New Delhi: After the Supreme Court (SC) on Friday said that nominated members cannot vote in the election for the Mayoral poll, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal described the order a “victory of democracy”.
The Chief Minister said that the apex court’s order has proved how the Delhi Lt. Governor (L-G) V.K. Saxena and the BJP were passing “illegal and unconstitutional orders”.
“SC order is victory of democracy. Many thanks to SC. Delhi will now get a Mayor after two-and-a-half months. It has been proved how the L-G and the BJP together were passing illegal and unconstitutional orders in Delhi,” Kejriwal added in a tweet.
A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud also ordered issuance of a notice convening the first meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in 24 hours, fixing the date of election for the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and members of the Standing Committee.
The national capital is yet to elect the Mayor and Deputy Mayor after three previous meetings held on January 6 and 24 and February 6 were adjourned without holding the election, following a ruckus between BJP and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Councillors.
The last meeting of MCD Councillors held on February 6 was adjourned until the next date amid sloganeering and ruckus over the issues of aldermen voting rights.
MCD Presiding Officer had said that the polls to elect Mayor, Deputy Mayor and Standing Committee members will be held simultaneously. She had also added that as per DMC Act, alderman are eligible to vote in the Mayor and Deputy Mayor polls.
Minister for Minorities Affairs Smriti Irani (File Photo)
After billionaire investor George Soros foretold that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would “have to answer questions” as a result of Indian business tycoon Gautam Adani’s recent stock market woes, Union Minister Smriti Irani urged Indians to stand as one against “foreign powers who try to intervene in India’s democratic processes.”
“The man who broke the Bank of England, and is designated by the nation an economic war criminal, has now pronounced his desire to break Indian democracy. George Soros, an international entrepreneur, has declared his ill-intention to intervene in democratic processes of India,” the fiery BJP leader said.
George Soros wants a govt that is pliable to his needs is more than evident from his statement. That he has announced funding of over a billion dollars to target leaders like PM Modi is significant. Every 5 yrs we elect a democratic govt: Smriti Irani, BJP pic.twitter.com/TATWcjmp4a
MUNICH — “I’ve discovered I’m popular with Munich taxi drivers,” chortled Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He’s surprised they recognize him. They have been peppering him with questions about the future of Russia and whether its President Vladimir Putin will resort to nuclear weapons or can remain in power.
They aren’t the only ones curious to get Khodorkovsky’s answers here at the Munich Security Conference. In the margins of the conference Khodorkovsky, former Russian tycoon, onetime political prisoner and now a leading Putin critic, is being sought out. And in bilateral chats, to the last query about whether Putin can hold on to power, Khodorkovsky says the only way the Russian leader will is if the West offers a helping hand by losing its nerve, engaging in premature negotiations and pushing Ukraine into a dubious deal.
“Let’s call it Minsk 6,” he tells me as I sit with him and other Russian opposition figures in a hotel bar after an exhausting day in the bustling Bavarian capital. The bar is full of other huddles deep in earnest discussion.
While conference organizers spurned a delegation from the Russian government, Russia’s opposition politicians and activists, including former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov and former independent Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov, have been welcomed. Khodorkovsky’s first session was packed out.
Ukraine’s leaders remain wary of Russia’s dissidents, arguing they aren’t immune from chauvinism and “largely ignored the eight years of war waged against us, even before the February invasion,” as Ukrainian lawmaker Lesia Vasylenko recently told me. “In order to be a Russian whom we can trust,” Vasylenko said, “you have to really prove that you’re not just against your own regime in Russia, but you oppose the war in Ukraine and that you stand for all the values Ukraine is defending — namely territorial integrity, Ukraine’s independence within the internationally recognized borders.”
Here in Munich, though, what Khodorkovsky and the others have been saying is music to the ears of the Ukrainians. On the spectrum between hard-liners and doubters who worry about escalation, they are among the most militant and are determined to bolster Western nerve and dispel fears of nuclear escalation.
