MOSCOW — Chanting slogans against President Vladimir Putin, tens of thousands took to the streets Sunday across Russia’s vast expanse to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, keeping up the nationwide protests that have rattled the Kremlin. More than 3,300 people were detained by police, according to a monitoring group, and some were beaten.
Russian authorities mounted a massive effort to stem the tide of demonstrations after tens of thousands rallied across the country last weekend in the largest, most widespread show of discontent that Russia has seen in years. Yet despite threats of jail terms, warnings to social media groups and tight police cordons, the protests again engulfed many cities on Sunday.
The 44-year-old Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator who is Putin’s best-known critic, was arrested on Jan. 17 upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusations. He was arrested for allegedly violating his parole conditions by not reporting for meetings with law enforcement when he was recuperating in Germany.
The United States urged Russia to release Navalny and criticized the crackdown on protests.
“The U.S. condemns the persistent use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists by Russian authorities for a second week straight,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Twitter.
The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected Blinken’s call as a “crude interference in Russia’s internal affairs” and accused Washington of trying to destabilize the situation in the country by backing the protests.
On Sunday, police detained over 3,300 people at protests held in cities across Russia’s 11 time zones, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests.
In Moscow, authorities introduced unprecedented security measures in the city center, closing subway stations near the Kremlin, cutting bus traffic and ordering restaurants and stores to stay closed.
Navalny’s team initially called for Sunday’s protest to be held on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, home to the main headquarters of the Federal Security Service, which Navalny claims was responsible for his poisoning. Facing police cordons around the square, the protest shifted to other central squares and streets.
Police were randomly picking up people and putting them into police buses, but thousands of protesters marched across the city center for hours, chanting “Putin, resign!” and Putin, thief!” a reference to an opulent Black Sea estate reportedly built for the Russian leader that was featured in a widely popular video released by Navalny’s team.
At some point, crowds of demonstrators walked toward the Matrosskaya Tishina prison where Navalny is being held. They were met by phalanxes of riot police who pushed the march back and chased protesters through courtyards, detaining scores and beating some with clubs. Still, protesters continued to march around the Russian capital, zigzagging around police cordons.
Nearly 900 people were detained in Moscow, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who joined the protest. “If we keep silent, they will come after any of us tomorrow,” she said on Instagram before turning out to protest.
Several thousand marched across Russia’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg, and occasional scuffles erupted as some demonstrators pushed back police who tried to make detentions. Nearly 600 were arrested.
Some of the biggest rallies were held in Novosibirsk in eastern Siberia and Yekaterinburg in the Urals.
“I do not want my grandchildren to live in such a country,” said 55-year-old Vyacheslav Vorobyov, who turned out for a rally in Yekaterinburg. “I want them to live in a free country.”
As part of a multipronged effort by authorities to block the protests, courts have jailed Navalny’s associates and activists across the country over the past week. His brother Oleg, top aide Lyubov Sobol and three other people were put Friday under a two-month house arrest on charges of allegedly violating coronavirus restrictions during last weekend’s protests.
Prosecutors also demanded that social media platforms block calls to join the protests.
The Interior Ministry issued stern warnings to the public not to join the protests, saying participants could be charged with taking part in mass riots, which carries a prison sentence of up to eight years. Those engaging in violence against police could face up to 15 years.
Nearly 4,000 people were reportedly detained at demonstrations on Jan. 23 calling for Navalny’s release that took place in more than 100 Russian cities, and some were given fines and jail terms. About 20 were accused of assaulting police and faced criminal charges.
Soon after Navalny’s arrest, his team released a two-hour video on his YouTube channel about the Black Sea residence purportedly built for Putin. The video has been viewed over 100 million times, helping fuel discontent and inspiring a stream of sarcastic jokes on the internet amid an economic downturn.
Russia has seen extensive corruption during Putin’s time in office while poverty has remained widespread.
Demonstrators in Moscow chanted “Aqua discotheque!,” a reference to one of the fancy amenities at the residence that also features a casino and a hookah lounge equipped for watching pole dances.
Putin says neither he nor any of his close relatives own the property. On Saturday, construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, a longtime Putin confidant and his occasional judo sparring partner, claimed that he himself owned the property.
Navalny fell into a coma on Aug. 20 while on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow and the pilot diverted the plane so he could be treated in the city of Omsk. He was transferred to a Berlin hospital two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to the Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities have refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, claiming a lack of evidence that he was poisoned.
Navalny was arrested immediately when he returned to Russia earlier this month and jailed for 30 days on the request of Russia’s prison service, which alleged he had violated the probation of his suspended sentence from a 2014 money-laundering conviction that he has rejected as political revenge.
On Thursday, a Moscow court rejected Navalny’s appeal to be released, and another hearing next week could turn his 3 1/2-year suspended sentence into one he must serve in prison.
In geopolitics, Biden will spend time and political capital rebuilding the Transatlantic relationship, something other recent U.S. presidents never had to worry about. He’ll have to re-establish U.S. credibility in the region by reassuring South Korea, Japan and other Asian allies—who are rightly fearful that Trumpism might return—that the U.S. remains committed to help them manage challenges created by China’s rise. That means a tighter alignment of free-market democracies and a coordinated multilateral approach.
