Media

Americans used to be just ignorant about Muslims and the Middle East. Now we're also fearful, stupid and wrong.

Information has long been falsified and weaponized in Turkey and the Arab world—and we're headed that way fast.

China’s central government has cracked down on press freedom as the country expands its international influence, but in the internet age, many of its citizens hunger for a free flow of information.

High profile visits to war or disaster zones have long been common and popular among senior U.S. officials, as has foreign travel in general. Hillary Clinton was proud that she had traveled to 112 countries as secretary of state. At the same time, security requirements have grown, seemingly exponentially, often causing indignation among local people because of the disruption in their daily lives. And sometimes tragedy happens, as in Cameroon, where U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power’s speeding motorcade killed a child in April. But, U.S. officials welcome the U.S. media attention such visits provide, as do local elites and politicians who ae often disconnected from the people they ostensibly govern. Ambassador Power’s entourage included nine journalists, and a purpose of the visit was to call attention to refugees. But, Washington too often overlooks the downside among host populations, if not elites, to the security requirements of U.S. visitors. On December 16, The New York Times released a report documenting the April 18, 2016 accident when a vehicle in Ambassador Power’s motorcade struck and killed a six-year old child in a Cameroonian village. Power was on her way to a refugee camp that housed sixty thousand people forced from their homes by the radical Islamist movement Boko Haram. Her fourteen vehicle motorcade was traveling through the village at an estimated forty-five miles per hour. Following usual security procedures, the motorcade did not stop, though an ambulance, part of the motorcade, did. But the child was already dead. According to the New York Times, Ambassador Power was personally devastated when she heard the news. Against the advice of her security people, she returned to the village to offer condolences, where her reception was icy. The U.S. Department of State has paid compensation to the family of the child: $1,700 in cash, two cows, sacks of flour, rice, salt, sugar, onions, cartons of soap, and oil. The Times also reports that the U.S. government has built a well near the front of the family house. Ambassador Power has established an escrow account personally to pay the school fees of the victim’s siblings through high school. Ambassador Power’s security was tight: in addition to Cameroonian elite forces it included U.S. Navy SEALs. U.S security personnel dictated the size of the motorcade, its speed, and the fact that it did not stop. After all, Boko Haram had conducted recent operations only twenty miles away. With respect to the security of U.S. officials, as the Times observes, “Failure is unacceptable: Congressional panels spent two years and more than $7 million investigating why the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency were not able to prevent the deaths of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, when the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi was stormed in 2012.”

The tragedy-as-soap-opera starring Paralympian Oscar Pistorius is over. Or, maybe not. Pistorius, a Paralympian gold medalist who also competed in non-disabled events, was a major media celebrity and hero in sports mad South Africa. In 2013, he killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, by shooting her through a closed bathroom door. He maintains that he thought she was an intruder. In 2014, in a trial before Thokozile Masipa, a female, black judge, he was found guilty of “culpable homicide” (roughly the equivalent of manslaughter) and sentenced to five years imprisonment. South Africa does not have the jury system. In South Africa, both the defense and the prosecution have the right to appeal to a higher court. The prosecution did so. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the verdict of culpable homicide and found him guilty of murder. It then sent him back to Judge Masipa for resentencing. On July 6, 2016, she sentenced him to six years imprisonment, one year more than her sentence for culpable homicide. In her public statement, the judge carefully balanced the aggravating and mitigating factors. Her bottom line: there was no purpose to imposing the usual fifteen-year sentence for murder. (South African judges have discretion in sentencing.) Many South Africans, especially those active on women’s issues, found the judge’s arguments unconvincing. In its aftermath, there has been popular outcry that the sentence reflects the enduring privileges of race and celebrity. (Pistorius is  famous, white, and was once wealthy.) The Pistorius case has for many become emblematic of South Africa’s persistent problems: violence against women, the ubiquitous presence of firearms, the frequency of home invasions, and persistent white privilege. As Greg Nicolson, writes in the Daily Maverick, “Much of the response to Wednesday’s sentencing reflected on the socio-economics of race and class: Pistorius is white and can afford a top legal team, so he was viewed favorably and given a lenient sentence, when black, and particularly poor, people would be judged harshly.” The same observation could too often be made about the operation of the criminal justice system in the United States. The new, six-year sentence may be appealed by the defense and the prosecution. Pistorius’ lawyers have said they will not appeal. It is not yet clear what the prosecution might do, especially given the outcry against the leniency of the sentence. However, if the sentence stands, in eighteen months Pistorius could be given credit for the time he has already served under “correctional supervision” and would be eligible for parole in three years.