It goes back to Khodorkovsky’s “Minsk 6.” As ever, he argues in a methodical way, inviting his interlocutor to follow his argument step by step in imitation of the Socratic method, asking and answering questions to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions.
Some Western leaders have expressed their worries to him about a coup in Moscow. They are fearful that Putin will be replaced by someone worse. To this, Khodorkovsky says it can’t get any worse. He trawls through his cell phone to show me a bizarre video clip posted to the internet where one of Putin’s top nuclear advisers enthusiastically discusses how Russia will soon be able to racially improve future generations by cloning and incubating through planned eugenics. Presumably the dissident gene will be extracted.
He senses some in the West want negotiations, are putting out feelers and are under the impression Putin might want soon to negotiate. “They’re testing the waters,” he says. But he is adamant that talks would end badly for Ukraine, the West and Russians.
“Let us assume we have negotiations for a peaceful settlement. Let’s call it Minsk 6,” Khodorkovsky says, a hypothetical resurrection of the Minsk agreements that sought to end the war in Donbas but that were declared dead by Putin on February 22 last year, days before he launched his invasion.
He went on: “What does Putin get from this? He says, okay, I get to keep Crimea and give me all of Luhansk and Donetsk and I’ll return most of what I captured along the Black Sea coast, but leave me a corridor to Crimea. Let’s say Zelenskyy is squeezed and agrees to negotiate. You would destabilize Ukraine, which would be thrown into civil conflict as 87 percent of Ukrainians would not stomach such a deal — it would have the equivalent effect of, say, if Zelenskyy had taken up the American offer at the start of the war and taken a lift out of the country.”
Khodorkovsky outlines what would then happen. Putin would regroup, mobilize more, and draft people in the occupied territories, build up his arsenal and replenish his depleted munitions. The Russian leader would then accuse the Ukrainians of not holding up their part of Minsk 6, as civil conflict raged in Ukraine, which he would say is a threat to Russians in the occupied territories and likely there would be occasional attacks on border posts staged or otherwise.
Dmitry Medvedev recently warned that Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine could spark a nuclear war | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
“You see Putin has no choice but to wage wars. His base of support now is restricted to the the so-called national patriots — to get more support, he needs to improve the economic well-being of Russians and he can’t do so because of corruption and cronyism and things like that,” Khodorkovsky says. At the same time, he would have to deal with the destroyed regions of Ukraine he occupies, and he’s faced with Western sanctions “and nobody will be in a hurry to lift them.” And his base of support will say he has failed to de-Nazify Ukraine or get NATO to move away from Russia’s borders.
“He will have absolutely no choice. He will have to start a new war. Only now his eyes are going to be on NATO countries, mainly the Baltics,” Khodorkovsky concludes.
After Khodorkovsky breaks off to talk with more interlocutors, Dmitry Gudkov tells me he agrees with his compatriot. And he also shares his view that it is unlikely Putin will resort to using tactical nuclear weapons, despite the threats and saber-rattling and comments by the likes of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s sidekick and now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
Medvedev recently warned that Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine could spark a nuclear war. “The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Gudkov sees such threats as empty but an exercise in intimidation aimed at frightening doubters and faint hearts in the West, and strengthening their hand in urging a winding down and cautious calibration of support for Ukraine.
But Gudkov says Western leaders should hammer home a frequent warning of their own to everyone in Russia’s nuclear chain of command. “They should say repeatedly, ‘we know exactly who you are and where you live and if you push any buttons, we will target and get you — and you will never escape justice and revenge’,” says Gudkov.
Medvedev is one of Putin’s lieutenants who draws special derision from the Russian dissidents in Munich. Once keen to present himself as a moderate, Western-tilted modernizer and reformer, his recent furious tirades have prompted many in the West to scratch their heads and ponder, “Whatever happened to Dmitry Medvedev?”