Biden will also need to persuade Russia that bad behavior, whether cyber operations targeted abroad or domestic political repression, will have consequences. On Iran, the goal is two-fold. First, avoid a near-term crisis while the Biden team finds a way to restart negotiations for an updated nuclear deal that will boost Iran’s economy and global security. Second, demonstrate that the U.S. will honor and enforce past commitments. For North Korea, Venezuela and Turkey, the Biden team needs at least to maintain the status quo in its turbulent relations with all three. None of these moves—even if successful—changes the fact that the global order is slowly slipping away from the U.S. The previous four years has demonstrated both the deep dysfunction of U.S. politics and the potential for sharp policy reversals over time. But if Biden can slow the erosion of U.S. influence, much can still be achieved.
Next, economics. The ongoing pandemic and its economic fallout confronts the new president with urgent domestic priorities. The U.S. vaccine rollout continues to move slowly (one and a half months into the vaccination drive, just 4.3 million people have been vaccinated with two-dose shots so far), and much more stimulus will be needed to keep Americans afloat until enough of the U.S. population has immunity to reach a stable new normal. The long-term question that Biden and team need to answer is how to respond to a world in which the global free market is giving way to a hybrid economy in which certain countries only trade particular goods and services with those politically aligned with them.
Why is this happening? China and the threat it poses in both developing and setting standards for emerging technologies are moving the world where toward a system of two competing tech ecosystems, a Chinese one and a Western one, and China has already begun exporting its tech to Beijing-friendly governments who depend on access to the Chinese market. While global trade can offer benefits to all who engage in it, tech competition between the U.S. and China—where control and access to data is paramount—is increasingly zero-sum. As technology plays an ever-larger role in our economies, that will fracture big pieces of the global free market. Absent a coherent strategy from the U.S. and other free market democracies to deal with this reality, state-capitalist China will be the most important player in this new economic order. (While the world’s most important tech companies are based in the U.S., they don’t report to Washington the way Chinese companies do to Beijing. Just ask Jack Ma.) And that means the Biden team must find a way to align with as many allies as possible on development and regulation of 5G and related emerging technologies to begin setting the terms of future international trade.
These are mammoth tasks, each complicated for its own unique reasons. But Biden can’t ignore any one of them, particularly because all three issues (geopolitics, economics and technology) will have an extraordinary impact on the fight against climate change. In fact, addressing climate can help Biden unlock progress across most of these other fronts—there is space for geopolitical collaboration to address global warming, the pandemic and its economic costs could provide the crisis needed to force a difficult-but-necessary transition to a more green economy, and there is no way out of our current climate change trajectory without new technologies that can help foster tech cooperation, not just tech competition.
Sometimes there are virtuous cycles at play even when it comes to global politics—the question is whether Biden can capitalize on this one.
Two days after Alexey Navalny, head of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) was arrested on his return to Moscow from Berlin, he released a video expose that shocked Russians and people around the world. In the video, “Putin’s palace. History of the world’s largest bribe,” Navalny alleged that an opulent property near Gelendzhik, a town in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, was constructed for Russian President Vladimir Putin with illicit funds of $1.35 billion, provided by members of his inner circle, and that Putin is the real owner of the palace.
The palace’s features apparently include a port, a vineyard, a church, a casino, an underground hockey rink, and toilet brushes costing $850 a piece. “It is a separate state within Russia… And in this state there is a single, irreplaceable tsar. Putin,” Navalny said in the video. Allegedly covering an area of 17, 691 square meters, it is the largest private residential building in Russia. Putin denied the claims. “Nothing listed there has ever belonged to me or my close relatives,” he said Tuesday.
Within 24 hours of its release to YouTube, the video reached 20 million views and within a week, 93 million, making it the activist’s most popular investigation. After Navalny’s arrest pushed thousands of people to protest in more than 100 cities across Russia on Saturday, demonstrators waved toilet brushes in the air. Police detained 3,711 people over the weekend, according to Moscow-based NGO OVD-Info, sparking international condemnation. TIME looked into how the investigation unfolded:
How did the investigation originate?
The idea to look into the Gelendzhik property came to Navalny a few days after he woke up from a coma in Berlin in early September, Maria Pevchikh, head of the investigations department at FBK tells TIME over the phone from her home in London on Monday. Pevchikh and FBK investigator Georgy Alburov began their research a few weeks later, while Navalny dug out leads as he was recovering in intensive care and wrote the video’s script. “I can’t say we started from scratch,” says Pevchikh. She and Alburov have been uncovering dozens of corruption scandals with FBK for over a decade. They knew where to look. “So many stories have somehow overlapped in terms of how Putin manages his corruption,” she says.
Putin-insider-turned-whistleblower, Sergei Kolesnikov, also laid some of the foundations for the investigation. Kolesnikov said he was responsible for building the property from 2005. Originally conceived as a “small house”, it started morphing into a “huge palace,” Kolesnikov tells Navalny in the video. Kolesnikov fled from Russia after publishing in 2010 an open letter calling on then-President Dmitry Medvedev to end Putin’s corruption, wherein he divulged how the palace came to be. “The debilitating corruption and greed plague millions of Russians,” he wrote. In the decade since, there have been no large-scale leaks about the residence.