Rachel Brown is a research associate in Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. China ranks first in many things – population, greenhouse gas emissions, foreign treasury holdings – but openness toward refugees is one arena in which it has not traditionally been considered a leader. It therefore came as surprise when China ranked first in Amnesty International’s recently released “Refugees Welcome Index,” a survey that polled over 27,000 people in twenty-seven nations on their attitudes toward refugees. This put it ahead of nations such as Germany and Canada that have already taken in thousands of Syrian refugees. China also topped the list in citizens’ reported willingness to accept a refugee into their homes, with a whopping 46 percent of respondents willing to do so. (In the next highest nation, the United Kingdom, the share was just 29 percent.) While the Chinese data may not be fully representative as it was collected from just 1,055 respondents in eighteen major cities, the survey nonetheless caught people off guard.  The results fly in the face of multiple aspects of China’s past policies and attitudes toward refugees, namely: The Chinese government provides little financial support for international refugees. In 2015, the Chinese government ranked just fifty-first among both private and national donors to the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), giving only $941,841, less than one-eighth the amount given by private Chinese donors. (The Chinese government has also provided other humanitarian assistance to Middle Eastern countries resettling refugees and donated ten thousand tons of food for Syrian refugees in February 2016). The government also has not shown particular tolerance toward those fleeing to China’s own borders. China is party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Convention against Torture, but as of December 2015, UNHCR reported just 727 displaced "persons of concern" in China. The same month, the UN Committee Against Torture criticized China’s policy of deeming North Korean defectors economic migrants not refugees and forcibly deporting them. This behavior violates China’s international treaty obligations since North Korean defectors may face “persecution, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention and, in some cases, sexual violence” after repatriation. And just two weeks ago, a report indicated that China planned to send home Kokang refugees, an ethnic Chinese population from Myanmar, who had been living in Yunnan province. Officials don’t respect refugee status abroad much either. Last year, multiple Chinese dissidents were returned from Thailand despite receiving arrangements for resettlement as asylees and being granted a UNHCR letter of protection. Chinese citizens may not actually be so enthusiastic about taking in refugees. In a poll by China’s state-run Global Times shortly after the Amnesty report’s release, 90.3 percent of respondents said they didn’t want “to receive refugees in their own homes,” and 79.6 percent opposed having them in their own city or as a neighbor. Popular comments on the survey echoed this less tolerant attitude and called on Western nations to bear full responsibility. One user wrote, “I’m only willing to accept a refugee from a natural disaster, and will absolutely not accept a refugee from a civil war because conflict refugees are of America’s own making and all of the consequences should be assumed by America. We absolutely cannot pay the bill for America’s homicidal maniacs!” Another wrote, “America, the ‘model for global citizens,’ can come do patrols in the South China Sea, why can’t they be a model for housing refugees????” So which survey is more accurate? Most likely neither entirely reflects national sentiments. The Global Times survey was open to anyone online, but the paper is known for its nationalistic readership and controversial positions; meanwhile GlobeScan, who conducted Amnesty’s survey, held phone interviews with members of urban, adult populations, who may be more tolerant of refugees. Linguistic confusion could also have skewed Amnesty’s results. A Quartz article noted that the word used for refugee in the survey, nanmin (难民), can refer either to someone fleeing across international borders or to someone internally displaced due to a natural disaster or other cause. In China, the authors observe, people might be more willing to host the latter. Indeed, China placed highly on questions including just the term nanmin but ranked nineteenth on a question that specifically referenced being “able to take refuge in other countries to escape war or persecution.” (Interestingly, the Global Times poll also only used nanmin, but did reference the Amnesty survey). Despite the Amnesty survey’s potential flaws, reasons for optimism remain. In the study, Chinese respondents placed first in one last category: the belief that their government should be doing “more to help refugees fleeing war or persecution.” 86 percent of respondents supported this statement. China has successfully integrated refugees before and could do so again. Most of the approximately three hundred thousand refugees resettled during the Vietnam War now enjoy full rights. If anywhere close to 86 percent of Chinese citizens truly believe their government should do more, it’s time for them to start advocating for policy changes, including potential resettlement.