The overall view is that he has gone through a makeover to accord with his master’s voice but is also positioning himself to be more relevant, much like the technocrat Sergey Kiriyenko, the former prime minister and current first deputy chief of staff in the Presidential Administration. Kiriyenko has taken to macho-posturing around the occupied territories of Ukraine’s Donbas decked out in camouflage.
But Medvedev’s comments have had a special poisonous and extreme flavor of their own. He’s described Joe Biden as a “strange grandfather with dementia,” dubbed EU leaders as “lunatics,” and promised Russia will ensure Ukraine “disappears from the map.” All his genocidal rhetoric contrasts with the hip image he once presented with his love for blogging and gadgets and a visit to Silicon Valley to be handed a new iPhone 4 by Steve Jobs.
So crazed has Medvedev seemed in recent months that it provokes Anastasia Burakova, founder of the NGO Kovcheg (The Ark), which supports Russian political refugees overseas, to joke that he “must be an American spy using his tirades to send secret information to the CIA.” Or maybe Putin wants him to say especially mad things “to make him look sensible as a way to say to the West look, I could be replaced by someone worse than me.”
And here we come full circle. Ultimately how long Putin rules will largely be determined by whether the West holds its nerve, say the Russians in Munich.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Some 130,000 demonstrators swarmed the streets that night last month to rally against the country’s new far-right government — arguably the most extreme in Israel’s history — and an agenda that even centrist politicians say threatens Israel’s democracy. The protest wasn’t a one-off. Pro-democracy demonstrations have taken place every Saturday since the start of January, bringing in some of the largest crowds in recent memory (though smaller than the 2011 social justice protests that, at their height, brought approximately a quarter million people to the streets).
The new government is led by a familiar face, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in and out of office since 1996 and is still on trial for corruption charges.
But the coalition he cobbled together to regain power includes elements that once composed the fringe of Israeli politics. That includes Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right religious nationalist who heads a political party named “Jewish Power.” Previously, he was a member of Kach, a party that was outlawed in Israel and that spent 25 years on the U.S. State Department’s list of terror organizations; in a twist of irony, Ben Gvir is now serving as the country’s national security minister. Since taking the helm, he has visited the Al Aqsa compound in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, home to the third holiest site in Islam. Al Aqsa is sacred to Jews as well, but such visits are viewed by Palestinians as a huge provocation — an act so contentious that Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit is widely credited with sparking the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
Another controversial figure in the new government is Bezalel Smotrich, a settler and the leader of an ultra-nationalist religious Zionist party. Smotrich is now serving as a finance minister; it is widely believed that, in this role, he will ensure West Bank settlements get the money they need to continue to grow, threatening what little possibility remains of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state.
Already, this new government is making moves to chip away at the country’s democratic space. A proposed overhaul to the judiciary would render the High Court’s judgments toothless and would destroy its independence, upending the country’s system of checks and balances. The government also announced an intent to shut down Kan — the country’s only publicly funded broadcast news service — with Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi “calling public broadcasting unnecessary.” Outrage was so intense that it’s been put on ice for now as the government focuses instead on pushing through its controversial judicial reforms. Netanyahu defends the reshuffling of the judiciary, dismissively calling them a “minor correction.”
But even Israel’s own president, Isaac Herzog, is sounding the alarm. In a speech given on Sunday — the day before a massive nationwide strike that brought 100,000 Israelis to protest outside of the Knesset on Monday — Herzog warned that the country is “on the brink of constitutional and social collapse.”
“I feel, we all feel, that we are in the moment before a clash, even a violent clash,” Herzog said. “The gunpowder barrel is about to explode.”
When I wade into the crowd on that Saturday night, just after Shabbat has ended, there’s another consistent fear I hear from Israelis: that this new government will undermine its standing in the world, including with its most important ally, the United States. But while there are fears about losing American support, some Israelis also voice concern that American backing will continue regardless of what this new government does — a scenario they view as enabling and dangerous. Because what would an Israel — held accountable to no one, left entirely to its own devices — look like?
