliatory Russian cyber attacks and for an “element of surprise,” said Valentin Petrov of Ukraine’s National Security Council to Hromadske TV.

But then, just hours after Poroshenko signed the decree, his office reported a cyber-attack on his website, using Vkontakte and Yandex.

The post Backlash grows against Ukraine’s attempts to block Russian social media appeared first on Coda Story.

This is the story of Alexandr Byvshev, a poet and a schoolteacher from Russia’s Oryol region who was sentenced to 300 hours of labor for posting a poem about Ukraine that criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

In January, a second new criminal case was started against Byvshev for another poem about Ukraine.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.

This is a story of young mother from Russia’s Kurgan region who was sentenced to six months in prison for sharing a video on the Russian social media platform Vkontake.

The case of Evgeniya Chudnovets has sparked debate across Russia about how Russians should behave on social media.

UPDATE: On March 6, 2016 the Kurgan regional court announced that Evgeniya will be released from prison, one month before the end of her sentencing. The decision came after Russia’s supreme court asked Kurgan to reexamine its verdict. Read more on this development here.

Jailed for a Like tracks cases of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.

“Maybe don’t post any more photos with Khodorkovsky,” Mansky’s camerawoman suggested when Mansky finished the interview. A recent picture of Mansky with the oil tycoon turned opposition financier on Facebook had drawn unwanted attention, she explained.

Vladimir Putin’s clampdown on dissent has turned Latvia into an important center for Russian media and culture with many organizations moving to Riga. Mansky joined the exiles in 2014 after pressure from the authorities made it difficult for him to continue operating from Moscow. “In a situation of total lies, the more documentaries, and the more outlets, the better.”

From Riga Mansky still pursues the broad release of his films in Russia and Artdocfest screens its films in several Russian cities. In a country where state media has a monopoly on public discourse and lies have come to dominate the official narrative, Mansky believes that independent documentaries have a new and important role to play.

“Everything needs to be brought up for analysis,” said Mansky. “Artdocfest exists to ask questions.”

A documentarian since the early 1990’s, Mansky has been on both sides of Russia’s cultural establishment. In the early 2000s he shot three consecutive documentaries about Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin with Putin’s avid participation. By 1999 he was among the several founders of the Laurel Branch Prize, Russia’s Peabody award for nonfiction filmmaking.

Then in 2006, together with film critic Victoria Belopolskaya and others, Mansky started Artdocfest. For 10 days in the winter audiences in Russia can watch the art house documentaries that are contenders for the Laurel Branch Prize.

The nature of the festival began to change as the Kremlin clamped down on independent media, first in the wake of mass protest against Putin’s return as president in 2011 and then in response to the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. A showcase for non-televised films, the festival and its post-screening discussions strongly diverged from the official state narrative broadcast across government-controlled airwaves.

A year after the release of Mansky’s documentary “Truba (Pipeline)” in 2013, a film that made clear how little locals benefit from Russia’s oil and gas industry, things came to a head with Russia’s Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky. The government would cease funding Artdocfest, Medinsky announced, as well as all of Mansky’s projects. This decision came shortly after Mansky signed a public letter condemning the Kremlin’s television coverage of Euromaidan.

Other sponsors of the festival, like Canon Russia, followed in order to toe the party line. That same year Mansky and his wife Natalya Manskaya, who also works in film, picked up and moved to Riga.

“Until then, I had always thought of Latvia the same way you think about a sailboat on the water. You know it’s out there somewhere but you don’t think it has anything to do with you,” says Mansky.

Though the Artdocfest team left the country, they decided to continue screening its films in Russia, in part to tap into an unexpected documentary boom in Russia. Television, film and theater are still heavily dependent on state funding in Russia, explained Mikhail Iampolski, a professor at New York University and a post-Soviet cinema expert. But advances in technology have made documentaries easier and cheaper to make. The result is an unexpected flourishing of the medium as a form of political expression.

“Today, the most important thing is to have a diversity of voices,” said Iampolski. “In a situation of total lies, the more documentaries, and the more outlets, the better.” “Nonfiction film becomes the repository of quality and of resistance.”

Held in early December in three Russian cities, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, this year’s festival featured more than 150 films on topics that rarely make headlines in Russia’s mainstream media. Among them were films on disability rights and neo-Nazism, a political portrait of the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and two films following the trial of performance artist Petr Pavlensky, a man who spent much of 2016 in jail for igniting the doors of the Russian secret police building. On December 9 the Artdocfest competition prize went to Alexander Kuznetsov’s “We’ll Be All Right,” which follows a group of disabled adults in a state-run facility in Siberia as they seek to emancipate themselves from state guardianship.

“There is a war of ideas,” said Daniil Dondurey, editor of the magazine Iskusstvo Kino (Art of Cinema), of the need for such social criticism. “Can fiction film take it upon itself to rise to the challenge? No. Can television? No. Nonfiction film becomes the repository of quality and of resistance.”

Beyond losing state funding, Artdocfest has faced serious challenges, from disruptive last-minute inspections by authorities to special film edits in order to accommodate Russia’s obscenity laws.

“It’s a new form of censorship,” says Mansky of Russia’s costly and bureaucratic new copyright restrictions which were passed in 2014. “Say you shot the film on your iPhone. You don’t have a company. You have no capacity to file paperwork. That means you also cannot show your film.”

Mansky believes that the law is simply used to restrict, not protect, filmmakers. Artdocfest recently lost a lawsuit after being prosecuted for a copyright infringement.

Originally adopted to regulate profane speech, the law allows a certification committee to deny a company the necessary screening certificate for essentially any reason. Mansky’s 2014 film “Under the Sun,” shot in North Korea and hailed as one of the best documentaries of 2015 by western and South Korean media, was delayed in Russia for over a year due to the law.

Many Russian filmmakers worry that the already cramped space that they have carved out for themselves will also be shut down. For many Ukrainian filmmakers, or for those working on subjects in Ukraine, Russia can now be off limits. For the first time this year, Artdocfest held its roundtables in Riga in order to avoid provocation in Russia and to allow Ukrainian participants to attend. “I am ecstatic that I’ve picked a side, and I urge those who have not done so to pick one,” he said of directors who shy away from political themes and statements. “I breathe easier in the morning.”

Looking forward, Mansky plans to expand partnerships with online media and even launch an online platform that could expand Artdocfest far beyond the 300,000 tickets it typically sells during its 10-day festival.

Mansky said that he’s wary of the repercussions he can face for his line of work. His newest film “Rodnye (Close Relations)” is shot in Ukraine and Crimea. After the documentary premiered in Russia at this year’s Artdocfest he said he wonders whether he could face trouble. The worst case scenario, he said, would be for him to be detained on his way out of the country after the festival or a visit.

Each year, the director prepares a backup plan in case Artdocfest is canceled last-minute in Moscow. But he is unrepentant about his stance.

“I am ecstatic that I’ve picked a side, and I urge those who have not done so to pick one,” he said of directors who shy away from political themes and statements. “I breathe easier in the morning.”

The post Outside Looking In: A Russian filmmaker fights censorship from abroad appeared first on Coda Story.

In Episode One Coda speaks with Elena Chingina, the mother of 22-year-old Ruslan Sokolovsky who is currently waiting for his trial date in a Yekaterinburg prison.

On August 11, 2016 Ruslan uploaded a video of himself playing Pokemon Go in a church. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested at home and charged with offending the religious feelings of believers. His trial begins in mid-January.

Coda’s mini-documentary series tells the stories of Russians who have been prosecuted or imprisoned for their posts, shares or likes on social media.

The post Jailed for a Like appeared first on Coda Story.