Nick Ashton-Hart was the senior permanent representative of the Internet sector to the United Nations and its agencies and member states in Geneva until 2015 and remains active in international Internet policy. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter @nashtonhart. Europe is confronting its greatest political crisis since the Cold War. The mass migration of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and others will define the continent’s relationship to the Muslim world. Will Western Europe successfully integrate the more than a million desperate people who have already arrived or will it alienate them and create an underclass of the desperate and disenfranchised? Technology might be the answer to successful integration. Saying that the migrants and refugees are reliant on technology is an understatement. I’ve seen it personally whilst volunteering on the West Balkans route this past holiday season: the moment a WiFi signal is available anywhere migrants’ mobiles beep and they immediately connect with friends, family and fixers through Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other digital communication tools. The Internet is a migrant’s lifeline to the outside world. Migrants will need to rely on communities to successfully settle and integrate into their new surroundings. People, not governments, create communities. Governments provide services to communities. Asking the latter to do the former is a recipe for failure, yet that’s exactly what’s happening now. Local authorities don’t have enough housing for the volumes of migrants they have to settle. They don’t have enough doctors, language teachers, social workers. They don’t have enough staff to interact with so many new residents and in some cases can’t communicate with them due to language barriers. The result? Everyone frustrated and angry. The technology community’s response is promising. There are efforts to help refugees learn coding skills in Germany, NetHope and Cisco’s TacOps provide connectivity to migrant communities especially in temporary camps, and innovative apps for smartphones have popped up in many places. However, what’s lacking is an effort to leverage the tools that migrants overwhelmingly use Europe-wide to help them integrate from the ground up. Below are a few examples of what could be done. There have been a number of news reports of people across Europe willing to provide housing for migrants. Imagine if local authorities could provide migrants with a digital voucher for AirBnB rentals. This would make it easy for those willing to provide a home for migrants to do so, ensure that officials know where migrants are living, and allow for feedback on problems to make it back to local authorities. It would also give migrants access to a local connection and support network to help them integrate. Many Syrians entering Europe are well-educated professionals—doctors, lawyers, and architects—and a meaningful number speak English. Meanwhile, there are already many Arabic and Farsi speakers living in Europe. Facebook and LinkedIn could leverage existing features that facilitate meeting people with common interests living close to each other. By making it easy for locals in a town to find the migrants settling near them doctors could meet doctors, architects could meet architects, and people with language skills in common find one another. What about LinkedIn tools to match migrants’ skills with those who need them? What about allowing local authorities responsible for job training and working programmes to help match employers with workers from migrant communities? Many Europeans are worried that their societies will not be able to integrate migrants because their socioeconomic contexts are so different. The best way to reduce these fears is to make it easy for migrants and the communities they settle in find to common interests and interact. It is easy to fear groups of people you don’t know and haven’t met, but these fears quickly subside when people who have common interests meet. Social media platforms are designed to do this and are heavily used by Europeans and migrants alike. EUROPOL, Europe’s police force, estimates 10,000 children who arrived as unaccompanied refugees are missing, with real fears for their safety amid concerns people and sex traffickers are preying upon them. There are ways that tech can help solve this problem. National authorities take pictures of migrant children when they enter a country and when they leave. These pictures can be compared to pictures of children in Google’s Person Finder and Facebook’s Safety Check to help identify missing children. Once identified, those pictures can be cross referenced with video feeds from CCTV cameras using facial recognition technology which is a major strength of these services. When there’s a match, an Amber alert notification could be pushed out to local authorities. Such a system would need to involve the collaboration of EUROPOL, international organisations and NGOs working in migration camps and centers and local authorities to ensure that they have the ability to respond when a child may have been located. All of these proposals are win-wins. The social media platforms and sharing economy services have an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate to Europe that they offer more than convenience and are not just engines for advertising and personal data collection. There’s an upside to data collection if everyone works together and uses it for socially beneficial purposes with proper safeguards. A collaboration with local communities and these services could transform the debate about social media and the disruptive innovation that new services have brought. Local authorities and tech companies need to step up and take the lead, not await orders from national capitals or Brussels. Perhaps a first step might be for the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) to organise a meeting with social media platforms to see what can be done. Time is not our friend. When efforts at integration fail, the result is disenfranchised populations like those we see in the suburbs of Paris and Brussels. The good news is that getting integration right has a constellation of benefits for Europe’s aging populations and economies. Tech doesn’t need to be the silver bullet. It just needs to be a part of the solution.