But in the past few years, FBK had received snippets of leaked information about the palace, such as photos and a floorplan. Pevchikh says the documents came from a few of the thousand workers involved in constructing extensions to the palace, despite the fact that their phones were banned on site. “I think those who were building the palace passed the threshold for being able to contain the information,” she says.
How did Navalny’s team film the palace?
This was one of the most challenging tasks, Pevchikh says. The team decided to travel to Gelendzhik to capture a video of the heavily-guarded residence using a drone. Three FBK staff members, Alburov, Vyacheslav Gimadi, and Vladlen Los, took a train at night from the capital. Before Alburov and Gimadi disembarked near Gelendzhik, Los replaced their phones with burners and took the devices on to the Black Sea city of Sochi. That way, if the police or the FSB, Russia’s security service, were monitoring the team’s geolocation they would be directed some 240km away from the estate. “We know we’re under constant surveillance,” says Pevchikh.
The particularly high hostility toward FBK in the Krasnodar region made the cover up more urgent. “Whenever we go there we get into some kind of trouble,” Pevchikh says. Navalny and several FBK members were attacked by residents outside Anapa airport in Krasnodar in 2016.
Unable to get near the palace on land due to the high level of security, FBK travelled by boat to the Black Sea Coast. Ahead of their trip, the investigators contacted the FSB for permission to sail in the region—a particular requirement for this area only, said Navalny—and were asked (without justification) to maintain a 1-mile radius from the coast around the estate.
The FBK investigators and a cameraman rode in a motor-powered dinghy boat on a clear, sunny day wearing bright orange life jackets. Alburov and Gimadi seemed appropriately dressed for their seaside escapade, donning shorts and fish and floral print short-sleeved shirts. “We’re in a slightly unusual situation for us,” Alburov said in the video, as the boat bobbed. They stopped two miles from the residence, from where they tried to fly the drone. Four attempts later, they got the detailed footage they were after.
As for the palace’s interior, FBK produced visuals based on descriptions and photos from workers at the residence. Using architectural plans that listed Italian furniture brands, they inquired with the manufacturer about the appearance and cost of the products. “Each couch was the cost of a small flat on the outskirts of Moscow, and if you took all the furniture from the reading room you could buy a decent flat in London,” says Pevchikh.
It’s not clear how often Putin frequents the residence. According to FBK, all but essential staff are dismissed when he visits. Several sources told FBK that Putin takes “select” guests including world leaders to the palace for the “real fun”, after meetings in his official residence in Sochi, which the independent investigative news site Proekt has confirmed, says Pevchikh.
Who financed the palace?
By analysing more than 100,000 bank transactions, Pevchikh and Alburov say they uncovered a complex web of transfers and shell companies that facilitates the flow of money needed to sustain the palace and its vineyards. They include the state-owned pipeline monopoly Transneft, oil giant Rosneft and its Chief Executive Igor Sechin, and Gennady Timchenko, Putin’s business partner from the 1990s. Much of this money comes from rental agreements between state companies and two companies that own the palace and the vineyard respectively, FBK claims.
Navalny says that Transneft paid 4.3 billion rubles ($56.7 million) in ‘rent’ and to legitimize monthly payments of 120 million rubles ($1.6 million), and that Transeft president Nikolai Tokarev visits the area annually to deliver speeches and pose for photos.
“That is why we call it the world’s biggest bribe. Putin’s friends, who got the right from him to steal whatever they wanted in Russia, thanked him a lot. But they also chipped in, and collected 100 billion rubles and built a palace for their boss with this money,” Navalny wrote in the written version of the investigation.
Dozens of investigators said that a defining feature of Putin’s 21 years’ in power is his tacit contract with the oligarchs, the wealthiest Russians: keep out of politics, and you can keep most of your money. The FBK and others claim that Putin and other Kremlin officials have been taking a cut from businesses. Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist, estimates Putin’s net worth is between $100 billion and $160 billion, which could make him the third richest man in the world after Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Who owns the palace?
According to Navalny’s video the palace is officially registered to Binom Joint Stock Company, a tiny firm based in a 100 square foot office in St. Petersburg.
Navalny said Binom’s employees are also employed by an obscure company, Aktsept, which is owned by Mikhail Shelomov, Putin’s cousin once removed (Putin and Shelomov’s grandparents were brother and sister). The link to a family member was significant, Pevchikh said, pointing out that Putin has transferred his palace’s management from individuals associated with the Kremlin to his own flesh and blood.
Through Aktsept, Shelomov owns 0.2 percent of Gazprom, worth more than 8 billion rubles ($108.6 million) and the annual dividends alone bring in more than 560 million rubles ($7.6 million), according to the investigation. Despite apparently becoming one of Russia’s richest people, Shelomov kept his day job at Sovcomflot, the country’s largest shipping company, and continued to live relatively modestly in a townhouse in St. Petersburg. This is because the wealth in his name really belongs to Putin, claims FBK — “he is just a nominee”, says Pevchikh.
