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Wartime in the ‘digital wild west’
As Israel continues its advance into Gaza, the need for oversight and accountability around what appears on social media feels especially urgent. Forget for a minute all the stuff online that’s either fake or misinformed. There are reams of real information about this war that constantly trigger the censorship systems of Big Tech companies.
In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns
Lights, cameras, what action? In Nairobi, the question looms large for millions of Kenyans, whose every move is captured by the flash of a CCTV camera at intersections across the capital. Though government promises of increased safety and better traffic control seem to play on a loop, crime levels here...
Why India is awash with anti-Palestine disinformation
In the last incarnation of this newsletter, Coda’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava worked each week to examine the disinformation being generated around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Deliberate distortion of the truth had long been a weapon in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, but the war laid bare just how ineffective we were at countering it. Fact-checking alone is of little use in the face of targeted lies intended to sow division and advance particular narratives.
The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany
On October 27, a rainy Friday evening in Berlin, as Israel bombed Gaza with new intensity before the launch of its ground invasion, I arrived at Alexanderplatz for a rally that had already been canceled. “Get walking now,” ordered one police officer in German. “You don’t need to be here,” shouted another in English. A father and daughter walked away from the police. He held her hand. She dragged a sign written in a shaky child’s script. “Ich bin keine Nummer.” I am not a number.
Will a new regulation on AI help tame the machine?
About a year ago, police outside Atlanta, Georgia, pulled over a 29-year-old Black man named Randal Reid and arrested him on suspicion that he had committed a robbery in Louisiana — a state that Reid had never set foot in. After his lawyers secured Reid’s release, they found telltale signs that he’d been arrested due to a faulty match rendered by a facial recognition tool.
The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land
Late on a hot night this summer, Mohammad Ashraf paced around his house, wondering if the time had finally come for him to flee his home of 40 years. Outside his window lay the verdant slopes of the Himalayas. All of Purola, a small mountain village in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, appeared to be asleep, tranquil under the cover of darkness. But Ashraf was awake. Could he hear noises? Were those footsteps beneath his window? Did his neighbors mean to do him harm?
Surviving Russia’s control
In the final days of 2021, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Supreme Court ordered Memorial, Russia’s oldest and largest human rights group, to be “liquidated.” On the day Memorial was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, Russian authorities seized the organization’s Moscow offices.
How the new UK tech law hurts Wikipedia
It has been an incredibly difficult three weeks in the world, and the internet shows it. In the last couple of newsletters, I’ve noted just how hard it is to find reliable information on the social web right now, where everything seems to revolve around attention, revenue and shock value, and verified facts are few and far between. So this week, I’m turning my attention to a totally different part of the internet: Wikipedia.
The smart city where everybody knows your name
At first glance, Aqkol looks like most other villages in Kazakhstan today: shoddy construction, rusting metal gates and drab apartment blocks recall its Soviet past and lay bare the country’s uncertain economic future. But on the village’s outskirts, on a hill surrounded by pine trees, sits a large gray and white cube: a central nervous system connecting thousands of miles of fiber optic cables, sensors and data terminals that keeps tabs on the daily comings and goings of the village’s 13,000 inhabitants.
Under the radar: When AI doesn’t speak your language
If you want to send a text message in Mongolian, it can be tough – it’s a script that most software doesn’t recognize. But for some people in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, that’s a good thing. When authorities in Inner Mongolia announced...
The blackout in Gaza
It has been more than a week since Israel cut off electricity, water, fuel and food shipments for 2.3 million people in Gaza, as part of its response to the unprecedented attacks launched by Hamas on October 7. Internet shutdowns have become an all-too-common tool of control in conflict situations around the world. But an enforced power cut takes it to another level entirely. It makes network shutdowns look like child’s play.
How the global anti-LGBTQ movement found a home in Turkey
Kursat Mican scrolled through pictures on his phone as I sat across from him at a large wooden desk. He showed me one photo: a painting of a man in a blue dress. He scrolled on, then paused and held up the phone again. This one is of two lesbians, he told me.
How Big Tech is fueling — and monetizing — false narratives about Israel and Palestine
I have few words for the atrocities carried out by Hamas in Israel since October 7, and the horrors that are now unfolding in Gaza. I have a few more for a certain class of social media users at this moment. The violence in Israel and Palestine has triggered what feels like a never-ending stream of pseudo-reporting on the conflict: allegations, rumors and straight up falsehoods about what is happening are emerging at breakneck speed. I’m not talking about posts from people who are actually on the ground and may be saying or reporting things that are not verified. That’s the real fog of war. Instead, I’m talking about posts from people who jump into the fray not because they have something urgent to report or say, but just because they can.
Indian journalists are being treated like terrorists for doing their jobs
When India hosted the G20 summit last month, it presented itself as the “mother of democracy” to the parade of leaders and delegations from the world’s largest economies. But at home, when the world is not watching as closely, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is systematically clamping down on free speech.
Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops
This story was updated at 6:30 ET on October 16, 2023. Wabe didn’t expect to see his friends’ faces in the shadows. But it happened after just a few weeks on the job. He had recently signed on with Sama, a San Francisco-based tech company with a major hub in Kenya’s capital. The middle-man company was providing the bulk of Facebook’s content moderation services for Africa. Wabe, whose name we’ve changed to protect his safety, had previously taught science courses to university students in his native Ethiopia.
How AI is supercharging political disinformation ops
Were Slovakia’s elections rigged? Or was that just the artificial intelligence talking? Two days before Slovakians went to the polls last week, an explosive post made the rounds on Facebook. It was an audio recording of Progressive Slovakia party leader Michal Simecka telling a well-known journalist about his plan to buy votes from the country’s marginalized Roma minority. Or at least, that is what it sounded like. There was sufficient reason to believe that Simecka might have been desperate enough to do whatever it took to win the election — his party had been polling neck and neck against that of former Prime Minister Robert Fico, who resigned from the job back in 2018 amid anti-corruption protests following the murders of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova.
Why politicians are such couch potatoes when it comes to corruption
This is going to be my last newsletter for a while because I need to focus on writing my next book (about the fight against money laundering), so I’d like to start by thanking you for reading my weary and cynical thoughts every week, and to apologize for the fact I’m not going to keep sending them out.
The dangerous myths sold by the conspiritualists
Patches of pale skin on chiropractor Melissa Sell’s back and shoulders have been turned neon pink by the sun. “This is not a burn,” she tells her nearly 50,000 Instagram followers, “this is light nutrition.”. The “unhelpful invocation” of the term “sunburn,” she argues, makes “an...
Meta cozies up to Vietnam, censorship demands and all
When Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and his delegation visited Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters in California last week, they were welcomed with a board reminiscent of Facebook’s desktop interface. “What’s on your mind?” it read at the top. Beneath the standard status update prompt were a series...
Why are AI software makers lobbying for kids’ online safety laws?
Last week, the U.K. passed the Online Safety Bill, a law that’s meant to help snuff out child sexual exploitation and abuse on the internet. The law will require websites and services to scan and somehow remove all content that could be harmful to kids before it appears online.
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