“The unwarranted seizure of Batumelebi and Netgazeti’s bank accounts confirms what has been clear from the start of Mzia Amaglobeli’s trumped-up trial – that authorities’ goal is to silence two of Georgia’s most respected news outlets and the courageous woman who runs them,” said CPJ Chief Global Affairs Officer Gypsy Guillén Kaiser. “Georgian authorities should lift all undue restrictions on media outlets’ accounts, release Amaglobeli, and end their campaign against the independent press.”

Batumelebi reported that Georgia’s Revenue Service seized the accounts of the outlets’ legal entity, Gazeti Batumelebi, on July 17, after previously giving it just five days to pay accumulated tax debts, interest, and penalties totaling around US$100,000.

CPJ and international partners monitored the July 14 trial of Amaglobeli, who was jailed over an altercation with a local police chief, and denounced the charges against her as “disproportionate and politicized.” A verdict is expected on August 1, with the prominent media manager facing between four and seven years in prison and declining health.

The measures “appear aimed at breaking [Amaglobeli] personally and, ultimately, destroying the media organization she founded,” Batumelebi said in its statement.

The outlet, which is known for its coverage of human rights issues and scrutiny of authorities, said it had been paying off the debt and pointed to the much higher arrears of pro-government media as a “telling example” of “the selectivity of this pressure.”

The Revenue Service said in a July 22 Facebook post that the seizure of Gazeti Batumelebi’s accounts was carried out “automatically” and it was ready to lift the measure and allow the company to cover its debts “in the event of a tax agreement.” 

Batumelebi said the Revenue Service repeatedly declined its proposed payment plans both before and after the seizure.

In recent weeks, two independent broadcasters have reported similar account seizures over tax arrears, alleging political pressure. The moves come amid an unprecedented media crackdown and authoritarian turn by the ruling Georgian Dream party, with a series of repressive new laws on the press and extensive police violence against journalists. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Journalists at The Washington Post were targeted in a cyberattack on June 12, 2025, which may have breached a small number of their email accounts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Staff at the Washington, D.C.-based newspaper were told their Microsoft email accounts had been compromised, possibly granting access to emails they had sent and received, according to an internal memo by Executive Editor Matt Murray.

The memo said a small number of journalists’ email accounts were impacted and that a forensic team has been hired to investigate the breach, reported Bloomberg News. Reporters on the national security and economic policy teams, including some who write about China, were among those who were targeted, the Journal added.

The night after the hacking, the Post required all staff to reset their login credentials. And while email is often the primary entry point for hackers, reporters at the Post are said to use encrypted messaging platforms like Signal to communicate with sources, according to the Journal.

Microsoft and the Washington Post did not reply to queries from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Staff affected by the hacking were instructed not to discuss the cyberattack, the Journal reported.

“Although our investigation is ongoing, we believe the incident affected a limited number of Post journalists’ accounts, and we have contacted those whose accounts have been impacted,” Murray said in the memo, which was also obtained by CNN.

The Bloomberg report on the breach cited a source who said Chinese state-backed hackers had repeatedly probed a part of the Post’s IT infrastructure in April and May, although it wasn’t clear if that was related to the latest attack.

The Post had previously reported that it was targeted by hackers in multiple breaches that were discovered in 2011. At that time, hackers targeted its main IT server, compromising sensitive administrative passwords and potentially giving hackers broad access to the organization’s systems. Some of the attacks have been linked to groups based in China, the paper said.

Journalists are frequently targets of cyberattacks, as their emails often contain sensitive and confidential information — particularly related to their sources.

In 2022, for instance, the Journal was also reported to have been hit by a cyberattack where the intruders had access to its reporters’ emails and documents. The hackers appeared to be interested in issues of importance to the Chinese government, the paper said.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

“This incident once again underscores the serious lack of transparency and accountability in how the Indian government issues and enforces orders for the removal of social media content and the blocking of accounts,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Any action affecting journalists or news organizations must be based on clear legal grounds, be subject to independent judicial oversight, and not infringe on press freedom. India still lacks a credible mechanism to review or challenge these opaque and arbitrary orders.”

On July 5, two of Reuters’ handles, @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, were blocked, with X saying the accounts were obstructed “due to legal demands.” Several reports also suggest that accounts of Turkish broadcaster TRT World and the Chinese state media outlet Global Times were censored. The accounts were restored the next day. A government official speaking on condition of anonymity told CPJ that the authorities had not issued any orders to block the accounts and that they were engaging with X to get them restored. 

However, in a July 8 post, X countered the Indian claim and said that on July 3, the Indian authorities had ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts. X also expressed concerns about “ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders.” X has already sued the Indian government over a new official portal that it says grants “countless” government officials expanded powers to issue takedown orders.

The Indian government denied issuing any recent blocking order against Reuters and others and said the accounts were unintentionally restricted due to a previously issued directive that was part of broader digital enforcement measuresimplemented in the wake of heightened national security concerns. 

Authorities said they’d asked X to restore access immediately and blamed a 21-hour delay on the platform for the continued impediment.

In May 2025, X expressed concern about the Indian government’s demand to block over 8,000 accounts, and asked for such executive orders to made public.

X and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not reply to CPJ’s emails seeking comment. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Meanwhile, a note verbale (a diplomatic message or memo) signed by former Israeli ambassador to India Naor Gilon was shared on social media. In the note, Israel has seemingly accused an unnamed Indian Army officer of sexually abusing Israeli Defense Force female soldier Tzipi Cohen during a military exercise in Jammu and Kashmir. It is also mentioned that the incident marked a violation of India’s obligations under customary international law and called for a prompt, transparent and impartial investigation.

Pakistani X handle @commandeleven claimed that the Embassy of Israel had issued a note of formal diplomatic protest (Note Verbale) to the Indian ministry of external affairs accusing Indian Army Colonel Kamaldeep Singh, Commanding Officer of 6 Para (SF) of sexually assaulting IDF Sergeant Tzipi Cohen during a joint military exercise in the Jammu region of Kashmir. (Archived link)

Pakistani propaganda handle @MaddyViews also made a similar claim on X. (Archived link)

Pakistani website ‘The Pakistan Frontier’ made a similar claim by sharing a poster on its official Facebook page and Instagram. (Archived link 1, link 2)

Fact Check

Alt News noticed that the viral Note Verbale is signed by former Israeli Ambassador to India Naor Gilon, who was serving as Israel’s Ambassador to India until 2024, while the current ambassador is Reuven Azar.

A “Note Verbale” is a diplomatic communication sent from one government to another, and it is officially delivered through the embassy. It is a kind of formal communication that is usually written in the third person and not signed.

We performed a customised keyword search using terms from the Israeli Embassy’s Note Verbale, as per the viral claim, but could not find any credible media reports that could confirm this viral claim.

Next, Alt News came across a post by the Israeli Embassy in India on X (formerly Twitter). In this post, the screenshot of the viral ‘Note Verbale’ has been posted and the alleged claims have been denied and this ‘Note Verbale’ has also been called fake. The accompanying caption reads, “Unbelievable, the relationship between Israel and India is so solid, haters resort to fake news to try to harm it. It will not work.”

Unbelievable!
The bond between Israel and India is so solid, haters resort to fake news to try to harm it.
It won’t work.
#FakeNews #FactCheck #Pahalgam pic.twitter.com/KgX9HQe3Lh

— Israel in India (@IsraelinIndia) April 30, 2025

In other words, the Embassy of Israel has not issued any ‘Note Verbale’ to the Union ministry of external affairs of India. Furthermore, the viral claim that an Indian Army officer sexually harassed an Israeli female soldier is also false.

The post Israel embassy refutes claims of IDF soldier’s sexual assault by Indian Army colonel amplified by Pak accounts appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

Global tech giant Meta detected and eliminated 18 fake accounts from Facebook that were found to be part of Chinese covert influence operations aimed at discrediting the Dalai Lama and spreading false information about the Tibetan spiritual leader’s health.

Meta revealed this in its fourth quarter 2024 Adversarial Threat Report, which also said the company removed two pages, four groups, and five Instagram accounts.

All of the removed accounts and pages originated in China and were meant to target the Tibetan exile community, especially in India, Nepal and Bhutan, across multiple online platforms including Facebook and Instagram, as well as X, and Blogspot, Meta said.

“The individuals behind this activity used fake accounts – many of which were detected and disabled by our automated systems before our investigation – to manage Pages, post, and amplify other people’s content," Meta said in the report. “They used proxy IPs to conceal their origin and appear to be coming from India, Bhutan, or Nepal.”

One of the fake accounts posed as a journalist in India’s northeastern border state of Arunachal Pradesh, while most of the others pretended to be Tibetan expats, who primarily re-shared content and news related to Tibet and amplified anti-Dalai Lama posts, Meta said.

“The network posted mainly in English and Tibetan about news related to Tibet and its politics, including criticism of exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, conspiracies about his travel and health, and claims that the United States is using him as a lever against China,” the report said.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington said Meta’s report “disregards facts and confuses right and wrong,” according to spokesperson Liu Pengyu.

“China firmly opposes this. I would like to emphasize that Tibet affairs are purely China’s internal affairs and no external forces are allowed to interfere,” said Liu. “The 14th Dalai Lama is a political exile in religious guise. He has long been engaged in anti-China separatist activities and attempted to split Tibet from China.”

Remaining vigilant

Tenzin Lekshay, a spokesperson for the Dharamsala, India-based government-in-exile called the Central Tibetan Administration, told RFA Tibetan that he welcomed Meta’s investigation, and urged Tibetan exiles to remain vigilant against accounts that harm Tibetan unity and defame the Dalai Lama.

Using social media for covert operations is nothing new, Sriparna Pathak, associate professor of China studies at the O.P. Jindal Global University in Haryana, India, told RFA.

“China has been at it for years,” she said, adding that Beijing has added AI-driven tactics to disinformation campaigns in order to control narratives and suppress dissent, particularly regarding Tibet.

Meta’s investigation is significant in that it confirms suspicions about China’s online activities, Lobsang Gyatso Sither, Director of Technology at the Tibet Action Institute, which develops community specific technologies and educational content, told RFA.

“It serves as concrete proof ... about Chinese government interference in the exile community,” he said. “It’s critical that Tibetans avoid befriending suspicious accounts on social media platforms like Facebook and report them.”

Meta said it found the latest activity as a result of the social media giant’s internal investigation into suspected recidivist activity linked to the networks it removed and reported in its third-quarter of 2023 report.

In that report, Meta said it removed 12 accounts and seven groups that originated in China and targeted Tibet and India’s Arunachal Pradesh region.

These posts, Meta said, had violated its policy against what it calls ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior,’ which it defines as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal through the use of fake accounts to mislead others.

Meta said in the 2024 fourth quarter report that about 2,400 accounts followed one or more of the Facebook Pages that it removed, and 120 accounts joined one or more of the four groups it removed. Meanwhile, about 100 accounts followed at least one of the five removed Instagram accounts.

“We took down this network before its operators were able to build an audience among authentic communities on our apps,” Meta said.

Additional reporting by Dorjee Damdul and Tenzin Norzom. Edited by Tenzin Pema, Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Lobe Socktsang and Tenzin Tenkyong for RFA Tibetan.

“Turkish authorities continue to practice the ‘virtual patrolling’ and censorship of social media users under the false guise of national security,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The request to block access to multiple X accounts, including those of journalists and media, will have a negative effect on press freedom in Turkey, where media have already worked under constant government restraints.” 

On August 20, a criminal court in the northeast city of Gümüşhane ordered 69 X accounts, including those of at least three journalists and a media outlet, to be blocked from access inside Turkey. The court ruling was issued in response to request by the local military police to stop “terrorist organization propaganda,” according to reports. The court document, reviewed by CPJ, did not specify the nature of the alleged terrorist propaganda. 

The list of accounts CPJ reviewed included those of politicians, activists and individuals from various countries. As of August 27, some of those accounts were not accessible from inside Turkey, while others were suspended or deleted. The accounts of Amberin Zaman, chief correspondent for the independent news website Al Monitor; Deniz Tekin, a correspondent for the local media freedom group MLSA in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır; and the pro-Kurdish daily Yeni Yaşam were accessible despite being included on the court list. The account of Öznur Değer, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish news site JİNNEWS, was inaccessible. 

The Constitutional Court of Turkey canceled the Turkish police force’s authority for “virtual patrolling” in 2020 due to the right to privacy and the protection of personal data. However, the Turkish security forces continue the practice.

CPJ emailed Turkey’s interior ministry, which oversees the military police, for comment but didn’t receive a reply. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Retirement experts have been beating up on the accounts ever since. Two fresh examples aim specifically at 401(k)s, easily the most common of the type.

One was an in-depth article asking a serious question, “Was the 401(k) a Mistake?” The answer, equally serious, was an emphatic “yes”. By coincidence, the second critique also asked a serious question and delivered a “yes” answer: “Should Your 401(k) Be Eliminated to Save Social Security Benefits?”

The primary fault of 401(k)s and all comparable accounts—undeniable fifty years ago and undeniable today—is that they simply can’t compare to pensions. Employers put up the money for pensions, investing it on behalf of their workers. The workers collect when they retire, getting fixed monthly amounts (and often cost-of-living increases as well) for the rest of their lives.

At some point those workers will also be drawing Social Security, so they’ll be savoring financial double-dips for all of their later years.

Retirement plans are almost the exact opposite of pensions. Workers put up their own money (though employers, especially in more recent years, have kicked in something as well).  There are no guaranteed monthly returns down the road. There’s actually no guaranteed anything: the value of the accounts goes up one day and down the next, and where it ends nobody knows.

No wonder, then, that retirement experts have never been fans of IRAs, 401(k)s and the like. And yet, and yet: maybe the picture isn’t quite as bleak as it’s long been painted.

Maybe the bill that President Ford signed 50 years ago deserves to be called “the most important piece of retirement legislation” in American history.

Just for a change, let’s look at the bright side (and maybe the right side?) of retirement accounts. How they perform will hugely impact the coming decades for tens of millions of workers—and their spouses, children and grandchildren as well.

To begin at the beginning, President Ford and Congress had their heads and their hearts in the right place when they first created retirement accounts. It’s true that what they created would never provide the security of pensions—but most workers didn’t have pensions, and never would have.

Retirement accounts, though, gave them a vehicle they never had before: an easy way to invest, an easy way to create their own personal supplement to Social Security.

The accounts also came with a tax break that pensions never offered to workers. Account holders pay no taxes on any of the money they put into the accounts, or on any of the gains, until they begin withdrawals. The timetable for withdrawals would later get bonus tax breaks as well. The starting age has always been 59 ½, but the age for mandatory withdrawals has been pushed back twice. It’s now 73, headed toward 75 in 2033.

(Roth accounts are an outlier: contributions are taxed, but withdrawals are tax-free and there’s no mandatory withdrawal during the owner’s lifetime.)

From a modest beginning, retirement tax breaks have grown to become the biggest tax favor of all. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, they’ll cost $251.4 billion in fiscal year 2024. That’s $251.4 billion that doesn’t go to the Treasury, that stays instead in the pockets of taxpayers. Admittedly, those breaks heavily favor America’s high-, higher- and highest-income workers. (So do pensions, government and private industry alike.)

The fate of retirement accounts is directly linked to the stock market, and the link could hardly have been more rewarding. Of course, there are bad times; as recently as 2022, all the major indexes suffered huge losses.

But the market has always come back. This May 17th, for the first time in its 139-year history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 40,000. There’s a pass-along plus too; unlike pensions, retirement accounts can be left to any generation.

Wall Street’s performance underlines a notable about-face by Alicia H. Munnell, a prominent retirement expert. Ms. Munnell heads the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. She once believed that pensions outperformed 401(k)s—until the Center’s own research proved otherwise.

Asset accumulation, though, is just one measure of retirement plans. Ms. Munnell remains a critic: she co-authored the paper, mentioned earlier, that proposes scrapping 401(k)s to save Social Security.

For the final words on America’s 50-year-old retirement plans, let’s go back roughly 250 years to the French philosopher Voltaire. To paraphrase, never let the perfect (pensions) be the enemy of the good (IRAs and all their brethren).

• This article originally appeared in The New York Daily News

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerald E. Scorse.

Two commercial banks, Premier Bank and Dahabshil Bank International told the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) on April 13 and April 17, respectively, that they had suspended the organization’s accounts on orders from the Banadir Regional Court, whose jurisdiction includes the Somali capital Mogadishu, according to copies of the banks’ emails reviewed by CPJ.

On April 15, IBS Bank orally informed SJS officials in Mogadishu that it had suspended the organization’s accounts, also citing court orders, according to Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, the syndicate’s secretary general, who spoke to CPJ via email and messaging app.  

Abdalle told CPJ, that as of April 19, SJS and its lawyers have not officially received copies of the court’s suspension orders. However, Abdalle said the organization independently acquired, through its sources, a copy of the court’s directive to Premier Bank. In the April 9 letter, which SJS republished with a statement on April 14, the court said that the suspension order was in response to a report submitted by Somalia’s Office of the Attorney General, alleging that Abdalle and “his media organization used a fake media license to open the account and conduct illegal press activities while the organization named Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) is not registered.” The letter also authorized the attorney general to investigate SJS on these allegations and asked the banks to cooperate with this inquiry.

In an April 16  statement published on Facebook, Somalia’s Office of the Attorney General confirmed that it had submitted a report to the court, reiterated the allegations that SJS registered its accounts with “fake documents,” and said that the organization had breached sections of Somalia’s penal code that criminalize defamation, without specifying whom the organization was accused of defaming. The statement said that the attorney general would file charges against SJS once the investigations were concluded.