Military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have re-taken territory from the Islamic State and damaged it in other ways, including its ability to finance military operations. As counter-attacks continue in the Middle East, the Islamic State’s activities in Africa, especially North Africa, are increasing. These activities include a defining characteristic of the Islamic State—its use of the Internet and social media to strengthen its control of territory and advance its extremist agenda. This aspect of the group’s efforts in Africa has garnered less interest than the number of its fighters in North Africa or its territorial foothold in Libya. However, the Islamic State is applying its online strategy in Africa, which raises questions about how to respond to this development. The Islamic State’s use of the Internet and social media to spread propaganda, radicalize individuals, and recruit adherents and fighters has produced a dangerous form of cyber-facilitated extremism. The Islamic State developed online strategies to augment its control of territory in Iraq and Syria—the central manifestation of its material power and an ideological cornerstone for its caliphate. The group exploited opportunities and vulnerabilities in cyberspace even in the Middle East, which is less integrated in global economic affairs and has lower Internet access and usage rates than other parts of the world. Policy efforts, including counter-messaging and counter-content strategies, have struggled against the Islamic State’s online offensive, struggles that informed the U.S. decision to launch military cyberattacks against the group’s online capabilities. The factors that explain the Islamic State’s cyber-facilitated extremism are appearing in Africa. The Islamic State seeks to control territory in Libya, an objective consistent with the increasing number of its fighters in North Africa. Following its online playbook, the Islamic State is trying to harness social media to strengthen its power and position in Libya. Other groups, particularly Al Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, are copying the Islamic State’s social media strategies. Such cyber-facilitated extremism is unfolding as African cyberspace undergoes rapid changes, including efforts to expand Internet access and increase use of social media. The 2016 Posture Statement from U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) underscores that factors associated with the Islamic State’s brand of cyber-facilitated extremism are emerging in Africa. AFRICOM’s commander, General David M. Rodriguez, identified the Islamic State’s expansion in Libya and its support for terrorist groups in Africa as a threat, highlighting that the Islamic State and African terrorist groups are investing in Internet and social media capabilities to spread their ideology and recruit supporters across Africa. General Rodriguez also described patterns that will affect how African cyberspace develops, including economic growth, urbanization, and a youth bulge (which will accelerate Internet access and use of social media) and entrenched political and economic problems that produce conditions across Africa ripe for violent extremism (which will increase extremist exploitation of cyberspace). For various reasons, the online aspects of violent extremism within Africa have not gained sustained policy attention. Some efforts, such as AFRICOM’s support for a counter-messaging campaign called Operation Objective Voice, lacked prominence and faced questions about its effectiveness. With the Islamic State bringing its cyber-facilitated extremism to the continent, the time has come to formulate better responses. In the 2016 AFRICOM Posture Statement, General Rodriguez argued that countering violent extremism in Africa requires “a comprehensive approach employing diplomacy, defense, and development” strategies. This comprehensive approach should also address the online activities of extremist groups in Africa. As a combatant command that integrates military and civilian capabilities, AFRICOM is well placed to focus on the threat of cyber-facilitated extremism in Africa. It can oversee military involvement in countering this transnational threat, support diplomatic efforts with and among African countries to address extremist exploitation of the Internet and social media, and identify how extremists might take advantage of trends and vulnerabilities that emerge as African cyberspace evolves, including through implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Countering cyber-facilitated extremism in Africa will differ from what has been attempted against the online activities the Islamic State has undertaken to bolster its position in the Middle East. The territorial losses it has sustained in Iraq and Syria damage the group’s message, and, despite problems, government and private-sector efforts are challenging and disrupting the cyber means the group has used to spread its message. Whatever happens in the Middle East, the Islamic State has blazed the online trail violent extremists in the digital age will seek to emulate around the world. With the Islamic State bringing its cyber-facilitated extremism to Africa and with African terrorist groups adopting the Islamic State’s online playbook, the need for a comprehensive approach to the cyber components of violent extremism in Africa is becoming a more pressing policy issue.

Lincoln Davidson is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ever since Facebook was banned in China following riots in Xinjiang Province, China, in summer 2009, there has been speculation that the company is trying to regain access to the market, fueled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to build connections with the Chinese government and business community. Most recently, Zuckerberg made a highly-publicized visit to China last month, meeting with Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Chinese Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan. But despite Zuckerberg’s efforts, Facebook isn’t likely to be successful in the Chinese market, even if the government unblocks it. It’s not clear that Chinese consumers even want the product Facebook has to offer, and U.S. tech firms have had a particularly difficult time making it in the Chinese market. For a deeper dig into the challenges Facebook is likely to face, check out my blog post on Net Politics.