Avi, who works in high-tech, a key Israeli industry, says he is particularly worried about the government targeting the rights of secular Israelis, women and LGBTQ individuals — which could also prove to open rifts between America’s Democratic Party and the Israeli government. (Just a few days later, hundreds of Israeli high-tech employees would take to the streets, leaving their desks abruptly at midday to march on Rothschild Boulevard as they carried signs that read, “No democracy, no high-tech.”)
Asked if Israel’s relationship with the United States is a concern, Hila replies, “It’s always a concern. We’re supposed to be the only democracy in the Middle East and that doesn’t seem like where we’re going with the latest changes.”
Maya Lavie-Ajayi, a 48-year-old professor at Ben Gurion University, says she hopes to see some sort of intervention from the Biden administration and the European Union. “We see Hungary and we see Russia and we know you get to a point where [citizens] can’t fight back anymore.” She added that while Israel isn’t there yet, “I think that we need support to keep the democratic nature that was problematic in the first place.”
Lavie-Ajayi notes the withdrawal of American support would be a powerful lesson to Netanyahu: “Bibi would understand that he can’t just do whatever he wants, that he doesn’t have an open ticket to chip away at the democratic nature of this country.”
It’s not just people in the streets who see the prospect of pressure from abroad. In December, over 100 former Israeli diplomats and retired foreign ministry officials sent an open letter to Netanyahu expressing concern about the new government’s impact on the country’s international standing, warning that there could be “political and economic ramifications.”
Indeed, senior American officials seem to share at least some of protesters’ worries about the direction Israel is taking. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited Israel last month reportedly in hopes of “syncing up” with the new government. Then came Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip, during which he said he had a “candid” talk with Netanyahu, with Blinken touting the need for a two-state solution with Palestinians and the importance of democratic institutions.
Still, it seems unlikely Israel will lose American support — including billions in military aid — anytime soon.
“This administration will go to great lengths to avoid a public confrontation with the new Netanyahu government,” says Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department official who worked on Middle East negotiations and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
At the same time, Israel’s shifting politics — particularly with a government that’s now more religious right than secular right — could have unintended reverberations. It’s taken for granted that American liberals are likely to grow ever more skittish with an ultra-conservative Israel. But some in conservative corners are also worried, according to Yossi Shain, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University, professor emeritus at Georgetown University and former Knesset Member from Yisrael Beiteinu, a secular nationalist party on the right. He says he’s constantly on the phone with American counterparts who are deeply concerned about how the new government will impact the country’s security and economy.
“The Israeli right pretends to reflect American conservative values, but in fact distorts them,” he adds. “It builds on clericalism and religious orthodoxy that negates liberties, the core of American conservative creed.”
Now, Shain says, some of the same political actors who helped foster the circumstances that enabled this government to rise are wringing their hands.
To which Israel’s pro-democracy protesters would likely respond, “Told you so.”
Back on the street in Tel Aviv, many in the crowd, though not all, link the decades of Palestinian occupation with the decline of Israel’s democracy.
“Rights for Jews only is not a democracy,” reads one poster. A massive black sign — made out of cloth and held up by half a dozen protesters — depicts the separation barrier, guard towers and barbed wire that contain the West Bank; in the middle, a dove bearing an olive branch bursts through the structure. “A nation that occupies another nation will never be free,” says the sign in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
Nearby, a woman calls through a bullhorn, “Democracy?”
“Yes!” the crowd responds.
“Occupation?”
“No!” they cry.
“I’m terrified of a situation where [Israel’s new government] doesn’t reduce American support,” says Rony HaCohen, an economist, pointing to the way the military occupation of the Palestinian territories has become normalized amid a lack of American censure.