“The investigations into the allegations of criminal offenses by SJS are apparent acts of retaliation and the latest attacks on an organization that has been staunchly vocal about Somalia’s poor press freedom record,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator, Muthoki Mumo, in Nairobi. “Somali authorities should stop the legal harassment of the syndicate and reform the country’s laws to scrap criminal defamation, in line with international and regional standards on freedom of expression.”

SJS is under investigation for allegedly breaching sections of the penal code that punish the falsification of documents and certificates with up to 64 months in prison and impose a prison term of up to three years for defamation convictions, according to the statement by the attorney general, which does not state whether any specific SJS official would be criminally liable for these offenses. The organization is also accused of contravening sections of Somalia’s press law that require media outlets and training organizations to register with the ministry of information or face fines and prosecutions.

Abdalle said that the freeze on the SJS bank accounts was already having a “significant impact” on SJS’ work, but the organization remains “committed to advocating for press freedom, the safety of journalists, and human rights.”

He added, “We are actively engaging our legal team to address this matter, but our efforts can only succeed if the rule of law is upheld.”

CPJ has documented previous incidents targeting the organization, including  the arbitrary detention of the Syndicate’s staff, including Abdalle, and the organization’s human rights secretary Mohamed Ibrahim Osman Bulbul. In September 2023, cyberattacks temporarily knocked the organization’s website offline.

The office of the attorney general did not respond to CPJ’s queries sent via email; and Attorney General Sulayman Mohamed Mohamoud did not respond to requests for comment sent via messaging application or answer CPJ’s calls.

In their emails responding to CPJ’s queries, Premier Bank Head of Operations, Mahad Ahmed Mohamed, and Dahabshil Bank International’s Head of Operations, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamoud, declined to comment on the account suspensions.

Mahad said that Premier Bank is restricted from disclosing client information by “strict privacy laws and ethical banking standards.” Mohamed told CPJ to consult the bank’s email to SJS for detailed information.

IBS Bank did not immediately respond to an email from CPJ requesting comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Listen to the Talking China In Eurasia podcast

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Welcome back to the China In Eurasia Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China's resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

I'm RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here's what I'm following right now.

As Huthi rebels continue their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the deepening crisis is posing a fresh test for China’s ambitions of becoming a power broker in the Middle East – and raising questions about whether Beijing can help bring the group to bay.

Finding Perspective: U.S. officials have been asking China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Huthis, but according to the Financial Times, American officials say that they have seen no signs of help.

Still, Washington keeps raising the issue. In weekend meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan again asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to play a “constructive role” in stopping the attacks.

Reuters, citing Iranian officials, reported on January 26 that Beijing urged Tehran at recent meetings to pressure the Huthis or risk jeopardizing business cooperation with China in the future.

There are plenty of reasons to believe that China would want to bring the attacks to an end. The Huthis have disrupted global shipping, stoking fears of global inflation and even more instability in the Middle East.

This also hurts China’s bottom line. The attacks are raising transport costs and jeopardizing the tens of billions of dollars that China has invested in nearby Egyptian ports.

Why It Matters: The current crisis raises some complex questions for China’s ambitions in the Middle East.

If China decides to pressure Iran, it’s unknown how much influence Tehran actually has over Yemen’s Huthis. Iran backs the group and supplies them with weapons, but it’s unclear if they can actually control and rein them in, as U.S. officials are calling for.

But the bigger question might be whether this calculation looks the same from Beijing.

China might be reluctant to get too involved and squander its political capital with Iran on trying to get the Huthis to stop their attacks, especially after the group has announced that it won’t attack Chinese ships transiting the Red Sea.

Beijing is also unlikely to want to bring an end to something that’s hurting America’s interests arguably more than its own at the moment.

U.S. officials say they’ll continue to talk with China about helping restore trade in the Red Sea, but Beijing might decide that it has more to gain by simply stepping back.

Three More Stories From Eurasia

1. ‘New Historical Heights’ For China And Uzbekistan

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev made a landmark three-day visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi, engaged with Chinese business leaders, and left with an officially upgraded relationship as the Central Asian leader increasingly looks to China for his economic future.

The Details: As I reported here, Mirziyoev left Uzbekistan looking to usher in a new era and returned with upgraded diplomatic ties as an “all-weather” partner with China.

The move to elevate to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from a “comprehensive strategic partnership” doesn’t come with any formal benefits, but it’s a clear sign from Mirziyoev and Xi on where they want to take the relationship between their two countries.

Before going to China for the January 23-25 trip, Mirziyoev signed a letter praising China’s progress in fighting poverty and saying he wanted to develop a “new long-term agenda” with Beijing that will last for “decades.”

Beyond the diplomatic upgrade, China said it was ready to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan across the new energy vehicle industry chain, as well as in major projects such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower.

Xi and Mirzoyoev also spoke about the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, with the Chinese leader saying that work should begin as soon as possible, athough no specifics were offered and there are reportedly still key disputes over how the megaproject will be financed.

2. The Taliban’s New Man In Beijing

In a move that could lay the groundwork for more diplomatic engagement with China, Xi received diplomatic credentials from the Taliban’s new ambassador in Beijing on January 25.

What You Need To Know: Mawlawi Asadullah Bilal Karimi was accepted as part of a ceremony that also received the credential letters of 42 new envoys. Karimi was named as the new ambassador to Beijing on November 24 but has now formally been received by Xi, which is another installment in the slow boil toward recognition that’s under way.

No country formally recognizes the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, but China – along with other countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – have appointed their own envoys to Kabul and have maintained steady diplomatic engagement with the group since it returned to power in August 2021.

Formal diplomatic recognition for the Taliban still looks to be far off, but this move highlights China’s strategy of de-facto recognition that could see other countries following its lead, paving the way for formal ties down the line.

3. China’s Tightrope With Iran and Pakistan

Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region, as I reported here.

Both Islamabad and Tehran have since moved to mend fences, with their foreign ministers holding talks on January 29. But the incident put the spotlight on what China would do if two of its closest partners entered into conflict against one another.

What It Means: The tit-for-tat strikes hit militant groups operating in each other’s territory. After a tough exchange, both countries quickly cooled their rhetoric – culminating in the recent talks held in Islamabad.

And while Beijing has lots to lose in the event of a wider conflict between two of its allies, it appeared to remain quiet, with only a formal offer to mediate if needed.

Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me this approach reflects how China “shies away from situations like this,” in part to protect its reputation in case it intervenes and then fails.

Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center's South Asia Institute, added that, despite Beijing’s cautious approach, China has shown a willingness to mediate when opportunity strikes, pointing to the deal it helped broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.

“It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves,” he told me. “So [Beijing] might be relieved now, but that doesn't mean they won't step up if needed.”

Across The Supercontinent

China’s Odd Moment: What do the fall of the Soviet Union and China's slowing economy have in common? The answer is more than you might think.

Listen to the latest episode of the Talking China In Eurasia podcast, where we explore how China's complicated relationship with the Soviet Union is shaping the country today.

Invite Sent. Now What? Ukraine has invited Xi to participate in a planned “peace summit” of world leaders in Switzerland, Reuters reported, in a gathering tied to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

Blocked, But Why? China has suspended issuing visas to Lithuanian citizens. Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis confirmed the news and told Lithuanian journalists that “we have been informed about this. No further information has been provided.”

More Hydro Plans: Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Energy and the China National Electric Engineering Company signed a memorandum of cooperation on January 24 to build a cascade of power plants and a new thermal power plant.

One Thing To Watch

There’s no official word, but it’s looking like veteran diplomat Liu Jianchao is the leading contender to become China’s next foreign minister.

Wang Yi was reassigned to his old post after Qin Gang was abruptly removed as foreign minister last summer, and Wang is currently holding roles as both foreign minister and the more senior position of director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office.

Liu has limited experience engaging with the West but served stints at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and currently heads a party agency traditionally tasked with building ties with other communist states.

It also looks like he’s being groomed for the role. He recently completed a U.S. tour, where he met with top officials and business leaders, and has also made visits to the Middle East.

That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

Until next time,

Reid Standish

If you enjoyed this briefing and don't want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

“My sisters have died,” the young boy sobbed, chest heaving, as he wailed into the sky. “Oh, my sisters.” As Israel began airstrikes on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, posts by verified accounts on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, were being transmitted around the world. The heart-wrenching video of the grieving boy, viewed more than 600,000 times, was posted by an account named “#FreePalestine .” The account had received X’s “verified” badge just hours before posting the tweet that went viral.

Days later, a video posted by an account calling itself “ISRAEL MOSSAD,” another “verified” account, this time bearing the logo of Israel’s national intelligence agency, claimed to show Israel’s advanced air defense technology. The post, viewed nearly 6 million times, showed a volley of rockets exploding in the night sky with the caption: “The New Iron beam in full display.”

And following an explosion on Oct. 14 outside the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza where civilians were killed, the verified account of the Hamas-affiliated news organization Quds News Network posted a screenshot from Facebook claiming to show the Israel Defense Forces declaring their intent to strike the hospital before the explosion. It was seen more than half a million times.

None of these posts depicted real events from the conflict. The video of the grieving boy was from at least nine years ago and was taken in Syria, not Gaza. The clip of rockets exploding was from a military simulation video game. And the Facebook screenshot was from a now-deleted Facebook page not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Just days before its viral tweet, the #FreePalestine account had a blue verification check under a different name: “Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary.” It changed its name back after the tweet and was reverified within a week. Despite their blue check badges, neither Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary nor ISRAEL MOSSAD (now “Mossad Commentary”) have any real-life connection to either organization. Their posts were eventually annotated by Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, but these clarifications garnered about 900,000 views — less than 15% of what the two viral posts totaled. ISRAEL MOSSAD deleted its post in late November. The Facebook screenshot, posted by the account of the Quds News Network, still doesn’t have a clarifying note. Mossad Commentary and the Quds News Network did not respond to direct messages seeking comment; Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary did not respond to public mentions asking for comment.

An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The organizations looked at over 200 distinct claims that independent fact-checks determined to be misleading, and searched for posts by verified accounts that perpetuated them, identifying 2,000 total tweets. The tweets, collectively viewed half a billion times, were analyzed alongside account and Community Notes data.

The ongoing conflict in Gaza is the biggest test for changes implemented by X owner Elon Musk since his acquisition of Twitter last year. After raising concerns about the power of platforms to determine what speech is appropriate, Musk instituted policies to promote “healthy” debate under the maxim “freedom of speech, not reach,” where certain types of posts that previously would have been removed for violating platform policy now have their visibility restricted.

Within 10 days of taking ownership, Musk cut 15% of Twitter’s trust and safety team. He made further cuts in the following months, including firing the election integrity team, terminating many contracted content moderators and revoking existing misinformation policies on specific topics like COVID-19. In place of these safeguards, Musk expanded Community Notes. The feature, first launched in 2021 as Birdwatch, adds crowdsourced annotations to a tweet when users with diverse perspectives rate them “helpful.”

“The Israel-Hamas war is a classic case of an information crisis on X, in terms of the speed and volume of the misinformation and the harmful consequences of that rhetoric,” said Michael Zimmer, the director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society at Marquette University in Wisconsin, who has studied how social media platforms combat misinformation.

While no social media platform is free of misinformation, critics contend that Musk’s policies, along with his personal statements, have led to a proliferation of misinformation and hate speech on X. Advertisers have fled the platform — U.S. ad revenue is down roughly 60% compared to last year. Last week, Musk reinstated the account of Alex Jones, who was ordered to pay $1.1 billion in defamation damages for repeatedly lying about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones appealed the verdict. This week, the European Union opened a formal investigation against X for breaching multiple provisions of the Digital Services Act, including risk management and content moderation, as well as deceptive design in relation to its “so-called Blue checks.”

ProPublica and the Tow Center found that verified blue check accounts that posted misleading media saw their audience grow on X in the first month of the conflict. This included dozens of accounts that posted debunked tweets three or more times and that now have over 100,000 followers each. The false posts appear to violate X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, which bars all users from sharing media that may deceive or confuse people. Many accounts also appear to breach the eligibility criteria for verification, which state that verified accounts must not be “misleading or deceptive” or engage in “platform manipulation and spam.” Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations covering it.

We also found that the Community Notes system, which has been touted by Musk as a way to improve information accuracy on the platform, hasn’t scaled sufficiently. About 80% of the 2,000 debunked posts we reviewed had no Community Note. Of the 200 debunked claims, more than 80 were never clarified with a note.

When clarifying Community Notes did appear, they typically reached a fraction of the views that the original tweet did, though views on Community Notes are significantly undercounted. We also found that in some cases, debunked images or videos were flagged by a Community Note in one tweet but not in others, despite X announcing, partway through the period covered by our dataset, it has improved its media-matching algorithms to address this. For tweets that did receive a Community Note, it typically didn’t become visible until hours after the post.

This last finding expands on a recent report by Bloomberg, which analyzed 400 false posts tagged by Community Notes in the first two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack and found it typically took seven hours for a Community Note to appear.

For the tweets analyzed by ProPublica and the Tow Center, the median time that elapsed before a Community Note became visible decreased to just over five hours in the first week of November after X improved its system. Outliers did exist: Sometimes it still took more than two days for a note to appear, while in other cases, a note appeared almost instantaneously because the tweet used media that the system had already encountered.

Multiple emails sent to X’s press inbox seeking comment on our findings triggered automated replies to “check back later” with no further response. Keith Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team at X, was separately provided with summary findings relevant to Community Notes as well as the dataset containing the compiled claims and tweets.

Via email, Coleman said that the tweets identified in this investigation were a small fraction of those covered by the 1,500 visible Community Notes on X about the conflict from this time period. He also said that many posts with high-visibility notes were deleted after receiving a Community Note, including ones that we did not identify. When asked about the number of claims that did not receive a single note, Coleman said that users might not have thought one was necessary, pointing to examples where images generated by artificial intelligence tools could be interpreted as artistic depictions. AI-generated images accounted for around 7% of the tweets that did not receive a note; none acknowledged that the media was AI-generated. Coleman said that the current system is an upgrade over X’s historic approaches to dealing with misinformation and that it continues to improve; “most importantly,” he said, the Community Notes program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Community Notes were initially meant to complement X’s various trust and safety initiatives, not replace them. “It still makes sense for platforms to keep their trust and safety teams in a breaking-news, viral environment. It’s not going to work to simply fling open the gates,” said Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern California, who is skeptical about leaving moderation to the community, particularly after the changes Musk has made.

“I’m not sure any community norm is going to work given all of the signals that have been given about who’s welcome here, what types of opinions are respected and what types of content is allowed,” he said.

ProPublica and the Tow Center compiled a large sample of data from multiple sources to study the effectiveness of Community Notes in labeling debunked claims. We found over 1,300 verified accounts that posted misleading or out-of-context media at least once in the first month of the conflict; 130 accounts did so three or more times. (For more details on how the posts were gathered, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Musk overhauled Twitter’s account verification program soon after acquiring the company. Previously, Twitter gave verified badges to politicians, celebrities, news organizations, government agencies and other vetted notable individuals or organizations. Though the legacy process was criticized as opaque and arbitrary, it provided a signal of authenticity for users. Today, accounts receive the once-coveted blue check in exchange for $8 a month and a cursory identity check. Despite well-documented impersonation and credibility issues, these “verified” accounts are prioritized in search, in replies and across X’s algorithmic feeds.

If an account continuously shares harmful or misleading narratives, X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy states that its visibility may be reduced or the account may be locked or suspended. But the investigation found that prominent verified accounts appeared to face few consequences for broadcasting misleading media to their large follower networks. Of the 40 accounts with more than 100,000 followers that posted debunked tweets three times or more in the first month of the conflict, only seven appeared to have had any action taken against them, according to account history data shared with ProPublica and the Tow Center by Travis Brown. Brown is a software developer who researches extremism and misinformation on X.

Those 40 accounts, a number of which have been identified as the most influential accounts engaging in Hamas-Israel discourse, grew their collective audience by nearly 5 million followers, to around 17 million, in the first month of the conflict alone.

A few of the smaller verified accounts in the dataset received punitive action: About 50 accounts that posted at least one false tweet were suspended. On average, these accounts had 7,000 followers. It is unclear whether the accounts were suspended for manipulated media policy violations or for other reasons, such as bot-like behavior. Around 80 accounts no longer have a blue check badge. It is unclear whether the accounts lost their blue checks because they stopped paying, because they had recently changed their display name (which triggers a temporary removal of the verified status), or because Twitter revoked the status. X has said it removed 3,000 accounts by “violent entities,” including Hamas, in the region.

On Oct. 29, X announced a new policy where verified accounts would no longer be eligible to share in revenue earned from ads that appeared alongside any of their posts that had been corrected by Community Notes. In a tweet, Musk said, “the idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.” Coleman said that this policy has been implemented, but did not provide further details.

False claims that go viral are frequently repeated by multiple accounts and often take the form of decontextualized old footage. One of the most widespread false claims, that Qatar was threatening to stop supplying natural gas to the world unless Israel halted its airstrikes, was repeated by nearly 70 verified accounts. This claim, which was based on a false description of an unrelated 2017 speech by the Qatari emir to bolster its credibility, received over 15 million views collectively, with a single post by Dominick McGee (@dom_lucre) amassing more than 9 million views. McGee is popular in the QAnon community and is an election denier with nearly 800,000 followers who was suspended from X for sharing child exploitation imagery in July 2023. Shortly after, X reversed the suspension. McGee denied that he had shared the image when reached by direct message on X, claiming instead that it was “an article touching it.”

Another account, using the pseudonym Sprinter, shared the same false claim about Qatar in a post that was viewed over 80,000 times. These were not the only false posts made by either account. McGee shared six debunked claims about the conflict in our dataset; Sprinter shared 20.

