Foreign Correspondence, Vol 95
Exclusive: Tech companies are failing to keep elections safe, rights groups say
Hello, and happy Friday!
Ramadan is Rama-done, which means that I’m finally back to writing with the vital aid of caffeine. I can unfortunately make no promises that the quality of this correspondence will be any better for it.
As some of you may have seen, my alma mater, the University of Southern California, is back in the news—this time over its decision to cancel the traditional valedictorian speech that was due to be delivered next month by biomedical engineering student Asna Tabassum.
The move came after Tabassum’s selection prompted a fierce backlash over her pro-Palestinian views. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” the university said in a statement. “We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.”
You can read all about the controversy and the responses to it at my other alma mater, The Daily Trojan. But what I’ll say about it is this: By denying Asna the opportunity to address her roughly 19,000 fellow graduates and the tens of thousands of others who flock to campus for commencement day, USC has inadvertently given her a much bigger platform. Her statement on the matter, which you can read here, has reached countless people online. She has appeared on CNN and CBS. Headlines of her speech’s cancellation have even made it to this side of the Atlantic.
It’s just a shame that it did so at the expense of its own reputation. As Monica Marks wisely observed, sometimes the cost of “canceling” people hits the canceller hardest.
What I’ve written
A quarter of the way into the most consequential election year in living memory, tech companies are failing their biggest test. So, at least, is the charge that has been leveled by at least 160 rights groups across 55 countries, which are collectively calling on tech platforms to urgently adopt greater measures to safeguard people and elections amid rampant online disinformation and hate speech in to a letter exclusively shared with TIME:
In July, the coalition reached out to leading tech companies, among them Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Google (which owns YouTube), TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter), and asked them to establish transparent, country-specific plans for the upcoming election year, in which more than half of the world’s population would be going to the polls across some 65 countries. But those calls were largely ignored, says Mona Shtaya, the campaigns and partnerships manager at Digital Action, the convenor of the Global Coalition for Tech Justice. She notes that while many of these firms have published press releases on their approach to the election year, they are often vague and lack country-specific details, such as the number of content moderators per country, language, and dialect. Crucially, some appeared to disproportionately focus on the U.S. elections.
Keep reading: Exclusive: Tech Companies Are Failing to Keep Elections Safe, Rights Groups Say
As calls for the U.S. and others to halt arms exports to Israel continue to grow, I wrote about what culpability states could face if their weapons are found to have facilitated war crimes in Gaza.
The obligation that perhaps looms largest over Gaza is the responsibility that states have to prevent and punish genocide under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention. In a landmark decision in January, the ICJ determined in an interim judgment that there is a plausible risk of Israel committing genocide in Gaza. While this doesn’t constitute a definitive ruling (genocide cases can take years to resolve), it does put Israel’s allies on notice. “It makes countries aware that there’s that risk,” Ahmed says. “Continuing to provide arms to Israel when an apex U.N. court has said that there’s a plausible risk of genocide means that there’s a very serious risk that countries are also violating the Genocide convention, to the extent that they’re failing to prevent genocide by continuing to arm Israel.”
Keep reading: Israel Has Been Accused of War Crimes in Gaza. Could Its Allies Be Next?
What I’ve read
‘Putin Is My Enemy.’ The Revolution of Yulia Navalnaya • By Simon Shuster in TIME
Now, in taking up his cause, Navalnaya may have advantages that her husband lacked. Within the revolutionary movement, she has a chance to unite the forces of the opposition, moving past the internal feuds and rivalries that cost her husband plenty of potential allies. Among workaday Russians, her story could resonate on a more visceral level, connecting with people in ways that Navalny’s appeals to freedom and democracy did not. “Her power is her motive,” Albats says. “She is out to take revenge for a murdered husband, and that gives her a moral authority that people in Russia can understand.”
Matt Gaetz Is Winning • By Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic
I had tried repeatedly to schedule an interview with Gaetz. His staff had suggested that he might be willing to sit down with me. But there the firebrand was, that day in November, running away from me in his white-soled Cole Haans. Gaetz broke into a light jog down the escalator, then flew through the long tunnel linking the Rayburn offices to the House Chamber. Finally, I caught up with him at the members-only elevator, my heart pounding. I stretched out my hand. He left it hanging. We got on the elevator together, but he still wouldn’t look at me.
“Are you … afraid of me?” I asked, incredulous. Finally, he made eye contact and glared. Then the doors opened, and he walked out toward the chamber.
The untold story of Arab Jews — and their solidarity with Palestinians • By Sigal Samuel in Vox
Mizrahi intellectuals at the time were quick to link the discrimination against them to the discrimination against Palestinians. Orientalism — Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s term for a European tendency to portray “the East” as exotic, irrational, and uncivilized — was being used to cast both groups as inferior and deny them equal rights. Their struggle was one and the same. And so, starting in the 1950s, Mizrahim and Palestinians formed a solidarity movement, producing everything from joint magazines to joint street protests.
The New Movie ‘Civil War’ Matters for Reasons Different Than You Think • By Stephen Marche in The New York Times
Some critics have denounced the project, arguing that releasing the film in this particular election year is downright dangerous. They assume that even just talking about a future national conflict could make it a reality, and that the film risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is wrong.
Not only does this criticism vastly overrate the power of the written word or the moving image, but it looks past the real forces sending the United States toward ever-deeper division: inequality; a hyperpartisan duopoly; and an antiquated and increasingly dysfunctional Constitution. Mere stories are not powerful enough to change those realities. But these stories can wake us up to the threats we are facing. The greatest political danger in America isn’t fascism, and it isn’t wokeness. It’s inertia. America needs a warning.
What I’m thinking about
I recently learned that one of my contacts in Gaza, a young Palestinian law student and civil society activist called Amir Hasanian, is trying to evacuate his family to neighboring Egypt. And he isn’t alone: Scores of Palestinians in Gaza have been trying to crowdfund their way to safety—an effort that, as my colleague Astha Rajvanshi recently reported, involves raising exorbitant sums to pay off travel brokers in Egypt. Since Oct. 7, thousands of GoFundMe pages have been set up, raising tens of millions of dollars.
As the journalist Peter Beinart wrote of these fundraisers in
: “Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough.”If you’re in a position to do the same, you can help Amir and his family here.
Until next time,
Yasmeen