Washington, DC – An online influencing operation using fake social media accounts has targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which cited a new report from a disinformation watchdog.
Fake Reporter, an Israeli group that studies online disinformation, found that the accounts echoed Israeli government accusations about links between the UN agency and Hamas, spreading them in comments on social media websites.
As described by Haaretz, the report — released in Hebrew — says the influencing campaign relied on a network of hundreds of social media accounts, as well as three newly created “news websites”, to promote pro-Israel narratives.
But in recent weeks, the influence campaign has focused its efforts on UNRWA, an agency that supports Palestinian refugees.
The report showed that the fake accounts have been replying to posts from United States legislators and Western media outlets with screenshots of a Wall Street Journal story claiming connections between the UN agency and Hamas.
“The people targeted the most with such comments by the campaign’s avatars were American politicians, specifically the social media accounts of Democratic lawmakers, and accounts considered pro-Israel,” the Haaretz article reads.
“An analysis of the campaign’s content over the span of the war reveals that UNRWA has been the single most popular topic.”
That Wall Street Journal report on UNRWA, which relied entirely on uncorroborated Israeli accusations, was co-authored by a former Israeli soldier.
Marc Owen Jones, an expert in online influence campaigns and an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, had also noted the same network of fake accounts last month.
“Discovered hundreds of sock puppets promoting Israeli propaganda on X, Threads, FB & Insta. It also includes ‘fake’ websites,” Jones wrote in a series of social media posts on February 2.
“Recently, it has been spreading anti-UNRWA #disinformation, & trying to undermine solidarity between Palestinians & Black people.”
The fake accounts, which Jones described as a “massive cross platform pro-Israel deception operation”, come at a time when Israel is aggressively pushing to end the mandate of UNRWA.
Earlier this year, the Israeli government said 12 members of the UN agency participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed more than 1,030 people.
UNRWA opened an investigation into the allegations. The UN also appointed an independent panel to review the agency.
The Israeli accusations prompted more than a dozen Western countries, led by the US, to suspend funding for UNRWA, which delivers vital services, including education and healthcare, to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza and across the Middle East.
More than half of Gaza’s population consists of refugees forcibly displaced from their homes during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and their descendants.
Rights advocates have warned that the defunding of UNRWA only worsens the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where people are facing the risk of famine amid Israel’s blockade of the territory.
In a published report seen by several media outlets last month, UNRWA said Israeli forces tortured several of its staff members in Gaza to admit to links to Hamas.
In recent weeks, several countries, including Canada and Australia, have resumed their contributions to the UN agency.
But the administration of US President Joe Biden has continued to suspend UNRWA funds, despite repeatedly acknowledging the agency’s vital role in delivering services to Palestinians.
The White House has also backed a foreign funding bill being considered in Congress that would ban US funding for UNRWA.
Several Democratic politicians have called on Biden to restore the assistance. “There’s no doubt that the claim that [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and others are making, that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas, are just flat-out lies,” Senator Chris Van Hollen told CBS News on Sunday.
The European Union also sent requests for info to tech giants on their use of generative artificial intelligence.
The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Chinese e-commerce site AliExpress over concerns about illegal and pornographic content on its platform.
In a statement on Thursday, the European Union’s executive arm said it would investigate the e-commerce giant under its Digital Services Act (DSA), a law requiring companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful products on their platforms.
The probe will determine if AliExpress breached the DSA in “areas linked to the management and mitigation of risks, to content moderation and the internal complaint handling mechanism, to the transparency of advertising and recommender systems, [and] to the traceability of traders and data access for researchers,” the commission said.
Fake medicines, food, and dietary supplements sales – as well as pornographic material that the commission said minors can still access on the website – are major issues, the statement read.
How AliExpress recommends products to shoppers and whether the site complies with a rule requiring a searchable repository of adverts provided on the platform are other areas of investigation.
The move followed a “request for information” order the EU sent to Alibaba Group Holding Limited, owners of AliExpress, last November, in what was the first stage of the investigation.
In recent months, the EU has challenged the might of Big Tech companies with the DSA – which first came into force last August – and a sister law, the Digital Markets Act.
Both policies have hit tech giants with strict curbs and obligations on how they do business. So far, they have targeted “very large” platforms with more than 45 million monthly European users.
Platforms face fines that can go up to six percent of their global turnover for violations.
“The Digital Services Act is not just about hate speech, disinformation and cyberbullying,” Thierry Breton, the European Commission’s internal markets chief, said on Thursday.
“It is also there to ensure [the] removal of illegal or unsafe products … This is not negotiable.”
On Thursday, the commission also sent requests for information to Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X – formerly Twitter – and others regarding their use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Officials said they will examine whether the companies conduct risk assessments and have risk mitigation measures to tackle potentially harmful generative AI content.
Microsoft’s LinkedIn will separately receive scrutiny over whether it allows profiling in its advertising service following a complaint from civil society organisations.
Earlier in February, the commission opened formal probes into TikTok regarding concerns that the site breached transparency, minor protection, and addictive design rules.
Probes into Meta and X were also announced in December over their regulation of disinformation regarding Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
On Wednesday, the European Parliament greenlit the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first set of rules to regulate AI. The act is expected to be endorsed by the European Council in May.
Tehran, Iran – A new regulatory directive from Iran’s top internet governing body shows how authorities hope to steer Iranians away from foreign platforms and turn them towards local ones.
Iran’s top internet policymaking body released a directive earlier this week that stipulates new rules with potentially wide-ranging ramifications for the country’s already constrained internet landscape, which the agency says were approved by Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
The Supreme Council of Cyberspace (SCC) asserted that using “refinement-breaking tools” is now “forbidden” unless the user has obtained a legal permit.
That is the new word Iranian authorities have come up with for virtual private networks (VPNs), online privacy tools that mask the user’s IP (internet protocol), which most Iranians use regularly to circumvent heavy internet restrictions.
