Category: Lifestyle

When Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) started fighting in November 2020, a second front quickly opened online, where both sides seek to control the narrative.

Social media became a battleground, with the Ethiopian government and its supporters on one side and Tigrayan activists and supporters on the other. Each side tried to present its version of events to English-speaking audiences, according to The Media Manipulation Casebook. Created by the Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change project at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Casebook group has been researching Tigray-related information campaigns since the conflict began.

The Tigrayan side focused largely on raising awareness of the conflict, while supporters of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration in Addis Ababa sought to disprove its opponent’s claims. And while both made misleading or sometimes false claims, the study found that official communications and pro-government users’ posts often sought to discredit any content contradicting the federal government’s narrative as disinformation.

“It is a complex case that interacts with the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa, historical trauma, activism, hate speech, misinformation, platform manipulation, and propaganda, all in the midst of an ongoing civil conflict,” according to research by The Media Manipulation Casebook.

At the start of the conflict, Tigrayan activists took to Twitter, and the nonprofit advocacy group Stand With Tigray soon emerged. At the same time, pro-government groups such as Ethiopia State of Emergency Fact Check tried to counter what they saw as TPLF disinformation, often seeking to discredit foreign and local coverage.

Operating exclusively on Twitter and Facebook, the group, which later rebranded as Ethiopia Current Issues Fact Check (ECIFC), stood out with official-sounding directives and statements that often condemned international coverage of the war.

Some analysts whom VOA spoke with believe the federal government launched the group. Authorities deny the claim, and government supporters see ECIFC as a necessary response to what they view as biased media coverage.

“Coverage had been hijacked by the operatives affiliated with the TPLF who are residing in different parts of the Western world,” Dina Mufti, a spokesperson for Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told VOA. “And these operatives were actually the ones who are running these misinformation and disinformation campaigns. And they are not helping the international community to see the reality on the ground.”

Deacon Yoseph Tafari, chair of the Ethiopian American Civic Council, an association that describes itself as an advocate for human rights and the rule of law in Ethiopia, agreed.

“Something had to be done,” he told VOA, referring to what he sees as biased reporting. “Under these circumstances, the government has no other ways or tools at its disposal.”

Hiring the experts

The push to sway opinions online complemented more traditional efforts over the past year, as various parties engaged lobbyists to influence U.S. government policy and public opinion.

Among recent contracts, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Peace spent $270,000 for a six-month contract with the international public policy and law firm Holland & Knight, according to a foreign lobbying report.

The Colorado-based Ethiopian American Civic Council hired three public affairs professionals “to help push back against bipartisan criticism of the government’s response to violence in Tigray.”

And the Tigray Center for Information and Communication hired a Washington-based policy and advisory company, Von Batten-Montague-York, to press “for the removal of all Eritrean military personnel and militia from Tigray” and to ensure access to humanitarian aid delivery in Tigray, news website Politico reported. After the passage of a Senate bill, the firm stopped lobbying on the center’s behalf, according to reports.

The focus on influencing opinion extends to foreign media, with the Ethiopian federal government arguing that the TPLF is dominating or distorting international coverage.

But Ethiopian journalists and analysts say what the federal government considers disinformation is legitimate coverage critical of the government or sympathetic to the Tigrayan cause.

The Abiy administration was quick to throw its support behind the ECIFC’s calling out of what it sees as biased coverage. When ECIFC launched on social media, the prime minister’s spokesperson Billene Seyoum sent an email and a tweet directing media to the group’s social media accounts.”

Get the latest and fact-based information on the State of Emergency and Rule of Law Operations being undertaken in Tigray Region by the FDRE Federal Government,” Billene tweeted.

CIFC has charged that the media are being used to “peddle exaggerated and uncorroborated allegations,” giving space to “false allegations being lodged by TPLF operatives” and misrepresenting official statements.

The latter accusation, in a statement posted Aug. 11 on Twitter, cited reporting by U.S.-based outlets including Bloomberg and the The Washington Post.

“Most of the headlines and the content of the stories continue to deny through silence and turn a blind eye to the role a terrorist organization TPLF is playing in wreaking havoc in the stability of the country,” the statement read.

Local and foreign journalists who cover Ethiopia told VOA the statements show how deeply the Ethiopian government cares about the international coverage.

“It became a war about the narrative,” Addis Standard founder and Editor-in-Chief Tsedale Lemma told VOA. “They still are concerned about the narrative more than the actual effect of the war.”