Sprinter has tweeted AI-generated images, digitally altered videos and the unsubstantiated claim that Ukraine is providing weapons to Hamas. Each of these posts has received hundreds of thousands of views. The account’s follower count has increased by 60% to about 500,000, rivaling the following of Haaretz and the Times of Israel on X. Sprinter’s profile — which has also used the pseudonyms SprinterTeam, SprinterX and WizardSX, according to historical account data provided by Brown — was “temporarily restricted” by X in mid-November, but it retained its “verified” status. Sprinter’s original profile linked to a backup account. That account — whose name and verification status continues to change — still posts dozens of times a day and has grown to over 25,000 followers. Sprinter did not respond to a request for comment and blocked the reporter after being contacted. The original account appears to no longer exist.

Verification badges were once a critical signal in sifting official accounts from inauthentic ones. But with X’s overhaul of the blue check program, that signal now essentially tells you whether the account pays $8 a month. ISRAEL MOSSAD, the account that posted video game footage falsely claiming it was an Israeli air defense system, had gone from fewer than 1,000 followers, when it first acquired a blue check in September 2023, to more than 230,000 today. In another debunked post, published the same day as the video game footage, the account claimed to show more of the Iron Beam system. That tweet still doesn’t have a Community Note, despite having nearly 400,000 views. The account briefly lost its blue check within a day of the two tweets being posted, but regained it days after changing its display name to Mossad Commentary. Even though it isn’t affiliated with Israel’s national intelligence agency, it continues to use Mossad’s logo in its profile picture.

“The blue check is flipped now. Instead of a sign of authenticity, it’s a sign of suspicion, at least for those of us who study this enough,” said Zimmer, the Marquette University professor.

Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations actively covering it.

Of the verified accounts we reviewed, the one that grew the fastest during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict was also one of the most prolific posters of misleading claims. Jackson Hinkle, a 24-year-old political commentator and self-described “MAGA communist” has built a large following posting highly partisan tweets. He has been suspended from various platforms in the past, pushed pro-Russian narratives and claimed that YouTube permanently suspended his account for “Ukraine misinformation.” Three days later, he tweeted that YouTube had banned him because it didn’t want him telling the truth about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Currently, he has more than two million followers on X; over 1.5 million of those arrived after Oct. 7. ProPublica and the Tow Center found over 20 tweets by Hinkle using misleading or manipulated media in the first month of the conflict; more than half had been tagged with a Community Note. The tweets amassed 40 million views, while the Community Notes were collectively viewed just under 10 million times. Hinkle did not respond to a request for comment.

All told, debunked tweets with a Community Note in the ProPublica-Tow Center dataset amassed 300 million views in aggregate, about five times the total number of views on the notes, even though Community Notes can appear on multiple tweets and collect views from all of them, including from tweets that were not reviewed by the news organizations.

X continues to improve the Community Notes system. It announced updates to the feature on Oct. 24, saying notes are appearing more often on viral and high-visibility content, and are appearing faster in general. But ProPublica and Tow Center’s review found that less than a third of debunked tweets created since the update received a Community Note, though the median time for a note to become visible dropped noticeably, from seven hours to just over five hours in the first week of November. The Community Notes team said over email that their data showed that a note typically took around five hours to become visible in the first few days of the conflict.

Aviv Ovadya, an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society who has worked on social media governance and algorithms similar to the one Community Notes uses, says that any fact-checking process, whether it relies on crowdsourced notes or a third-party fact-checker, is likely to always be playing catch-up to viral claims. “You need to know if the claim is worth even fact-checking,” Ovadya said. “Is it worth my time?” Once a false post is identified, a third-party fact-check may take longer than a Community Note.

Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team, said over email that his team found Community Notes often appeared faster than posts by traditional fact-checkers, and that they are committed to making the notes visible faster.

Our review found that many viral tweets with claims that had been debunked by third-party fact- checkers did not receive a Community Note in the long run. Of the hundreds of tweets in the dataset that gained over 100,000 impressions, only about half had a note. Coleman noted that of those widely viewed tweets, the ones with visible Community Notes attached had nearly twice as many views.

To counter the instances where false claims spread quickly because many accounts post the same misleading media in a short time frame, the company announced in October that it would attach the same Community Note to all posts that share a debunked piece of media. ProPublica and the Tow Center found the system wasn’t always successful.

For example, on and after Oct. 25, multiple accounts tweeted an AI-generated image of a man with five children amid piles of rubble. Community Notes for this image appeared thousands of times on X. However, of the 22 instances we identified in which a verified account tweeted the image, only seven of those were tagged with a Community Note. (One of those tweets was later deleted after garnering more than 200,000 views.)

We found X’s media-matching system to be inconsistent for numerous other claims as well. Coleman pointed to the many automatic matches as a sign that it is working and said that its algorithm prioritizes “high precision” to avoid mistakenly finding matches between pieces of media that are meaningfully different. He also said the Community Notes team plans to further improve its media-matching system.

The false claims ProPublica and the Tow Center identified in this analysis were also posted on other platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. On X, having a Community Note added to a post does not affect how it is displayed. Other platforms deprioritize fact-checked posts in their algorithmic feeds to limit their reach. While Ovadya believes that continued investment in Community Notes is important, he says changing X’s core algorithm could be even more impactful.

“If X’s recommendation algorithms were built on the same principles as Community Notes and was actively rewarding content that bridges divides,” he said, “you would have less misinformation and sensationalist content going viral in the first place.”

ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified and analyzed more than 2,000 tweets by verified accounts that posted clearly debunked images or videos in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war. The posts, which encompassed more than 200 false claims, were published by more than 1,300 verified accounts and collectively received half a billion impressions. We then looked at Community Notes and account data associated with those tweets.

Since the metrics on tweets, accounts and Community Notes were viewed at various points in time, they may not be current; for example, the status of accounts or Community Notes may have changed and the number of impressions on tweets and notes might be different after the time frame of our analysis.

In this review, we focused on claims that could be unambiguously debunked, including those based on generative AI images that aren’t labeled as such, old pictures and videos presented as current, falsified social media posts and documents, footage from video games described as real events, doctored images and mistranslated videos. To compile our list of debunked claims, we reviewed fact checks from multiple news organizations, including BBC Verify, Logically Facts, two stories from The New York Times, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. We also identified debunked claims by filtering Community Notes data by relevant keywords (Gaza, Palestine/Palestinian, Israel, IDF, Hamas/Hammas, Mossad, Iron Beam, Iron Dome), and verified the note using independent news organizations or reverse image searches to ensure that each was accurate. We did not include claims that could not be independently verified or that were contested under the fog of war.

We compiled tweets using X’s text search functionality and Google’s reverse image search. Reverse image search was able to identify both images and videos (using a frame from the video). The claims and tweets we compiled are a convenience sample, not an exhaustive survey of all media-based misinformation on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas war: The dataset relies heavily on images that Google has indexed as well as tweets that use identical or very similar language, which allows X’s search functionality to surface them. Additionally, the accounts mentioned in the story might have tweeted more false claims than those we identified. Tweets deleted prior to our searches are not captured in our dataset. (In its response, X provided us with 18 examples of Community Notes and tweets that were not in our dataset and could not be located because the tweets were not yet indexed by Google or could not be easily found by X’s search function.)

We also analyzed the accounts that were posting these tweets, using account data collected by researcher Travis Brown from July through November 2023. We used this data to determine account status, follower count, handles and usernames.

For Community Notes, we downloaded X’s open-source datasets and filtered by notes with the above-mentioned keywords. A single tweet can have multiple Community Notes and the same note can appear alongside multiple tweets. Our analysis ensured we took both relationships into account.

X’s Community Notes data contains the current status of a note as well as the time at which that status was set. It also includes when the Community Note was created and the note’s text. For some tweets that use repurposed media (i.e. media from a tweet that’s already been debunked by Community Notes) the note appears immediately due to improvements in X’s media-matching algorithm. This means that occasionally the time of creation or visibility of a note will be before the time the tweet was posted.

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Elizabeth Yaboni of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

The Chinese Communist Party had targeted more than 50 apps, including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, the company said in an Aug. 29 blog post.

“We were able to tie this activity together to confirm it was part of one operation known in the security community as Spamouflage and link it to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement,” it said, citing similar threats originating out of Russia.

China has been stepping up its efforts to influence and manipulate news and information worldwide, and has used an array of tools to project a positive image of itself abroad, the U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House reported in September 2022.

Meta said it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts originating in China for violating its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. 

The network had targeted democratic Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, as well as global Chinese-speaking audiences, the company said in its Adversarial Threat Report for the second quarter of 2023.

“This network was run by geographically dispersed operators across China who appear to have been centrally provisioned with internet access and content directions,” the report said.

The content included positive commentary about China and its actions in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, as well as criticisms of the United States, Western foreign policies, and targeted critics of the Chinese government, including journalists and researchers, it said.

‘The main battlefield is Twitter’

Netherlands-based rights activist Lin Shengliang said pro-Beijing trolls are still going strong on X, formerly Twitter, however.

“The Chinese Communist Party has always engaged in cultural penetration and narrative penetration overseas,” Lin said. “The main battlefield is Twitter.”

Lin said many of the trolls are prisoners in China’s carceral system.

“It used to hire internet commentators in the early days, but it has started getting prisoners to work as trolls in groups,” he said. “They are more organized now, and sometimes pretend to be dissidents, and try to change the direction of the narrative at critical moments.”

Meta said it had identified “multiple distinct clusters” of fake accounts being run from different parts of China.

“Their behavior suggested that they were operated by groups who may have worked from a shared location, such as an office,” the Adversarial Threat Report said. “Each cluster worked to a clear shift pattern, with bursts of activity in the mid-morning and early afternoon, Beijing time, with breaks for lunch and supper, and then a final burst of activity in the evening.”

And while the accounts were geographically hundreds of miles apart, they often shared the same proxy infrastructure and posted identical content.

“These clusters of activity ... shared identical content across many internet platforms – not just links and articles, but short, ‘personal’ comments as well,” the report said.

“These comments were designed to appear unique and personal, using terms like ‘I’ and ‘we’ and referring to individual experiences and beliefs. However, hundreds of different accounts made the same “personal” comments on many different services and websites,” it said.

Sometimes the comments would even have a number attached, indicating it had likely been copied and pasted from a numbered list.

Troll army of millions

Financial analyst Wang Jian said overseas social media platforms typically underestimate the scale of China’s online troll army.

“There are tens of millions in China’s troll army, two million of whom are full time,” Wang said. “In addition to those two million, local governments and other institutions including colleges and universities have their own information officers or online commentators.”

“This is the 50-cent army,” he said. “If you post anything on X, they will come and curse you, quarrel with you and try to lead a trend.”

“The Chinese Communist Party relies on propaganda and brainwashing,” Wang said. “If it didn’t, the people would rebel.”

He said some social media platforms seem slow to take action, despite the growing evidence of coordinated action.

“They all want to retain the possibility of doing business in mainland China,” Wang said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jing Wei for RFA Mandarin.

The Jakarta District Court heard the case of alleged bribery and gratification against suspended Papua governor Lukas Enembe on Monday with evidence from expert witnesses saying that an audit showed records to be “clean and accurate”.

The hearing was convened to hear the testimony of three expert witnesses on the allegations against Governor Enembe.

The panel of judges heard the testimony of two experts Dr Muhammad Rullyandi, SH, MH (a constitutional law expert and lecturer at the Faculty of Law of Jayabaya University) and Dr Eko Sambodo, SE, MM, Mak, CFrA (an expert in state finance and losses), and the third witness was due to be heard today.

• READ MORE: Ailing suspended Papuan governor Enembe now in detention cell after army hospital
• Other Lukas Enembe case reports

The experts concluded that nine reports provided by the country’s state financial audit board during Enembe’s tenure as a governor did not contain any irregularities, or misreporting.

It was all “clean and accurate” within the framework of regulations and procedures, the witnesses said.

Complied with admin law
According to Dr Rullyandi (Indonesians often have single names), the state financial management complied with administrative law, which was supervised by a state institution known as the Badan Pemeriksa Keuangan (BPK), the State Financial Audit Board.

“The BPK is the final step in the state management process, starting with planning, implementation, and before accountability, it is under supervision,” Dr Rullyandi said.

Among the BPK’s responsibilities were the supervision of procurement and service contracting. When the BPK found criminal elements under its supervision, it reported them to the authorised agency required by law, he said.

Dr Rullyandi said that this was regulated in Article 14 of Law No. 15 of 2004 concerning the Examination of State Financial Management and Responsibility.

Article 14 of Law No.15 of 2004 states:

(1) “If criminal elements are detected during the examination, the BPK shall make an immediate report to the appropriate authorities in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations”.

Therefore, before the findings could be prosecuted as articles of bribery or gratification, they must first be tested by the BPK, which then reports them to law enforcement agencies.

Administrative rules
That is the correct way of thinking, said the expert witness.

Law enforcement is not permitted to enter the administrative area while it is still in the administrative process. The law states that when administrative law enforcement occurs, law enforcement should not enter before the BPK makes recommendations,” Dr Rullyandi continued.

The BPK audit report indicates that there were no criminal indications of financial irregularities during the term of Governor Lukas Enembe in regional financial management, including no alleged irregularities in procurement processes for goods and services, which indicates that the principle of legal certainty was met.

According to Dr Rullyandi, initiation of the investigation process into an alleged criminal act of corruption against Governor Lukas Enembe was not based on BPK’s recommendations.

This means, from the beginning of the investigation until it was transferred to the court, investigators ignored Law No. 15 of 2004, especially Article 14. To enforce the law of corruption, relating to criminal norms regulating bribery and gratification, administrative law norms must be considered.

This is accomplished by referring to Law No 1 of 2004 concerning the State Rreasury, which states in section weighing letter c that state financial administration law rules must govern state financial management and accountability.

According to Dr Rullyandi, there is also a provision in Law No. 15 of 2004 pertaining to the Responsibility of State Financial Inspection and Management, which regulates how state finances are handled and held accountable in the fight against criminal corruption.

Abuse of office allegations
“Regarding allegations of abuse of office, Dr Rullyandi said the defendant did not possess the qualifications to abuse his position through bribery and gratification as stated in Articles 11, 12A, and 12B of the Law.

Law No. 31 of 1999 concerning the Eradication of Corruption, as amended by Law No. 20 of 2001.

It was due to the authority or power associated with Enembe’s position, which allowed him to move in order to do or not do something related to the procurement of goods and services. This was given as a result of or caused by something he did or did not do in his position that violated his obligations.

His position as Governor and as user of the budget had been delegated and handed over to the powers of budget users and officials authorised to carry out the procurement committee for goods and services in accordance with Article 18 of Law No. 1 of 2004 concerning the State Treasury.

Particularly, anyone signing or certifying documents related to the letter of evidence that is the basis for the expenditure on APBN / APBD is responsible for its content and consequences.

According to Dr Eko Sambodo’s testimony, if a province [such as Papua] had been given nine times the Unqualified Fair Opinion (abbreviated WTP), administratively, all of them had been managed in accordance with relevant regulations, accountability, and accounting standards.

“When it comes to managing finances, it has been audited, so there are no regulatory violations,” Dr Sambobo said.

Governor Enembe’s senior lawyer, Professor OC Kaligis, asked the witness whether this opinion of the WTP could be used as evidence, that corruption did not exist in the province.

The witness replied that in auditor terms, corruption was known as irregularities. Deviation causes state losses.

It means that everything has been done according to and within regulations, including governance, compilers, and reports. It also means that expenditures have been proven, clarifications have been made, all of which contribute to its final report.

“This is all WTP offers,” said Dr Sambobo. Under the leadership of Governor Enembe, Papua province won the WTP opinion nine times consecutively.

Another expert opinion was due to be heard in court today.

Witness’s testimonies in Court
The court completed hearing witnesses last week (Monday, August 21), who testified to their involvement or knowledge of the alleged bribery, gratification, and corruption scandal.

Out of 184 witnesses, only 17 were brought to court, and only 1 had any connection with Governor Enembe. Sixteen of these witnesses testified as to not have any connection to Enembe.

Only one witness linked to the governor’s name, Prijatono Lakka, a pastor and Enembe’s assistant, who sent Enembe one billion rupiah (NZ$105,000) to cover medical expenses through governor’s personal funds, resulting in an array of allegations, his arrest, and the ongoing process.

To date, no witnesses have emerged to provide testimony or evidence concerning all the alleged wrongdoings and misconduct of Lukas.

Although the governor’s health has improved somewhat, his condition is still critical. The governor’s lawyers continues to ask the judge to detain him in the city for medical treatment and to allow medical specialists outside of the control of Corruption Eradication Commission (acrynomed KPK) to treat him in a free environment.

However, these requests have not been responded to. Currently, the governor is confined to the prison cells of KPK.

He is secheduled to appear in court next week on Monday to bring the final stages of this protracted legal drama to closure.

Lukas Enembe’s term as Papua’s provincial Governor will end during early September — next week.

Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

• Other Yamin Kogoya articles

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Public accounts for the Beijing Lala Salon, Wandouhuang, Transtory, Outstanding Partners, Ace and the Flying Cat Brotherhood were shuttered on the eve of Chinese Valentine's Day on Aug. 22, veteran activist Li Tingting said.

"Such accounts have been targeted once before two or three years ago," said Li, who is better known in feminist circles as Li Maizi. "The government departments in charge of internet management have always targeted accounts linked to sexual minorities, which aren't encouraged by the Chinese government."

She said not all of the accounts were linked to LGBTQ+ groups – some were more broadly feminist.

The move comes after Chinese officials removed an LGBTQ+ anthem titled "Rainbow" by Taiwanese pop star A-Mei from her setlist from a concert earlier this month in Beijing, while security guards forced fans turning up for the gig to remove clothing and other paraphernalia bearing the rainbow symbol before going in, according to media reports.

Sherry Zhang, who goes by the stage name A-Mei, wrote the song for all of her lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and questioning friends, and it is frequently heard at Pride events in Taiwan. Her fans among the LGBTQ+ community often turn up and wave rainbow flags or wear rainbow clothing in a show of solidarity, confident that the song will make an appearance.