On Jan.19, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the allegations in the video were not new, and also false. “We explained many years ago that Putin does not have any palace in Gelendzhik,” he said.
What’s next for FBK?
Navalny faces three and half years in prison at his next hearing on Feb. 2 on charges of violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement case that he said was “politically motivated”. Alburov and several FBK members, including press secretary Kira Yarmysh, were arrested in Moscow on Jan. 21, accused of inciting participation in Saturday’s protests. Police arrested Los, a Belarusian citizen, the same day and drove him to the Belarus border with a sack on his head, says Pevchikh. He is barred from re-entering Russia until November 2023.
Meanwhile, Pevchikh is planning the next corruption probe. “The palace investigation was just the start. We cracked the code, we figured out how they pay for things and where they get money from. We already know where to dig further,” she says.
With the authorities’ crackdown on FBK, she is well aware of the risks she faces. But she says it won’t stop her investigative work or plans to return to Russia. “That is exactly what the authorities want. Fear,” she says, “And I am not gifting it to them.”
The end of April will be a turning point for former President Donald Trump. That’s when he will learn whether he can regain control of his Facebook and Instagram accounts—and direct access to nearly 60 million followers on two of the world’s largest social media platforms.
It’s not publicly elected officials who will make this call, nor a judge, nor even Facebook itself. Instead, it will be the 20 members of theFacebook Oversight Board, a little-known panel of lawyers, journalists and former political leaders from 18 different countries that Facebook established less than one year ago.
Trump’s accounts have beensuspendedsince Jan. 7—the day after he incited a violent mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building in Washington. While Twitter permanently banned Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook’s suspension (and Instagram’s) would last indefinitely, and at least until the end of Trump’s presidency. The news landed into polarized Americans’ feeds with predictable divisiveness: many said the decision had come too late; others—and not just supporters of the former President—derided it as unconscionable censorship. Then, the day after Trump left the White House, Facebook announced it was asking its newly created Oversight Board to decide whether to reinstate the 45th U.S. President.
The Oversight Board’s ruling on the Trump case will be a defining moment for Facebook, perhaps the biggest test yet of whether the company’s attempts to regulate itself can gain legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people and lawmakers around the world. The decision will be watched particularly closely in the U.S. and E.U., where legislativeefforts to rein in Big Techare on the cards. “The ambition for the Oversight Board is for it to have a quasi-judicial role, and the key thing about any judicial institution is it has to have legitimacy to earn deference,” says Daniel Weitzner, the director of MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative. “Over time, if this body makes decisions that are seen as reasonable, and Facebook follows them, I think they’ll become a part of the landscape.”
The question of Trump’s continued access to Facebook is especially thorny for the company, given the polarized political landscape. “We’re dealing with a significant proportion of registered Republicans who question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration,” says Weitzner, who served in the Obama White House. “They’re not going to accept the Facebook Oversight Board’s legitimacy if they don’t like the result.”
And in coming to its ruling on whether to uphold Trump’s suspension, the OversightBoard could also open the door to an even bigger decision than Trump’s future on the platform: whether Facebook should change its rules to allow other elected politicians to be banned. Up until now, that has been rare, thanks to an exemption that allows political leaders to break the rules if Facebook judges that the newsworthiness of a statement outweighs the risk of physical harm.
In referring Trump’s case to the Oversight Board, Facebook also asked for “policy recommendations” about how the company should deal with “suspensions when the user is a political leader.” But an Oversight Board spokesperson told TIME that any decision would not be binding—leaving the final say up to Facebook alone.
Michaela Handrek-Rehle—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 15, 2020.
Why Facebook created the Oversight Board
For years, Facebook hassaid it’s uncomfortablethat it alone has the power to grant or deny access to one of the world’s information superhighways—and the attention that those kinds of decisions inevitably bring.
“I think everyone would benefit from greater clarity on how local governments expect content moderation to work in their countries,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2018. But in lots of places, government rules still aren’t tailored to legally enforce the removal of online threats, especially in countries like the U.S. where free speech is prized. “Those norms don’t exist, and in the meantime we can’t duck making decisions in real time,” Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, Nick Clegg, told the New YorkTimeson Monday. (Facebook said Clegg was unavailable for an interview for this story.)
“Platforms have never wanted to be in a position of having to make controversial decisions,” says Weitzner, who in the 1990s was involved in drafting Section 230, the federal law that defines how platforms are held accountable for content. “They actually want to be told what to do.”
In 2018, Zuckerberg floated plans to set up a body that would be a kind of Supreme Court overseeing Facebook’s rules, staffed by an independent body of experts. In May 2020, that body came to life in the form of the Facebook Oversight Board. A co-chair,Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is a former Prime Minister of Denmark. Among the Board’s members areTawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yemeni activist, and Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of Britain’sGuardiannewspaper. The Board is funded by a $130 million trust, set up by Facebook but legally independent, and pays each of its members a six figure sum,according to the New YorkTimes. Facebook says its rulings will be both binding and transparent.