Reports and statements by the United Nations and other international bodies also appear to support reporting that has been criticized by the government and ECIFC.

VOA made multiple interview requests to ECIFC through its social media pages but received no response.

On its Facebook page, ECFIC lists itself as a government website. But the same detail does not appear on Twitter. Scanning the group’s public information, VOA could not determine who works for the group or what its official mandate is.

Foreign Affairs spokesperson Dina told VOA that the fact check group is not affiliated with the government, however.

“The group is independent. They’re acting by themselves,” Dina said. “I know that they’re doing a fantastic job.”

“They give correct information — proper information — from Ethiopia,” he continued. “I’m not interested in commenting on that group.”

Disguised as a fact check

Some say ECIFC’s work illustrates a broader phenomenon in which a “fact check” itself disseminates disinformation.

Aly Verjee, a senior adviser with the United States Institute of Peace, said the group’s “co-opting of fact-checking language is very, very deliberate and very important.”

“There are people who aren’t going to trust anything that comes from a government spokesperson. But if they see ‘fact check’ associated with it, then maybe that brings an additional appearance of it being credible information,” Verjee said. “It potentially devalues the idea that there is objective reporting.”

Ethiopian journalist Tsedale said that despite the name, the group’s intention has always been clear: pushing the federal government narrative. “From the very beginning, it was not about fact-checking as it was about countering information that the government sees as not to its interests. It barely did any fact-checking.”

VOA did not identify any self-titled fact-checking accounts among those supporting the Tigrayan side.

Stand With Tigray is one of the most prominent pro-Tigrayan groups. It has more than 36,000 followers on Twitter and 14,478 followers on Facebook. The group runs Twitter campaigns calling on the international community to stop humanitarian crises, and it draws attention to what it sees as atrocities in the region.

CIFC, in comparison, has more than 84,000 followers on Twitter and 111,000 followers on Facebook.

The pro-government group appears to have a wide audience, said Claire Wilmot, who co-wrote The Media Manipulation Casebook report Dueling Information Campaigns: The War Over the Narrative in Tigray.

Wilmot said everyone is a target — especially foreign journalists and foreigners in general, as well as Ethiopians in Ethiopia and members of the diaspora.

“The fact check account draws its power from the preexisting narrative that the TPLF is financing a massive disinformation campaign online, which has not been substantiated by any evidence. It uses that disinformation narrative to undermine any and all critical reporting that shows the government in a negative light,” Wilmot told VOA.

“The impact that that will have on information health in Ethiopia, on the ability for independent journalists to challenge government narratives — that’s a big question.”

Source: Voice of America

The Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou returns to Burkina Faso this weekend after being canceled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One Burkinabe director, who has made a film documenting a nursery for the infants of sex workers, talks about the importance of telling African stories through cinema.

Moumouni Sanou is a documentary film director from Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second largest city.

In 2019, he made a film, which is being screened at The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, or FESPACO.

Night Nursery follows the story of an older woman who runs a nighttime home for sex workers’ children in Bobo Dioulasso.

Sanou said he wants Night Nursery to humanize sex workers.

Sanou said the idea was to show a different side to sex workers, which is very rarely seen. In Burkina Faso and in the rest of Africa this profession is frowned upon, he said. “But it is also the oldest profession in the world. When we see these girls, people say they are bad people because they are sex workers,” he adds.

FESPACO has been running since 1969 and this year will feature films from around 30 African countries in its official selection. Cinema professionals and cinephiles travel from all over Africa and beyond to attend.

“FESPACO is one of the biggest African film festivals, and for me to be selected and represent Burkina Faso in the documentary film section will mean this film will be seen by the whole world, not just by Africans,” Sanou said.

Ardiouma Soma, the director of FESPACO, says that this year, the event will also host the African International Film & TV Market — known as MICA — for the first time.

Soma said, because this year the MICA will be held at FESPACO they have invited distributors, whose names he prefers not to mention, to Ouagadougou. He said the market will allow them to find new projects that are in post-production and also films that are already finished but not scheduled for FESPACO, so that they can buy them for their own platforms.

Last year, FESPACO, which usually happens every two years, was cancelled due to COVID-19. Burkina Faso is also in the middle of a conflict with terrorist groups linked to Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Burkina Faso’s culture minister, Élise Foniyama Ilboudo Thiombiano, said it is important the festival goes on.

She said it’s a challenge for Burkinabè to continue to be able to keep the festival going every two years. But it is through cinema we can see the vision of Africans and the people who live on this continent, she adds. She points out that her predecessors all made sure FESPACO remained a focal point for Africa and she intends to do the same.

