It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, June 05, 2023
On World Environment Day: Al Mezan Warns of Critical Environmental Situation in Gaza Strip
T.Sh | DOP -
The Mezan Center for Human Rights June 5, 2023, has issued a warning about the deteriorating environmental conditions in the Gaza Strip, which has been deprived of clean and healthy environmental components due to the 16-year-long Israeli blockade imposed on the strip.
The Mezan Center called on the international community to take effective measures to end the Israeli blockade on Gaza, ensure the passage of materials necessary for the maintenance and development of water and sanitation facilities, and put an end to the Israeli violations, which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Monday 5 June 2023 marks World Environment Day. It is an important occasion on which to assert the importance of respect for all peoples’ environmental rights.
However, the commemoration coincides with the ongoing destruction of environmental components in the Gaza Strip by Israeli occupation forces through their military attacks and systematic violations, as well as the suffocating blockade imposed for the 16th consecutive year.
The dire environmental situation in Gaza has severe consequences on the health and well-being of the population, exacerbating an already challenging humanitarian crisis.
Efforts to address these environmental challenges in Gaza require international support and collaboration.
It is crucial for the international community to exert pressure on all relevant parties to lift the blockade, provide necessary resources, and hold the Israeli occupation accountable.
New Research Shows Nearly One in Four Scottish Children in Poverty
2023-June-5 15:32
TEHRAN (FNA)- Nearly one in four children in Scotland are living in poverty, according to new research, as campaigners call for action on “unacceptably high” rates.
A total of 101 organisations, under the End Child Poverty Coalition, say all levels of government in the UK most act on the findings, STV reported.
Despite Scottish Government targets, just four local authority areas in Scotland had child poverty rates below 18% in 2021/22, according to research by Loughborough University.
The government’s aims to have all areas under this target by 2023/24, and under 10% by 2030.
Glasgow City, North Ayrshire and Clackmannanshire had the highest child poverty rates, with 32%, 29% and 28.3% respectively.
East Renfrewshire had the lowest estimated rate of 14.4%, followed by East Dunbartonshire, 14.9%, the Shetland Islands 15.4% and Aberdeenshire 16%.
The statistics were calculated based on the number of children who live in a household with a median income below 60% after housing costs are removed.
Child poverty rates across Scotland suggest nearly one in four children (24%) are in poverty, compared to 29% across the UK.
John Dickie, director of the Child Poverty Action Group, made a number of recommendations to national and local governments on behalf of the End Child Poverty coalition.
The recommendations include urging the UK Government to scrap the two-child benefit limit – where families with additional children born after April 2017 cannot access further financial aid, while the Scottish Government should do more to mitigate the policy.
The roll-out of the Scottish Child Payment of £25 for eligible children under 16 was praised by campaigners, however they urge ministers to increase its value.
Dickie said, “These latest statistics are a stark reminder that child poverty remains unacceptably high across the UK, including in every local authority area of Scotland."
“It’s now absolutely vital that the UK Government scraps the poverty creating policies like the two-child limit,” he added.
He added, “Here in Scotland, the Scottish Child Payment is already making a big difference to struggling families, but nearly one in four children still face this deep injustice and further effort is now needed to ensure Scotland’s upcoming child poverty targets are met."
“The First Minister has committed to use devolved powers to the ‘absolute maximum effect’, so his Government must now do the right thing and go further to both increase the value of the Scottish Child Payment and put in place additional payments for families affected by the two-child limit,” he said.
He also called for local governments in Scotland to ‘double down’ on child poverty action plans by putting low income families at the centre of decision-making.
The UK Government said two million fewer people, including 400,000 children, were in absolute poverty than in 2009/10.
A spokesperson said, “We are providing a £94bln package of immediate cost-of-living support worth around £3,300 per household."
“But in the long-term, the best route out of poverty is through employment, which is why we are boosting our childcare offers to help more parents to re-enter and progress in work," the spokesperson added.
“The two-child policy asks families on benefits to make the same financial decisions as families supporting themselves solely through work, and there continues to be careful exemptions and safeguards in place within the policy to protect people in the most vulnerable circumstances,” the spokesperson said.
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Government said, “Tackling poverty and protecting people from harm is one of three critical missions for this government."
“This year and last we have allocated almost £3bln to support policies to tackle poverty and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis," she said, adding, “We have continually urged the UK Government to also take urgent action and match our ambitions to tackle poverty."
“We have a range of actions in our Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan and our five family payments could be worth over £10,000 by the time an eligible child turns six – over £8,000 more than families in England and Wales," she said, adding, “This includes the Scottish Child Payment which 303,000 children are now benefitting from and is projected to lift 50,000 children out of poverty this year.
“In addition, we’re making £84mln available to protect people from the damaging impact of UK Government welfare cuts including the bedroom tax and benefit cap, and have taken action on rent," the spokeswoman said.
“We are taking action within limited powers and fixed budget but it is only with the powers of an independent nation that we can use all the levers other governments have to tackle poverty and inequalities,” she added.
Plans for first universal basic income trial in England
If scheme secures funding, participants would receive £1,600 per month and be monitored for two years
HARRIET MARSDEN 5 JUN 2023 Supporters say UBI would simplify the welfare system and reduce poverty Longtown Media/Alamy Stock Photo
Thirty people will receive £1,600 per month if England’s first universal basic income trial gets the go-ahead.
Researchers from the independent think tank Autonomy are seeking funding for a two-year pilot programme, said BBC News, “to see how it would change the lives of the group”.
The trial, supported by Northumbria University and the Big Local charity initiative, would select 30 participants “at random from a pool of volunteers” in Jarrow, South Tyneside, and East Finchley in north London, said The Independent, with 20% of places reserved for people with disabilities.