What the Oversight Board is doing
On Thursday, the Oversight Board announced rulings on its first five cases—a smattering of disputes about Facebook takedowns of controversial posts. In a sign that its members were prepared to overrule their progenitor, the Board overturned Facebook’s original decisions in four of the five cases, saying in a statement that its rulings “demonstrate our commitment to holding Facebook to account.” Facebook duly said it would enforce the decisions.
The Oversight Board’s public statement also hints at the bigger decision to come, on Trump. “Recent events in the United States and around the world have highlighted the enormous impact that content decisions taken by internet services have on human rights and free expression,” it said. The controversies created by those decisions, it went on, “draw attention to the value of independent oversight of the most consequential decisions by companies such as Facebook.”
There are early signs that the board’s members lean toward more permissive views on free speech—which could be a good omen for the former President. One of the five rulings the Oversight Board announced on Thursday overturned Facebook’s decision to take down an anti-Muslim post from Myanmar, where Facebook acknowledged in 2018 that it did not do enough to stop genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority the previous year.
The post that the Board called on Facebook to reinstate included images of a dead Muslim child and a caption stating that “there is something wrong with Muslims (or Muslim men) psychologically or with their mindset,” according to a summary of the case released by the Board. The post, which Facebook had removed for violating its hate speech policies, also “seems to imply the child may have grown up to be an extremist,” the Board’s summary said. But the Board overturned Facebook’s decision to remove the post, concluding that “while the post might be considered offensive, it did not reach the level of hate speech.”
The decision worried some activists. “Facebook’s Oversight Board bent over backwards to excuse hate in Myanmar—a county where Facebook has been complicit in a genocide against Muslims,” a spokesperson for the U.S.-based NGO Muslim Advocates said in a statement. “It is clear that the Oversight Board is here to launder responsibility for Zuckerberg and [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg. Instead of taking meaningful action to curb dangerous hate speech on the platform, Facebook punted responsibility to a third party board that used laughable technicalities to protect anti-Muslim hate content that contributes to genocide.”
Photo-illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME; Getty images
How Facebook’s critics are responding
To many critics of Facebook, the Oversight Board is a distraction from the real issues plaguing the company: misinformation at scale, hate speech, organized violence, and the ways Facebook’s algorithms amplify those kinds of content. One group of critics has set up an alternative panel of experts, called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, and issued a statement on Thursday rubbishing the Board’s first set of decisions. “This is a PR effort that obfuscates the urgent issues that Facebook continually fails to address: the continued proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on their platforms,” the statement said.
For critics, the Oversight Board is a spectacle aimed at preserving the broad status quo: taking controversial decisions on content out of Facebook’s hands, while avoiding harder questions that might harm Facebook’s business model, like tweaking its algorithms to reduce the rapid spread of harmful content. “I think any self-regulatory effort, because that’s essentially what this is, will always fall short of a firmly rule-of-law-anchored process,” saysMarietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center,who sits on the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “I just hope it doesn’t distract American lawmakers.”
Among the alternative board’s criticisms: the fact members of the Oversight Board were “hand-picked” by Facebook. (Facebook maintains that the Board is financially and operationally independent.) “They’re independent thinkers, but the process doesn’t set them up to be truly independent,” says Schaake. “The setup has a lot of baked-in limitations.”
One of those limitations, according to Schaake, is the Board’s jurisdiction. Currently, it can only pass rulings on whether certain posts should have been taken down by Facebook — not rule on posts that are allowed to remain online. It also cannot issue rulings on Facebook’s amplification algorithms, which many researchers say are instrumental in spreading and promoting divisive content online, or entire Facebook groups, which are akey vectorfor the rapid spread of harmful content like misinformation and incitement to violence. The Oversight Board says it hopes its remitwill soon expandto cover posts that remain on the site, not just ones Facebook has already taken down.
Given these limitations, the headline-grabbing matter of Trump’s account is little more than a distraction, critics say. “The fact that Donald Trump is unable to express himself on Facebook is less important than the fact that all of his followers and supporters continue to express themselves on Facebook,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, who is not affiliated with the alternative board. “The phenomenon that we should be worried about is the aggregate message that undermines democracy, divides societies, spreads hatred. That continues, and Facebook either can’t or won’t do anything about it.”
And even with Trump banned from Facebook, his supporters and right-wing commentators like Dan Bongino continue to dominate the list of top-performing posts on Facebook each day, according todata compiled by New YorkTimesreporter Kevin Roose.
“Facebook continues to allow Steve Bannon to broadcast despite calling for the beheading of a government official and continuing to make claims the 2020 election was fraudulent,” wrote Roger McNamee and Maria Ressa—both members of the alternative board—in acolumnfor TIME on Thursday. “Evidently,” they write, “we should not take Facebook’s commitment to stop hate at face value.”
What’s next for regulating Big Tech
There are no easy answers to questions of how to set binding, democratically-ordained standards for the newly-powerful social media platforms. While Facebook has received lots of criticism for the Oversight Board, no other company has established even a semi-independent body to interrogate and potentially overturn otherwise-unaccountable decisions by powerful executives.