As for Sanou, he is hoping Night Nursery could receive an award, and the recognition it needs to win a wide audience.

Source: Voice of America

Facebook was used to spread disinformation about the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar, and in 2018 the company began to delete posts, accounts and other content it determined were part of a campaign to incite violence.

That deleted but stored data is at issue in a case in the United States over whether Facebook should release the information as part of a claim in international court.

Facebook this week objected to part of a U.S. magistrate judge’s order that could have an impact on how much data internet companies must turn over to investigators examining the role social media played in a variety of international incidents, from the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to the 2021 Capitol riot in Washington.

The judge ruled last month that Facebook had to give information about these deleted accounts to Gambia, the West African nation, which is pursuing a case in the International Court of Justice against Myanmar, seeking to hold the Asian nation responsible for the crime of genocide against the Rohingya.

But in its filing Wednesday, Facebook said the judge’s order “creates grave human rights concerns of its own, leaving internet users’ private content unprotected and thereby susceptible to disclosure — at a provider’s whim — to private litigants, foreign governments, law enforcement, or anyone else.”

The company said it was not challenging the order when it comes to public information from the accounts, groups and pages it has preserved. It objects to providing “non-public information.” If the order is allowed to stand, it would “impair critical privacy and freedom of expression rights for internet users — not just Facebook users — worldwide, including Americans,” the company said.

Facebook has argued that providing the deleted posts is in violation of U.S. privacy, citing the Stored Communications Act, the 35-year-old law that established privacy protections in electronic communication.

Deleted content protected?

In his September decision, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said that once content is deleted from an online service, it is no longer protected.

Paul Reichler, a lawyer for Gambia, told VOA that Facebook’s concern about privacy is misplaced.

“Would Hitler have privacy rights that should be protected?” Reichler said in an interview with VOA. “The generals in Myanmar ordered the destruction of a race of people. Should Facebook’s business interests in holding itself out as protecting the privacy rights of these Hitlers prevail over the pursuit of justice?”

But Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said on Twitter that the judge’s ruling erred and that the implication of the ruling is that “if a provider moderates contents, all private messages and emails deleted can be freely disclosed and are no longer private.”

The 2017 military crackdown on the Rohingya resulted in more than 700,000 people fleeing their homes to escape mass killings and rapes, a crisis that the United States has called “ethnic cleansing.”

‘Coordinated inauthentic behavior’

Human rights advocates say Facebook had been used for years by Myanmar officials to set the stage for the crimes against the Rohingya.

Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who testified about the company in Congress last week, said Facebook’s focus on keeping users engaged on its site contributed to “literally fanning ethnic violence” in countries.

In 2018, Facebook deleted and banned accounts of key individuals, including the commander in chief of Myanmar’s armed forces and the military’s television network, as well as 438 pages, 17 groups and 160 Facebook and Instagram accounts — what the company called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company estimated 12 million people in Myanmar, a nation of 54 million, followed these accounts.

Facebook commissioned an independent human rights study of its role that concluded that prior to 2018, it indeed failed to prevent its service “from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”

Facebook kept the data on what it deleted for its own forensic analysis, the company told the court.

The case comes at a time when law enforcement and governments worldwide increasingly seek information from technology companies about the vast amount of data they collect on users.

Companies have long cited privacy concerns to protect themselves, said Ari Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. What’s new is the vast quantity of data that companies now collect, a treasure trove for investigators, law enforcement and government.

“Private companies have untold amounts of data based on the commodification of what we do,” Waldman said.

Privacy rights should always be balanced with other laws and concerns, such as the pursuit of justice, he added.

Facebook working with the IIMM

In August 2020, Facebook confirmed that it was working with the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), a United Nations-backed group that is investigating Myanmar. The U.N. Human Rights Council established the IIMM, or “Myanmar Mechanism,” in September 2018 to collect evidence of the country’s most serious international crimes.

Recently, IIMM told VOA it has been meeting regularly with Facebook employees to gain access to information on the social media network related to its ongoing investigations in the country.

A spokesperson for IIMM told VOA’s Burmese Service that Facebook “has agreed to voluntarily provide some, but not all, of the material the Mechanism has requested.”

IIMM head Nicholas Koumjian wrote to VOA that the group is seeking material from Facebook “that we believe is relevant to proving criminal responsibility for serious international crimes committed in Myanmar that fall within our mandate.”

