Under The Radar – 06 August

Ang on Unsplash

This week, we discuss:

1. The crackdown on dissent in Belarus

2. Germany sends a warship into the South China Sea

3. Resignations at Nice as new policy begins to take shape

‘We’re on your side’

What happened?

Boris Johnson met Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Downing Street this week, where he provided his full support in her efforts to bring down Alexander Lukashenko’s despotic regime.

What does it mean?

Tsikhanouskaya arrived in London with more on her agenda than a polite meeting with the Prime Minister. She is working her way around the West, putting pressure on governments to turn up the heat on the Belarusian regime by closing the loophole allowing sanction exemptions.

This week has been significant for underlining why the international community must step up efforts to end Europe’s last dictatorship, with Belarus continuing to flout international norms to stifle dissent.

The high-profile case of Olympian Krystina Timanovskaya, who refused to fly to Belarus after she criticised her coaches, is sadly just the tip of the iceberg. Athletes in Belarus have been targeted by the regime as part of a massive crackdown on anyone criticising the government. Many have been imprisoned, and while some lucky ones have fled, Tuesday’s murder of Vitaly Shishov, the head of a Kyiv-based non-profit organisation that helps Belarusians fleeing persecution, proves that no one is out of Lukashenko’s reach.

The rise of such shocking incidents, both within and outside of Belarus’ borders, should sound alarm bells throughout the international community. Unfortunately, we should not be so quick in assuming that such activities are the last desperate gasps of a dying regime. Without tougher measures, the dictatorship will continue to survive and persecute those who campaign for democracy.

One German Warship

What happened?

On Monday, for the first time since the turn of the millennium, the Germans sent a warship into the South China Sea. But despite the historical significance, German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer marked the occasion with deliberately anodyne comments: “We want existing law to be respected, sea routes to be freely navigable, open societies to be protected and trade to follow fair rules”.

What does it mean?

The Bayern’s voyage indicates a fundamental re-orienteering in German foreign policy. Until now, Germany has been wary of providing any military reproach to ongoing Chinese regional expansion. Partly because of WWII’s legacy on the nation’s psyche, but mainly since the eastern economic powerhouse is Germany’s most valued trading partner, which is something that China has been more than happy to leverage.

On a visit to Germany this year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang went so far as to praise the near-even export/import split as ‘win-win cooperation’, while also warning against intervention in China’s ‘internal affairs’ – a not-so-cryptic allusion to human rights abuses and aggressive regional expansion.

Thus far, Germany’s attempts to reconcile economic self-interest in the East with strategic alliances in the West has been to Washington’s consternation and detriment. Now the belated willingness to share the burden of risk in antagonising China comes as an overdue but necessary correction. With the imperial hegemon in Asia ascendant, and American might waning, leaving the US to counter China alone will soon cease to be possible.

The sea change in German policymaking here is welcome. Providing it has the wherewithal to stay the course

Nice lose their patience with patients

What happened?

Four members of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) have resigned in anticipation of a change in policy regarding recommended treatment for ME, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.

In its updated guidance on ME, Nice will no longer include graded exercise therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy as recommended treatments.

What does it mean?

Chronic fatigue syndrome is one of those conditions that most often pits medical practitioners against their patients. The medical consensus for chronic fatigue is that it is largely a psychological illness best treated through non-pharmaceutical interventions. But sufferers of the condition have long argued that doctors fail to appreciate that their symptoms are real and physical and that the prescribed therapies are not effective.

Five of the twenty-one Nice committee members who drafted the new guidance were patient representatives. Whilst that’s a minority, it’s a higher number than usual, leading to suggestions that more weight was placed on patient views than on published scientific evidence. The wave of resignations from clinical professionals in protest of the new advice supports this view.

But the pitting of “scientific evidence” against “patient views” is unproductive and unnecessary. Medical understandings shift as new information and data points emerge and it is vital that patient testimony features among those data points.

In the past decades, there have been enormous strides in the medical understanding of eating disorders thanks to the tireless advocacy of survivors and their families. There must be much greater collaboration between scientific experts and “experts by experience” – that is, the people who can provide personal insight into how illnesses affect the body and mind. The medical establishment must continue to listen to and value the people that it aims to treat.