Twitter has approached the problem differently. In a thread days after his company permanently suspended Trump, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he did “not celebrate or feel pride” in the move, and went on to discuss how the events of previous days had increased the imperative to “look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm.” The thread seemed to acknowledge the broader dynamics of algorithmic amplification—which go well beyond Trump—but his proposed solution raised some eyebrows.
He said Twitter was funding the development of a new “decentralized standard for social media,” that might contribute to a future Internet “that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity.” Called Bluesky, the initiative left several unanswered questions about how the problems of algorithmic amplification and harmful content would be solved. “As a free expression advocate, there’s a lot of positives and benefits to decentralized models,” Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s free expression project,told the site Digital Trends. “But there are questions of, if someone posts something illegal, how will law enforcement respond?”
For Schaake and other critics of Big Tech, the only enduring solution is for governments to reclaim the powers of gatekeeping the public square that the tech companies usurped. But that will take time. During that time, projects like Facebook’s Oversight Board will have a chance to win—or lose—public approval.
(BEIJING) — China said Friday it will no longer recognize the British National Overseas passport as a valid travel document or form of identification amid a bitter feud with London over a plan to allow millions of Hong Kong residents a route to residency and eventual citizenship.
The announcement by Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on Friday throws up new uncertainty around the plan just hours after the U.K. said it would begin taking applications for what are called BNO visas beginning late Sunday.
Under the plan, as many as 5.4 million Hong Kong residents could be eligible to live and work in the U.K. for five years then apply for citizenship. Demand soared after Beijing last year imposed a sweeping new national security law on the former British colony following months of pro-democracy protests.
“The British side’s attempt to turn a large number of Hong Kong people into second-class British citizens has completely changed the nature of the two sides’ original understanding of BNO,” Zhao told reporters at a daily briefing.
“This move seriously infringes on China’s sovereignty, grossly interferes in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs, and seriously violates international law and the basic norms of international relations,” he said. “China will no longer recognize the so-called BNO passport as a travel document and proof of identity starting from Jan 31st, and reserves the right to take further measures.”
Many Hong Kongers carry multiple passports and it is unclear what if anything the Chinese government could do to prevent people entering the U.K. through the BNO visa plan. As a further protection of personal privacy, a cellphone app will allow applicants to download their biometric information without having to been seen visiting the British visa office.
The BNO passport was originally a disappointment for Hong Kongers when it was first offered ahead of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule in 1997. At the time, it offered only the right to visit for six months with no right to work or become a full citizen. Applicants had to have been born before the handover date.
However, pressure grew to expand such privileges as China increasingly cracked down on civil and political life in Hong Kong in what critics say violates China’s commitment to maintain the city’s separate way of life for 50 years after the handover. China first declared the 1984 Sino-British Declaration setting out the handover arrangements null and void despite its recognition by the United Nations, then imposed the national security law on the territory after the city’s legislature was unable to pass it on its own.
“I am immensely proud that we have brought in this new route for Hong Kong BNOs to live, work and make their home in our country,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement.
“In doing so we have honored our profound ties of history and friendship with the people of Hong Kong, and we have stood up for freedom and autonomy – values both the UK and Hong Kong hold dear.”
Agricultural systems are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, producing about 20% of total global emissions. At the same time, the single biggest threat of climate change is the collapse of global food systems. As the world population grows, the climate heats up and resources become more scarce, how will we ensure we have enough food to go around?
Science is being combined with agriculture to develop new crops that can withstand the impacts of climate change. A group working at the forefront of this collaboration is CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the world’s largest publicly-funded agricultural research partnership. But this area needs to be scaled up; CGIAR says double the amount of the current level of investment is needed to slow down the food and climate crises facing the planet by 2030.
On the side-lines of the UN’s 2021 Climate Adaptation Summit, TIME speaks with Agnes Kalibata, the Rwandan-born agricultural scientist and policymaker who was recently appointed as UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ special envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit. The summit will call for bold action to transform the way the world produces and consumes food, while providing solutions and delivering progress on Sustainable Development Goals. Kalibata, a former minister for agriculture in Rwanda, played a large role in bringing food security to the mostly agricultural country. In an interview edited for edited for length and clarity, Kalibata discusses new food technologies, the future of farming, and why eating insects, while good for human and planetary health, is likely to remain a fringe idea for the foreseeable future.
TIME: Climate scientists are projecting future devastation if we don’t act now to curb emissions. But are we already seeing an impact on the ground when it comes to farming and food supplies?
Agnes Kalibata: We’ve seen huge impact on food in countries that are in marginal areas [such as the Sahel, on the fringe of the Sahara Desert], where farming systems depend on rainfall and rainfall has become less predictable. So for these communities that are living on the edge, [climate change] has impacted food security. We’ve seen average losses of 20%. That reduction takes away everything a farmer would have in term of income.
TIME: So if these climatic changes are inevitable, how do we make farmers and food systems more resilient?
AK: Number one: use science to ensure that farmers have better tools to manage the problem. For example CGIAR is doubling down to ensure that [scientists] are bringing out drought resistant [crop] varieties. Here in Kenya where I live, farmers are moving from varieties they’ve always known, that take six months to mature, to varieties that are taking two to three months. These varieties require less rain, they mature early, and they are resistant to pests.
