Facebook controversy erupts in India & Egypt persecutes female TikTok influencers
We hope you are staying safe and having a good week! This week we have updates from India and Egypt. A controversy has erupted in India after an article published by The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s top public policy executive in India, citing business reasons, didn’t apply hate-speech rules to at least four individuals and groups linked with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who were “flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence”. In Egypt we take a look at the targeting of female TikTok users for "violating family values". In this issue we also have your regularly scheduled round up of COVID-19 highlights and updates from Meedan.
We're hosting a book talk on September 3 with How to Handle a Crowd author Anika Gupta. Please sign up here if you're looking to take your small community group to the next level, start a career in online moderation, or tackle your own business’s comments section.
Your COVID-19 questions
Journalist and medical doctor, Dr. Seema Yasmin shares weekly highlights from Meedan's public health journalism tool, learnaboutcovid19.org.
How long is a person infected with COVID-19 contagious?
Dr. Seema says: "New guidance released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-August described when and for how long people should stay in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 or suffering symptoms consistent with the disease. The CDC said immunity can persist for at least three months, but this was misreported in a variety of leading news outlets as “up to three months,” causing confusion about the duration of immunity. The new CDC guidance says people who have tested positive for COVID-19 do not need to get tested again or quarantine for up to three months after an initial illness or positive test result, as long as they don’t suffer any symptoms. This is because evidence shows that reinfection within three months is unlikely because immunity does not appear to wane within that time frame.
Anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19 or suffered symptoms consistent with the illness must isolate from others for 10 days after the positive test result or 10 days after symptoms started. Isolation should only end at 10 days if the person hasn’t had a fever for at least 24 hours (without the use of fever-reducing medicines) and any other symptoms have improved. There is a caveat: a few people who suffer severe illness may remain infectious for up to 20 days after their symptoms started. In this case, it’s important to talk to a doctor to figure out when isolation should end."(Read more on what our our experts say here)
Are children less susceptible of contracting the novel coronavirus? And what do we know about the inflammatory syndrome impacting children with COVID-19?
Dr. Seema says: "A slew of new data about children and COVID-19 has also caused some confusion. A July study from South Korea found that children younger than 10 years are less likely to spread the disease than adults but that children ages 10-19 are more likely to spread the disease than adults. But a new report from the same research team, published on August 7, reveals a flaw in their earlier analysis which means children ages 10-19 are not more likely than adults to spread the virus that causes COVID-19. (The finding about kids under 10 still holds: they are less likely than adults to spread the virus.)
Studies of household and community outbreaks show children are infrequently the index case, meaning it’s usually an adult who is the first known case in a COVID-19 outbreak. Children are also a lot less likely than adults to get sick with COVID-19 (kids make up 8.8% of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and 0.8% of all COVID-19 deaths) and a lot less likely to wind up in hospital (kids are hospitalized with COVID-19 at a rate of 8 per 100,000 compared to 164 per 100,000 adults).
But when children with COVID-19 do need hospitalization, 1 in 3 need treatment in an intensive care unit. This can be because of a rare complication of the disease known as Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C which has afflicted around 600 children in the US. It's typically seen in children aged around 8 years (with a range of 2 weeks to 20 years) and can affect the heart, lungs, kidneys, renal system and digestive tract. Two thirds of these children needed treatment in the ICU and around 2% died." (Read more on what our our experts say here)
What do we know about pregnant women and COVID-19?
Dr. Seema says: "Pregnancy increases the risk for severe COVID-19 disease, meaning there is a higher chance a pregnant person who becomes infected with the coronavirus will require hospitalization and suffer more serious symptoms of the disease. Preterm birth and other birth-related complications have not been associated with COVID-19, according to the studies completed and available at this time. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. CDC) encourages people to take preventive measures while pregnant and to seek prenatal care throughout pregnancy. If a person is infectious during labor, it is possible for them to spread the virus to the baby."
Top stories
Is Facebook favouring the ruling BJP in India? (BBC)
Did Facebook go easy on hate speech by an Indian lawmaker belonging to the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to protect its interests in its biggest market? A Wall Street Journal report, based on interviews with current and former Facebook employees, suggests so, and it prompted immediate calls for an investigation.
“We prohibit hate speech and content that incites violence and we enforce these policies globally without regard to anyone's political position or party affiliation. While we know there is more to do, we're making progress on enforcement and conduct regular audits of our process to ensure fairness and accuracy." — A Facebook spokesperson in an email response to the BBC
Egypt’s TikTok crackdown targets young female influencers (Coda)
In Egypt at least nine female TikTok users have been prosecuted in recent months on charges related to inciting debauchery and prostitution. The girls are all from middle or working-class backgrounds, and some monetized their followings to earn thousands of dollars. While their content did not violate the app’s community standards, Egyptian authorities have enforced their own red lines, without clearly demarcating them. The women have been charged with “violating family values” – a vaguely defined clause from a controversial cybercrime bill that was passed in August 2018. Reporters Without Borders warned that the bill would legalize President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s broader war against online dissent, which has resulted in the blocking of at least 500 news websites and the jailing of numerous Egyptians for posts on Twitter and Facebook.
"The government has created a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women,” said Mozen Hassan, founder of the non-profit women’s rights group Nazra for Feminist Studies. In 2016, Hassan and her NGO were charged with receiving foreign funds for the purpose of “harming national security.” Her assets were frozen and she was banned from traveling.
Hassan now believes that Sisi’s regime is targeting women online because the internet has become the last public space available to them. “The bad women are activists, human rights defenders and the TikTok girls," she said.
What’s new at Meedan
This pandemic isn’t a swan—it’s a canary (An Xiao Mina)
COVID-19 is a yellow canary event for the kind of environmental destruction we should expect globally, the racial and global inequalities we’ve allowed and encouraged to fester, the information ecosystems we’ve funded through advertising, and a long-running denialism of both the social and biological sciences. When miners see a dead canary, they know it’s time to evacuate. But in the context of a global pandemic, there’s nowhere else to go. We have to face it, understand the underlying causes, and do our best to change them.