Each person in the group would receive £1,600 a month “without any conditions, while researchers monitor what effects the cash has on their lives”, reported the Daily Mail. A control group would also be monitored, without being paid.
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The scheme would cost about £1.6 million, with £1.15 million for the payments and about £500,000 for evaluation, admin and support.
Critics of universal basic income (UBI) say it would divert resources from public services without alleviating poverty, while supporters say it would simplify the existing welfare system.
“All the evidence shows that [a UBI] would directly alleviate poverty and boost millions of people’s wellbeing,” Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, told BBC News. “The potential benefits are just too large to ignore.”
He told The Guardian that “we want to see what effect this unconditional lump sum has on people’s men
The scheme would be the first of its kind in England, but similar pilots are underway in the US and elsewhere. Last year, the Welsh government launched a £20 million two-year trial offering £1,600 a month before tax to 500 young care leavers.
In 2020, calls from more than 170 MPs and peers for a basic income during the pandemic were rejected by the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
Finance Squeeze for More Than 100,000 Households as Lenders Raise Mortgage Rates While Inflation Continues to Grip UK
2023-June-5
TEHRAN (FNA)- Tens of thousands of Britons face a mortgage nightmare this month as their fixed deals end at a time when rates are rising and product availability is falling.
Data from the Financial Conduct Authority has revealed 116,000 households are finishing their fixed-rate deals in June and face the prospect of rising repayments, This Is Money reported.
Continuing turbulence saw Santander unusually make changes over the weekend, while TSB withdrew all its ten-year fixes on Friday with just 150 minutes' notice.
Further hikes are expected this week - with the average two-year rate now at 5.72 percent and five-year at 5.41 percent, according to Moneyfacts. This is up from 5.34 percent for a two-year and 5.01 percent for a five-year just a fortnight ago on May 22.
The financial data website also found the number of fixed and variable rate products had fallen by 699 or 15 percent in a fortnight - from 5,385 on May 22 to 4,686 on Monday.
Coventry Building Society will raise its fixed deal rates Tuesday, after other lenders such as Barclays, HSBC and NatWest all increased theirs over the past week.
While many of the 116,000 households affected this month will already have locked into new fixed rate deals, the bigger effect is more likely to be on those with mortgages ending in a few months' time who have not acted yet.
Among them are the 640,000 people who have deals set to finish in the last six months of this year, according to Office for National Statistics data.
Recent market volatility that has prompted the reduction in availability of mortgage products has been sparked by expectations of further interest rate rises.
Around 75 percent Britain's 20 biggest mortgage lenders have upped their rates since the market turbulence began on May 24, reported The Times.
Higher than expected inflation figures for April – when the Consumer Prices Index fell to 8.7 percent - saw traders increase expectations for the path of rates later this year.
That pushed up the "swap rates" used to determine mortgage deals, prompting lenders to reassess those they had on offer.
A number of providers have withdrawn selected fixed mortgage products over the past few weeks and some have pulled their entire fixed rate range.
The market turmoil resulted in a spike in government bond yields to their highest level since the chaos sparked by Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-Budget last autumn.
That had sparked an even bigger drop of mortgage deals from the market. In October, just 2,258 deals were on offer.
Rachel Springall, finance expert at Moneyfacts, told MailOnline, "These latest increases come at a time of volatility surrounding future interest rates, and it is a move we have seen from other lenders through uncertain times as they adjust their pricing - such as surrounding the fiscal announcement and during the UK lockdown over the pandemic."
"Just a few weeks ago, it was widely expected that fixed mortgage rates would reduce over the next few months, but it is impossible to predict such rate movements as pricing is determined by fluctuating swap rates and lenders appetite for business," Springall added.
"When lenders withdraw mortgage products it can be in reaction to interest rate volatility, or even down to demand. However, withdrawals may influence other lenders to follow suit and reconsider their own propositions," Springall said, adding, "Anyone considering a new mortgage would be wise to seek advice to go over the full package of any deal to find the right deal for them."
Meanwhile a study by Hargreaves Lansdown released on Monday has found two in five people with a mortgage say their payments have not gone up since interest rates started rising – because so many are on fixed rate deals.
Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at the firm, said, "There's a remortgage nightmare lying in wait for more than three million people."
"They've been shielded from the horror of rate hikes so far by a fixed mortgage, and when their deal runs out, they face the full force of the rises in one single hit," she added.
She said anyone whose deal comes to an end in the coming year is set to see their monthly payments increase by an average of £192, but almost two thirds of people in the firm's study said this would cause them financial problems.
It comes as the Daily Mail reported on Monday on how a record one in five first-time buyers are signing up to mortgages of more than 35 years as interest rates soar.
But while spreading out the loans makes them more affordable in the short term, it means homeowners will accrue thousands of pounds more debt on the interest over the lifetime of the mortgage.
In many cases, they will still be paying off the deals well into their 70s.
It shows how surging Bank of England interest rates, which have gone up from 0.1 percent to 4.5 percent, are affecting the long-term financial future of new generations of buyers as well as those who already own homes and are facing steeper monthly bills.
The industry figures show that 19 percent of all loans taken out by first-time buyers in March were for terms of more than 35 years.
That compares to 9 percent in December 2021, when the Bank of England started hiking rates as it tried to tame galloping inflation.
March's figure is the highest level since records began in 2005, when just 2 per cent of first-time mortgages were taken out at such long durations.
The figures also showed that more than half of first-time buyers now take out a home loan of more than 30 years.
The data forms part of a report due to be published by industry body UK Finance this week.
Figures from lender Halifax earlier this year showed the average age of a first-time buyer had risen to 32 in 2022 – two years higher than a decade ago.