All major social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, are banned in Iran but along with thousands of websites, remain highly popular with tens of millions of users – for years prompting users to resort to circumvention tools.
Iran had made the purchase and sale of VPNs illegal in 2022, but news that using them, even without any commercial transaction involved, would also be banned prompted a backlash online.
Many pointed out that an overwhelming majority of Iranians have no choice but to use them if they wish to access the free internet, so making the use of VPNs illegal would effectively include most people in the country.
SCC Secretary Mohammad Amin Aghamiri told state television a day after the uproar that the regulations do not include the general public, and are only directed at top state entities – the office of the supreme leader, the presidency, the judiciary and the parliament, among others.
Pushing foreign platforms away
But regardless of whom the VPN ban covers, the SCC directive contains other regulations that call for large-scale changes in Iran’s internet landscape.
For one, it asks the culture ministry to collaborate with the economy and information and communications technology (ICT) ministries to come up with a plan in one month that would incentivise content creators and businesses active on foreign platforms to stay “strictly on local platforms”. The goal: to bring at least half of the target audience to local platforms within six months.
This effectively means that the SCC wants much of the content created by people inside Iran on the likes of wildly popular Instagram and YouTube to move to local platforms. It is unclear how the government expects to make this happen within months.
“Any advertisement by legal entities on foreign platforms is illegal,” asserts the directive, which tasks the culture ministry, state television, law enforcement, the economy ministry and the judiciary to monitor this and report back every quarter.
Moreover, the ICT ministry has been tasked with offering “comprehensive and essential government services” on local platforms “exclusively”, with at least two services ready within six months.
Some of this has been in the works for several years.
The Iranian state has been working on a “National Information Network”, obligating websites and services to position their servers inside Iran, limiting some government services only to local platforms, and making global internet traffic cost twice as much as local traffic to incentivise using local services.
Unblocked ‘shells’ of foreign platforms
Another part of the SCC directive could also have a significant impact on how social media platforms are used in Iran.
It stipulates that authorities must provide technical capabilities that would allow Iranians to access “useful foreign services” in the form of “governable formats”.
This, it said, could include negotiations for foreign platforms to establish representative offices inside Iran, in addition to “windows of access” baked into local platforms, and “shells” of foreign platforms that would not be blocked like the main versions.
No foreign companies running social media platforms have agreed to place representatives in Iran – that would need to be accountable to the Iranian state – and major brands like United States-based Meta have said they are not interested.
As for the so-called shells, Iranians have experienced them before, and have been exposed to breaches of privacy as a result.
In 2018, after Iran blocked the massively popular messaging app Telegram, citing its alleged use in inciting and enabling “riots” during a period of protests and unrest, unfiltered shells of the app started being used by Iranians.
Iran also underwent an almost total internet blackout that lasted for nearly a week during the November 2019 protests that started after the government significantly increased petrol prices.
These shells would allow unblocked access, but would have access to users’ data as it was passed through them before reaching the servers of the original app. This exposed millions of Iranians to data leaks and fraud before people became aware of the dangers.
Now, the Iranian state wishes to officially endorse such shells, essentially inviting people to use them instead of the main apps which will remain blocked.
Internet disruptions, unexplained by authorities, are casting serious doubts over the rule of law and Pakistan’s ambition to expand its digital economy.
In Pakistan, the internet has become a battleground. Not one fought with tanks and missiles but with throttled bandwidth and targeted shutdowns.
Less than two months into 2024, Pakistan’s 128 million internet users have repeatedly been plunged into digital darkness, facing disruptions to mobile networks and social media platforms. In at least three instances in January, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram have been out of reach. Now, many users have been disconnected from X (formerly Twitter) for more than 72 hours, marking the longest such disruption witnessed during this year’s election period and continuing past the voting on February 8.
This is not without precedent. Pakistan has a long history of internet disruptions, particularly during periods of political turmoil. The country witnessed a four-day blackout after the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2023, and access to social media applications have allegedly been blocked on more than six occasions over the past year alone. Pakistan ranks third in the world for imposing nationwide restrictions. Alarmingly, each measure was carried out with nary a whisper of warning or explanation from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, the telecom and internet regulator, casting serious doubts over the rule of law and Pakistan’s ambition to expand its digital economy.
The ramifications of such actions are far-reaching. Internet censorship not only violates fundamental rights to freedom of expression and access to information but also hinders economic activity and disrupts essential services. According to the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, a 24-hour suspension of internet services leads to a financial setback of 1.3 billion rupees ($15.6m), equivalent to a remarkable 0.57 percent of the nation’s average daily gross domestic product. Being the third largest base of freelance workers in the world, frequent disruptions can bring to a screeching halt years of progress and plunge foreign clients into a sea of doubt. In today’s interconnected world, digital access is no longer a luxury but a necessity, and its deliberate curtailment stifles innovation and progress. Perhaps most concerning are the impacts of such disruptions on democracy itself. For instance, it is deeply troubling that citizens voting in the country’s first digital election were unable to confirm their polling stations due to a lack of mobile connectivity.
Authoritarian governments have increasingly sought to use internet disruptions and blockades as weapons to crush dissent. Over the past five years, at least 46 governments have imposed social media and messaging app restrictions. The Global Network Initiative has consistently pushed against such intentional restrictions, which almost always violate the principles of proportionality and necessity. Ironically, precedent has shown that disruptions usually don’t achieve their purposes as people often find ways to access applications through less secure channels when faced with restrictions. According to 10VPN, demand for VPN services in Pakistan more than doubled on February 18 compared with the daily average over the 28 days prior as X began to face restrictions in the country.
Among Pakistanis, growing online outrage has helped fuel successive waves of protest against perceived election rigging, culminating in countrywide demonstrations challenging the legitimacy of the process. While the telecom authority referred to the recent outage as a “technical glitch”, seemingly targeted social media embargoes coinciding with these protests fuel suspicion among international partners who see it as a worrying step towards digital authoritarianism.
