Hate speech in India & surveillance threat to journalists in the MENA region
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We hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
In this edition, we look at tech platforms and their response to hate speech and regulations imposed by governments. We also take a look at the challenges faced by independent reporters under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
In India, Meta released its first annual Human Rights Report, which includes a brief section reporting on the Meta commissioned independent human rights impact assessment (HRIA) for India. The company has failed to publish the full report of the HRIA which leads to concerns around transparency and accountability.
In the Middle East, President Biden had an opportunity during his recent trip to reclaim the mantle of champion for press freedom around the globe. Instead, it seems he has backtracked on one of the core tenets of his foreign policy agenda. Despite the rise in digital authoritarianism in the region, surveillance fell off the radar during Biden's visit.
Finally, ahead of the elections in Chile, misinformation finds space in the new text of the Constitution and there is a deep difference between the models that represent the current Constitution and the new proposal.
If there are updates you would like us to share from your country or region, please reach out to us at checklist@meedan.com.
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The latest top stories
Meta and hate speech in India (Thomson Reuters Foundation)
Last week, Meta, formerly Facebook, released its first human rights report, which included some snippets from the pending Human Rights Impact Assessment on India. But this was not a preview of the full assessment. Rather, Meta told Human Rights Watch that it does not “have plans to publish anything further on the India HRIA,” an abdication of its commitment to transparency and due diligence. The India assessment, which the company commissioned in 2019, was meant to independently evaluate Meta’s role in spreading hate speech and incitement to violence on its services in India, following criticism of the company by civil society groups. What was published last week gets us no closer to understanding Meta’s responsibility, and therefore its commitment to addressing the spread of harmful content in India. Instead, it deflected blame, focusing on the role of third parties and end users.
Meta’s refusal to release its India assessment in full contributes to the perception that its human rights impact assessments are designed to deflect criticism and divert efforts to hold platforms accountable — Deborah Brown and Jayshree Bajoria, Human Rights Watch
Google, Meta Bow to Sweeping Taxes, Content Curbs in Indonesia (Bloomberg)
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook have submitted to Indonesian regulations that grant Jakarta sweeping powers to shut down content it deems undesirable and tax digital sales. The Indonesia regulations allow the government to block services that fail to remove within 24 hours content that could potentially “incite unrest” or “disturb public order,” such as those that promote child pornography or support terrorism. Social media operators are facing increasing scrutiny from governments around the world for fake news and their outsized influence on political discourse around the world. They are grappling with growing oversight and content restrictions from Europe to India to Southeast Asia.
“There will be warnings, followed by fines and lastly, shutdown of services for those who fail to register.” — Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, director general of informatics applications at the ministry
Hacking the press: The surveillance threat to MENA's journalists (The New Arab)
The use of spyware by regimes across the Middle East has created a dangerous and hostile environment for journalists. But despite the rise in digital authoritarianism, surveillance fell off the radar during Biden's visit.
With tens of journalists behind bars, today Egypt is considered the world’s third worst jailer of media workers, and surveillance technology enables this.
Reporter Says Taliban Forced Her to Publicly Retract Accurate Articles (The New York Times)
A veteran war reporter in Afghanistan was told she would go to jail if she didn’t tweet an apology for her reporting. The reporter, Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian who writes for Foreign Policy and other publications, explained her circumstances on Wednesday, after she had safely left Afghanistan. She said the Taliban had taken issue with articles that she wrote in 2021 and 2022 about the threat of forced marriages by Taliban fighters and the violence facing L.G.B.T.Q. people living in Afghanistan. She wrote that one intelligence officer had told her that “there are no gays in Afghanistan,” while another had told her that he would kill anyone he learned was gay.
"They dictated. I tweeted,” she wrote on Twitter. “They didn’t like it. Deleted, edited, re-tweeted. Made video of me saying I wasn’t coerced. Re-did that too.” — Lynne O’Donnell
The "brutal" misinformation about the new Constitution proposed for Chile (BBC News)
"Brutal": that is the term used by researcher Sebastián Valenzuela, professor at the Catholic University of Chile, to describe and compare the misinformation surrounding the text that Chile must approve or reject in a mandatory vote referendum on September 4.
"It is disinformation as a means to increase animosity, polarization, a visceral feeling against someone or something….. However, unlike what happened with the public outbreak or with Covid, this disinformation campaign about the Constitutional text has been produced at the level of elites, of people with positions of economic, political, and intellectual power. That explains why now the subject is discussed so much: because this time it has been clearer to identify its sources." — Sebastian Valenzuela, a professor at the Catholic University of Chile
What’s new at Meedan
Fact checkers and their mental health – research ‘work in progress’
Birmingham City University along with Meedan are researching the mental health impacts for individuals exposed to video, visual and audio content depicting conflicts or violence, or other hateful content online; the extent to which they’re protected in this work; and, of course, how these issues might be mitigated. In May and June we interviewed 10 people working in these fields and presented initial findings at Global Fact 9: “the world’s largest and most impactful fact-checking summit”. We are currently seeking additional interviewees who could offer time for an interview in July 2022, so that we can develop this into a full journal article later this year. If you work in fact-checking, verification, online content moderation, archiving or journalism, independently or as part of a team within a small organisation, and could share your experiences with us, please email jerome@meedan.com or dima@meedan.com.