Li, who was among five Chinese feminists detained ahead of International Women's Day in 2016 for planning a campaign against sexual harassment on public transport, added: "The accounts targeted included the Beijing queer women's center Lala Salon, Wandouhuang, which is a feminist platform."

Advocacy and Promotion

She said the Flying Cat Brotherhood was a gay men's group, while censors had also targeted the transgender account Transtory and Ace, a group representing asexuals.

The Wandouhuang artists' group was set up by Toni, Mengxia and Xiao Lufei, who all graduated from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2019, according to a bio that was still visible online on Wednesday.

Beijing Lala Salon was set up in November 2004 as a non-government organization offering social activities for lesbians, to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and to promote lesbian culture.

Its account on the social media platform Weibo was still visible on Thursday, but displayed no content.

They had offered literary and social events, film and television screenings, forums, lectures and a drama group.

Li said she once volunteered for the group as a project manager around 10 years ago.

"I felt as if [the authorities] are ticking these tasks off a list," she said.

‘Orders from higher up’

A Shanghai-based lesbian who declined to give her name for fear of reprisals said she had been a member of Transtory and Ace.

"There must have been orders from higher up banning lesbians, gays and transgender folk," she said. "It's about awareness of one's own gender, and what gender you think you are."

LGBTQ+ and health rights activist Lu Jun, who now lives in New York, said that was likely.

"It may seem that it's Tencent shutting down these WeChat accounts, why would they do that?" Lu said. "It must be that the authorities issued an administrative order, which means that Tencent would break the law if it didn't block these accounts."

"This is the will of the authorities."

He said the move is a violation of the right to free speech, but also of LGBTQ+ rights.

In April, two LGBTQ+ students from Beijing's Tsinghua University lodged an administrative lawsuit against China's Ministry of Education after being harassed and threatened by the authorities for leaving rainbow flags out for people to take in a campus supermarket.

While homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and removed from official psychiatric diagnostic manuals in 2001, ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has ushered in a far more conservative attitude to sexuality than his predecessors.

Activists have said the crackdown stems in part from the government's fear of civil organizations as a threat to party rule.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

On Monday, August 21, Gaon Savera’s Facebook page became inaccessible in India, and its account on X, formerly known as Twitter, was also blocked the following day, according to news reports and Mandeep Punia, editor of Gaon Savera, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

On Tuesday, August 22, Gaon Savera received an email from X, reviewed by CPJ, stating that the account had been withheld in response to a legal demand by the Indian government under the Information Technology Act. Gaon Savera did not receive a notice from Meta, which owns Facebook, or the Indian government, Punia said.

CPJ was able to access the outlet’s social media pages from the United States.

The previous week, the website and social media accounts of the independent online news magazine The Kashmir Walla were blocked in India.

“The Indian government’s arbitrary ban on Gaon Savera’s social media accounts, within days of blocking The Kashmir Walla’s website and social media accounts, marks a disturbing new trend of censorship in India,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Kuala Lumpur. “The Indian government must stop targeting independent news publications and allow Gaon Savera to report without interference.”

Some articles on the site of Gaon Savera, which covers grassroots people’s movements in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, have disappeared, Punia told CPJ, adding that the outlet’s technical team was investigating.

Punia told CPJ that he suspected that the censorship was in response to Gaon Savera’s coverage of ongoing farmer protests in Punjab and Haryana ahead of a national convention of workers in Delhi on August 24.

Punia was arrested while reporting on farmers’ protests as a freelancer in January 2021 and detained for four days.

Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Saturday, August 19, The Kashmir Walla became inaccessible in India following an order by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block its website under the IT Act without any prior notice, according to a statement by The Kashmir Walla, reviewed by CPJ, and news reports.

The Kashmir Walla, which is known for its human rights reporting in the disputed territory of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, said its accounts on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, were also blocked, describing the government’s action as “opaque censorship” and “gut-wrenching.”

The media outlet said it also received an eviction notice from the landlord of its office in Srinagar, the largest city in Jammu and Kashmir, on the same day.

“The Indian government’s arbitrary ban on The Kashmir Walla’s website and social media accounts marks a new low for press freedom in the region,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Kuala Lumpur. “If the Indian government aims to be taken seriously as a democracy, it must promptly reinstate The Kashmir Walla’s website and accounts, and put an end to the persecution, harassment, and arrest of journalists in Kashmir.”

The blocking of The Kashmir Walla’s website and social media accounts is the latest move to stifle the press in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where dozens of journalists have been attacked, imprisoned, and forced to flee as the government has tightened its control following the repeal in 2019 of the region’s constitutional autonomy.

Fahad Shah, the editor and founder of The Kashmir Walla, has been detained for 18 months and is on trial for terrorism over a 2011 opinion piece published by the outlet, while Sajad Gul, a trainee reporter with the website, has been held since January 2022 under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act.

When CPJ tried to access The Kashmir Walla’s website in India on Monday, the page showed a message saying, “The website has been blocked as per order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000.” Similarly, The Kashmir Walla’s Facebook page, which has 476,000 followers, said, “This content isn’t available at the moment” and its X page said, “@tkwmag’s account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand.”

CPJ was able to access the outlet’s website and social media pages from the United States.

Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Confirmation of the action came after the United States Embassy in Dhaka sent a letter to the government requesting that Bangladesh comply with such sanctions, which was then forwarded to the Bangladeshi state-owned bank, according to documents seen by BenarNews.

But Md. Afzal Karim, Sonali Bank’s chief executive officer and managing director, said action had already been taken against the accounts of Myanma Foreign Trade Bank and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank. He did not say exactly when. 

“We have already frozen the accounts of the two banks due to the OFAC sanction,” Karim told BenarNews on Wednesday, referring to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an agency under the U.S. Treasury Department that enforces sanctions.

Karim said the two Myanmar banks had total deposits of US$1.1 million in Sonali Bank. 

“This money cannot be transacted [on],” he said.

“For more than a month, the accounts of the two banks [in Sonali Bank] are not being used for any transactions.”

Karim said that after Sonali Bank had frozen the accounts, the Myanmar junta had requested Bangladesh to make the accounts available for transaction. 

“We were requested by Myanmar to open the account. However, it will not be possible to open until the sanction is lifted,” Karim said.

He said he was relieved that Sonali Bank did not have a large amount of funds in accounts in the two sanctioned Myanmar banks.

“We don’t have much money there. One bank has 17,000 euros, another has [200,000] dollars,” he said. “They have more money with us.”

In June, Washington announced its sanctions against three entities, including the two banks controlled by the Burmese military, which overthrew an elected government in February 2021.

The U.S. Treasury said the two banks “facilitate much of the foreign currency exchange within Burma and enable transactions between the military regime and foreign markets, including for the purchase and import of arms and related materiel.”

Since the military coup, the Burmese junta has cracked down on mass protests, killed nearly 4,000 people and arrested thousands more, according to human rights groups. The United Nations said more than 1.8 million people had been forced to flee their homes in Myanmar because of violence since the coup.

The United States, in a letter to the Bangladesh foreign ministry dated Aug. 3, reminded it of the sanctions on the two Myanmar banks and urged Dhaka to “take appropriate action.” The ministry then sent a letter to Sonali Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Bangladesh informing them about the U.S. embassy letter.

“On June 21, we imposed sanctions on three entities in response to atrocities and other abuses that the regime committed against the people of Burma,” according to an excerpt from the embassy’s letter. 

“These designations reinforced our objectives of denying the regime access to foreign currency and further preventing the regime from purchasing arms that could be used to commit atrocities and other abuses.” 

BenarNews contacted the U.S. embassy in Dhaka for details but did not immediately hear back.

Bangladesh-Myanmar trade is small. The South Asian country mainly exports potatoes, biscuits and plastic products to Myanmar, and imports items such as wood, frozen fish, ginger and onions.

In fiscal year 2022, Bangladesh imported goods worth around $128.5 million from Myanmar, its next-door neighbor, and exported items worth $3.9 million to Myanmar.

The U.S. sanction on the two Myanmar banks that have accounts in Sonali Bank should not be a financial burden on Bangladesh, said Syed Mahbubur Rahman, managing director of Mutual Trust Bank.

“Since Bangladesh does not have a large amount of business with Myanmar, there will not be a significant bottleneck due to this reason,” he told BenarNews. “There is no reason to worry about it.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Reyad Hossain for BenarNews.

In a July 12 letter, the Telecommunications Regulator of Cambodia ordered local internet service providers (ISPs) to block the websites and social media accounts of The Cambodia Daily, U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA), and Kamnotra, a new independent public database, according to reports by RFA, Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJA), a local advocacy and news organization, and Voice of America (VOA), which is also funded by Congress. The order targeted a total of nine domains among the three news organizations, VOA reported.

The letter said the three outlets had broadcast information to “make confusion, affect the government’s honor and prestige, and failed to fulfill the operating conditions of the Information Ministry,” according to the CamboJA’s translation of the order which was issued in Khmer.  

The telecommunications regulator ordered local ISPs to block access to the listed websites and social media accounts “immediately,” according to VOA.

“Cambodia’s censorship order against The Cambodia Daily, Radio Free Asia, and Kamnotra is a crude attempt to curb free reporting on the country’s upcoming general election,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “As long as authorities harass and suppress the press, Cambodia will only be a democracy in name, not in substance.”

The Southeast Asia Globe reported on July 18, that the banned sites “are still mostly accessible through a virtual private network,” or VPN, which can be used to evade internet censorship.

In February, Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered the closure of Voice of Democracy over news coverage he viewed as slandering his son Hun Manet, who is widely expected to replace his father as prime minister after Sunday’s election.

Voice of Democracy was broadly recognized as one of the few remaining independent news outlets in Cambodia, with a track record of reporting on corruption and human rights issues in the country.

Several of its reporters fled the country soon after the closure order due to fears for their personal security if they remained in Cambodia, Voice of Democracy representatives told CPJ.

Kamnotra, which maintains two databases of government records and other non-government data aimed at informing the public, was launched in June by the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, the same nongovernmental organization that ran Voice of Democracy until its closure, according to CamboJA.

Cambodia’s Ministry of Information and the Telecommunications Regulator of Cambodia did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

It has been six months now, but I have to make a strange admission. I miss the laughs I used to get over the pseudo-authoritative pronouncements of Fiji’s former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum (pictured).

I recall that he got a bit over-excited in January this year. That was when he decided to lecture the new government on “constitutionalism” and “rule of law”.

This was apparently without any reflection on how he and his FijiFirst party government had performed by the rule of law standards on which he was pontificating.

• READ MORE: Read other Richard Naidu columns

But in the last few days he decided to debate Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica on the FijiFirst party’s 2022 financial accounts, apparently insisting that FFP was not insolvent.

This was never going to be an equal contest. Kamikamica is a chartered accountant. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, well — he isn’t.

You don’t need to be an accountant to read a balance sheet — or to understand the simple definition of insolvency.

It’s not hard. You are insolvent if you “cannot pay your debts as they fall due”. You can find the accounts of all the main political parties on the Fiji Elections Office website.

More cash than others
FFP’s balance sheet (see image) says it has cash and term deposits of more than $270,000 in the bank.

That’s pretty good. It’s actually more cash than all the other political parties combined. But FFP also has debts (called, in accountant-speak, “payables and accruals”).

These come to well over $1.6 million. Once you add and subtract all the smaller stuff, FFP is left with net liabilities of just over $1 million.

In other words, that’s $1 million that FFP, even if it sold everything it owns, still could not pay to its creditors.

That $1.6 million in debts “fell due” months ago. And FFP could not pay them as they fell due. So FFP is insolvent.

Why pretend otherwise? Luckily for FFP, there isn’t a simple legal way for a creditor to wind up a political party for not paying its debts. Presumably FFP’s unpaid suppliers have learned that bitter lesson a bit late.

Learning lessons
But we are all learning lessons about FFP. Six months ago it was all-powerful. Its leaders sat in taxpayer-funded government offices and did (pretty much) whatever they wanted.

They regularly lectured the rest of us on all of our failings and all the things we were doing wrong. They exuded competence. Fast forward to June 2023.

The same FFP — which previously ran a government that spends $4 billion a year — had been suspended because it couldn’t prepare its own accounts on time.

The deadline for submitting political party accounts is March 31 each year. That’s in the Political Parties Act. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum presumably knew that because, after all, he “wrote the law”.

FFP’s accounts were not submitted by March 31. The Acting Supervisor of Elections (in stark contrast to her predecessor) did not fire off a suspension letter one day later.

She gave FFP (and some other political parties) an extension of time to put in their accounts. Six weeks later, FFP still had not filed its accounts.

And at that point even the most reasonable supervisor is entitled to be annoyed. That was when the suspension letter went out. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s reaction at the time was the usual legalistic bluster unsupported by the facts. FijiFirst, he said, had not been afforded “due process and natural justice”.

Failed to meet deadline
He did not elaborate. And what could he say? His party had been given a six-week extension of time and still not met the deadline under the law he had himself drafted. And then we found out.

FFP was deeply in debt — and presumably too embarrassed to tell the rest of us. If it hadn’t been suspended, we would probably still not know.

What else can we learn from the accounts of the former ruling party? We can see from its balance sheet that it began 2022 with (cash and term deposits) more than $860,000 in the bank.

That’s the sort of money other politicians could only dream of. At that time the People’s Alliance and National Federation Party, between them, had less than $20,000.

However FijiFirst then went on to spend $4.2 million — or more accurately, it ran up debts of that amount, and now it has to find $1.6m to pay off those debts.

That is because FFP raised only $2.2 million in donations. I say “only” — but that $2.2 million was twice as much as the three parties now in government could collect.

More lessons
There are other, bigger, lessons to learn from all of this — lessons about money and politics. What was FFP thinking as it threw around the cash in the 2022 election campaign?

Who would spend $1.6 million they didn’t have? The answer — a party that thought that, as long as it could win, the cash would keep rolling in.

No political party in Fiji’s history has ever had millions of dollars to spend.

And no political party in Fiji has ever cashed in on its political power as cynically as FFP did in the past 10 years. It was FFP that made the laws on electoral funding for political parties.

Companies were not allowed to contribute — only individuals and only up to $10,000 each. All donors had to be publicly disclosed — this included someone who put $2 in a bucket during a soli.

SODELPA leader Viliame Gavoka famously commented on how the laws required his party to issue a receipt for selling a $1 roti parcel. FFP of course, did not have to bother with the small stuff.

Soli? Roti parcels? Why bother when you can just wait for the $10,000 cheques? And the cheques rolled in — with embarrassing enthusiasm.

Early donor lists
Many of us saw the early FFP donor lists when they were published. Prominent business families fell over themselves to write their $10,000 cheques.

Of course, these cheques were from “individuals”. Those individuals were company directors, their spouses and even their under-age children, even if those children (and probably some of the spouses) didn’t have bank accounts to write cheques from.

You would hear from other, less enthusiastic, business people about invitations to FFP fund-raisers. You went — and you took your chequebook with you — because if you didn’t, well…

One business man complained to me: “If I pay, I get to talk to them — but they don’t do anything about my business problems anyway.”

Fiji is not the first country to encounter unhealthy problems about money and politics.

These create challenges in every democracy. In Fiji’s so-called “true democracy”, the rules about who donated money were supposed to be transparent.

The Political Parties Act originally required the Supervisor of Elections to publish the names of people who donated to political parties. But as FFP’s donors squirmed with discomfort under the spotlight of social media, in 2021 FFP quietly changed the law — buried, of course, in one of those Bills that would be rushed to Parliament on two days’ notice and rushed through the infamous Standing Order 51.

The law change meant that those party donor lists still had to be disclosed to the Supervisor of Elections — but the Supervisor no longer had to publish them in the newspapers.

Climate of political fear
Of course, in the climate of political fear that FFP actively promoted, that created a separate problem.

The ruling party always collects the millions. But the opposition parties would have to work much harder to collect their cash because no one with any serious money wanted to be identified on those disclosure lists as giving money to the opposition.

Because, even though the Supervisor of Elections no longer had to publish those lists, any member of the public could still inspect them.

Most Fiji citizens might not know that. But the one person who would know that was the general secretary of FFP — also the minister for elections, attorney-general and minister for economy.

Now, however, for the first time since 2014, we can do something about our money-and-politics laws.

Those laws need to be reviewed, with a strong eye on the lessons of the past.

But the most critical lesson is probably not about those laws. It is about the climate of fear that enabled one political party to raise millions of dollars to keep itself in power while keeping all of its opponents out of cash.

Some good news?
Finally, for diehard FijiFirst supporters — a small spot of good news in those accounts. Apparently FFP still has 6120 “promotional sulu” in stock.

The sulu, according to the accounts (Note 11), have been “fully expensed”. This is because “realisable value cannot be determined with reasonable accuracy.” This is the way accountants say: “We don’t think anybody wants them so we can’t put any value to them.”

Perhaps to show their loyalty, FFP’s fans could buy the sulu to pay off the $1.6 million debt. This would cost only $270 per sulu. Just thought I’d try to help.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who writes a regular independent column for The Fiji Times. He has enough sulu.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The move is the latest bid by the junta to cut off the flow of assistance to Myanmar’s armed resistance, which the military has vowed to eradicate in the aftermath of its Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat, but which has made increasing gains on the ground in key areas of the country.

An investigation by RFA Burmese found that last month the junta closed at least 721 accounts it accused of ties to anti-junta forces with mobile banking providers including KBZPay, WavePay, AYAPay, and CBPay. The junta shuttered similar bank accounts prior to May, although the number was not immediately clear.

Account holders who were locked out of their accounts told RFA that the military had ordered Myanmar’s Central Bank to monitor “irregular” money transfers and deposits and to crack down on associated accounts.