In the absence of a precise and transparent legal basis for restrictions, the systematic erosion of democratic principles leaves the country treading a dangerous path backwards for both fundamental rights and economic progress.
Democracy’s future is no longer only decided at the ballot box. From crowdsourcing solutions to exposing corruption, the internet and social media have become powerful tools for advancing participatory governance in democracies. They enable citizens to connect directly with their representatives, hold them accountable and enable the enjoyment of fundamental human rights in a democratic society.
As Pakistan faces a transition in leadership, it must consider how it can move beyond this one-step-forward, two-steps-back approach and persuade the world and its citizens that it can foster a peaceful, stable internet, economy and democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
It is an image that could belong to a film that is part horror, part sci-fi: US President Joe Biden standing against a murky background, bright-red laser beams emanating from his eyes, his United States flag brooch shining prominently against his lapel.
Yet, it was no meme page or troll account posting that image: It was posted on Biden’s own X page early on Monday. Coming against the backdrop of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza that has killed more than 28,000 people and that the US has backed, the image prompted particular criticism of Biden by some social media users.
Here is all we know about Biden’s post so far:
What was the post about?
Biden’s post came after the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl.
Singer Taylor Swift – arguably the biggest name in the world of entertainment who has previously criticised former US President Donald Trump, Biden’s chief rival in the 2024 election – is dating Travis Kelce, who plays for the Chiefs. While Swift’s appearance at National Football League (NFL) games this season has helped the sport’s brand, it has also sparked conspiracy theories from sections of the far-right, which have suggested that the NFL was conspiring to set up a win for the Chiefs to create a backdrop for Swift to endorse Biden’s candidature.
Though the Chiefs won, Swift is yet to declare support for any presidential candidate. That did not stop Biden from mocking the conspiracy theory with his tweet, suggesting that he had plotted the moment.
Biden’s tweet set off a range of reactions on X, from digital eye-rolls to responses expressing disappointment and outrage.
Several users questioned whether Biden’s account was hacked. Others joked about an intern posting the image while others remarked how they thought a parody account posted the picture at first glance.
Many suggested that Biden’s post was distasteful and insensitive as it came amid Israel’s devastating war on Gaza.
The Biden campaign makes a Dark Branden joke on the same night that Israel kills over a hundred Palestinians in a brutal bombing campaign over Rafah. What did they mean by this? pic.twitter.com/QXvenBlFi0
While calling for an end to civilian deaths in Gaza, the Biden administration continues to sell and supply weapons to Israel.
this is what the president of the united states is tweeting while over 1 million men, women and children are being slaughtered with weapons he has provided and paid for. https://t.co/Y278Per7ZT
Given the war in Gaza, the post was not “appropriate”, said Ahmed Al-Rawi, an associate professor of news, social media and public communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
“But I don’t think Biden is thinking of the global audience here,” he said. “He is mostly thinking about his US audience.”
What is the Dark Brandon meme?
The alt text, or image description on Biden’s post, simply says, “dark brandon”. This is a reference to a meme that dates back to October 2021.
A crowd was chanting obscenities about Joe Biden during a race at the Talladega Superspeedway race track in Alabama. While interviewing race winner Brandon Brown, NBC’s sport reporter Kelli Stavast interpreted the chants to be, “Let’s Go Brandon”, and reported them as such on live television.
Since then, the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” became code for verbal abuse at Biden, lending Republican politicians new language to use against Biden online, circumventing censorship and avoiding criticism. The phrase also started showing up as song lyrics.
The Brandon meme has since evolved and different renditions of Biden’s image with laser beams shooting out of his eyes – dubbed “Dark Brandon” – started making the rounds on the internet.
Cutouts of the Dark Brandon meme even made an appearance at the venue for the third Republican presidential primary debate in November 2023.
Cutouts of the ‘Dark Brandon’ internet meme are displayed across from the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the venue for the third Republican presidential primary debate in Miami, Florida, on November 8, 2023 [Mandel Ngan/AFP]
Has Biden made similar posts in the past?
Regardless of origin, the meme that was intended to mock and criticise Biden has repeatedly been co-opted by Democrats and Biden himself. His tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the Brandon phrase began as early as 2021 and has continued.
In April 2023, Biden put on dark sunshades after making a joke about becoming the “Dark Brandon” persona during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, DC.
Biden made a joke about becoming the ‘Dark Brandon’ persona during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC on April 29, 2023 [Carolyn Kaster/AP]
Biden’s campaign made its first post on Truth Social, presidential race rival Donald Trump’s conservative social media network in October 2023. With the Dark Brandon profile picture, the verified @BidenHQ account posted, “Well. Let’s see how this goes. Converts welcome!”
This appropriation of memes is part of an ongoing political war, said Al-Rawi, who has researched and written about the politics of memes.
“The meme in itself is a political communication tool,” he told Al Jazeera. “It is being weaponised by different parties in order to attract attention and distract from other issues.”
Al-Rawi believes the Brandon meme has worked in Biden’s favour from the perspective of his supporters, who like the fact that he is taking on a political attack. On the other hand, Al-Rawi said, it could come across as insensitive in parts of the Global South.
Al-Rawi also attributed Biden’s efforts to “meme-ify” political messaging to attempts to connect with younger voters. Biden’s ability to govern has come under scrutiny due to his age and issues with his memory.
Biden is not the only politician who has used memes to relay political messaging. Social media teams and followers of politicians including former US President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have banked on memes and internet trends to further political messages.
World leaders used to communicate through press releases and statements aired on television, but the advent of social media has shifted how they communicate with the public, Al-Rawi said.
Social media platform X has blocked searches for one of the world’s most popular personalties, Taylor Swift, after explicit artificial intelligence images of the singer-songwriter went viral.
The deepfakes flooded several social media sites from Reddit to Facebook. This has renewed calls to strengthen legislation around AI, particularly when it is misused for sexual harassment.
Here’s what you need to know about the Swift episode and legality around deepfakes.
What happened to Taylor Swift?