But one protester questions even the United States’ ability to rein in its closest ally in the Middle East. Jesse Fox, a 41-year-old doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University, says that while he’d like to see the Biden administration raise some pressure, he believes Israel is already headed down “the path of Hungary” and other countries that have abandoned democratic principles.
“It starts with the court reforms,” he says. “After that, they have plans to try to bring the media under government control. And then, who knows?”
And as an American Jewish immigrant who has lived in Israel for the better part of 20 years, Fox adds, “I want Americans to realize that, right now, being ‘pro-Israel’ means opposing the Israeli government.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party on Tuesday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government of threatening the fourth pillar of democracy by raiding the BBC.
Lashing out at the government over its actions, AAP leader Atishi said: “The BJP wants to suppress every word spoken or shown against the government. The Income Tax Raid on the BBC is an attack on the democracy of India. Media is the most important pillar of democracy, today the BJP Central government is trying to break the fourth pillar of democracy.”
Addressing the media, she said that this is a message to the entire media fraternity that if they show anything against the BJP and the PM, they will meet the same fate. Raising questions about the Centre’s intentions behind the action, she said: “BJP banned the documentary made by BBC to prevent the country from seeing these allegations unfold. India is at number 150 out of 180 countries in the Global Index of Press Freedom, today the whole world is questioning India’s democratic status.”
“Why has the BBC been raided? Because today, not only India but the entire world is discussing the BBC documentary. First of all, the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Central government got that documentary banned and removed from websites and social media so that no one in India is able to watch it. This was the first act of censorship by the BJP-ruled central government after the BBC’s documentary on Narendra Modi.”
And with today’s income tax raid, she alleged, that the BJP-led central government “is threatening all of us and asserting that no one, not even a globally famous organisation like the BBC can say, write, or show anything that is critical of their administration”.
Atishi asked the BJP to explain what image of India does it want to present to the whole world.
“History is witness that you can suppress the voice of the people for some time but you cannot suppress the voice of every person forever,” she said, appealing to the BJP to not intimidate the media like this, and stop tarnishing India’s image in front of the world.
Thiruvananthapuram: leader and Rajya Sabha member A A Rahim on Sunday criticised the Centre’s decision to appoint retired Supreme Court judge S Abdul Nazeer, who was part of the 2019 Ayodhya verdict, as Governor of Andhra Pradesh saying it was a blot on Indian democracy.
The move to appoint the retired apex court judge was condemnable as it was not on par with constitutional values of the country, the CPI(M) MP said.
Justice (retired) Nazeer was part of the five-judge Constitution bench which had in November 2019 cleared the way for the construction of a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) and directed the Centre to allot a five-acre plot to the Sunni Waqf Board for a mosque in a different location.
“The decision of the Union government to appoint Justice Abdul Nazeer as a Governor is not on par with the constitutional values of the country. It is highly condemnable. He (Nazeer) should refuse to take up the offer. The country should not lose the confidence in its legal system. Such decisions of the Modi government are a blot on Indian democracy,” Rahim said in a Facebook post.
The Marxist party leader said the retired judge was appointed in the gubernatorial post within six weeks after his retirement.
“He was a member of the bench which gave the verdict in the Ayodhya case. He had also courted controversy when he took part in the national council meeting of Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (ABAP) at Hyderabad on December 26, 2021. It’s a Sangh Parivar organisation of lawyers,” Rahim said.
He also pointed out that in a speech at the ABAP meeting, Nazeer opined that “the Indian legal system has been continuously ignoring the legacy of Manusmriti”.
“His words did not reflect the high degree of impartiality and loyalty to the Constitution that a judge serving in the higher judiciary should possess. Now, he has got the Governor post,” Rahim added.
Justice Nazeer, who retired on January 4, has been part of several path-breaking verdicts, including those on the politically sensitive Ayodhya land dispute, instant ‘triple talaq’ and the one that declared ‘right to privacy’ a fundamental right.
He was elevated as an apex court judge on February 17, 2017.