While some of the closed accounts may have been used by individuals funneling money to anti-junta organizations including the People’s Defense Force paramilitary group and shadow National Unity Government, others belonged to ordinary civilians running small businesses, some of those affected said Friday.

Yangon resident Wai Oo said his KBZPay account, which he opened in 2019 to run his online shopping business, was closed by the junta last week with nearly 2 million kyats (US$950) still in it. He said he went to his bank to explain the mistake, but was forced to leave without his money or account reinstated.

“If they want to cut off support to the PDF, they should do their due diligence first,” he said. “Online shopping businesses like mine make bank transactions on a daily basis and they should investigate them more carefully. We are being hurt by this baseless closure of our accounts.”

Amar Myint, a woman from Monywa, also had her KBZPay account frozen on the order of the central bank with no explanation given, even though she only used it for regular banking activities.

“I’m just an ordinary citizen who minds her own business and I don’t get involved in any complicated activities,” she said, adding that she mostly used her account to pay for her internet access and shop online. “When I talked to the bank, they didn’t say anything beyond that they were instructed to do so by the central bank.”

Transactions monitored daily

RFA also spoke with employees of private banks who said that, since the coup, they have had to report their institution’s online and mobile bank account transactions to the central bank on “a daily and monthly basis.”

“Among the accounts, those with at least 10 daily transactions and or that make transfers of 2 million kyats or more are monitored separately,” said an official at one bank who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. “When an account is suspected of transferring money to other regions, they close the account permanently.”

Attempts by RFA to contact central bank officials regarding the closure of mobile bank accounts went unanswered Friday.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun said at a press conference in the capital Naypyidaw in September that the imposition of such strict rules was done to “prevent financial fraud and violence.”

Making lives difficult

Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, a group formed by former military officers, told RFA that the account closures are key to protecting the nation from terrorism.

“If you look at it from a national security standpoint, it’s worrying that some huge amounts of money are transferred from one place to another for suspicious activities by using modern technology and no one can trace them,” he said. “If these transactions can’t be strictly controlled, the resistance groups will continue to receive support, which will lead to more rebellion and chaos for the people.”

But Sayar Kyaung, the leader of the anti-junta Yangon UG Association, said that the regime’s closing of mobile bank accounts impacts not only PDF groups but also the livelihoods of regular civilians.

“The junta knows that people will not be able to pay attention to the revolution if making ends meet becomes more and more difficult,” he said. “The junta is trying to cripple people’s businesses so that they will be less willing to support the revolution.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Later, in a more aggressive move, he offered to buy the company at $44 billion, his ‘best and final’ offer. Over the next few days, Musk and Twitter reached a deal. However, on May 13, Musk tweeted that the deal had been put on hold over concerns related to the prevalence of bot and spam accounts on the platform. A few hours later, he tweeted that he was “still committed to the acquisition”.

The acquisition was eventually completed in late October. But the drama leading up to the actual acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk was like a precursor to what the Musk-led platform had to offer — bizarre policy moves, claims of free speech and actions wholly detrimental to the cause, and random moves that either stayed or got rolled back at Elon’s whims, to name a few.

The Moderation Council That Never Was

One of the first tweets by Elon Musk after the acquisition was a video of himself walking into the Twitter headquarters carrying a sink. The same day, he penned an open letter to advertisers. it said, “It is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

On October, 28, Musk announced that Twitter would have a moderation council and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” Ironically, one of the first directives made by Musk after he took over was the reinstatement of Babylon Bee, a satirical site that had been suspended for an anti-trans tweet. A month later, Babylon Bee, former US President Donald Trump, and various other figures were welcomed back to the platform.

Meanwhile, the promised moderation council never happened. While responding to a tweet, Musk said that the moderation council was based on the fact that a ‘coalition of political/activist’ groups had agreed not to encourage advertisers to leave the platform. Musk claimed that the group had broken the deal hence the council never took off. Speaking to CNBC, various members of this coalition denied having such a deal.

Perhaps, Musk’s understanding of content moderation became clear when he suspended the account of Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). The account of the musician was suspended after he shared an image of a swastika combined with the Star of David. Responding to a user, Elon wrote, “I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

According to two former employees who spoke to The Washington Post on condition of anonymity, Ye’s tweet would have violated Twitter’s rules on hateful content, not incitement to violence. In the same week, Musk announced that Twitter would reinstate all suspended accounts based on a Twitter poll.

A few weeks later, when Musk did a poll asking whether he should step down as CEO, his ardent supporters suggested that Twitter polls could be swarmed by ‘bots’ and that only Twitter blue subscribers should be allowed to vote in policy-related decisions. Interestingly, the fact that Twitter polls are prone to manipulation was already raised by former employees and researchers. It is just that these concerns did not matter as long as polls were yielding favourable results.

While Elon Musk was busy organizing polls, on November 18 in India, editor-in-chief of the pro-BJP propaganda channel Sudarshan News Suresh Chavhanke tweeted to his 6,00,000 followers an invitation card for a wedding reception of an interfaith couple, thus revealing the venue of the event and putting the couple and their families at risk of physical violence — a clear case of violation of Twitter’s policy.

This wedding event was eventually cancelled. This tweet continues to be available on the platform even today. Suresh Chavhanke never faced any consequences. Interestingly, almost a month later, Twitter temporarily suspended the accounts of multiple journalists because they ‘doxxed’ the real-time location of Elon Musk by reporting or sharing about the popular jet tracking account @ElonJet.

Amplify Misinformation, Hate and Threats, All at ₹650 per month

It was clear from the beginning that very few prominent Twitter users would succumb to the pressure of subscribing to Twitter Blue. The flip-flops on the feature has been the butt of jokes on the platform since Musk took over. Recently, it became clear that half of all the Twitter Blue subscribers had less than 1,000 followers (this data is before the legacy blue tick purge of April 20, 2023). Not only that, there has been an uptick of hateful content, conspiracy theories and even denialism on the platform. (Reports can be found here, here and here).

Alt News checked close to two dozen Twitter Blue subscriber accounts which have more than 10,000 followers and predominantly engage in content related to India. We found that these accounts not only amplified dangerous communal misinformation but also regularly participated in trolling, amplifying political propaganda, doxxing and sharing content that stereotyped marginalized communities. Some of these accounts have been reinstated on the platform because of the ‘general amnesty’ that was granted based on a Twitter poll last year.

One of the accounts called ‘@MrSinha_‘ that was reinstated by Twitter on December 26 had amplified dangerous communal misinformation within four days of being active on the platform. On December 30, when Indian cricketer Rishabh Pant met with a near-fatal car crash, @MrSinha_ tweeted that the cricketer had met with an accident in a Rohingya-dominated area and that instead of helping him, the locals looted all his belongings and ran away.

This was entirely false as police clarified in a video statement. In fact, Pant was saved by Haryana Roadways Bus operators Sushil Kumar and Paramjeet Nain. The two had contacted the police, saved Pant’s life and handed his valuables to him while the paramedics were taking him away.

This user has amplified communal and political misinformation on multiple occasions since being reinstated (here, here, here and here).

In March this year, when a migrant crisis in Tamil Nadu was fueled by misinformation, verified Twitter Blue user Mohammed Tanvir was among the prominent enablers of panic on social media. This user shared three graphic videos claiming that they were visuals from Tamil Nadu where Bihari migrant workers were being lynched. Alt News independently debunked two of the three clips shared by Tanvir. The Tamil Nadu Police also issued a statement debunking these claims.

Monu Manesar, a cow vigilante from Haryana, who has been accused of the murder of two Muslim individuals and is apparently on the run was also a verified Twitter Blue user until things blew out of proportion and his alleged deeds came under the spotlight. This is in stark contrast to what happened in the case of Suresh Chavhanke, who tweeted the address of an interfaith wedding reception. The tweet was simply never removed because it never caught the attention of international media.

Ritesh Jha, who rose to fame in the spring of 2021 for doing a YouTube live stream in which the channel’s audience ‘rated’ Pakistani women, ‘auctioned’ them off to each other, and posted sexually charged comments on their looks and clothes, is also a verified Twitter Blue user. Jha who goes by the pseudonym ‘Liberal Doge’, has been at it for over two years and was the inspiration for the GitHub apps ‘Bulli Bai’ and ‘Sulli Deals’, which did a similar auction of Twitter accounts of Indian Muslim women.

Below is a collage of some of the tweets and replies made by Ritesh Jha alias Liberal Doge as a Twitter Blue subscriber.

He also shared a clip recently in which a minor can be seen being sexually assaulted. The clip has a text superimposed on it that reads, “Lessons being taught in madrasa”. Jha also used his Twitter to amplify the false claim that a recent chemical blast in Bulandshahr took place at a Muslim individual’s house, a claim categorically refuted by police.

Another account called Megh Updates, which attempts to position itself as a news aggregator, was reinstated on January 12. Since then, this account has spread false information at least 10 times.

The activities of these accounts are not just limited to spreading misinformation. They are also involved in trolling, harassing and attempting to intimidate journalists and politicians by sending items to their addresses. On at least three separate occasions, a paid verified user called ‘@Cyber_Huntss’ has put up tweets in which he says he is sending grocery items to his targets. Among his targets were Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair, Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. (Archive 1, 2 and 3).

Tweets by these accounts targeted Dr BR Ambedkar, journalist Danish Siddiqui who was killed by the Taliban, and shared AI-generated images of Prophet Muhammad and Aisha.

One account even shared the false claim that Dr BR Ambedkar was ‘the first rapist of independent India’. The basis of this claim is a medium post and nothing else. (Archive)

Attacks on Journalists in India

Journalists have always been a target of abuses on Twitter, especially those hailing from minority communities. In 2018, Amnesty International looked at 778 women journalists and politicians in the US and UK and found that 7.1% of tweets sent to them were abusive or problematic. In 2020, Amnesty International released a report in which they analyzed 114,716 tweets mentioning 95 Indian women politicians in a three-month period. It found that 13.8% of the tweets that mentioned 95 women politicians in the study were either ‘problematic’ or ‘abusive’. The study also found that Muslim women politicians received 94.1% more ethnic or religious slurs than women politicians from other religions.

The issue of inappropriate and abusive content existed in the old regime, but in Musk’s Twitter, these accounts are not only given a verified tick (which looks like a seal of approval) but their engagements are also prioritized as per the claims of the new owner. Below are some of the content produced or reshared by these verified accounts.

Indian Muslim journalists Rana Ayyub, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Mohammed Zubair, and Sayema, a radio jockey, are among the top favourites for these trolls. Ayyub, who is famous for her investigative reporting and columns, has been a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi government. In a recent study, researchers found that “of all the obvious abuse directed at Ayyub, 62% were personal attacks, including sexist, misogynistic, sexually explicit and racist abuse (e.g. ‘presstitute’, ‘ISIS sex slave’, ‘Jihadi Jane’, etc.) and 35% was designed to undermine her credibility as a journalist or commentator.” The research also notes that “nearly 42% of all of Ayyub’s tweets receive at least one abusive reply, a remarkably high rate, and the speed of the abuse is highly unusual – sometimes within seconds of her posting – potentially signalling coordinated campaigns.”

Ayyub told the researchers that she was not only being attacked for her journalism but due to her faith as well, so she had to defend herself ‘as a Muslim journalist’. The amount of abuse faced by journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani and RJ Sayema is almost on a par with Rana Ayyub. In February this year, right-wing influencers attempted to create a ruckus over Arfa allegedly being a speaker at the Harvard India Conference, by sharing a poster of the list of speakers from 2020. Arfa did not take part in the 2023 conference. Even Right Wing outlets debunked the claim. (Archive)

Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair is among the few Muslim male journalists who are relentlessly trolled. There are verified accounts which unfailingly manage to abuse or send threats on almost all of his tweets. Zubair spent 23 days in jail last year after Delhi police had arrested him over a 2018 tweet that an anonymous complainant found ‘objectionable’. At the beginning of March, Zubair received a series of online threats from pro-Hindutva influencers after Alt News debunked a disinformation campaign about murderous attacks on migrant Bihari workers in Tamil Nadu. Below are screenshots of the relentless trolling of the above-mentioned journalists done by some verified Twitter Blue users.

A clear line of communication is also missing since Twitter now automatically responds to media queries with a poop emoji. Other factors also make it evident that a very small team has been looking into day-to-day moderation and there is virtually no direct communication until it causes an uproar.

Recently, when the news agency ANI was locked by Twitter, the editor of the organisation made a Tweet announcing the same while tagging Musk. The same evening NDTV was ‘blocked’ by Twitter and they too announced it while tagging Musk. Both handles were restored within a few hours. This came across as quite unusual, as social media companies have a person of contact to quickly rectify an error like this. In Twitter 2.0, grievances can be directly addressed by tagging the owner, giving an advantage only to those accounts having a large number of mass followers.

When Musk took over Twitter last year, he started using his personal account to respond to complaints. At one point, he changed his Twitter bio to ‘Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator‘, normalizing the practice. In the previous regime, users raised issues about Twitter by tagging the Twitter Support account and/or some prominent employees. At the present moment, that systematic approach has been dismantled. India has the third largest Twitter users globally and it is surprising that Musk himself is the de-facto point of contact for such a huge user base. Such a carefree approach for a market like India only accentuates the policy paralysis in Musk’s Twitter.

A Twitter Blue user with 1 million plus followers uploaded two movies back to back on Sunday, April 30. It took Twitter three hours to take down the first movie and the second movie remained on the platform for up to seven hours, making it evident that Twitter currently is surprisingly slow at detecting and taking down illegal content. Twitter under Musk is also struggling to curb child abuse content despite it being one of the top priorities promised by him. Even a network of AI spam bots using ChatGPT to tweet politics in Southeast Asia and cryptocurrency remained under the radar until it was flagged by a researcher earlier this month.

Free Speech Absolutism — A Sham From The Start

Post-acquisition, Elon gave access to internal documents of Twitter to a handful of journalists who published what they called the ‘Twitter Files’, which apparently revealed partisanship, government interferences and censorship happening on the platform. Based on these publications, Musk openly criticised the policies of the platform that existed under the previous leadership. Around the same time, Musk took the opportunity on multiple occasions, to explain his position when it comes to ‘censorship’. In fact, during the talks about the acquisition of Twitter, Musk said that by free speech he simply meant speech which complied with the law. It was clear from the beginning that his understanding of content moderation was rather naive and more importantly, he would simply comply with any government requests without ever challenging it.

My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022

In January this year, when the BBC aired its two-part documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ in the UK, which looked into the role of Narendra Modi during the 2002 Gujarat violence, it quickly gained attention among Indian viewers due to unauthorised circulation of clips of the documentary on social media platforms.

The Indian government invoked an emergency law and issued orders to YouTube and Twitter demanding that they block any content related to the documentary from being published on their platforms. Complying with this, Twitter blocked dozens of tweets that provided links to the documentary. When prompted about this by a user, Elon replied by saying that “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things”.

Then almost a month and a half later, Twitter blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India based on legal requests from the Indian government. Additional 23 accounts were blocked by Twitter on March 23 based on legal demands. On March 28, BBC’s Punjabi news service was ‘withheld’ in India for a few hours based on a government request. On April 7, investigative journalist Saurav Das tweeted that one of his tweets about home minister Amit Shah had been withheld globally. The move was an apparent first for Twitter as the platform generally tended to block tweets only in the region whose government had made the legal request.

My tweets have been withheld not just in India, but worldwide. I don’t remember the context of tweeting this, can anyone figure out? pic.twitter.com/lUwCfV1870

— Saurav Das (@OfficialSauravD) April 7, 2023

It was not unusual for Twitter even under the previous leadership to comply with requests made by the government. But the blanket compliance appears to contradict not only Elon’s commitment to ‘free speech’ but also the culture that was established by the previous system. For instance, in July 2022, about three months before Musk took over, Twitter took the Indian government to court for a judicial review of the content it had asked to be blocked in the country. On April 12, 2023, during an interview with BBC, it became apparent that Musk’s Twitter had no interest in taking the same path. He said that India’s rules for social media platforms were ‘quite strict’ and that he would rather comply with the government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail.

Amid all these developments, Musk followed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Twitter on April 10, 2023.

Elon Musk is now following Narendra Modi (@narendramodi)

— ELON ALERTS (@elon_alerts) April 10, 2023

To Verify or Not to Verify, That is the Question

A consistent vision also appears to be missing from the beginning of the takeover, other than the obvious obsession with metrics and labels. The very first product launched by Twitter under Musk, a paid-for blue verification mark, had to be paused immediately after launch due to the swarming of fake verified accounts spreading misinformation. Next, Twitter removed labels indicating a device from which a tweet was sent because according to him it was a “waste of screen space & compute”. Then eventually came the ‘view count‘ button, while they experimented with the position of the retweet and like buttons. He also introduced colour-coded check marks, in which yellow check marks indicate corporate accounts, while the grey check marks denote the accounts of government officials. An additional label called “Official” was introduced at some point and killed within hours before the very first Twitter Blue launch which gave users the option to apply for a paid blue check mark.

I just killed it

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022

Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October last year was rejoiced by Right Wing figures globally. Many prominent Russian and Chinese personalities challenged Musk to live up to his commitment towards free speech by removing labels on their accounts and rolling back policies limiting their visibility and reach on the platform. Their wishful remarks started coming to fruition in April of this year when Musk’s Twitter labelled the National Public Radio (NPR) as ‘state-affiliated media’, which was later changed to ‘Government Funded’ after a long email exchange between NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn and Elon Musk. During this period, the platform also stopped enforcing policies designed to limit the reach of Chinese and Russian propaganda.

New: while Twitter slapped a state-affiliated label on NPR, it’s stopped enforcing policies designed to limit the reach of Chinese and Russian propaganda https://t.co/nbxfDH2cUj

— Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) April 5, 2023

Twitter continued to globally label several accounts as ‘Government Funded’ based on a Wikipedia list, among which was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The organisation argued that it was ‘less than 70% government funded’, after which Twitter labelled it as ‘69% Government Funded’. Both NPR and CBC have stopped using Twitter over the false label.

Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re “less than 70% government-funded”, so we corrected the label pic.twitter.com/lU1EWf76Zu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 18, 2023

As of April 21, Twitter has removed labels from all accounts, including those belonging to Russia and China. Upon being enquired, Musk told reporters that all media labels were dropped based on a suggestion by Walter Isaacson, the former president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

The page where Twitter explained its policies for state-backed media has been deleted pic.twitter.com/2avxZtgUgi

— Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) April 21, 2023

The news of state-controlled media experiencing sudden Twitter gains without any announcement of the change in platform policy was confirmed by DFR Lab’s research. Twitter removed all legacy verified accounts on April 20, 2023. Taking advantage of this change, within a few hours, a fake account subscribed to Twitter Blue claiming to represent the paramilitary group fighting for control of Sudan falsely claimed its leader had died in the fighting. A verified Twitter Blue account also tweeted that Turkish President Erdogan was poisoned while meeting a Russian official without providing any reliable citations, as pointed out by Twitter Community Notes volunteers.

Recently, Twitter also announced an update about its ‘enforcement philosophy’, wherein it was said that based on the existing policy of visibility filtering, additional details would be provided via publicly visible labels to tweets that are in violation of Twitter’s policy on ‘Hateful Conduct’. Twitter refers to this move as “Freedom of speech, not reach“. It took Twitter less than 10 days to fail at enforcing this policy. When civil rights attorney and clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo posted a collage of screenshots of verified accounts calling for the execution of trans people and their allies, Twitter not only removed those tweets by verified handles but also took action on the tweet of Caraballo, which now only shows a blank panel. The tweet by Caraballo does not have any labels that indicate it has been limited.

We’re at the calling for executions of trans folks and the people that support them stage. This isn’t actually asking a question, this is incitement, especially when all the blue check replies are gleefully replying they want to execute trans people. pic.twitter.com/xqWwqx93bG

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) April 26, 2023

It has also been reported that Twitter will not be publishing a transparency report for the year 2022 and has “also chosen to stop publishing routine disclosures of copyright and government takedown requests on the Lumen Database — Twitter doesn’t appear to have disclosed any Indian takedown requests since April 9, and even copyright request disclosures globally haven’t been forthcoming since April 15”. Since Musk took over, Twitter has complied with 971 requests from governments and courts. In fact, in its self-reports, Twitter under Musk shows that it did not challenge even one single request made by courts and governments. More importantly, the compliance rate in the year before the acquisition hovered around 50%. At present, the figure has jumped to 83%. When Twitter fails to challenge such take-down requests in countries like India, it becomes virtually impossible for the end user to legally challenge these take-downs.

As of April 15th, 2023, Twitter has not submitted copies of any of the takedown notices it receives to Lumen.
According to Lumen’s persons of contact there, Twitter’s 3rd party data sharing policies are under review, and they will update Lumen once there is more information.

— Lumen (@lumendatabase) April 27, 2023

To sum up, with the reinstatement of deplatformed accounts & a policy muddle at its worst, Musk’s Twitter has become exactly what he promised it won’t —  a ‘free-for-all hellscape’. Below is a list of additional developments that happened in the last few weeks:

• Twitter said it would not exempt public safety accounts from its new limited API plans.
• Twitter permanently suspended the account of journalist Dell Cameron because of ‘violations’ of its hacked materials policy.
• Twitter removed legacy checkmarks and suspended the @BlockTheBlue Twitter account, a campaign started by powerful Twitter users to block all users paying for Twitter Blue.
• Twitter falsely labelled that celebrity accounts paid for Twitter Blue.
• Twitter added verified check marks to the accounts of dead celebrities, making them look like paid Twitter Blue subscribers.

The post Return of suspended accounts, policy muddle make Musk’s Twitter a ‘free-for-all hellscape’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

In prepared testimony for a Senate Banking Committee hearing slated for Tuesday morning, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reveals that the 10 largest deposit accounts at Silicon Valley Bank held a combined $13.3 billion, a detail that's likely to intensify criticism of federal regulators' intervention in the firm's recent collapse.

When SVB was spiraling earlier this month, the FDIC, Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve rushed in to backstop the financial system and make all depositors at the California bank whole, including those with accounts over $250,000—the total amount typically covered by FDIC insurance.

"At SVB, the depositors protected by the guarantee of uninsured depositors included not only small and mid-size business customers but also customers with very large account balances," FDIC chief Martin Gruenberg writes in his prepared testimony. "The ten largest deposit accounts at SVB held $13.3 billion, in the aggregate."

Gruenberg goes on to estimate that the FDIC's $125 billion Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF)—which is financed primarily by assessments on insured banks and "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government"—took a $20 billion hit as a result of the SVB intervention.

According to Gruenberg, nearly 90%—$18 billion—of the DIF loss stemming from SVB is "attributable to the cost of covering uninsured deposits." He added that the DIF absorbed a roughly $1.6 billion cost to cover uninsured deposits at Signature Bank, which failed shortly after SVB.

The FDIC chair's testimony comes as federal regulators continue to face scrutiny for glaring oversight failures in the lead-up to the collapse and backlash over the emergency response, which many have characterized as a bailout for the wealthy and well-connected given SVB's role as a major lender to venture capital and tech startups.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, whose firm was accused of helping spark a bank run by advising clients to pull their money from SVB, told the Financial Times that he had $50 million in a personal account at the bank when it failed earlier this month.

"The bailout really did protect billionaires from taking a modest haircut," Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project tweeted in response to Gruenberg's testimony.

Writing for The American Prospect on Monday, Revolving Door Project researcher Dylan Gyauch-Lewis called the federal government's swift action in the wake of SVB's failure "a good illustration of the enormous class bias in American policymaking."

"As soon as corporations and the wealthy run into trouble, elites trip over themselves, discarding both law and precedent, to rescue them," Gyauch-Lewis wrote, noting that federal regulators had to classify SVB's collapse as a "systemic risk" to the financial system—a disputed characterization—in order to legally guarantee deposits over $250,000.

For contrast, Gyauch-Lewis added, "consider student loan forgiveness. The legal justification is clear as day, and the authority itself is used regularly. According to the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, the Education Department can forgive student loans as it sees fit in a national emergency."

"At bottom, the core reason SVB's depositors got bailed out had little to do with morals or even financial risk," Gyauch-Lewis argued. "It happened because they had rich and powerful friends with the ear of the president's chief of staff. Broke students don't. The students have to organize and campaign for decades to get something far worse than what they wanted, and for that to hang in the balance at the Supreme Court. The SVB depositors just had to whine on Twitter and make a few calls."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Just after midnight on Sept. 13, Kristian “Murda” Murphy was watching TV at home in Boca Raton, Florida, when his phone began buzzing.

“Murda u always outside we gon see you,” read a message from an account he didn’t recognize.

Murphy is a music manager, producer and entrepreneur who has worked with high-profile rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, among other artists. Hours before the threats began, 6ix9ine posted a message to his more than 20 million followers on Instagram that mocked the recent death of rapper PnB Rock. Taking exception to the post, people began blowing up Murphy’s phone.

“I’m sitting home by myself literally watching TV, all of a sudden I see these texts started coming in and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” said Murphy, in a gravelly voice that retains the accents of his native Yonkers, New York. In addition to threatening bodily harm, the anonymous messengers told Murphy they were coming for one of his most valuable assets — the @murdamurphy Instagram account. It had more than 300,000 followers and brought in thousands of dollars a month thanks to people and companies who paid Murphy to share sponsored posts.

“WE PACKING ACCOUNTS SOON ” read a message from a person who identified himself as OBNBrandon.

Murphy didn’t know it, but he was in the crosshairs of one of the most prolific and notorious members of a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them. While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app’s slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.

A ProPublica investigation found that OBN, who also goes by OBNbrandon and Brandon, has prompted Meta to ban an array of influencers and entertainment figures. In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the “log-out king” because “I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram.”

“I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages,” he wrote.

OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta’s customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company’s standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets’ names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they’ll be barred for violating Meta’s ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.

Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment.

“Once you’re put on Brandon’s radar, whether someone’s paying him or not, he has this personal investment in making sure that your life is miserable and that he’ll try and get as much money out of you as he possibly can,” said Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model. Her main Instagram account with roughly 100,000 followers has been repeatedly deactivated since 2021.

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.

“We know the impact these scams can have on people which is why we continue investing to protect our users, including updating our support systems and keeping the scammers out,” said the spokesperson, who asked not to be identified due to security concerns. “This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms.”

The story of how OBN has manipulated Meta’s systems is a cautionary tale for social media platforms. While the company is often criticized for being slow to take down misleading or offensive material, OBN was able to make a lucrative living by finding the pressure points that prompt Meta to act quickly based on false reports.

Murphy said that’s exactly what happened to him. Until OBN came along, he was earning between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from his Instagram account. It was filled with pictures of him with rappers and well-known figures from the Miami nightlife. Murphy, a stocky man with short blond hair and permanent five o’clock shadow, typically posed in black clothes, aviator sunglasses and thick diamond chains, with one or both of his middle fingers extended at the camera. He charged aspiring entrepreneurs between $2,000 and $5,000 per story to be featured in a post on his verified account.

“People pay me all the time to post promos for music, crypto,” he said. “I can make five, 10 grand by accident if I needed to. … The money’s crazy.”

Murphy had never heard of OBN until that September morning. He went to bed shortly after 3 a.m. and woke up to discover his Instagram account was disabled.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever had my account taken, ever, in my life. My heart dropped,” he said.

He was initially successful in getting Meta to reactivate it. But it’s been offline since December. Meta declined to comment on Murphy’s experience.

“I make money with that account, so it’s not fair to me that this guy has more power than Meta — it’s like a multibillion-billion-billion-dollar company,” Murphy said. “And they can’t do nothing about it.”

Online, OBN portrays himself as something of a gangster. Videos and photos he’s posted indicate he drives a white Lamborghini and wears expensive watches.

His main marketing vehicle for his services is the messaging app Telegram, where he has run a channel called @teamobn since August 2021. He posts about accounts he says he got banned, unbanned or verified. He touts software he uses to file false reports that allege an account violated Meta’s community guidelines, triggering a takedown.

He describes various strategies he uses to get accounts banned. For example, he says he can get a legitimate account suspended for violating Meta’s rule against impersonation by taking a verified Instagram account and changing its display name, profile photo and content to mirror his target’s. Then he sends Meta a report claiming that the legitimate account is impersonating the verified account.

Jilted lovers, jealous friends and business rivals use his services. OBN wrote that he also targets people for his own amusement, because they insulted a friend or client, or because they offer rival services. After banning an account, he frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying.

Several notable people in the often-intertwined worlds of hip-hop, Miami nightlife, OnlyFans models and online influencers, including Celina Powell and Myron Gaines, have endorsed OBN. Powell is an online influencer who claims to have had sexual relationships with prominent rappers and has amassed more than 3 million followers on Instagram. Gaines co-hosts the “Fresh & Fit” podcast, a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers that bills itself as providing “the TRUTH to Females, Fitness, and Finances.” Gaines, whose legal name is Amrou A. Fudl, was temporarily banned from TikTok for misogynistic comments.

On Oct. 21, 2021, Gaines paused the broadcast to offer a plug. “​Shouts out to our boy Brandon. For y’all that don’t know or follow me on Instagram on @unplugfit, I got my shit banned and then I’m back up now and my boy @obn.here was the one that got it back,” Gaines said, as an image of OBN’s Instagram account flashed on the screen. “So if you’ve got issues with Instagram, you get banned, whatever it is, this is the guy that you want to fucking contact.” Gaines didn’t respond to requests for comment. After ProPublica contacted Gaines, the video of the “Fresh & Fit” episode that featured his OBN shoutout was set to private, removing it from public view.

Those who said they were targeted by OBN include Adam22, the host of the popular hip-hop podcast “No Jumper,” who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, and Tommy Rodriguez, a Florida businessman with 1 million followers. OBN has said that he was responsible for banning Asian Doll, a rapper with 4.2 million followers; she did not respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on all three cases.

OBN often targets women who rely on Instagram to draw people to their pages on OnlyFans, where they charge subscribers to view sexually explicit content.

“This is how I feed myself and my family,” said Danii Banks, an OnlyFans model with close to 8 million Instagram followers. She said she lost $300,000 in income when OBN induced Instagram to take down her account. He extorted thousands of dollars from her to restore her account, but it remained down, she said.

“It’s like someone lighting a fire on your business and just walking away.”

Meta declined to comment on Banks.

Banks lives in the Las Vegas area, as does OBN, according to posts, emails and public records. Banks reported him to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI for defrauding her, but she hasn’t heard back, she said. OBN, meanwhile, appears to have pursued a job with the Las Vegas police while mocking attempts by Meta and law enforcement to investigate him.

Last summer, he posted an email from the LVMPD’s Office of Human Resources that said the recipient, whose name was redacted, had met the requirements to continue the application process for becoming a police cadet. It said a written exam would be held; the date was also redacted.

“Wish me luck boys,” OBN wrote in his Telegram channel.

The next day, he shared a video shot in the LVMPD parking lot. “It went well,” he wrote and added a thumbs-up emoji.

Roughly a month later, OBN joked about an email from Meta telling him that it had complied with a request from an unnamed law enforcement agency for data regarding one of his accounts.

“Bro instagram or meta at this point is beyond cringe lmao,” he wrote on Telegram, using the popular acronym for “laughing my ass off.”

Despite his frequent activity on Telegram and Instagram, and the shoutouts from major podcasts and influencers, OBN’s true identity — and even whether the account is run by one person or more than one — has remained a mystery.

ProPublica’s investigation led to one person who either is OBN or is closely linked to him: 20-year-old Edwin Reyes-Martinez, who lives with his mother in an apartment complex roughly 13 miles north of the Las Vegas strip.

Numerous clues connected Reyes-Martinez to OBN. Victims said OBN told them to send money to a bank account in the name of Edwin Reyes, or via an email address, ermtz030@icloud.com, that included Reyes-Martinez’s initials. That address also matched a partially redacted email, 030@icloud.com, that’s listed in the Las Vegas police letter OBN posted on Telegram.

A similar string of letters and numbers appears in a Twitter username, @ermtz030. That account bears Reyes-Martinez’s name and photo and features videos filmed inside a white Lamborghini. Although the videos don’t show the driver’s face, he is wearing a gold ring that resembles one worn by Reyes-Martinez in photos from his Facebook account. Another Facebook photo showed Reyes-Martinez posing in front of a white Lamborghini similar to the one featured in OBN’s Telegram profile.

Visited at his home in early February, Reyes-Martinez was dressed in a baggy, orange long-sleeve shirt, brown pants and brown slippers. A pair of gold and diamond studs sparkled in his ears. At first, he denied knowing who OBN is or having anything to do with him.

After being told that his own bank account had accepted more than $10,000 in payments intended for OBN in just the past few months, he changed his story. He said that someone named Brandon asked him to funnel money through his bank account to unknown recipients.

“There’s an individual that asked me if I can receive a payment,” he said. “I have no idea what that payment is for. I received them as a favor for the person.”

He pulled out his phone and showed an Instagram account called @madetoomuchmoney that he said belongs to the Brandon who contacted him. He said he didn’t know where the money went or what Brandon’s last name is. “I know a lot of Brandons.”

He said he works full time in a warehouse. “You see my hands? These are hard work hands,” he said, holding them out. “If I was OBN, I wouldn’t be working.”

ProPublica also submitted a request to the Las Vegas police for records related to any application by Reyes-Martinez to the department’s cadet program. The department declined, citing a Nevada law that allows it to withhold personnel records.

After the meeting in his apartment, Reyes-Martinez did not respond to follow-up questions. Meta sent him a cease-and-desist letter on March 17, about two weeks after ProPublica contacted the company for comment on OBN’s activities and on the evidence connecting Reyes-Martinez to OBN. A spokesperson said Meta had banned him from its platforms but declined to share the letter.

Account banning is just one of several lucrative schemes that prey on Instagram, which is uniquely important for celebrities, entrepreneurs, influencers and anyone seeking clout and status. Last year, a ProPublica investigation exposed a million-dollar operation that saw people pay $25,000 or more to fraudulently obtain verified accounts.

The verification badge, a blue tick added next to an account’s name, is applied to accounts that Instagram determines are authentic, unique, complete and notable. Verified accounts can charge more for sponsored posts, are given prominence by Instagram’s algorithms, and are seen as more difficult for people like OBN to take down. The ProPublica story prompted Meta to remove verification badges from hundreds of accounts.

OBN has said that he can take down verified accounts. “If you want someone smoked we talk 4 figures or nothing,” he wrote in his Telegram channel. In a separate post, he offered to create verified accounts for a $15,000 fee.

Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including “​​access to a real person for common account issues.” The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested in new account security and recovery measures, including a tool to help users who’ve been hacked. It’s also giving more users an opportunity to complain to a human agent rather than a bot.

The 1996 federal Communications Decency Act generally exempts platforms from legal liability related to the behavior of their users. However, the Federal Trade Commission has required several online platforms to bolster their security.

“If somebody is able to get into the account, the FTC doesn’t treat that company as a victim. They treat them as part of the problem,” said Eric Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara School of Law.

Meta has been under a consent decree with the FTC since 2012 because of allegations that the company, then known as Facebook, violated its privacy promises to users.

Some OBN victims have tried to hold Meta accountable. In late 2021, Tiara Johnson, a former adult performer who had more than 2.8 million Instagram followers when she lost her account, filed a breach of contract suit against Meta, which is pending in federal court. She said the company wrongly removed her account. Her suit includes screenshots of a conversation with OBN in which he says someone paid him $3,000 to ban her account. She then paid him the same amount to get it back, but he didn’t get it reactivated.