On Wednesday, AI-generated, sexually explicit images began circulating on social media sites, particularly gaining traction on X. One image of the megastar was seen 47 million times during the approximately 17 hours it was live on X before it was removed on Thursday.
The deepfake-detecting group Reality Defender told The Associated Press news agency that it tracked down dozens of unique images that spread to millions of people across the internet before being removed.
X has banned searches for Swift and queries relating to the photos, instead displaying an error message.
Instagram and Threads, while allowing searches for Swift, display a warning message when specifically searching for the images.
Search warning for Taylor Swift AI on Instagram
What are platforms like X and AI sites saying?
On Friday, X’s safety account released a statement that reiterated the platform’s “zero-tolerance policy” on posting nonconsensual nude images. It said the platform was removing images and taking action against accounts that violate the policy.
Meta also released a statement condemning the content, adding that it will “take appropriate action as needed”.
“We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed,” the company said.
OpenAI said it has safeguards in place to limit the generation of harmful content on its platforms like ChatGPT and declines “requests that ask for a public figure by name, including Taylor Swift”.
Microsoft, which offers an image-generator based partly on the website DALL-E, said Friday that it was in the process of investigating whether its tool was misused.
Kate Vredenburgh, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics, pointed out that social media business models are often built on sharing content and their approach is usually to clean up after such an event.
Swift has not issued a statement about the images. The pop star was seen on Sunday at an NFL game in the United States, cheering on her boyfriend Travis Kelce as his Kansas City Chiefs advanced to the Super Bowl.
Posting Non-Consensual Nudity (NCN) images is strictly prohibited on X and we have a zero-tolerance policy towards such content. Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them. We’re closely…
Swift is not the first public figure to have been targeted using deepfakes, which are a form of “synthetic media” or virtual media manipulated and modified through artificial intelligence.
Images and videos can be generated from scratch by feeding AI tools with prompts of what to display. Alternatively, the face of someone in a video or image can be swapped out with someone else’s, such as a public figure’s.
Fake videos are commonly made in this way to show politicians endorsing certain statements or people engaging in sexual activities they never engaged in. Recently, in India, sexually explicit deepfakes of actress Rashmika Mandanna went viral on social media, sparking an uproar. A gaming app used a deepfake of cricketing icon Sachin Tendulkar to promote its product. And in the US, former Republican presidential contender Ron DeSantis’s campaign produced deepfakes showing ex-President Donald Trump, who is leading the party’s presidential nomination race, kissing public health specialist Anthony Fauci, a hated figure for many conservatives because of his advocacy for masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While some deepfakes are easy to identify because of their poor quality, others can be much more difficult to distinguish from a real video. Several generative AI tools such as Midjourney, Deepfakes web and DALL-E are available to users for free or at a low fee.
More than 96 percent of deepfake images currently online are of a pornographic nature, and nearly all of them target women, according to a report by Sensity AI, an intelligence company focused on detecting deepfakes.
Is there any legislation that could protect online users?
Legislation specifically addressing deepfakes varies by country and typically ranges from requiring disclosure of deepfakes to prohibiting content that is harmful or malicious.
Ten states in the US, including Texas, California and Illinois, have criminal laws against deepfakes. Lawmakers are pushing for a similar federal bill or more restrictions on the tool. US Representative Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, has introduced legislation that would require creators to digitally watermark deepfake content.
Sexually explicit deepfakes, when nonconsensual, could be a violation of the country’s broader laws. The US does not criminalise such deepfakes but does have state and federal laws targeting privacy, fraud and harassment.
In 2019, China implemented laws mandating disclosure of deepfake usage in videos and media. In 2023, the United Kingdom made sharing deepfake pornography illegal as part of its Online Safety Act.
South Korea enacted a law in 2020 criminalising the distribution of deepfakes causing harm to the public interest, imposing penalties of up to five years in prison or fines reaching about 50 million won ($43,000) to deter misuse.
In India, the federal government issued an advisory to social media and internet platforms in December to guard against deepfakes that contravene India’s IT rules. Deepfakes themselves are not illegal but, depending on the content, can violate some of India’s information technology rules.
Hesitance around stricter regulation often stems from concerns that it might hold back technological progress.
“It just assumes that we couldn’t make these regulatory or design changes in order to at least significantly reduce this,” Vredenburgh said. Sometimes, the social attitude can also be that such incidents are a price to pay for such tools, which Vredenburgh said marginalises the perspective of the victims.
“It portrays them as like a small minority of society that might be affected for the good of all of us,” she said. “And that’s a very uncomfortable position, societally, for all of us to be in.”
How is the world reacting?
The White House said it is “alarmed” by the images while Swift’s fanbase — called Swifties — mobilised to take action against them.
“While social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation and nonconsensual, intimate imagery of real people,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a news briefing.
US lawmakers also expressed the need to introduce safeguards.
Since Wednesday, the singer’s fans have quickly reported accounts and launched a counteroffensive on X with a #ProtectTaylorSwift hashtag to flood it with more positive images of Swift.
“We often rely on users and those that are affected or people who are in solidarity with them in order to do the hard work of pressuring companies,” Vredenburgh said, adding that not everyone can mobilise the same kind of pressure and so relying on outrage to translate to lasting change is still something to worry about.
This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.
Rohtak and New Delhi, India: Dhuli Chand was 102 years old on September 8, 2022, when he led a wedding procession in Rohtak, a district town in the north Indian state of Haryana.
As is customary in north Indian weddings, he sat on a chariot in his wedding finery, wearing garlands of Indian rupee notes, while a band played celebratory music and family members and villagers accompanied him.
But instead of a bride, Chand was on his way to meet government officials.
Chand resorted to the antic to prove to officials that he was not only alive but also lively. A placard he held proclaimed, in the local dialect: “thara foofa zinda hai”, which literally translates to “your uncle is alive”.
Six months prior, his monthly pension was suddenly stopped because he was declared “dead” in government records.