That suggests that as they opt for longer mortgage deals, first-time buyers are more likely to be tying themselves into repayments that stretch until the end of their working lives, or even well into their retirements.
Meanwhile, research from consultancy Stonehaven has predicted that a quarter of a million households face the risk of defaulting on their mortgages this year.
The study, reported by The Sunday Times, estimates that 1.3 million homeowners are at risk of being unable to cope when their fixed-rate home loan deals end. Of those, 230,000 are due to see their deals expire by the end of 2023.
Rammstein respond to allegations against Till Lindemann
On the weekend, German band Rammstein responded to testimonies by women that they were recruited to have sex with the band's lead singer, Till Lindemann.
Rammstein have just embarked upon a European tour
Image: Sebastian Dammark/Gonzales Photo/picture alliance
German rock band Rammstein has released a statement on Instagram in response to accusations of sexual assault and abuse of power against lead singer Till Lindemann.
In the statement, the band urged fans not to "prejudge" in the wake of last week's media reports in Germany, with testimonies from women alleging a systematic process of luring females to backstage parties in order to satisfy Lindemann's sexual demands.
"The publications of the last few days have caused irritation and questions among the public and especially among our fans," the post on social media began. "The accusations have hit us all very hard and we take them extremely seriously."
"To our fans we say: It is important to us that you feel comfortable and safe at our shows — in front of and behind the stage."
"We condemn any kind of assault and ask you: Do not participate in pre-judgements of any kind towards those who have made accusations. They have a right to their point of view."
"But we, the band, also have a right — not to be prejudged either."
Aggressive reaction
Last month, Shelby Lynn, a fan from Ireland, traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, to attend a Rammstein concert.
There, she was invited to an after-show party. She reported that, at the party, she met Lindemann, and that he wanted to have sex with her. Lynn said that Lindemann reacted very aggressively when she declined the invitation.
Lynn detailed her suspicions that one of her drinks had been spiked with drugs, owing to the fact that she had no memory of a part of the evening after having only two drinks and a shot of tequila. She says that she was left bruised and vomiting for 24 hours after the concert. Lynn posted a picture of her injuries online and filed a complaint.
On June 2, German public broadcaster NDR and daily Süddeutsche Zeitung published a report with testimonies of women whose experiences mirror Shelby Lynn's, suggesting a systematic process to lure females to after-show parties, who were reportedly specifically chosen to have sex with Till Lindemann.
Publisher KiWi drops Lindemann
In light of the allegations, Lindemann's publisher, Kiepenheuer & Witsch (KiWi), has dropped him as a client.
The German publishing house released a statement saying it was "shocked" by the allegations against Lindemann, adding its "sympathy and respect goes to the women affected."
KiWi also said that "in the course of the recent reports, we became aware of a porn video in which Till Lindemann celebrates sexual violence against women and in which the 2013 book In Still Night published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch plays a role. We rate this as gross breach of trust and as a ruthless act in relation to the values we represent as a publisher."
"From our point of view," the KiWi statement continued, "Till Lindemann exceeds immovable limits in dealing with women. We have therefore decided to end our collaboration with Till Lindemann with immediate effect, as our relationship of trust has been irretrievably broken."
“Of course my case was political. Especially after our fight for Shiyes”.
Activist spent 2.5 years in prison for Rammstein music video.
Andrei Borovikov meets his family and friends right after prison.
Former head of Alexey Navalny headquarters in Arkhangelsk Andrei Borovikov was released from prison today after he spent 2.5 years behind bars. We spoke to him after his release.
Text: Elizaveta Vereykina May 23, 2023 Borovikov was accused of “spreading pornography” for publishing music video “Pussy” by the German band Rammstein on his social media page.
The Barents Observer spoke with Andrei Borovikov today right after his release:
Andrei Borovikov on the day of his release from prison in Arkhangelsk.
Photo by: Oleg Borovikov
How do you feel now being free?
I feel like I’m drunk without wine. I feel whole spectrum of feelings. I think I´ll calm down only in few days. But may be even this evening I will get used to the thought that I’m out of the prison barrack.
Do you consider your case political?
Of course! How can you not consider the 2 years in prison for a Rammstein music video not a politically motivated case? 250 thousand VKontakte social network users did exactly the same (posted the exact same video). But it was only me who went to the jail for that. Of course it´s politically motivated case. Especially if you take into account our fight for Shiyes (series of protests against the construction of landfills and waste incinerators in Arkhangelsk region) and my political views. Are you shocked by how Russia has changed since your imprisonment in 2021?
To say the least! When I went to prison in 2021, back then I thought that Russia was a full dictatorship. But what’s happening now, in 2023… I couldn’t even imagine something like this in 2021. I only could imagine something like this as a plot for a fiction book about some kind of “alternative Russia” fantasies. But now, there is the “Special Military Operation” (official Russian name for the war in Ukraine), mobilisation, all those losses.. And especially what’s going on in the heads of our Russian fellow citizens! What sort of views they have now, what kind of opinions, how much hatred some of our citizens express… I couldn’t even imagine something like this back then. Are you going to continue your activism now?
I can’t answer this question now. I don’t want to lie. I will think about it and let’s see if it’s possible to live in Russia in 2023 and still remain a person faithful to your views. How were you treated in the prison?
I had friends there, but also some conflicts. It was a brutal manly environment. Nothing extraordinary, no tortures or something like that.
Andrei Borovikov leaving prison after 2,5 years behind bars.
Borovikov´s case was opened after a man from Arkhangelsk named Alexander Durynin complained about Borovikovs Rammstein video post to the Russian anti-extremist police. Durynin, who back then pretended to be just a volunteer in the Navalny Arkhangelsk headquarters (now recognised as extremist organisation by the Russian law), turned out to be a police informer, as activists realised.