This Week’s Must Reads

1. ‘The pandemic has exacerbated existing political discontent’ for The Economist

2. ‘In a world of anodyne corporate PR, we should value the straight talkers’ by Graham Ruddick for The Times

3. ‘How the bobos broke America’ by David Brooks for The Atlantic

4. ‘Covid has shown up western democracy’s childish tendencies’ by Edward Luce for the Financial Times

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Under The Radar – 30 July

Stiven Sanchez on Unsplash

This week, we discuss:

1. Whether Britain’s “tilt” to Asia will actually counter an assertive China

2. Plans to transition Facebook from a social media company to a “metaverse” company

3. Black Mirror-style surveillance being deployed in the UK

Should Britain sit this one out?

What happened?

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin addressed Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies on Tuesday, laying out the Biden administration’s vision for the Indo-Pacific region.

Following the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth in the South China Sea this week, Austin argued that Britain might be more helpful as an ally if it did not focus on Asia due to the UK’s “scarce” military resources. He concluded that Britain could be more useful closer to home and in other parts of the world.

What does it mean?

The UK government’s recent security and defence review unveiled a “tilt” to Asia. And the arrival of a new aircraft carrier to the hotly contested South China Sea was intended to send a message to the UK’s allies, as well as her adversaries, that post-Brexit Britain has the will and the resources to establish a presence in the region.

But now the UK has been undermined by its closest ally. Secretary Austin’s remarks in Singapore emphasised how Britain would simply be getting in the way whilst doing little to tilt the balance of power in the West’s favour.

Lloyd has a point – Britain’s modest fleet means that it does make more sense for the U.S. to go it alone. And more importantly, Lloyd has also perceived a more pressing threat to Britain in the North Sea and the English Channel, where the Royal Navy is having to monitor the activities of Russian ships more frequently.

With conflict in Ukraine likely to escalate after last month’s incident off the coast of Crimea, Russia must demand the full attention of the MoD.

It’s the end of the (real) world as we know it 

What happened?

Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to transition Facebook from a social media company to a “metaverse” company. In an interview with The Verge, he outlined several applications of the metaverse, including an “infinite office” that lets users create and experience their ideal workplace through virtual reality.

What does it mean?

First coined in the 1994 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, the term “metaverse” describes an online world where people communicate in a virtual environment, often using VR headsets. As Zuckerberg phrased it: “instead of just viewing content, you are in it.”

The metaverse’s advocates envision an enhanced reality, built up collaboratively by individuals who are liberated from the limitations of their own circumstances. Zuckerberg heralded the added opportunities it would bring to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited: “it’s the next best thing to a working teleportation device”.

But Zuckerberg’s cyberutopianism is at best naïve, and at worst extremely sinister. As a society, we’re barely able to get to grips with 2-D social media platforms – there is still no consensus on how they should be governed, how their content should be moderated, and what impact they have on our shared sense of reality. Navigating the 3-D version will be immeasurably harder.

And Zuckerberg failed to mention one of the biggest benefits that it would provide for his company: namely, access to an even more granular level of information about users’ habits. Facebook is already able to harvest information on what we choose to click and to share. In the metaverse, it will be able to record how and where we move, how long we look at certain things and how we react to certain stimuli. In other words, it’s a data capitalist’s dream.

Is a Black Mirror-style surveillance society becoming a reality?

What happened?

A recent report published by the campaign group Big Brother Watch has revealed that millions of British citizens are being profiled without their knowledge by “welfare-focused algorithms”.

What does it mean?

Some may argue that profiling for the purpose of identifying a person’s vulnerability to abuse, unemployment, or homelessness is a beneficial preventative measure. However, when surveillance becomes a prerequisite for universal credit and social housing, it’s clear that these methods disproportionately impact the poorest in society.

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have made us more aware of the everyday surveillance mass populations face. With the proliferation of technology in every facet of our lives, we are constantly being monitored and watched through our phones, home speakers, street cameras and public wifi networks.

But by extending these methods to social welfare, it increasingly resembles the Chinese social credit system – where deductions are made for ‘bad behaviour’, including debt and traffic violations, which results in the loss of certain privileges.