Under Haryana’s Old Age Samman Allowance scheme, people aged 60 years and above, whose income together with that of their spouse doesn’t exceed 300,000 rupees ($3,600) per annum, are eligible for a monthly pension of 2,750 rupees ($33).
In June 2020, the state started using a newly built algorithmic system – the Family Identity Data Repository or the Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) database – to determine the eligibility of welfare claimants.
The PPP is an eight-digit unique ID provided to each family in the state and has details of birth and death, marriage, employment, property, and income tax, among other data, of the family members. It maps every family’s demographic and socioeconomic information by linking several government databases to check their eligibility for welfare schemes.
The state said that the PPP created “authentic, verified and reliable data of all families”, and made it mandatory for citizens to access all welfare schemes.
But in practice, the PPP wrongly marked Chand as “dead”, denying him his pension for several months. Worse, the authorities did not change his “dead” status even when he repeatedly met them in person.
“We went to the district offices at least 10 times, out of which five times he [Chand] also accompanied us,” said Naresh, Chand’s grandson. “Even after several attempts to get this anomaly corrected at the government offices, and after filing a grievance complaint on the chief minister’s portal, nothing happened.”
It was only after Chand carried out the parody of a marriage procession and met a local politician that the authorities finally admitted their mistake and released Chand’s pension.
Chand is not an isolated instance of algorithm failure. According to data presented by the government in the state assembly in August last year, it stopped the pensions of 277,115 elderly citizens and 52,479 widows in a span of three years because they were “dead”.
However, several thousands of these beneficiaries were actually alive and had been wrongfully declared dead either due to incorrect data fed into the PPP database or wrong predictions made by the algorithm.
Such anomalies were not restricted to old-age pensions alone. Beneficiaries of disability and widow pensions, and other welfare schemes such as subsidised food, have also been excluded because the PPP algorithm made wrong predictions about their incomes or employment, excluding them from the eligibility criteria.
When people who had been wrongfully erased by the algorithm went to government officials to get the records corrected, they faced red tape. Many were shunted from one office to another, and made to file endless applications to prove the obvious – that they were in fact alive.
The ordeal faced by hundreds of thousands of citizens in getting their data corrected has made PPP one of the most controversial government plans of the Haryana government in recent years. The opposition party has termed it ‘Permanent Pareshani Patra’ (permanent inconvenience document) and promised that it will scrap the programme if it comes to power in the next assembly elections, due in 2024.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar (pictured) made the controversial PPP mandatory for all welfare schemes [File photo by Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]
The state, however, continues to not just defend but even expand the programme. Sofia Dahiya, secretary of the Citizen Resources Information Department that handles the functioning of PPP, in September 2022 told Al Jazeera: “PPP was easing and improving the delivery of services to the right beneficiaries and preventing leakages through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The interlinking of different databases was done to get an integrated database which was the ‘single source of truth’.”
India spends roughly 13 percent of its gross domestic product, or close to $256bn, on providing welfare benefits to about half the country’s population. Worried that such benefits were being usurped by ineligible claimants, the federal and several state governments have increasingly relied on technology to eliminate welfare fraud.
In the past few years, at least half a dozen states have adopted algorithmic systems to predict the eligibility of citizens for welfare schemes. Over the past year Al Jazeera, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Accountability Network, investigated the use and impact of such welfare algorithms.
Profiling families
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar launched the PPP programme in July 2019 and a year later made it mandatory for all welfare benefits.
In the absence of privacy laws, the opposition parties contested the move to gather the personal data of citizens for building out the PPP. The government argued that it allowed “proactive” delivery of welfare without the claimants having to show any documents or needing a field verification. In September 2021, it gave legal sanction to the programme by passing the Haryana Parivar Pehchan Act.
Within a year, however, massive problems with the PPP data started cropping up. After Chand’s ‘wedding procession’ stunt hit the headlines, thousands of poor thronged the district offices of the social welfare department, complaining about their exclusion from the schemes. The public outcry forced the government to launch grievance redressal camps across the state to review PPP data.
On August 29, 2023, Chief Minister Khattar admitted that out of the total 63,353 beneficiaries whose old-age pensions were halted based on PPP data, 44,050 (or 70 percent) were later found to be eligible. Though Khattar claimed the government had corrected most of the erroneous records and restored the benefits of the wrongfully excluded, media reports suggest that errors still persist.
Haryana Chief Minister admitted in August 2023 that thousands of eligible beneficiaries were refused old-age pensions because of issues in their Family ID [Courtesy of The Reporters’ Collective]
Algorithmic black box
The government did not respond to Al Jazeera’s Right To Information (RTI) applications seeking information on the design and functioning of the database to ascertain what led to the errors in the PPP database.
A few publicly available government documents, however, provide a peek into the workings of the programme.
To build the database, the government first collected demographic and identity data of the families, including their Aadhaar numbers, the biometric-based unique identity number assigned to every Indian citizen, their age proof, bank accounts, and tax identification numbers through data-entry operators at the village level.
A centralised electronic system then used Aadhaar-based authentication to match the identities of citizens in other government databases such as birth and death registries, land and property records, government employee databases, electricity consumption, and income tax return databases, among others, to build their comprehensive socioeconomic profiles.
This data was then used to “electronically” verify the annual income, age and other eligibility conditions of the applicants. Where electronic verification was not possible due to the unavailability of data, physical field verification was carried out. In cases where the physical verification did not pan out, the family income is derived by “logic-based artificial intelligence [AI].”
The chief minister’s office and the departments administering the PPP and the old-age pension schemes did not respond to Al Jazeera’s queries asking about the logic, formula and source code used by the AI. Neither did it clarify if the errors in the PPP were a result of wrong data entry or incorrect predictions by the AI. The government has also not responded to Dhuli Chand’s RTI query asking the authorities to explain why PPP had marked him as “dead.”
Khattar told the state Assembly that families could contest the income verification carried out by the PPP through “designated online mechanisms”.