Before this “spread of pornography” case, Borovikov was also sentenced to 400 hours of corrective labor for allegedly “violating rules of protesting” during the protests in Shiyes, where thousands of protesters demanded to stop the construction of landfills in the Arkhangelsk region.
In 2020 Amnesty International made the statement that the case against Borovokov was politically motivated: “Andrei Borovikov - is a civil and political activist, who is fighting for public interest on different issues. His opinion often differs from that of the authorities and his critical opinion is not liked by some of them”, - The Amnesty International stated.
In June 2021 everything that has any connection with now imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny Russian authorities labelled as “extremist” and “foreign agent”: Navalny´s headquarters, Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation and also Civil Rights Foundation. Police raids have been conducted all over Russia and many of the Navalny headquarters coordinators were given prison terms.
Invisible and Unaccountable: How Governments Communicate
UK authorities have been using Facebook and Instagram to target certain communities. Now Meta is releasing the data
Ben CollierBen Collier is a lecturer in digital methods at the University of Edinburgh
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks in London on March 7, 2023. (Leon Neal/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Last year, I visited Belgium with my husband, a trip largely revolving around sitting reading in the sun, eating vast quantities of fries with every meal and taking a series of decreasingly flattering photos of one another in front of fountains. Like most people on holiday, our phones were rarely far from view: messaging our friends and family back home, catching up on U.K. news or looking up local bars. Inevitably, this meant that we saw a lot of adverts jostling for our attention in the corners of our online lives — mostly for local tourist attractions or questionable fast-fashion products. But if I’d had the language on my phone set to Arabic, or had searched for recommendations for Syrian restaurants (which, in Brussels, are some of the best places to eat in the city), I’d have had a rather different experience. Instead of a promotion for half-price entry to Rene Magritte’s house, I’d have been bombarded with a series of grim messages accusing me of breaking the law and telling me that I’d be deported or thrown in jail, or that I risked an imminent and violent death if I tried to travel to England illegally, all courtesy of the U.K. Home Office.
I know all this because of my research — I’m an academic studying digital technologies and the roles they play in emerging forms of harm at the University of Edinburgh. Recently, I gained access to a huge amount of audience and targeting data held by Meta, the company that runs Facebook and Instagram, known as its “Ad library” — political adverts, how they were targeted and who saw them. I already knew that authorities in the U.K. were devising highly targeted ads to shape behavior, using the immense amount of personal data Meta stores, from what you read and buy online to your exact physical location. Adopting better communication techniques is no bad thing in itself, but when I began to dig further, ominous campaigns began emerging, which used intimidating tactics to push their policy. To take just one example: The U.K. Home Office has been using Facebook and Instagram to target vulnerable refugees with threatening fear-based messages.
Social media platforms have woven sophisticated surveillance and influence technologies directly into the fabric of our day-to-day lives. This is nothing new, as we all know from the ubiquitous ads that most of us have learned to tune out. But what has previously been hidden from sight is that this same technology is now being used by governments, giving them powers they didn’t have before. The U.K. authorities are using fine-grained profiles of people inside and outside the country to reach directly into people’s lives. This can be justifiable, even innocuous — encouraging the population to vote, go for medical checkups and other behavioral nudges that are in the personal and public good — but without transparency we can have no understanding about unintended consequences, up to and including potential harms inflicted on those being targeted.
On top of this risk, there are more fundamental questions about privacy to consider, vital to any functioning democracy. Does the government have a right to use these influence techniques on its citizens without their knowledge, in domains that often cross into matters of politics — not public health? Are there any protections in place, or was the U.K. government hoping that this would remain behind closed doors? Meta’s decision to make all this information available to researchers is forcing all these questions out into the open, but only if you have the skills to navigate the data. Our research is blowing the lid off a series of covertly targeted campaigns that show the government beginning to flex its muscles and use these new capacities for potentially more dangerous kinds of influence: fear-based campaigns targeted at vulnerable groups.
Together with researchers at the universities of Strathclyde, Napier, Edinburgh and Cambridge, I’ve been studying the rise of this new approach to advertising in the U.K. Our team calls this new phenomenon “influence government” — or, in its law enforcement form, “influence policing” — to describe how the state has begun using the marketing tools of the social media platforms in the service of public policy. Until now, we haven’t known how these adverts work “under the hood.” Our wider research shows that this was all being driven by a controversial approach to government policy that has become embedded in the U.K. over the past 15 years, based on a behavioral theory known as nudge.
Nudge is an idea which might have been tailor-made for the U.K. government. Drawing from behavioral psychology, nudge uses a toolkit of subtle tricks to push people toward particular behaviors. Many of these have been used extensively in the private sector to drive purchasing. A trivial example is that people are more likely to buy a product costing $9.98 than one priced at $10.00, as the additional digit inflates the perceived cost. Similar innovations have been seen in the design of buildings and public spaces: Airports now force you to walk through duty free before you get to the departure lounge.
In the late 2000s, a pair of academics, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, took these approaches and synthesized them into a framework for shaping society. Often described as “libertarian paternalism,” their work was a major influence on former Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government in the U.K. It revolved around the idea that, in a time of deepening crisis, the state had to step in to guide society, but that the public would never accept being directly told what to do from above. Instead of telling the public to change their behavior, policymakers would subtly shape the environment in which they made decisions, making small changes to pricing, the architecture of buildings and the design of public services, in order to make people feel like they were choosing to change their behavior themselves. A classic example draws on the idea that most people don’t deviate from the “default” option unless they have strong views. Thus, making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in drastically increases the number of people donating their organs, while retaining the element of personal choice.