Lincoln Davidson is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Last month, Chinese propaganda officials rushed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s defense, ordering media to crack down on criticism of the tech entrepreneur. Interesting company for a man who has celebrated the power of the Internet to enable free speech. Zuckerberg was in China for meetings with Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship and propaganda chief Liu Yunshan. According to state media, Zuckerberg “spoke highly of the progress China has made in internet field [sic], saying he would work with Chinese peers to create a better world in cyberspace.” It would seem that this “better world” is one where Facebook isn’t blocked by the Chinese government, as Zuckerberg found ways to skirt the Great Firewall and post a picture on the social network of his jog past Tiananmen Square. Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, over concerns that it could be used to organize anti-government protests. Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to make friends among the country’s business and government elite, presumably in hopes that the ban might be lifted. He’s begun to learn Chinese, delivered Chinese New Year well-wishes in the language, and gave his daughter a Chinese name. He serves on the advisory board of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, one of China’s top schools. He’s given Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, a tour of Facebook’s offices, telling Lu at the time that he’d bought copies of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China for some of his employees. It’s understandable that Zuckerberg wants Facebook to enter China: the country’s 660 million Internet users are an attractive market. But it’s not going to work. The evidence suggests that the Chinese market is not interested in the product Facebook has to offer. Despite the controls the government places on freedom of expression, China has a vibrant ecosystem of online communities. And yet, the social networks that are most popular among Chinese people are ones that look very different from Facebook. Microblogs, known as weibo in Chinese, function more similarly to Twitter than Facebook, and have about 200 million monthly active users. WeChat, by far the most popular social media platform in China, has 650 million monthly active users, most of whom are assumed to live in China. From the core service it started out as—a messaging app similar to WhatsApp—WeChat has grown into a whole digital ecosystem in a single app. It has integrated mobile payments that are utilized by a fifth of the app’s users. Companies and government agencies use official accounts to connect with consumers and citizens. WeChat’s “Moments” allow users to post pictures that can be viewed by their connections. Businesses have come to rely on WeChat groups for communication among team members, and the app’s maker is now looking into developing an enterprise version akin to Slack. Startups are even using WeChat as a platform for launching their own services. The app has become so ubiquitous that the average Chinese phone user sends just over one text message per day. The Chinese social network most similar to Facebook in both layout and the way in which users interact with each other, RenRen, has been losing users for years and seen the value of its stock decline by 80 percent since it listed on the NYSE in 2011. And while the decline of weibo in the face of WeChat’s meteoric rise suggests that Chinese users can be fickle when it comes to choosing a preferred social network, this shift occurred just as the government was clamping down on weibo. It might even be the case that adoption of WeChat was a pragmatic choice by netizens who understand the limits of censorship and seek to maximize their room for expression within the strictures set by the government. If this is the case, Facebook will have difficulty winning them over, as it would surely be the target of heightened government attention were it to ever be unblocked, given its foreign status and history of use by anti-regime protestors in the Middle East. But even if Chinese people do want the product Facebook has to offer, the fact that it’s not local is still a major barrier. The Chinese market is notoriously tricky for foreign companies to crack—particularly tech companies. There are a confluence of reasons that contribute to this difficulty. Opposition from regulators is a big one; the government’s stated objective of developing national champions creates incentives for officials to make life difficult for foreign entrants. Localizing is also not as straightforward as slapping a Chinese slogan on your product. The list of U.S. firms that have failed at this reads like a Menlo Park phonebook. Yahoo pulled out of China fully last March, unable to make headway. Microsoft’s Bing search engine managed to attract barely one percent of online searches in the country, and then just gave up completely, making competitor Baidu (which is used for 92 percent of searches in China) the default search engine on the company’s Edge Internet browser. Amazon’s China adventure played out similarly. Faced with entrenched competitors like Alibaba and JD (and, less frequently noted, e-book publishers like Yuewen Group), by the end of 2014, Amazon had a market share of just 1.3 percent. Even Uber, which garnered praise for hiring local managers when it entered the Chinese market, has had trouble in China. Uber has had to fight state regulators, who have repeatedly raided the company’s offices, and faces a losing battle against its main competitor, Didi Chuxing (formerly known as Didi Kuaidi) that has the backing of both Alibaba and Tencent, giants of the Chinese Internet. Didi completes about seven million rides each day, compared to Uber’s one million rides per day in China. While those numbers are likely inflated, there’s no question that Didi dominates the Chinese market. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick may be willing to bleed $1 billion per year (you read that right) fighting; how long his backers will accept that drain is a separate matter. Even if Facebook were to make it in the Chinese market, at what cost would it come, not only in cash but in reputation? Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple have all suffered from this. Any time there’s been even the slightest suggestion that American companies are involved in Chinese censorship efforts, they’ve been widely derided in the press. And companies that stand up to the CCP, as Google did when it decided to withdraw from China in 2010, have been praised. Is a market of 660 million Internet users worth the trouble? Mark Zuckerberg seems to think so. This history of Silicon Valley’s inroads into China suggests otherwise.