But even the families whose data was eventually corrected told Al Jazeera that the process of grappling with an unresponsive official mechanism was onerous and time-consuming.
Death by data
Ram Chander and his wife Ompati, both 60, are residents of Chhichhrana village in Haryana. In March 2022, the couple found out that their old-age pension, which had started only six months ago, had been stopped as they were declared dead in the PPP database.
Ram Chander filed multiple complaints with various government offices but to no avail. That May, he submitted to government officials a notary-signed affidavit saying he and his wife were alive and that their pension be restarted.
In July 2022, the PPP database corrected their status to “Alive” but that error continued in another government database. The local data entry operator accepted their request of “Mark as alive” and that was finally approved after they presented themselves at the office of the Additional Deputy Commissioner (ADC) who heads the implementation of PPP at the district level. The duo’s pension restarted some six months after they had been cut off.
“I have been continuously visiting the office of the ADC since March 2022,” Chander told Al Jazeera in September 2022. “They told me that the mistake had been corrected. Then I visited the local data-entry operator and found out that my status was still ‘dead’, and so I again went to the ADC office. This kept happening every time.”
Al Jazeera met several other families in Haryana who had been denied their pensions due to errors in PPP.
Daya Kor, 64, lives with her family of two sons, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. After her husband Omprakash’s death in 1996, she started receiving the monthly widow pension of the state. Widowed women currently receive 2,750 rupees ($33) every month under the scheme. But Kor’s pension was stopped in March 2022. As per PPP records, she and her granddaughter were earning an annual income of 600,000 rupees ($7,200) each. Her granddaughter was just nine years old.
Daya Kor’s old age pension was stopped because the gov’t said she and her nine-year old granddaughter earned 600,000 rupees each [Courtesy: The Reporters’ Collective]
Kor’s family told Al Jazeera that the only earning member in the family was her elder son Devendar, 37, who worked as a bus driver for a private school – earning around 7,000 rupees ($84) per month – and also has a side job as a part-time farmer.
“If the family income was over 12 lakh rupees, why would we need the 2,500 rupees pension?” he asked.
Daya Kor’s pension was finally restarted, but her family cannot forget the ordeal it went through in the process.
“For the correction in PPP, I was told at the ADC office to get an income certificate,” Devendar said. “But to get the income certificate, I am being asked for my PPP. I do not understand how to deal with this.”
(Part 1 of the series revealed how an opaque and unaccountable algorithmic system deprived several thousand poor of their rightful subsidised food.)
Tapasya is a member of The Reporters’ Collective; Kumar Sambhav was the Pulitzer Center’s 2022 AI accountability fellow and is India research lead with Princeton University’s Digital Witness Lab; and Divij Joshi is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.
TikTok is a lot like the young people on its platform – difficult to control.
Earlier this year, the fate of the short-form video app in the United States hung by a thread as several states looked to imposed restrictions on its use, and one state, Montana, legislated on a ban. And yet, TikTok seems set to enter 2024 on solid footing. After all, which political party would want to start an election year banning a platform on which 150 million mostly-young Americans spend their lives?
The app survived a year in which its CEO was subjected to a five-hour US Congressional grilling in March, the app was banned on federal government devices, and lawmakers called for a broader ban on the app, calling it “spyware” and “digital fentanyl”.
While the obstacles in its path since then may not have vanished, they seem to have diminished in size. A federal judge blocked a ban on TikTok in Montana at the end of November, a PEW survey released earlier this month showed that fewer Americans supported a federal TikTok ban than they did earlier in the year, and Congress won’t take up legislation addressing foreign-owned apps like TikTok this year.
While no astrologers were consulted for this piece, it’s fair to say the stars seem to have aligned in favour of TikTok as it enters 2024.
The new year is unprecedented, with elections in over 70 countries, including the US.
“This is the first time TikTok will be front and centre as an app for political news and views in an election year, a particularly tricky path for TikTok to walk down,” said Katie Harbath, founder and CEO of technology policy firm Anchor Change.
“The platform will have to make decisions that companies like Meta and Google have had to do in the past. Candidates will want to reach voters on the platform, the way the Biden campaign is working with TikTok influencers,” she added. Harbath was previously public policy director for global elections at Facebook, now Meta.
Harbath said Democrats won’t be the only ones forced to use TikTok to reach young voters. Republicans, including the likes of Nikki Haley, who have called for a TikTok ban, will have to do a mea culpa and use the app for their campaigns, she said. “Eventually, the place where the voters are will win,” Harbath pointed out.
While TikTok may not be going away anytime soon, it will have to navigate tricky regulatory waters, something Harbath believes the company is adept at, given that it has hired veterans from other tech platforms and has worked at winning over the broader public.
While conversations around TikTok being forced to divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, seem to have died down for now, the proposition is not dead in the waters, she said. Irrespective of which party wins elections next year, ByteDance will be pushed to sell TikTok’s US operations to an American company, she said.
“A sale would depend on whether investors see a real challenge for TikTok to continue being associated with ByteDance. This could depend on broader geopolitical issues, like China’s actions in Taiwan,” Harbath said.
The controversy over TikTok stems from fears that it could spy on US citizens on behalf of China. FBI director Chris Wray called the app a national security risk, adding that Chinese companies were forced to do whatever the Chinese government wanted them to “in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government”. He feared China could harness the app to influence users.
TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, in his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March, said, “TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honour such a request if one were ever made.” He has said repeatedly that ByteDance was not owned by the Chinese government, and that 60 percent of the company was owned by global institutional investors.
Whom to believe
Chantal Winston is one of the many small business owners who find TikTok useful for finding new clients [Courtesy of Chantal Winston]
At the heart of the TikTok debate lies the question of whom to believe. “We don’t have enough information to make that call yet,” Harbath said.
Harsh Taneja, associate professor of New and Emerging Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has researched audience measurement regimes across the world, pointed to the inherent difficulties with accessing data about platforms today, an issue that is not limited to TikTok.