This was all combined with a change in how the government communicates. Instead of simple awareness campaigns telling the public to stop smoking or pick up their litter, more “strategic” adverts incorporate contextual analysis of the cultures and perceptions of different groups to craft narratives more likely to be noticed. Some of this involves detailed research into cultural narratives within particular groups that underpin the behaviors the government is trying to change. Real examples include allowing the National Health Service (NHS) to pinpoint specific misconceptions or worries around blood donation held by minority ethnic communities and counter them directly in the ad content. Others involve a more “hypodermic” model — using the intimacy of social media platforms to deliver the ad “in the moment” as someone does something undesirable. For example, the police might target someone with a stern warning and a picture of a police officer when they search for illegal content online.
Rather than descend into conspiracy theory about secretive government propaganda, it’s important to realize much of this boils down to the kind of innocuous “stop smoking” messages on cigarette packets, classic marketing techniques and minor improvements to public services that most of us would expect our government to be working on. In the corporate world, much of this would simply be considered good marketing practice. But as these campaigns have endured and evolved in the post-Cameron years, they have become increasingly widespread and high-tech in the U.K., and a number of issues have become dangerously apparent. Nowhere are these issues more prominent than in the realms of borders and national security.
There is a deepening fracture in U.K. politics around refugees and asylum, with policy recently focusing on stopping the “small boats” used by vulnerable refugees who, denied safe routes of passage, attempt a difficult crossing over the English Channel from France to the U.K. The Home Office has tried several approaches to reducing these crossings, drawing on nudge theory combined with a simplistic and much-disproven “deterrence” model. The theory is that if the government makes the crossings more dangerous and difficult, treats the people who make it across worse, increases enforcement of both these aspects, and finally ramps up fear-based communications, then refugees will judge that the risks outweigh the benefits and choose not to attempt it.
It might seem absurd to think that a “nudge” in behavior or a targeted advert would deter someone fleeing war and death, someone spending everything they have to reach Calais, leaving behind their lives and families. What is even more surprising is that the government would be able to reach these people at all. It is here — in the targeting itself — that the nudge aspects take on a more frightening role.
Our research has now revealed that these adverts use deeply invasive forms of digital targeting to deliver their messages. They are a high-tech version of former Home Secretary (and later Prime Minister) Theresa May’s infamous “Go Home” vans, when, to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, the Home Office hired vehicles with the words “Go Home” on them and drove them around areas with high immigrant populations. Instead of physically driving racially charged adverts around the streets, fine-grained digital profiling tools are now being used to target vulnerable groups.
Digital advertising is nothing new; it is a core part of the business model underpinning the social media platforms that govern so much of our lives. Services like Facebook and Google are free precisely because they collect our data — what we watch, what we buy, who we are and our minute-to-minute location in the world — and turn it into complex profiles that advertisers can use to send us messages. The “built environment” of the social media platforms on which we increasingly live our lives is shot through with mechanisms for studying and influencing our behavior. Although this always felt “creepy” to some people, most accept that, for example, Coca-Cola might want to make different adverts to appeal to different sections of the public, a restaurant might want to advertise promotional offers to people physically nearby, and a sneakers brand might want to target people who had recently searched for “buy sneakers” on Google. Things began to seem more ominous with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it transpired that political campaigners were using these tools to try to drive voting behavior and sway elections.
But how do you use marketing tools designed to sell shoes and drinks to stop vulnerable refugees from crossing the channel in small boats?
As you might expect, Facebook’s ad platform is designed for commercial use and has no category for “refugees in Calais.” Instead, the Home Office and their contractors (who do research in refugee camps and conflict zones) have built up profiles of the different refugee groups they want to target by combining multiple layers of minute behaviors and interests with location data detected by the platform. Sometimes this is simple: One advert, for example, targets all Arabic-speakers in Brussels. Another targets Vietnamese speakers in Calais who have recently spent time in other European countries. But these categories — created for commercial purposes — can be combined into what we call “patchwork profiles” to target extremely specific groups.
A snippet of what this looks like gives an insight into one of the “patchwork profiles” that have been assembled by the contractors in an attempt to find and deter refugees:
Age: 18-65+
Gender: All
Language: Arabic
Interests: Afghan Premier League, Afghan Star, Afghan Wireless, Afghanistan, Afghanistan national cricket team, Afghanistan national football team, Aleppo, Baghdad, Cinema of Iran, Damascus, Eritrea, Football in Iraq, Homs, Iran, Iran national football team, Iraq, Iraq Football Association, Iraq national football team, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi Premier League, Iraqi cuisine, Kabul, Kurdistan, Lebanon, MTN Syria, Music of Afghanistan, Music of Iran, South Sudan, South Sudan national football team, Sudan, Syria, Syria (region), Syria TV, Syria national football team, Syrian cuisine, Syrianska FC, The Voice of Vietnam, Vietnam national football team, Vietnamese language, mtn afghanistan
Locations targeted by one U.K. Home Office campaign, predominantly aimed at cities on the coast of France and Belgium nearest the U.K. (Mikey Andreasson/New Lines)
My first reaction to seeing this profile was shock. The behaviors and interests feel deeply personal. They are partly based on people’s Facebook and Instagram activity — liking particular pages or declaring demographic information, life events or location. But much of this is collected automatically through Meta’s extensive infrastructure of cookies and trackers — which detect the things you show an interest in as you travel around the internet. Visit a fan site for the Afghan Premier League, or look up a recipe for Syrian mutabbal, and those interests are added to your targeting profile, despite the fact that these two interests are somewhat incongruous.