In February, Meta moved to dismiss the case, saying it has no obligation to provide an Instagram account to Johnson. The court is scheduled to consider the motion in June.

OBN can’t deactivate accounts by himself; he needs Meta to do it, either by triggering its automated systems or by getting a worker to take action. He has often boasted of bribing workers at Instagram and Meta, which recently acknowledged firing or disciplining workers who took bribes to access user accounts. ProPublica could not identify any Meta workers who accepted bribes from OBN.

But OBN did appear to have advance knowledge of a cease-and-desist letter sent on behalf of Meta to online marketer Joey Hickson.

Hickson built a business running large social media accounts like @break and @lmao, and he had four Instagram accounts with tens of millions of followers. He said he paid OBN for services such as helping people get an Instagram username they wanted or obtaining verified accounts.

After initially cooperating, OBN stopped delivering, according to Hickson. Then OBN started threatening to take Hickson’s accounts down. Last Sept. 22, OBN taunted Hickson on Instagram. “Enjoy your c&d,” he wrote, referring to the cease-and-desist letter sent by a law firm representing Meta.

Hickson immediately checked his email and saw that he had received just such a letter from Perkins Coie, a law firm that said it was writing on behalf of Meta. The letter said an investigation found that he and his company were “abusing Instagram” by offering account reactivation and verification services and by selling fake engagement such as likes and followers. It was banning Hickson and taking down his accounts.

OBN “knew before I did,” Hickson said.

OBN posted a message in his Telegram channel to celebrate that Hickson’s personal Instagram account, @joey, had been deactivated. He accused Hickson of stealing $20,000 from him and said, “enjoy the c&d my brother.”

OBN then tried to convince Hickson to pay him $15,000 to reverse the ban. He said he could get Meta and its law firm to withdraw the sanction because he was responsible for it. He said another hacker had created several Instagram accounts with fabricated accusations against Hickson and then sent the complaints to a Perkins Coie attorney. Referring to the lawyer as “my people,” he said he’d tell her that the accounts were “falsely made” to frame Hickson.

“Buddy I’m the one who did it who do you think she [the lawyer] gon listen to lmao I bring her clients everyday,” OBN wrote.

OBN asked Hickson to pay him through an intermediary: Dan Folger, a former photographer for rap star Wiz Khalifa who has over 300,000 Instagram followers and a Telegram channel where he sells Instagram services such as account reactivation. OBN has posted screenshots in his Telegram channel that show crypto payments from Folger to OBN. OBN has also shared video security footage, presumably supplied by Folger, of a ProPublica reporter visiting Folger’s Nevada home. In a Telegram chat, Folger denied working with OBN. He did not respond to detailed questions sent via his attorney.

Hickson rejected OBN’s offer, saying he wasn’t aware of anyone who had gotten a cease-and-desist retracted. He denies that he broke Meta’s rules. “I’ve spent a decade of my life building what I built only to have someone come in and tarnish that. I’m just trying to get my accounts back and my life back.”

Meta said Hickson’s accounts were appropriately taken down for violating Instagram’s terms of service. Perkins Coie and the attorney mentioned by OBN did not respond to requests for comment.

Before the bans and the victims, before the white Lambo, OBN was just a teenager with a PlayStation. “We used to just play games online,” Syenrai said in a telephone interview. Syenrai is the internet handle of a young man who was once prominent in the Instagram banning community. He requested that his real name not be used. Syenrai knew OBN as Brandon when they met online around 2018. They have never met face-to-face. He said he believes that Reyes-Martinez is at least partially responsible for the online activities carried out under the OBN handle, but that more than one person may be involved.

Syenrai said that Brandon earned money by selling a how-to guide to scamming. “The guides were easily found online for free, but OBN sold them for $45 a pop,” he said.

Brandon used the OBN moniker specifically for scamming, Syenrai said. Asked what the acronym stands for, Syenrai said he was told it was “only bands” — a reference to the paper band that holds a stack of bills together — followed by the version of the N-word that ends in “a.”

Everything changed for Brandon and Syenrai in the middle of 2020. A mutual friend named Abu “learned how to ban and showed it to me and Brandon,” Syenrai said. Syenrai caught on so well that he earned a measure of fame in 2021 by “memorializing” the account of Instagram head Adam Mosseri. When an account owner dies, Instagram can enable a memorial setting that locks the account and informs viewers that the person is dead. Mosseri’s memorializing only lasted an hour, but it embarrassed the company.

“It was a wild transition for us guys, from playing games to taking down celeb pages,” Syenrai said.

That kind of high-profile takedown is a way for a banner to gain clout, a flexing of skills to showcase Instagram’s vulnerability and make fellow banners jealous — like OBN, who also took credit for memorializing Mosseri.

It was also a quick route to a stern warning.

Syenrai received a cease-and-desist notice from Meta in November 2021. He said he stopped banning and working with OBN.

Kay Jenkins’ Instagram popularity helped her earn between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from sponsorships and OnlyFans subscriptions. But after she moved to Miami from her native Utah in March 2021, both her main Instagram account and her secondary accounts for her real estate and personal coaching businesses were repeatedly suspended. Months later, she learned by chance what had happened. In November 2021, she was a guest on “Fresh & Fit,” along with Celina Powell. Powell, who rose to fame by claiming to have slept with rappers and discussing the alleged affairs on hip-hop podcasts such as “No Jumper,” had recently given a shoutout to OBN.

“I’m telling you right now if you need any Instagram services, you need your account back, whatever the fuck you need, you have to go to my boy @obn.here,” Powell had said in an Instagram video that OBN shared in his channel.

After the broadcast, Powell and Jenkins rode the elevator from the studio up to Jenkins’ apartment. Powell called someone she referred to as Brandon and started talking about banning accounts.

“Who is this guy?” Jenkins asked her. “Can he bring my account back?”

“Yeah, he can bring it back if I tell him to,” Powell said. “Because he’s the one who shut it down.”

Powell explained that she had OBN ban Jenkins. Powell was upset after seeing a video of her then-boyfriend dancing with Jenkins at a Miami club, Jenkins said.

Jenkins hid her anger. “I was so hopeful that like, OK, if she’s the source that brought it down, she’s probably my only hope to fucking get it back,” Jenkins said.

Powell agreed to get OBN to restore Jenkins’ accounts. And soon they were reactivated. On Dec. 5, less than a week after the “Fresh & Fit” appearance, Powell posted another shoutout for OBN.

Still furious at Powell, Jenkins ended their friendship. Her main account promptly went down again.

Jenkins finished 2021 with her main Instagram account suspended and no indication from Meta about if or when it might come back.

“I had the worst Christmas of my life, I contemplated slitting my wrists, I didn’t feel like living anymore,” Jenkins said.

Powell was imprisoned in June 2022 for violating parole on a 2015 conviction for driving a getaway car in a theft. Powell, who was recently released, declined to comment. Around the time of Powell’s re-arrest, Jenkins’ Instagram account was restored. But the reprieve was short-lived. On Sept. 23, OBN messaged Jenkins. He offered to get her account verified for a fee. She declined and told him not to contact her again.

“Dumb ass b!tch,” read a private Instagram message sent to her the next day from an account linked to OBN. “I’m going to ruin you.”

Two days later, Meta suspended Jenkins’ account.

Jenkins decided the only way to protect her account and income was to make peace with OBN. It proved to be an expensive decision.

OBN assured Jenkins that he would be happy to work with her. He told her that he had a senior-level Instagram contact in Europe who could help unban and verify her account. He shared a screenshot of a conversation with the contact but, in an apparent oversight, failed to fully redact the name, according to Jenkins.

Seeing no alternative, Jenkins paid OBN $5,000, receipts show. Her account briefly came back online but was soon taken down by Meta. Then OBN blocked her on Telegram and deleted their conversation, according to Jenkins. She decided she had one more option: go directly to OBN’s high-level connection at Instagram. She found the employee’s Telegram account, which had the same username, photo and bio as his verified Instagram account. She messaged the account to say that she’d been working with OBN but he failed to deliver the services promised.

The response was sympathetic: “We made insane money no clue what went wrong.” They struck an agreement to reactivate and verify Jenkins’ account for $4,000. She sent the money, and her account was unlocked on Nov. 18, but it was suspended again four days later; the contact demanded another $4,000 to fix it. Again, Jenkins sent the money.

On the morning of Nov. 24, she woke up and immediately checked Instagram to see if her account was back. It wasn’t. And she had a new Telegram message from OBN.

“Haha ur talking to my rep such a slut he won’t help you for shit anymore I’ll make sure of that,” OBN wrote.

Jenkins’ account never came back. She hired a lawyer and sent Meta a demand letter for $25,000 in damages for the repeated loss of her main Instagram account. Meta hasn’t replied. In reality, Jenkins was paying OBN all along. In an elaborate scam, he had posed on Telegram as the Meta employee. The cryptocurrency wallet to which Jenkins sent payments matched a wallet that OBN has used for other transactions.

ProPublica also traced the IP address of the server that the alleged Meta employee used to access the internet. It wasn’t in Europe. It was used by a cellphone in Las Vegas.

Meta acknowledged that its employee was impersonated. As a result, the employee and his family have faced threats and harassment for years. The employee reported the account to Telegram. After being contacted by ProPublica, Telegram removed the account, which a spokesperson described as “fraudulent.”

Following Reyes-Martinez’s conversation with a ProPublica reporter in his North Las Vegas apartment, the @madetoomuchmoney Instagram account he said belonged to “Brandon” was deactivated. OBN blocked the reporter from his Twitter account and Telegram channel and announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service.

“I’m done with banning if you mention anything about bans I’ll block you,” OBN wrote to his followers.

But he wanted people to know he was still in business.

“Only doing instagram claims & verification, and C&Ds only for high paying nothing less let’s work .”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis.

The attacker made other unknown actors administrators of the Facebook page, and they deleted hundreds of news and political commentary videos, Shaheen said. They also posted pornographic images and videos of attacks on a religious minority group, sparking fears that Voice News staff may face criminal charges. Distribution of pornography is prohibited under Pakistan’s penal code, and local courts have sentenced people to death for sharing allegedly blasphemous content on Facebook and WhatsApp in the past. Those accused of blasphemy have also faced violence and harassment from right-wing religious groups.

Voice News has appealed to Facebook to correct the issue and are monitoring the page to manually delete offensive posts in the meantime, according to Shaheen.

A second Facebook page operated by the outlet was also seized in November 2022. News videos on that page were also deleted and pornographic content was posted there for several weeks until Voice News staff regained control of the page after appealing to Facebook. The outlet has backup copies of the lost videos, but many are not currently available to the public, Shaheen told CPJ.

Voice News, which is based in the eastern city of Lahore, estimates a combined audience of 5 million followers on broadcast and social media platforms.

In a separate incident in December, unidentified hackers accessed the account the broadcaster uses to manage its website and domain, according to a screenshot of messages from the service provider, which CPJ reviewed. They lost advertising revenue as a result and are republishing content from a backup copy, Shaheen told CPJ.

Unidentified men attacked Shaheen, who has commented critically on Pakistan’s security forces and political instability, in Lahore last July and stole his laptop, but did not take his wallet when he offered it, leading him to believe he was targeted for his journalism. In early 2023, authorities had not held the perpetrators accountable, Shaheen told CPJ.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp.

The move targets "illegal content" produced by people who "fail to correct their political stances" after completing a prison term, according to an opinion article published on the state-run China News Service.

It will likely have a profound impact on political prisoners, who are often prevented from working and placed under ongoing surveillance even after serving their time.

By Jan. 21, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's online content arm had shut down 222 accounts and "cleaned up" thousands of items of content "depicting the prison experience [and] questioning the national judicial system," the report said.

The aim of the clampdown is to block off former prisoners' ability to "attract online traffic" or sell products online, it said, without specifying what kind of sentences such prisoners had served.

Online platforms Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and Tencent had all cooperated in "investigation and reform" of their content, it said.

"All short videos released by the accounts of ex-prisoners were manually reviewed," the report said, adding that 83 keywords relating to release from prison had been blocked, making it hard for live streamers to attract viewers of such content.

Trying to survive

Dissident Xu Wanping, who has served a total of 20 years in prison, said many recently released prisoners have been sharing their experiences, or simply selling stuff online as a way to make a living on their release.

"They're trying to address their basic need to exist following their release from jail, and society should pay more attention to how they are supposed to do that," Xu told RFA. "They should get more help and support."

Stated-backed news site The Paper cited an industry regulator as saying that the authorities are trying to stop people from "flaunting their experiences of crime or prison" online, or transmitting insider information to the public.

Former university lecturer Gu Guoping, who has been repeatedly detained by the Shanghai police, said those who get out of prison shouldn't be deprived of their rights.

"They are normal citizens and should therefore not be deprived of their right to speak," Guo said. "[Legally], a citizen has the right to freedom of expression."

Under surveillance

In practice, this is seldom the case for former political prisoners, who are held under surveillance at a location decided by the authorities, sometimes for years after their release, and frequently prevented from earning a living.

Prominent rights lawyer Tang Jitian was released after more than a year of police detention on Jan. 14, showing up in his birthplace in the northeastern province of Jilin, instead of his home in Beijing, a common practice for recently released political prisoners.

"I'll try to keep doing what I can keep doing, but ... I can't say any more right now," Tang told RFA, saying it was "inconvenient" to speak, a phrase often employed by people targeted for official surveillance.

Tang's friend and fellow rights activist Xiang Li said Tang had been sent back to his parental hometown of Dunhua, Jilin, on the morning of Jan. 14 by the state security police.

"I personally believe that ... the state security police drove him to someplace in Dunhua, and then asked his family to come pick him up," he said. 

Tang's license to practice as a lawyer was revoked in 2010 after he campaigned for direct elections within the state-run Lawyers' Association, and represented practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

His friend Zhao Zhongyuan said his "release" doesn't mean he has his freedom back.

"No, that won't happen, for sure," Zhao said. "Tang Jitian was already being monitored before he lost his freedom ... the authorities have been monitoring him for many years, and they won't let up."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting and Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

Responding to news reports that Twitter had suspended the accounts of at least six U.S.-based journalists who cover the platform,  Ginsberg said: “We are deeply alarmed by Twitter’s seemingly arbitrary suspension of reporters. If Twitter owner Elon Musk truly wants to foster a platform that allows free speech for all, it makes no sense to remove journalists from the platform. If confirmed as retaliation for their work, this would be a serious violation of journalists’ right to report the news without fear of reprisal. Twitter should immediately restore these reporters’ accounts.” 

Ginsberg added that Twitter users often cite access to news and information about current affairs  –  particularly on local issues like road closures, weather warnings, and health crises – as one of their prime reasons for using the platform. “Casting doubt on journalists’ credibility not only creates a hostile environment that could put them in physical danger, it also threatens the public’s right to access important information about events that affect our everyday lives,” she said.  

Those suspended included reporters for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications, according to the same reports.

News of the suspension has generated a global outcry, with Vera Jourova, European Commission vice president, tweeting that the EU’s Digital Services and Media Freedom acts required “respect” of media freedom. “There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” she said.

In a post that asked his followers to adjudicate the duration of the suspension, Musk said on Twitter that the reporters had “doxxed [his] exact location in real-time,” violating the platform’s new rules on posting publicly available data showing the flight path of private jets. A handful of Twitter accounts, including one that tracked the flight patterns of Musk’s aircraft, were shuttered this week. 

Some of the journalists whose accounts were suspended had posted about the new policy, but at least one told The Associated Press that he had not shared location data. 

The development follows the abrupt dissolution on Monday of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group to improve platform safety and address issues like hate speech. CPJ, which was a member of the group, has not received a response to its email asking Twitter for comment on the suspensions.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp.

An estimated 40 accounts were hacked and VND40 billion stolen.

The Department of Cyber ​​Security and High-Tech Crime Prevention (PA05), operating under the Quang Binh Police Department, launched an investigation  after a victim complained on Nov. 18, according to state-controlled media.

The agency is investigating one member of the fraud ring for "using computers, telecommunications networks, and electronic means to appropriate property."

Another is accused of “illegally infiltrating another person's computer network, telecommunications network or electronic means” of communication.

PA05 has investigated suspected bank fraud in with many localities including Ho Chi Minh City, Tien Giang, Tay Ninh, Ben Tre and Thanh Hoa. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, speaks during a news conference following a Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 2, 2022.

Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Esther George, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, speaks virtually during the Jackson Hole economic symposium in Tiskilwa, Illinois, on Aug. 27, 2021.

Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

On June 7, 2021, a slaughterhouse inspector with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported a violation at a Tyson Foods-owned poultry plant in Nashville, Arkansas. The inspector saw a bird on the slaughter line "vigorously flapping" as it headed towards the "scald vat." That wasn't supposed to happen. 

Slaughterhouses are sites of round-the-clock pain, as employees endure punishing working conditions, and as animals go to their deaths en masse: 33 million cows, 128 million pigs, and more than 9 billion chickens were slaughtered for food in 2021 alone.

Poultry slaughter is meant to be a well-choreographed process. The scald vat is a boiling vat of hot water situated at the end of the kill line, designed to defeather chickens after they've already been slaughtered. Strung up by their ankles in metal shackles and moving fast down the conveyor belt, birds are supposed to die by "exsanguination" after passing through the kill machine, which runs automated rotary blades across the animals' throats. Birds are supposed to bleed to death before they enter the scalder for defeathering; and before they bleed to death, they're supposed to be stunned immobile by an electrified water bath even earlier on the line. Electrocution, slaughter, defeathering. In that order. 