The problem, said Taneja, is that data on tech companies is being provided by the company itself, unlike an earlier era where organisations like Nielsen collected data on television viewership and content. “The data was being collected by a third party that was neither an advertiser on the platform nor the platform itself,” he said. “We had more visibility into viewership data, whereas today data use on tech platforms is opaque.”
Taneja said the calls to ban TikTok in the US were ironic, given that, a decade ago, Hillary Clinton likened China’s internet firewall to a “new information curtain,” a Cold War reference to the “iron curtain”.
While American politicians have accused TikTok of addicting kids and polluting young minds, Taneja said some of the panic around TikTok is similar to the panic around television in the 1970s, when the adverse effects of television on children was a hot topic, and communications theories focussed on how television would cultivate violent views of the world and promote crimes.
There is also a huge generational divide between those who use TikTok and those who are legislating over the platform, Taneja said.
“Almost everybody who has the power to do something consequential about the platform is not, most likely, part of its 150 million user base in the US, and certainly not an active user,” he said.
TikTok is now an important part of the cultural fabric of a segment of the country and a place where people channel their creative talents.
Banning it would have negative consequences on the creator economy, he said.
‘Where we go to learn things’
Novelist Amy Zhang says TikTok can be a lot of work but it’s also fun [Courtesy of Amy Zhang]
Chantal Winston, a young Black woman who posts videos of herself making candles is one of five million businesses on the platform, many of which are small businesses.
“When I launched my nontoxic candle business, BLKessence, in 2020, I didn’t even think about creating a TikTok account. Once I started creating candle-making TikTok videos in 2021, I wished that I had done it a lot sooner,” she told Al Jazeera. The behind-the-scenes videos of how she makes candles have got her new business, she said.
For novelist Amy Zhang, TikTok is fun “because it is unserious”.
She writes way less in periods when she is making videos on TikTok, a lot of work in itself. “To consistently put out videos, you have to do a lot of scrolling, saving sounds and seeing what people are engaging with. So when I’m actively scrolling, I’m not so much reading or writing. When my book came out earlier this year and I was trying to post every day, it was difficult to focus on anything else. Now that the initial [book] release period is over, I’m just having fun,” she told Al Jazeera.
“It’s hard not to feel threatened by the short video format, or to compare the audience size for a video that took one hour to produce versus the reader pool for content that takes one year to write,” she added.
Not all young people on the platform use it to post videos. Yashvi Tibrewal, a 25-year-old marketing professional based in the San Francisco Bay Area, uses the app as a search engine. The majority of her friends do so, too. “It’s where we go to learn things,” she said.
News reports have repeatedly written of TikTok replacing Google as Gen Z’s search engine. Taneja, a scholar of audience behaviour, says the platform a group of people use the most is the one they use for everything, including news.
While much of the TikTok debate focuses on its ties with China, many young people in America, like Tibrewal, are more concerned about US-owned companies towing the US government line, particularly on subjects like Middle Eastern politics. For instance, Meta-owned apps have been accused of censoring Palestinian content.
“We’re sceptical about what American-owned companies are doing algorithmically,” says Tibrewal. That TikTok is not owned by the US and is not as involved in US government policy is something that has piqued the interest of her generation.
The government is planning new regulations that may impose penalties on both creator and platform hosting deepfakes as it looks to clamp down on what IT and Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishaw described as “a threat to democracy”.
Amid some celebrities reporting their faces being manipulated onto another video, new protection regulations being considered will look at measures including watermarking AI-generated content, deepfake detection, rules for data bias, privacy and guards against concentration.
“Deepfakes have emerged as a new threat to democracy. These (can) weaken trust in society and its institutions,” Vaishnaw said after meeting with various stakeholders, including social media platforms, Nasscom and other professors from the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
“We will start drafting the regulations today itself and within a very short timeframe, we will have a separate regulation for deepfakes,” he said.
The government, he said, would come up with actionable items on four pillars — detection of deepfakes, preventing the spread of such content, strengthening reporting mechanisms, and spreading awareness on the issue — within 10 days.
All stakeholders present at the meeting shared similar concerns regarding deepfakes, he said. “All social media platforms agreed to have extensive technology to detect deepfakes.” India has over 80 crore internet users, which are projected to cross 120 crore in two years. Deepfake is a piece of technology that leverages AI to alter a person’s appearance, voice, or actions in a way that can be realistic and challenging to discern from authentic, unaltered content. Recent deepfakes have brought to the fore the urgency of a regulatory framework for AI in the new Digital India law.
Vaishnaw said deepfake advertisements or misleading promotions are a threat that Indian society is facing currently.
“The use of social media ensures that deepfakes can spread rapidly in a more significant manner without any check and go viral. This is why we need to take urgent steps to strengthen trust in society and our democracy,” he told reporters here.
Deepfakes shot into prominence after actor Rashmika Mandanna’s face was found to have been used in an embarrassing video earlier this month. Some other celebrities including Katrina Kaif and Kajol were also reported to be victims of deepfake.
Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also warned about the threat deepfakes pose.
On Saturday, Vaishnaw warned social media platforms would lose the immunity they enjoy under the ‘safe harbour’ clause in the Information and Technology Act if they fail to take measures against deepfakes. The clause states that an online platform cannot be held accountable for the content shared on it by users.
After the meeting with stakeholders on Thursday, he said deepfake video creators have found ways to even crack labelling and watermarks. “Thus, there has to be something that finds a way out of it.” Next meeting on the subject will be held in the first week of December.
Within the next 10 days, the government would come up with clear actionable items on four pillars — detection (of deepfakes, misinformation), how to prevent spread of misinformation, how to strengthen reporting mechanisms, (in-app reporting mechanisms have to be strengthened) and increasing awareness, the minister said.
“All the companies have shared our concern. They understood that this is not free speech, that this is something very harmful… they have understood the need for much heavier regulation,” he added. “The use of social media is ensuring that deepfakes can spread significantly more rapidly without any check and they are getting viral in few minutes of the uploading.