This is combined with the list of target locations, which casts a tight digital net around real physical spaces. This net starts in Brussels, then draws routes to the sea through a series of tiny towns on the way to the coast: Nazareth, Comines, Monchy-Breton, Bourseville, Fontaine-sur-Somme. When it reaches the sea, it spreads out in a thin band along the coastline: Calais, Dunkirk, Blankenberge, Grande-Synthe, Gravelines, Saint-Martin-Boulogne, Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont. If you’re in these places, making your way from Brussels to the coast, your phone’s location sensor will allow the platform to target you directly. The ad platform’s surveillance data is so finely detailed that it even lets you distinguish people who live in these areas from people who are visiting, traveling through, or have just left.
Another set of categories that were clearly created to market products to people on a holiday or business trip have been repurposed to target these vulnerable refugees:
Language: Pashto
Life events: Away from Family, Away from Hometown
Location: Brussels
Language: Arabic
Location: Just left Brussels
Although these systems claim not to put our data in the hands of governments, the levers they have created for shaping our behavior are giving authorities power and specific reach that were previously unattainable. When I dug down further, I found the content of these campaigns — and found it even more alarming. The campaigns are clearly designed to cause fear in the people who see them. The graphics are stark, including military-style drones, roiling waves and terrified people on tiny boats. The text of the adverts relies on frightening and accusatory content to project a kind of “digital border,” declaiming, for example, “If you help drive the boat, we will arrest you as a people smuggler” and “Small boats will be destroyed by big ones in the channel” — in Pashto, Arabic and Vietnamese.
On the left, a U.K. Home Office ad in Arabic reads, “Don’t believe the smugglers’ lies.” On the right, an ad in Dari reads, “Don’t lose your life for the sake of coming to Britain.” (U.K. Home Office)
They are clearly based on nudge philosophy, pulling apart every conceivable aspect of the “decision environment” faced by refugees — potential prosecution, the competencies of smugglers, the physical danger of the crossing, the chance of being scammed — and trying to change the perception, and therefore decision, of the viewer.
These are all real concerns facing those who make a channel crossing and some might argue that the Home Office is trying to help them. However, these people are facing danger not primarily because the sea is dangerous or because smugglers are untrustworthy (though these are undoubtedly true). They are in danger because the U.K. government has deliberately shut down all of the possible safe legal routes for them to enter the country — leaving only the most dangerous options. The dangers involved are unlikely to be news to them by the time they reach the French coastline — but the adverts themselves will contribute to the stigma, alienation and fear that they face.
Marketers often argue that “at worst, we’ll have no effect,” but communications — especially when underpinned by the lethal force of the state — can themselves cause harm. This phenomenon, known as “blowback,” reflects the enormous complexity of how communications campaigns are actually received by the public. If your targeting is off, many unintended recipients may be exposed to it, who may interpret it in an entirely different way from the intended audience. Arabic-speaking people who live in, work near or simply visit France and Belgium will receive ads invisible to their friends and neighbors, potentially creating — or increasing — feelings of stigmatization, anxiety or paranoia. And the second order effects of communications — even when they hit the “right” people — can interfere with messages in all kinds of ways. For example, recipients’ feelings of being targeted might diminish trust in authorities that might be able to help them, or play into the hands of people looking to exploit them. Extremist groups have long sought to drive a wedge between their targets and society; ads from governments popping up on social media feeds and suggesting people from your background are not welcome here are grist to their mill.
The Meta Ad Library shows us who actually saw the adverts. The Home Office’s target audiences varied hugely, from tens of thousands of people to only a few hundred. The bulk of the ads landed where you might expect — mostly in Brussels and the Flemish Region of Belgium, with many served directly in Calais. But the “tail” of the data shows a much wider reach, hitting people as far away as Punjab, Mexico and Jordan. This happened when they ran ads targeting Arabic speakers who had just been in Brussels — when they added “away from family” to this profile, this slimmed the target audience down from 500,000 to 5,000. But the fact remains — thousands of Arabic speakers around the world, including many visiting Brussels on holiday or for business, have been targeted by this campaign. As I was looking at this, I realized that I was witnessing a sociological experiment: I could see at a glance where Arabic-speaking people who visited Brussels were traveling for the duration of the ad campaign. This shows how invasive these new forms of advertising can be (and why we should be cautious about the government using them). A researcher looking into the data held by Meta years after it was gathered can track travel patterns of certain demographic groups without anyone knowing. More broadly, this advertising indicates the power that these infrastructures wield not only to influence us, but to give governments a view into our lives that they never had before — seeing how information spreads online and how we react to it in real time.
Looking at these and other campaigns as a sociologist produces a truly strange effect. You can see how the British state sees different groups and how the Meta platform offers up hundreds of tiny aspects of their lives to build bespoke profiles and target them directly. Nor is it only people wanting to build a new life in the U.K. who are being targeted. Large numbers of these kinds of campaigns are aimed within the borders of the U.K. itself, at British citizens. Most of these campaigns are far more innocuous — and less likely to use fear — but the intimate digital targeting still raises real concerns. As government communications become more dependent on nudge theory, they are also becoming far more targeted, based on our online behavior. Although it may be absolutely appropriate for the state to make sure that some parts of the population are getting particular messages, doing so on the basis of extensive surveillance of their online and offline lives is a different matter. There needs to be far more transparency in how government nudge ads are being targeted so that the public can understand what they are seeing and how their data is being used. This transparency itself can be a powerful defense against unintended consequences and blowback — otherwise, the field is left open to conspiracy theories and speculation.
These targeted campaigns showcase the sharp end of the capabilities that the new ad infrastructures have given governments. We miss a trick when we think about the human right to privacy as simply a matter of who has our data — privacy is just as much about who can exert influence on us and how. Although they were created for commercial marketing, the ad systems of social media platforms have handed governments a profound window into our lives: an endlessly configurable menu of characteristics that they can use to target us, and access to the most intimate spaces in which to drop their nudges.