But the inspector in Arkansas watched one bird, and then a second, and then "a third and fourth flapping bird" enter the scalder after having missed the knife, and the employee meant to serve as "Back Up Killer" had evidently missed the still-conscious birds, so, against both slaughterhouse protocol and federal law, these birds were boiled alive. 

This inspection report from Arkansas is just one of dozens of firsthand accounts detailing what USDA representatives witnessed last summer at 300 poultry slaughterhouses currently under federal inspection. Available on a USDA-run website, these testimonies chronicle the many legal and illegal abuses chickens endure at slaughter, among them broken bones, suffocation, and the acute distress of being kicked, thrown, or stepped on. The details are, often, grisly: birds whose heads were "engorged with blood," birds whose "skin had been torn off," birds—still living—strewn amongst carcasses and "decapitated heads" on the blood-soaked floor.

Slaughterhouses are sites of round-the-clock pain, as employees endure punishing working conditions, and as animals go to their deaths en masse: 33 million cows, 128 million pigs, and more than 9 billion chickens were slaughtered for food in 2021 alone. What the USDA's slaughter inspections reveal is just how much can go horribly wrong during animal slaughter—and just how little of it is public knowledge. 

When the USDA publicly released its own records of slaughterhouse violations in January of this year, it didn't do so to relieve the suffering of animals. In 2019, the USDA and one of its eight branches—the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)—came under fire in a lawsuit alleging these agencies had violated the Freedom of Information Act, which enshrines "the right of the public to information." According to the plaintiffs—animal advocacy nonprofits Animal Welfare Institute and Farm Sanctuary—the USDA and FSIS had systematically refused to disclose "key records" demonstrating their oversight of the federal laws that protect food safety and animal welfare. The records—reports of violations documented during FSIS inspections at US slaughterhouses—reveal a great deal about the scope of the laws governing the treatment of animals raised for food, and about the grim realities of producing meat at an industrial scale, as seen through the eyes of federal agents whose aim is to uphold a regime dedicated to the safety and quality of food. 

After an attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed, which the court denied, the USDA and FSIS settled in 2021, agreeing to proactively publish FSIS inspection reports for three years. The release of these slaughterhouse violations is a breakthrough, because it's almost impossible to see what happens inside slaughterhouses in the first place.

Ag-gag laws—also known as "farm security" laws—protect operations like farms, feedlots, and processing plants from potential whistleblowers and exposes by making it a criminal offense to take photos or videos at agricultural facilities without the consent of the owner. Industrial farms tend to support ag-gag legislation in order to tamp down on undercover investigations for fear of bad press and further regulation. 

With such strict laws in place, the USDA's disclosure of inspection records is a rare breakthrough. The USDA's records of poultry slaughterhouses are particularly inured to bias because these inspections don't monitor the welfare of birds at slaughter—just the safety and quality of their meat.

What these inspectors observe is dependable. When they describe the chickens "aggressively chucked" onto the conveyer belts, or the chickens "mutilated by the machinery of the automatic cage dumper," or the chickens with "patches of dry, dark yellow skin with missing feathers," they do so for no reason other than to ensure the smooth management of the slaughterhouse's operations. 

Although the inspection records leave much to be desired, something is better than nothing. The USDA has agreed to proactively post its slaughterhouse inspection records for the next three years. Meatpacking plants don't have glass walls—but until 2024, at least, their walls will be a little less opaque.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Ashley Chang.

Punjab Kings tweeted in support of Arshdeep saying, “We are proud of you Arsh”. Responding to this, right wing influencer @MrSinha_ wrote that Punjab Kings were cheering for those responsible for the defeat of the Indian cricket team and questioned whether Khalistanis were running the handle. He later deleted the tweet (Archived link). It is worth noting that that Prime Minister Narendra Modi  follows this account. Apart from this, its list of followers includes many right-wing influencers such as Rahul Roshan, CEO of right-wing propaganda website OpIndia, Vijay Patel, founder of right-wing portal Onlyfact, BJP supporters Ankit Jain and Amit Kumar.

In a now deleted tweet, right wing influencer @delhichatter called Arshdeep a ‘traitor’. (Archived link)

A user named Vishwas posted a tweet asking how Arshdeep survived Operation Blue Star. (Archived link)

A Twitter handle with the display name Shimorekato hurled abuses at Arsheep Singh, calling him a Khalistani and asking him to return to Canada. (Archived link)

Celebrities come out in support of Arshdeep 

Amid all the controversy, several celebrities tweeted in support of Arshdeep. Former Indian cricketer and Rajya Sabha MP Harbhajan Singh wrote in a tweet, “Stop criticizing Arshdeep, no player deliberately drops catches. We are proud of our boys, Pakistan played well. Shame on such people who are humiliating Arshdeep and the Indian team by saying cheap things on this platform.”

Stop criticising young @arshdeepsinghh No one drop the catch purposely..we are proud of our boys .. Pakistan played better.. shame on such people who r putting our own guys down by saying cheap things on this platform bout arsh and team.. Arsh is GOLD

— Harbhajan Turbanator (@harbhajan_singh) September 4, 2022

Indian cricketer Irfan Pathan tweeted and wrote, “Arshdeep has a strong character. Virat Kohli stated that under pressure anyone can make mistakes, and it was a big match. You learn from them so that the next time the opportunity comes, you can look forward to taking such important catches.

Did only Pakistani handles call Arshdeep a ‘Khalistani’?

Citing government sources, CNN News18 editor Pallavi Ghosh wrote, “The series of tweets trashing Arshdeep Singh are being checked and traced. For now, it looks like fake accounts from Pakistan, this should not be amplified.” (Archived link)

Kanchan Gupta, senior advisor, ministry of information and broadcasting, retweeted a thread on how Pakistani handles targeted Arshdeep Singh with a sinister motive and claimed these tweets were being forwarded by Alt News co-founder Mohammad Zubair to sully India’s image. (Archived link)

Thread on how Pakistani handles targeted Arshdeep Singh with a sinister motive, and how these tweets were amplified by @zoo_bear to sully India’s image. https://t.co/rUzbbiJwS2

— Kanchan Gupta (@KanchanGupta) September 5, 2022

Right wing influencer Anshul Saxena posted screenshots of tweets by Pakistani accounts, claiming that Pakistan was running its Khalistani propaganda and calling Arshdeep Khalistani. At the end of the thread, Anshul added that it was clear that Pakistan’s accounts started targeting Arshdeep Singh by calling him Khalistani. But the sad thing is that some people of India also got caught in the trap and trolled Arshdeep in the same way. (Archived link)

8) Whatever I showed you in this thread is just sample

It’s clear that accounts from Pakistan started targeting Arshdeep Singh by calling him Khalistani

Sad part is that some people of India also fell into the trap & trolled Arshdeep in the same way

This is what Pakistan wants

— Anshul Saxena (@AskAnshul) September 4, 2022

The truth behind the handles calling Arshdeep ‘Khalistani’

We first searched for the tweets seen in the viral screenshots, and found that some of these were still visible on Twitter. The pattern of the tweets, retweets, and likes of some of these Twitter accounts indicate that they are Indian. After the screenshot went viral, many locked or deactivated their accounts. However, the archived links of the tweets and the handles sharing them are given below. Below are some of the tweets made by the accounts which appear to be run by Indian users.

Case 1 – Twitter User Shivam (@Shivambiswal)

Twitter user Shivam posted a tweet linking Arshdeep to Khalistan after he missed the catch. (Archived link)

When we examined Shivam’s Twitter profile, we discovered this was an Indian handle which often tweeted in support of Gems of Bollywood, BJP leaders Kapil Mishra, Tajinderpal Singh Bagga, right wing influencer Anshul Saxena and other right wing accounts. It is clear from this that this account belongs to the Indian user. Shivam deactivated his account after the screenshot of the tweet went viral. However, the archived version of Shivam’s profile can be accessed here.

Case 2 – Twitter User Clock Tower (@Clocktower45)

Twitter user Clock Tower also labelled Arshdeep a Khalistani when he dropped the catch. (Archived link)

When we searched the Twitter profile of Clock Tower, we found that this user had wished the president of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha Mumbai Tajinder Tiwana on his birthday. Along with this, the user had tweeted about celebrations of a Hindu festival when the Eknath Shinde government was formed in Maharashtra. Replying to Harbhajan Singh’s take on Arshdeep, this user had written that they had a right to criticize him since he was an Indian player. Apart from this, the tweet posted on August 29 about Pakistan’s victory clearly indicates that this is an Indian account. (Archived link)

Case 3 – Twitter User Pradeep (@MahakalMessi)

Twitter user Pradeep had abused Arshdeep in a tweet after missing the catch, calling him Khalistani. (Archived link)

We examined Pradeep’s Twitter account and found that this user had also written that Indian cricketer Rishabh Pant should not be allowed to play in T20 matches. Apart from this, there are many tweets on this user’s profile in support of Dhoni, Kohli, and the Indian cricket team. On February 5, 2021, this user had talked about using a Jio SIM card while tweeting, which confirms that they are from India. An archived version of Pradeep’s profile is available here.

Case 4 – Twitter User Lakshman (@Rebel_notout)

Twitter user Lakshman posted a tweet that read ‘Khalistani’ at 11:05 PM, right after Arshdeep missed the catch. (Archived link)

After examining Lakshman’s tweets, we found that he had made several tweets related to Indian politics in the past as well. One of these stated that peace would be established in Kashmir only when members of a single religious community, i.e. the Hindus, would be living there. The archived version of Lakshman’s profile can be found here.

Case 5 – Twitter User Rishabh Upadhyay (@oyerishabhai)

Twitter user Rishabh Upadhyay blamed India’s defeat on the Khalistani community. (Archived link)

When we checked Rishabh’s Twitter account, we found that this user had retweeted posts made by several right-wing influencers. In fact, the user had earlier posted several tweets similar to the one in question. After Nupur Sharma’s suspension by the BJP, Rishabh tweeted in her support and opposed the BJP in the same tweet. This makes it evident that the handle belongs to an Indian user. The archived version of Rishabh’s profile can be found here.

You can find archived versions of many other such accounts here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). They are listed here in chronological order (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Based on old tweets posted by these handles, it is evident they are Indian handles. 

Arshdeep dropped the catch around 11:05 PM. Using epoch time on Twitter, we checked the tweets containing the keywords ‘Khalistan’ and ‘Khalistani’ posted between 11:05 PM and 11:10 PM Indian Starndard Time, and we observed a certain pattern. Within this timeframe, most of the accounts who used the word ‘Khalistani‘ seem to be Indian. At the same time, most of the accounts using the word ‘Khalistan‘ appeared to be Pakistani, among them was Pakistani journalist Wajahat Saeed Khan. This tweet was also posted in the same timeframe. After the catch was dropped, Pakistani accounts were mocking Arshdeep by linking him to Khalistan, while Indian accounts were abusing Arshdeep by calling him a ‘Khalistani’ and using other cusswords. We have hyperlinked the archived search results of both the keywords (Khalistan and Khalistani) above. Both archives contain tweets made immediately after the catch. Readers can scroll down after clicking on the archive link to see all the tweets made at that time.

Some of the tweets containing the keyword ‘Khalistani’ along with timestamps are given in the collage below, which you can also access by clicking here.

This link contains a list of tweets made by Indian and Pakistani accounts linking to Khalistan. The file also contains archived links of the tweets made by Indian accounts.

All in all, several right-wing influencers shared only the tweets made by Pakistani accounts, claiming that the tweets criticizing Arshdeep as ‘Khalistani’ after he dropped the catch were part of Pakistani propaganda. When we examined the tweets made immediately after the catch was dropped, Alt News found that these tweets were made by both Indian and Pakistani accounts within the same 11.05PM to 11.10PM (IST) timeframe. Pakistani accounts ridiculed Arshdeep for dropping the catch while Indian accounts wrote abuses along with calling Arshdeep Khalistani. 

The post Fact-check: Were Twitter accounts calling Arshdeep Singh ‘Khalistani’ all from Pakistan? appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Mohammed Zubair.

The post The West Can’t Stop Pillaging Other Countries’ Bank Accounts appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Against this backdrop, more than 50 handles on Twitter are claiming to be of Droupadi Murmu. However, it is worth noting that none of these accounts are verified. Twitter often verifies accounts belonging to prominent individuals, as indicated by the blue ticks visible on the display name. In this article, we will be investigating some of the handles claiming to be that of Murmu’s. 

1. ‘@draupadimurmupr’

We noticed that this account was created in June 2022. As per the bio, this handle claims to be the official account of ‘President Draupadi Murmu’. It currently has a follower count of close to 50,000. (Archived link)

On July 21, the handle shared a Twitter thread thanking ministers, MLAs and MPs for their support in her election to the post of President. (Archived link)

Several leaders including Prime Minister Modi, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu shared congratulatory messages to Murmu for being elected as the President. However, it is worth noting that these leaders did not tag any of the handles claiming to be Droupadi Murmu’s. Yet, this account quote-tweeted all of the posts adding a note of thanks, as if it belonged to the President herself. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4)

On the other hand, Vineet Kumar founder of Cyberbeace Foundation and the official handle of Jamia Millia Islamia University tagged the handle ‘@draupadimurmupr’ while issuing their congratulatory wishes to Droupadi Murmu on becoming the President.

Taking a closer look at this account, we noticed several spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in many places. It is highly unlikely that tweets with such glaring errors would be posted by an official handle. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)

2. ‘@dwivedi_ji12’

This account was created in January 2013. It has over 51,000 followers. (Archived link)

In a July 21 tweet, the user behind this account thanked supporters for following her journey from a small village to the President’s House. Once again, the post read as though this was the official handle of Droupadi Murmu. (Archived link)

The user also replied to a few tweets while posing themselves as Droupadi Murmu. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)

We took a closer look at the timeline of this account, and came across a number of odd tweets and replies it had posted earlier. This confirmed that this could not have been the official handle of Droupadi Murmu. Moreover, an earlier username read ‘@dwivedi_ji12’, suggesting that the account belongs to one Dwivedi and not the President.

3. ‘@DraupadiMurmu12’

The ‘@DraupadiMurmu12’ handle was created in April 2018. Its bio mentions ‘President of India Draupadi Murmu’. It also reads ‘Proud to be a Sanatani Hindu’. This account has amassed over 33,000 followers. (Archived link)

On July 21, this account tweeted photos of Droupadi Murmu with her daughter and granddaughter. (Archived link)

Meri beti or naatin pic.twitter.com/voRTGIvxdW

— Draupadi Murmu (@DraupadiMurmu12) July 21, 2022

On June 24, ‘@DraupadiMurmu12’ tweeted a picture of Yashwant Sinha and Droupadi Murmu, asking which of the two would win the election. Replying to this tweet, a user with the handle ‘@draupadimurmum’ called it a fake account. To which, this account replied alleging that the other user’s account was not official either. In other words, the individual behind ‘@DraupadiMurmu12′ admitted on their own that they were running a fake account.

It is noteworthy that Droupadi Murmu was congratulated by a number of dignitaries and senior leaders on Twitter when she became the President. This includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well. However, he did not tag any account in his message. On the contrary, he is known to tag the handles of any prominent people mentioned in his tweets. (Link 1, Link 2)

Smt. Droupadi Murmu Ji has devoted her life to serving society and empowering the poor, downtrodden as well as the marginalised. She has rich administrative experience and had an outstanding gubernatorial tenure. I am confident she will be a great President of our nation.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2022

Moreover, all the accounts claiming to be that of Droupadi Murmu have spelt her name wrong. The official Twitter handle of the President of India spells her name as “Droupadi” and not “Draupadi” as written by these fake accounts.

Speaking to Aaj Tak, Droupadi Murmu’s PA Suraj Kumar confirmed that Droupadi Murmu does not have a personal account on Twitter as of yet.

To sum it up, our investigation revealed that all the Twitter accounts posing as the newly elected President Droupadi Murmu are fake.

The post Multiple fake Twitter accounts appear in President Droupadi Murmu’s name appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kinjal.

The Indonesian Independent Journalist Alliance (AJI) has condemned the hacking and disinformation attacks against the group’s general chairperson Sasmito Madrim as a serious threat to media freedom.

In a written release, the AJI stated that the incident was a “serious threat to press freedom and the freedom of expression”.

“This practice is a form of attack against activists and the AJI as an organisation which has struggled for freedom of expression and press freedom,” the group stated.

• READ MORE: Other Indonesian media freedom reports

“The hacking and disinformation attack against AJI chairperson Sasmito Madrim is an attempt to terrorise activists who struggle for freedom of expression and democracy”, the group said.

The AJI stated that the hacking attack began on February 23 and targeted Madrim’s personal WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook accounts as well as his personal mobile phone number.

All of the posted content on his Instagram account was deleted then the hacker uploaded Madrim’s private mobile number.

Madrim’s mobile number was subsequently unable to receive phone calls or SMS messages.

Pornographic picture hack
On his Facebook account, Madrim’s profile photograph was replaced with a pornographic picture.

On February 24, the AJI monitored a disinformation attack which included Madrim’s name and photograph on social media.

The narrative being disseminated was that Madrim supported the government’s 2020 banning of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), supports the government’s construction of the Bener Dam in Purworejo regency and has asked the police to arrest Haris Azhar and Fatia Maulidiyanti, two activists who were criminalised by Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan.

The AJI Indonesia asserts that these messages are false and such views have never been expressed by Madrim.

“These three [pieces of] disinformation are clearly an attempt to play AJI Indonesia off against other civil society organisations, including to pit AJI against the residents of Wadas [Village] which is currently fighting against the exploitation of natural restores in its village,” wrote AJI.

AJI Indonesia is asking the public not to believe the narrative of disinformation spreading on social media and to support them in fighting for press freedom, the right to freedom of expression, association, opinion and the right to information.

Translated from the Kompas.com report by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Kecam Peretasan Terhadap Ketumnya, AJI: Ancaman Serius Bagi Kebebasan Pers“.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.