Facebook told VOA in an email it is cooperating with the U.N. Myanmar investigators.

“We’ve committed to disclose relevant information to authorities, and over the past year we’ve made voluntary, lawful disclosures to the IIMM and will continue to do so as the case against Myanmar proceeds,” the spokesperson wrote. The company has made what it calls “12 lawful data disclosures” to the IIMM but didn’t provide details.

Human rights activists are frustrated that Facebook is not doing more to crack down on bad actors who are spreading hate and disinformation on the site.

“Look, I think there are many people at Facebook who want to do the right thing here, and they are working pretty hard,” said Phil Robertson, who covers Asia for Human Rights Watch. “But the reality is, they still need to escalate their efforts. I think that Facebook is more aware of the problems, but it’s also in part because so many people are telling them that they need to do better.”

Matthew Smith of the human rights organization Fortify Rights, which closely tracked the ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar, said the company’s business success indicates it could do a better job of identifying harmful content.

“Given the company’s own business model of having this massive capacity to deal with massive amounts of data in a coherent and productive way, it stands to reason that the company would absolutely be able to understand and sift through the data points that could be actionable,” Smith said.

Gambia has until later this month to respond to Facebook’s objections.

Source: Voice of America

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his body of work detailing the refugee experience and how colonialism shaped African culture.

At a news conference at the Swedish Academy’s headquarters in Stockholm, Permanent Secretary Mats Helm said Gurnah received the award for “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Gurnah, born in 1948 and raised on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, arrived in England as a refugee himself in the late 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories.

In its statement, the academy said, “In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books.” The statement said that quality is as evident in his latest novel, 2020’s “Afterlives,” which he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.

The academy went on to say Gurnah’s writing is “striking” for its dedication to truth and “his aversion to simplification. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

Gurnah will receive a $1.1 million cash prize, but for writers, the prize also adds prestige and publicity by exposing their work to much wider audience.

The Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were awarded earlier this week, with the Peace Prize to be awarded Friday, and economics on Monday.

The awards will all be formally presented in December. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the academy announced this year’s ceremony will be a mixture of digital and physical events. Laureates will receive their Nobel Prize medals and diplomas in their home countries.

Source: Voice of America

Burkina Faso has been making headlines for an Islamist insurgency that has created one of the world’s fastest growing humanitarian crises. But one man is showcasing what the country has to offer beyond conflict with a group he created called “Burkina Faso est Chic” (Burkina Faso is Chic).

Since conflict began six years ago, tourists in Burkina Faso have become a rare sight. The U.S. State Department advises against all travel to the country due to the risk of terrorism, kidnapping and crime.

Ben Nombre, a local web developer, is doing what he can to turn the tide on the country’s image and showcase the good the country has to offer.

“Burkina Faso est Chic” was an idea he came up with in 2019, says Nombre. When he started to notice the number of [terrorist] attacks he saw that Burkina Faso’s image was being tarnished. He points out that for a long time, Burkina Faso was a country where there were a lot of tourists coming in, before many of them were lost in recent years.

“Burkina Faso est Chic’s” Facebook page has attracted almost 24,000 followers. It posts regularly, highlighting a range of topics from lively nightspots to nature and wildlife.

The West African country has a rich equestrian heritage, but one local business that had catered to tourists wishing to ride horses is struggling, says the owner, Siaka Gnanou.

“It’s been affected a lot, it’s been affected a lot since 2016. It’s like, you see, at one time in such moments here it was full of people but since the terrorism it’s affected a lot,” Gnanou said.

The government says that as international tourist numbers have dropped, they are looking at aiding businesses in the tourism industry.

Élise Foniyama Ilboudo Thiombiano, Burkina Faso’s minister of culture, arts and tourism, says “we had a lot of money coming in from tourism, but we saw a considerable drop of more than 28% of that income. So there was a negative impact, at least at the beginning.” Now, she says, it is necessary to develop domestic tourism instead of foreign tourism.

Phillipe Yameogo, the manager of Squash Time, a recently opened club, which offers visitors the chance to play squash before drinks and dancing, says that when Nombre made a post about the club on “Burkina Faso est Chic,” it transformed their business.

He says it boosted their business to the point where they were forced to turn people away on the weekends. They are now in the process of extending the building to accommodate more people because they were so overwhelmed. “I really take my hat off to Mr. Ben,” says Yameogo.

Even in the midst of conflict, some aspects of Burkina Faso still thrive.

Source: Voice of America