A closer look shows how particular subcultures and minorities have been targeted. Often, these ads were intended to promote specific supportive resources, for example to Muslim communities, such as access to vaccination, public outreach or job support schemes. Some ads are aimed at those showing an interest in Islamic theology, or in particular Muslim celebrities. And “excluded” interests are also added, so if you like far-right figures and media, for example, you will be deselected from certain campaigns.
Until recently, the Meta platform allowed even more precise ways of doing this, automatically detecting “higher, medium or lower” levels of engagement with online content during Ramadan and offering this to advertisers as part of their targeting system. For example, while it is undoubtedly reasonable that the Scottish government should try to increase use of its COVID-19 app among particular groups with lower levels of vaccination, or that London’s Tower Hamlets Council might invite local Muslim residents to a public discussion of hate crime, both of these campaigns used detected levels of online activity during Ramadan as part of this targeting, which involves a whole raft of assumptions about religion and behavior.
The details suggest that targeting used by the government and its contractors is often simultaneously simplistic and invasive. For the Tower Hamlets campaign, the interests that would trigger being targeted (in addition to levels of content engagement during Ramadan) were:
INTERESTS: Adhan, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Arab television drama, Ayah, BBC Arabic, BBC Arabic Television, Dawah Addict, Dua, E-Quran, Eid al-Fitr, Five Pillars of Islam, Hajjah, Hijab, Hijab Europe, Hijab Fashion, Hijab Mode, Hijab Style, Hijab fashion inspiration, Islam Channel, Islamic banking, Islamic dietary laws, Modest Fashion, Muslim Aid, Muslim Hands, Quran Verses, Quran Weekly, Quran reading, Ramadan recipes, Sadaqah, Salat times, Sura, TV Alhijrah, Umrah & Hajj, World Hijab Day, Zakat
But there were further categories that would exclude you — including drinking, gambling and liking far-right figures and media:
EXCLUDED interests: Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Drinking, Fidesz Figyel, Fox Nation, Gambling, Jyllands-Posten, Katie Hopkins, Lars Larson, Laura Ingraham, National Review, Online gambling, Rush Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network, The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Sean Hannity Show
The geographical targeting was extremely precise, as might be expected given that the campaign was targeted at Muslims living only in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. If you studied the Quran or engaged with Ramadan content online, the chances of seeing the ad — a fairly innocuous invitation to a public meeting with the police and the local council — went up.
It’s not just Muslims — all sorts of diaspora communities are being similarly stereotyped through the same invasive online observations. Individuals are targeted once they’ve registered interest in a certain culture, perhaps through music or food. In a U.K. government ad campaign to promote support for small businesses, minority ethnic communities in London were defined through the following interests:
Interests: Afro-textured hair, Bangladesh Cricket, Boonaa Mohammed, Eid al-Fitr, Evangelicalism, Glossary of Islam, God in Islam, Hinduism, India national cricket team, Jumia, Muslimah Sholehah, Pakistan national cricket team, Pentecostalism, Popcaan, Ramadan (calendar month), SB.TV, Safaricom, Sizzla, West Indies cricket team, Wizkid (musician), Yasmin Mogahed
The targets of the Home Office adverts — vulnerable refugees — will not see them on a TV screen, in a newspaper or on a billboard. They will see them on Facebook and Instagram — perhaps while they are messaging their families. This will unquestionably cause them further anxiety and stress, yet it is vanishingly unlikely to affect their decision to cross.
While there are some areas in which communications campaigns might be a useful part of government, on their own they can do very little when massive structural forces and obstacles work against them, whether these be the lack of safe and legal routes to the U.K., pervasive inequality and austerity, the legacies of colonialism and the continuing reality of racism, or deep issues of identity and culture. There are also important questions of democracy here — is it the role of government to shape our behavior from above? Is it appropriate for government and law enforcement to target communities based on highly sensitive characteristics “read off” from invasive surveillance data without them knowing?
The choices available to agencies running this kind of campaign leave few unharmful options. Either they target their vulnerable audience in a deeply invasive way, or they go much wider and risk blowback. Yet there is next to no awareness that this is going on, let alone public discussion. When the Home Office placed knife crime ads on boxes of fried chicken in 2019, there was a huge public outcry because the way it was being targeted — stereotyping those who ate fried chicken as knife-carriers — spoke as loudly as the message itself. Yet these digital forms of targeting are far less open to public scrutiny. You shouldn’t need to be a data scientist to find out how the government is spending your money or the mechanisms through which it is trying to change your behavior. At the very least, there needs to be transparency about who is being targeted by campaigns that are paid for by public money, and why. Only then can our societies have a public discussion about what is and isn’t appropriate.
Young Pakistani Christian sentenced to death over pictures on Whatsapp
by Shafique Khokhar 06/05/2023,
Lawyer's protest: contents found on phone, in four years failed to prove crime. False accusations of blasphemy against religious minorities in Pakistan are often made to settle personal vendettas, property disputes, religious prejudices or commercial rivalries.
Bahawalpur (AsiaNews) - A court in Bahawalpur in recent days handed down a death sentence by hanging to the young Christian Noman Masih, 22, who was accused of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad for images received via Whatsapp in 2019.
Lazar Allah Rakha, Noman Masih's lawyer, said he was deeply disappointed with the verdict, as the prosecution failed to provide evidence of the blasphemy charge; nevertheless after four long years the court sentenced the young man to death.
Noman was charged with blasphemy for carrying blasphemous images on his mobile phone; the complaint was registered against him under Section 295-C, which provides for the death sentence. "Noman Masih's trial was concluded in January, but the court repeatedly postponed the verdict on various pretexts," Rakha said.