Number two: there are ways to manage the [farm] ecosystem—what farmers plant, how they use the soil—that can ensure that farmers produce a good crop, even when the rain is sub optimal.
Number three is irrigation. Here in Africa only 4% of the land is irrigated. With supplemental irrigation, it doesn’t matter if the rain comes at the wrong time.
The last one is insurance—just making sure that farmers don’t lose everything [when climatic conditions are bad]. Farmers won’t farm when they know they are only one season away from a disaster. Being able to have insurance to help make sure that farmers have an opportunity to cope [with the risk] is one way of dealing with it.
TIME: Science has to play a role, but when it comes to food, there is a strong, and vocal, aversion to some technologies, like genetic modification, that could have a big impact. For example, several African countries have refused to allow GMOs. How do you balance fear of new technology with the need for scientific advancement?
AK: I don’t think Africa has a fear of technology. Look at how fast the mobile telephone has spread. But countries have not yet put in place frameworks for bringing onboard genetically modified foods. We need to ensure that these [innovations] are anchored in science. Only science can help us define the impact. We don’t want to be damaging our food systems, or hurting people. Everything has to be anchored in science and evidence, even if there are people out there bashing the technology.
Technological [progress in] conventional breeding, like drought resistant crops, has already made 100% difference in people’s lives here in Africa. It moves a farmer from producing 0.5 metric tons of maize to producing about six metric tons, which makes him self-sufficient, which gives him the ability to send his kids to school. The truth is we are where we are now because of technologies that have already been developed.
TIME: What about other technologies, like high tech irrigation systems, digital soil sensors, field data science or robotic harvesting. Will they play a role in a more resilient agricultural future?
AK:It depends on the ability of these technologies to be to be embraced on the ground while providing real life solutions. I’ll give you an example. While other countries debated on drones, Rwanda was already figuring out how to use themto deliver blood and medicineto clinics across the country. Rather than embrace technology, some people opt to live in fear of it. But from what I’ve seen for Rwanda, it’s worked for them. The things you’re talking about provide huge opportunities, but they have to be embraced politically, number one. Number two, they have to help the private sector make money. [Otherwise] it’s going to be very difficult to translate them into solutions for farmers. New technologies won’t work if they are not meeting the needs on the ground, or if they’re not meeting a good political environment and a good business environment.
TIME:According to the 2019 EAT/ Lancetreport, the only way to feed a growing global population while reducing carbon emissions is for humans eat less meat and more vegetables. Is that a feasible solution from a food systems perspective?
AK: I would just say that we have enough belief in in the work that is going on under the Food System Summit that these solutions will come forward and come to light. So I will just leave it there.
TIME: It shows how much the world has changed that a UN envoy is willing to discuss GMOs, but not meat-free diets!
AK: The conversation is so polarized that I don’t want to add any fire. I want to leave it to the scientists.
TIME: Ok, let’s talk about insects instead. The European Union food safety agency just cleared mealworms for human consumption, following in the wake of a 2013 Food and Agricultural Organization report on insects as a healthy source of protein. What is it going to take to get the world eating more insects?
AK: Insects are 60% dry weight protein. I mean, honestly, why wouldn’t we use them? But we have to be able to put them in a form that is acceptable to different cultures and different societies. Overcoming the cultural barrier is going to be the most important thing when using insects in our diet. Some people are going to find no problem with it. There are a number of cultures here in Africa that already use insects in their diets, but there are other cultures that have completely refused, even though they are neighbors. I grew up in Uganda [as a Rwandan refugee] and one of the communities that that I grew up in eats termites. They were a delicacy. So we grew up knowing that this is one of the best foods to have, except our parents would not allow us to eat it. They would tell us that that’s not our culture; we don’t eat that.
TIME: Did you eat them anyway?
AK: I would be lying if I said I listened to my parents. My friends were eating them, so I wanted to taste them. And they’re pretty delicious. Grasshoppers are delicious too. Just like shrimp, crunchy and nice.
TIME: Do you see a future in farming for the next generation?
AK: When I finished school I worked in research, at CGIAR, so I have a better sense of what research can do for people. I also was [Rwanda’s] Minister of Agriculture, and that’s why I have a very good appreciation of [what can be achieved] when science and policy meet. You can change communities overnight with the right technology and policies. When farmers can increase yields with the pieces of land they have, and improve their livelihoods, they will come. My dad didn’t understand the value of improved seed the way I understand it today. If I were a farmer, I would not farm the way he did. I would farm differently. I would try to make sure that I have an irrigation system, or maybe I’d grow a different crop than he did. Maybe I would grow avocados and macadamia nuts, where he grew maize, because that gives me more money for the same piece of land.
Young people are interested in farming, but the numbers have to add up. They will farm because they see an opportunity to improve their lives, to make money, and to use that as a starting point in their lives. So it’s not true that young people are not farming. At AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, where Kalibata is President] only 9% of the farmers we work with are over 60. Fifty percent are under 35. The transformation of African food systems will come when young people are farming and making farming productive.