The Justice Nazeer-led five-judge Constitution benches delivered two separate verdicts this year, including the one which by a majority of 4:1 validated the legality of the Centre’s 2016 decision to demonetise the Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denomination currency notes, saying the decision-making process was neither flawed nor hasty.
Srinagar, Feb 11 (GNS): National Conference President and Member of the Parliament Dr. Farooq Abdullah on Saturday said the recent move of J&K administration to nominate Numberdars/Chowkidars for villages and towns across J&K runs contrary to the government claims of strengthening democracy in Jammu and Kashmir.
Echoing the concerns of a delegation of Numberdars that had called on him, Dr. Farooq said that the government is trying to bring in their own people for this important position through backdoor.
Dr Farooq said the association members who called on him resented the manner in which the incumbent Numberdars were being shown the door and the new ones nominated by the incumbent administration ditching all established norms and procedures. “The incumbent numberdars who command public confidence as persons are being shown the doors. It seems the administration, by nominating candidates of their choice, is trying to set a political discourse in the villages and towns that suits their cause,” he said.
“The positions of Numberdar and Chowkidar are very significant in terms of better coordination at the grassroot levels and for that reason the government should have acted more sensibly rather than in this arbitrary way,”Dr Farooq said adding, “The process of selection cannot evade accountability and public scrutiny. The manner in which the process is being carried out raises a number of questions and it’s the government which has to come clean.” (GNS)
SRINAGAR: The Jammu and Kashmir National Conference President and Member of the Parliament Dr Farooq Abdullah on Saturday said the recent move of J&K administration to nominate Numberdars/Chowkidars for villages and towns across J&K runs contrary to the government claims of strengthening democracy in Jammu and Kashmir.
Echoing the concerns of a delegation of Numberdars that had called on him, Dr Farooq said that the government is trying to bring in their own people for this important position through backdoor.
Dr Farooq said the association members who called on him resented the manner in which the incumbent Numberdars were being shown the door and the new ones nominated by the incumbent administration ditching all established norms and procedures.
“The incumbent numberdars who command public confidence as persons are being shown the doors. It seems the administration, by nominating candidates of their choice, is trying to set a political discourse in the villages and towns that suits their cause,” he said.
“The positions of Numberdar and Chowkidar are very significant in terms of better coordination at the grassroot levels and for that reason the government should have acted more sensibly rather than in this arbitrary way,”Dr Farooq said adding, “The process of selection cannot evade accountability and public scrutiny. The manner in which the process is being carried out raises a number of questions and it’s the government which has to come clean.”
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.
But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Disney has pulled an episode of “The Simpsons” that includes a line about “forced labor camps” in China from its streaming platform in Hong Kong.
The episode — first shown in October last year and titled “One Angry Lisa” — features a scene in which Marge Simpson takes a virtual exercise bike class with an instructor in front of a virtual background of the Great Wall of China. The instructor says: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones, and romance.”
China’s use of forced labor and mass internment camps to control the Muslim Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region culminated in a U.N. assessment that concluded Beijing’s actions may constitute crimes against humanity, although China rejects any claims of human rights violations in Xinjiang.
The “Simpsons” episode is no longer available on the Disney+ platform in Hong Kong, the Financial Times reported Monday, citing experts on censorship that claim Disney might have removed the episode out of concern for its business in mainland China.
This is the second time the platform has been accused of self-censorship in Hong Kong. In 2021, it reportedly dropped an episode of “The Simpsons” that made reference to Tiananmen Square, the scene of a brutal massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989.
In response to a request for comment, the Hong Kong government told the FT a film censorship system introduced in 2021, which forbids films from endangering national security, “does not apply to streaming services.” A spokesperson for the government did not comment on whether it had asked Disney to remove the episode.
In recent years, Beijing has cracked down on Hong Kong’s freedoms, sparking mass protests and international criticism.
Disney could not be reached for comment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