The minister said there are very urgent steps need to be taken to strengthen trust in society and to protect our democracy. “There is a need to take steps on this at the earliest whether they are legal, regulatory or technical action we need to take all sorts of steps.
Asked if there will be a change in the existing rule or new law may be brought, he said, “We can bring this in the form of making amendments to the existing rules or we can bring a new set of regulations.
“We also discussed watermarking and labelling. All agreed that we have to do this, this is the basic minimum which all will have to do,” he said. “When we will draft the regulation we will also be looking at the penalties both the person who has uploaded or created as well the platform. We are saying that the government will bring the regulation for detection, prevention, strengthening the reporting mechanism and creating awareness and using technologies for deepfakes and AI-generated content which can be harmful to society.
Until the regulation is made, social media platforms and companies promised to take all possible measures to prevent the spread of deepfakes. “All of them said they are taking steps internally and they would like to increase the intensity of those steps,” he said.
Stating that free speech and privacy are both important for the government, he said both these constructs are being undermined with deepfake. “So new regulation is for deep fake and AI-generated content is not harmful to society.” Giving examples of deepfakes, the minister said during electioneering in Madhya Pradesh, a video surfaced in which the chief minister was kind of saying to vote for the opposite party.
“That was absolute misinformation, deep fake and deep misinformation. We have to address that apart we have to ensure that the people who create these they are identified they have their own set of punishments simultaneously the platforms which are the tools through which this content is spreading they also have to take responsibility in terms of what they are allowing to be out on their platforms.
“Detecting a deepfake is very important. It is very important to identify between synthetic and deepfake content,” he added.
Is the iQoo Neo 7 Pro the best smartphone you can buy under Rs. 40,000 in India? We discuss the company’s recently launched handset and what it has to offer on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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As children return to school, two problems have risen to the top of their parent’s concerns, the impact of social media and the internet on children’s life.
According to the University of Michigan Health CS Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, more than half of parents rank mental health issues as the top health concern for their children and teens.
Overall, mental health and technology use topped this year’s top ten list of parent worries about health-related issues for children in the United States, surpassing childhood obesity, which parents ranked as the top children’s health issue a decade ago.
“Parents still view problems directly impacting physical health, including unhealthy eating and obesity, as important children’s health issues. But these have been overtaken by concerns about mental health, social media and screen time,” said Mott Poll co-director and Mott pediatrician Susan Woolford, MD, MPH.
Two-thirds of parents are worried about children’s increased time on devices, including overall screen time and use of social media, taking the No.1 and No.2 spots on the list of children’s health concerns this year, according to the nationally representative poll.
“Children are using digital devices and social media at younger ages, and parents may struggle with how to appropriately monitor use to prevent negative impacts on safety, self-esteem, social connections and habits that may interfere with sleep and other areas of health,” Woolford said.
Screen time became a growing concern for parents during the pandemic, previous reports suggest. Woolford encourages parents to regularly evaluate their children’s use of technology and consider limiting use if they notice signs of unhealthy interactions or behaviours. Certain social media and device settings can also help protect kids.
Mental, and emotional health concerns are top of mind.
The poll findings, which are based on 2,099 responses collected in February, also demonstrate parents’ continued concern about children’s mental health. The majority of parents view depression, suicide, stress, anxiety, and related topics like bullying as big problems.
And nearly half of parents expressed concern about a lack of mental health services. “The mismatch between the growing number of youth with mental health concerns and the limited access to mental health services has serious implications for children’s well-being,” Woolford said.
Parents also shared a high level of concern about school violence, which may reflect direct experience with school shootings or fights as well as media coverage about such events, Woolford says.
She added that changes to the school environment, such as metal detectors, armed guards and locked doors, as well as active shooter drills may remind children and parents about the potential for school violence. Parents may struggle with how to manage their own stress and anxiety while they try to reassure their children.
“Parents may want to talk with their child periodically about how safe they feel at school and what they’ve heard about violent incidents,” Woolford said. “They should tailor the information to their child’s age and avoid sharing graphic details while offering reassurance about safety measures that their school has in place.”
Parents in low-income households were more likely to view several children’s health issues as a major concern, including depression and suicide, bullying, school violence, unsafe neighbourhoods, drinking and drugs, smoking and vaping, teen pregnancy and sexual activity, child abuse and neglect, parental stress, discrimination, COVID, and health risks from pollution.
Meanwhile, parents in middle and high-income homes are more likely to rate overuse of devices and social media as significant problems.
“Differences in how parents view children’s health problems may reflect their day-to-day experiences dealing with environmental challenges such as unsafe neighbourhoods, as well as discrimination that may be more frequently experienced by children from low-income homes,” Woolford said.
Concern about a greater number of child health issues may be reflected in this group’s higher reports of parental stress as a big problem, Woolford added.
But parents across income groups rated other topics similarly, including unhealthy diet, obesity, healthcare costs, and lack of mental health services.
Falling just outside the top 10 children’s health concerns are obesity (48 percent), guns/gun injuries (47 percent), lack of mental health services (47 percent), poverty (45 percent), drinking/using drugs (44 percent), child abuse/neglect (42 percent), followed by unequal access to health care (35 percent), parental stress (35 percent), inaccurate/misleading health information (31 percent), teen pregnancy/sexual activity (31 percent), discrimination (31 percent), unsafe neighbourhoods (30 percent), gay/gender issues (LGBTQ) (29 percent), and health risks from polluted water and air (23 percent).
At the bottom of the list: the safety of vaccines (16 percent), over-involved parents/parents doing too much (13 percent) and COVID (12 percent).
“Today’s school-aged children have experienced dramatic shifts in classroom environments, technology norms and increased mental health challenges,” Woolford said.
“Parents should partner with schools, mentors and their child’s health care providers to address both ongoing and emerging health concerns. They should also regularly revisit conversations with their children and teens that encourage them to share any concerns they might be experiencing, both physically and emotionally.”
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