The Chinese model is designed to create incentives that are directly linked to behaviour, which supposedly results in a better civil society. In theory, it sounds well-meaning, but we must then ask the question of who safeguards populations from those doing the watching.

Despite the work done by whistleblowers to alert us to abuse of power and infringements on basic rights of privacy, apathy is allowing the surveillance state to cross more red lines. 

This Week’s Must Reads

1. ‘Lebanon’s year from hell: a diary’ by Chloe Cornish for the Financial Times

2. ‘Why is China smashing its tech industry?’ by Noah Smith for Noahpinion

3. ‘Mapping the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan’ by The Visual Journalism Team for BBC News

4. ‘Man v food: is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty agriculture problem?’ by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N Rosenberg for The Guardian

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Digital Digest – 23 July

In this week’s Digital Digest, we look at Channel 4’s latest ‘Super Human’ campaign and a House of Lords Committee’s plans for greater cooperation between social media companies and law enforcement.

We then take a look at big tech, with Facebook being accused of failing to combat COVID-19 misinformation and Anne-Marie launching her new album on TikTok.

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Closer To Home

Channel 4 aims to provoke with Tokyo 2020 ‘Super Human’ campaign

Channel 4 has released its campaign for the 2020 Paralympic Games, focusing on the daily struggles facing elite athletes as they fight to make it to Tokyo.

This is the third iteration of the Superhumans campaign, which Channel 4 first unveiled ahead of the 2012 Paralympics. Following the success of ‘Meet the Superhumans’, Channel 4 launched its ‘We’re the Superhumans’ campaign to promote its coverage of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.

In a first for Channel 4, More 4 will act as a dedicated team sports channel live from Tokyo.

Lords Committee calls for social media companies to fund police to capture online trolls 

The Lords’ Communications and Digital committee issued a warning to the Government that the coming Duty of Care laws could usher in a ‘wave of censorship’ if tech companies are ordered to take down too much content deemed harmful, even if it is technically legal.

The committee has called for a ‘polluter pays’ levy that would see social networks like Twitter and Facebook providing funding to the police in an effort to catch online trolls. They also called for a legal requirement to force social media companies to preserve deleted posts for a period of time that helps officers investigating crimes being committed on social media.

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Big Tech

Facebook in the spotlight as experts say vaccine misinformation remains rampant on the platform

Facebook is under fire once again over the proliferation of vaccine misinformation on its platform. This comes after Joe Biden said tech giants such as Facebook are “killing people” for failing to tackle the problem.

Experts say these posts are particularly prevalent on Spanish-language Facebook – an area of the platform Facebook is accused of not devoting enough resources to moderating.

Biden’s stark condemnation comes as Covid-19 vaccine uptake is plateauing in the US and new cases are once more on the rise.

Anne-Marie debuts her new album as a series of TikTok clips

Musicians have long debuted tracks as clips on TikTok ahead of their official release, but singer Anne-Marie has gone a step further and made her entire new album available for TikTokers to use.

Ahead of the album launch on Friday, clips of all the tracks from the album were released on TikTok.

This shows how TikTok’s partnerships with labels is evolving, to the point where dropping clips for fans to use a few days ahead of release is becoming an increasingly common marketing tactic.

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Also In The News

1. 110 brands, including Mars, KFC and GSK, have signed an open letter condemning Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat’s “lack of adequate action” in response to the racist abuse suffered by members of the England football team.

2. Good-Loop has launched an ad tracker, Green Ad Tag, to monitor the carbon cost of digital campaigns, detecting data transmission in real-time with a number of variations.

3. Netflix’s loss of domestic subscribers has prompted the streaming giant to focus on other ways of increasing user interaction, including a video game expansion riding off the success of its interactive show Black Mirror Bandersnatch and Stranger Things game. 

4. Ampersand is looking to expand its operations in partnership with LiveRamp. The partnership aims to ‘democratise’ the way TV is planned and will allow marketers to create custom audiences. 

5. The UK’s (embarrassingly slow) broadband speed could become 400 times faster with the next generation of broadband pioneered by BT-owned Openreach and Nokia. 

6. West Ham fans have taken to Twitter to rejoice in the rumoured signing of Italian national team member Domenico Berardi to the football club, which would bring a much-needed quality and experienced forward to the team. 

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