Minority rights activist Joseph Jansen said it is disturbing that a young Christian is sentenced to death for a crime without a fair investigation. False accusations of blasphemy against religious minorities are often made to settle personal vendettas, property disputes, religious prejudices or commercial rivalries.
At the same time, the abuse of the blasphemy laws (sections 295 to 298 of the PPC), which provide for severe penalties, has increased exponentially. Simple accusations of blasphemy have become a justification for attacking any accuser.
"Complainants and witnesses involved in making false accusations against the accused often enjoy impunity," Jansen added. Human rights activist Ilyas Samuel hoped that the High Court would annul the death sentence issued by Additional Judge Muhammad Hafeez Ur Rehman Khan and drop all charges against Noman.
Pakistan National Alliance for Minorities President Lala Robin Daniel said the issue of blasphemy is a very sensitive issue in the country. The highly inflammatory accusations have the potential to trigger lynch mobs. He said that these laws have massively affected Pakistan's marginalised Christian community and ruined the lives of many innocent people, and still no one is trying to change them. The government,' he concluded, 'must introduce a national action plan to counter the abuse of the blasphemy laws in the name of religion."
Why 'The Laugh of the Medusa' remains influential today
Women's writing and sexuality must be freed: On the birthday of French feminist author Helene Cixous, here's a look at how her best-known essay still resonates today
Deutsche Welle Published 05.06.23, A depiction of the Medusa myth by Caravaggio, 1571-1610Deutsche Welle
Helene Cixous' call is clear: "Woman must write her self."
Even if some of the post-structuralist and theoretical references in "The Laugh of the Medusa" can feel challenging for unversed readers, the essay by the French feminist author is filled with striking, empowering quotes.
It remains essential reading, especially for any young woman hoping to become an author: "Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself."
A pioneer of feminist studies in Europe
Born on June 5, 1937, in French Algeria to Jewish parents, Cixous became known for her experimental writing style, covering many genres: theater, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
In 1974, Cixous established Europe's first center for women's studies at the University of Paris VIII, a public and experimental university which she also co-founded as a direct response to the French student riots of May 1968.
The essayist, novelist and playwright has published over 70 works and is seen as a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her most influential article remains "The Laugh of the Medusa," which was originally published in French under the title "Le Rire de la Meduse" in 1975, and was translated into English by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen in 1976.
On masturbation and writing
Even though the literary landscape has considerably evolved since the 1970s, with more women authors being published and gaining recognition in recent years, "The Laugh of the Medusa" is an important reminder that over millennia, our Western cultural heritage has been defined through the male perspective.
Cixous argues that woman's abasement has been defined by how we have been "colonized" by "phallogocentric" thinking. The author builds on ideas developed by fellow Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). He was the one who coined the term "phallogocentrism," which refers to the focus given to the masculine point of view through language.
While she rejects our culture's imposed patriarchal narratives, Cixous' essay is equally filled with juicy phallic references, such as: "The act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis)."
For the feminist author, there is a direct connection between freeing woman's writing and the liberation of their personal sexuality, as both woman's writing and masturbation were too long associated with shame; they could only be done in secret, and accompanied by a feeling of guilt.
Revisiting the myth of the Medusa
The essay refers to the Greek myth of Medusa, a monster with venomous snakes for hair, whose gaze turned men to stone.
For Cixous, men's narrative portrayals of Medusa — a symbol of seduction and power — turned her into a symbol of the threat of castration. Medusa represented their fear of female desire.
"My text was an update of Greek mythology. There is no better example to describe the position of women and the murderous battle men take up against women. Medusa was one of three Gorgons [powerful, winged daemons], the daughters of Phorkys and Keto. She was the only mortal among them. Men were afraid of her. When they looked at her, they turned to stone," Cixous told DW in December 2022, referring to her famous essay.
"But why did she have such great power over men? Because she saw the men. The latter did not have the time to see her," she added.
Medusa and freeing women's hair in Iran
"Men do not want to see women and they put veils over them so that they become invisible, like phantoms. It is terrible to what extent women have been veiled, even in daily life," Cixous said in the DW interview focusing on women's protests in Iran. "Yet women are not objects, not veiled dolls. They are radiant. They are beautiful. My Medusa has traveled around the world. Right now she is obviously in Iran."
The feminist author was initially hesitant to speak on behalf of women fighting for their rights in Iran:
"Of course, I ask myself whether I can legitimately comment on this. After all, I'm not in Iran and I'm not risking my life like the people there. But she was encouraged to do so by fellow feminists: "My Iranian friends told me, why don't you do something? Speak! If you speak, the local people will hear. It is important for me to say, I heard you." Meanwhile, Medusa has been widely adopted by feminists and the #MeToo movement as a symbol of rage and the protector of women's secrets.
Cixous has also revisited her own text in a 2010 republication of the French original with a new foreword, exploring the idea of Medusa as a queer body, which is another reason why the essay remains widely quoted to this day.
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her," writes Cixous. "And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
...I write this as a woman, towards women. When I say 'woman,' I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the the "dark" --that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute-- there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes --any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.
I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all their own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of knowledge, on the basis of systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resononant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great --that is for 'great men'; and it's 'silly'. Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty --so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time....
The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to see half the world laughing, except that it's still going on. For the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration. They haven't changed a thing: they've theorized their desire for reality! Let the priests tremble, we're going to show they our sexts!
Too bad for them, if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and laughing....
We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been made victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end.'
Such is the syntax of women that, sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring them --otherwise they couldn't come-- that the old lady is always right behind them, wathcing them make phallus, women will go right up to the impossible....