WUHAN, China — A World Health Organization team has emerged from quarantine in the Chinese city of Wuhan to start field work in a fact-finding mission on the origins of the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
The researchers, who were required to complete 14 days in quarantine after arriving in China, could be seen leaving their hotel and boarding a bus on Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t immediately clear where they were headed.
The mission has become politically charged, as China seeks to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. A major question is where the Chinese side will allow the researchers to go and whom they will be able to talk to.
The mission only came about after considerable wrangling between the sides that led to a rare complaint from the WHO that China was taking too long to make final arrangements.
China, which has strongly opposed an independent investigation it could not fully control, said the matter was complicated and that Chinese medical staff were preoccupied with new virus clusters Beijing, Shanghai and other cities.
While the WHO was criticized early on, especially by the U.S., for not being critical enough of the Chinese response, it recently accused China and other countries of moving too slowly at the start of the outbreak, drawing a rare admission from the Chinese side that it could have done better.
Overall, though, China has staunchly defended its response, possibly out of concern over the reputational or even financial costs are being lacking.
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry wants the world to know the U.S. is humble as it rejoins the international conversation on climate change.In his Jan. 21 remarks to the international business community hosted by the G20 group, Kerry used the world “humility” to describe America’s reentry to climate talks five times.
But when it comes to China, humility is in short supply. Two days later, speaking at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Kerry called China’s efforts to reduce emissions insufficient, and said that if the country doesn’t bolster its commitments, countries working to fight climate change are “all going to lose credibility.”
On Wednesday, he reiterated the call for China to do more in remarks delivered virtually to the World Economic Forum. “China’s done a lot. I’m not insinuating they haven’t,” he said. “But they also are funding 70% of the coal-fired power plants around the world in the Belt and Road Initiative. So we have big challenges ahead of us here. We’ve got to be honest.” Later that day, Kerry and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both emphasized the U.S. would not bend on other issues it had with China in order to make a deal with Beijing on climate.
In particular, Kerry called China out for giving itself a longer timeline to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions than other nations, including the proposed timeline laid out by Joe Biden during his presidential campaign. China announced in December that it would peak its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2060, a full ten years later than the deadline the European Union, Japan and other top-emitting nations have given themselves to eliminate their carbon footprints. “It’s one of the few nations that has said something other than 2050,” Kerry told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Needless to say, we don’t want that to stand.”
It’s a bold statement considering that until a few weeks ago, the official position of the U.S. was open derision of almost any effort to tackle climate change. It’s also a wake-up call to the policymakers around the world who had hoped that climate change could once again serve as an olive branch around which the U.S. and China could rebuild their troubled relationship under the Biden Administration.
The U.S. and China are the world’s largest emitters, together accounting for nearly half of global emissions and, as the world’s only superpowers, they inevitably shape how the rest of the world responds to the universal threat of climate change. Those factors put climate change policymakers on high alert for any signs of how the two work together — or don’t — on climate policy.“This is the most consequential climate relationship that we’re going to have,” says Alan Yu, a former director for Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Obviously, it’s a complicated relationship.”
The U.S. dynamic with China has grown increasingly fraught in the past two decades. At the turn of the century, when the country’s economy was roughly the size of Italy’s, American officials hoped Beijing would gradually adopt a market economy—with an increasingly open and democratic society to follow.But China has remained committed to an authoritarian political system and its own model of economic growth, combining a market economy with heavy state influence.A number of disagreements between the governments have united American politicians across the political spectrum against China, from a dispute over territory in the South China Sea to China’s policy of forcing American companies to share their technology in order to do business there.
In the face of these disagreements, the Obama Administration used climate change as an avenue to maintain a working relationship with China. In themonths leading up to the negotiationsthat yielded the Paris Agreement, the nations made an important bilateral deal that gave the rest of the world confidence that they would both work to reduce emissions. In turn, the two countries used that collaboration as a foundation for other partnerships.“Our bilateral understanding on climate helped steady the relationship at a time of turbulence on economic and security issues,” Paul Bodnar, senior director for energy and climate on Obama’s National Security Council and now a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a U.S.-based NGO that works on energy and climate,said last year.
Relations with China grew markedly worse under Trump, who introduced sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, blamed Beijing for the spread of the coronavirus, and tightened visa rules for tens of millions of Chinese citizens, among other measures. As Biden emerged at the top of the Democratic ticket, many climate advocates hoped climate would return to its place the olive branch in the spiraling relationship. Eventually, they hoped, the two countries would once again work together to catalyze the rest of the world to decarbonize the global economy.
Now climate experts with experience in China say the possibility of winding back the clock with a comprehensive climate partnership seems increasingly distant. The new administration has adopted a broadly aggressive posture toward China from day one. Administration officials have given no indication that they plan to lift U.S. tariffs on goods imported from the country. Secretary of Defense Lloyd AustindescribedChina as “the most significant threat” to the U.S. during his confirmation hearings. And Biden’s team has stood by the Trump Administration’s categorization of China’s forced “reeducation” of millions of Uighurs as “genocide.”“Strategic competition with China is a defining feature of the 21st century,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday. “China is engaged in conduct that hurts American workers, blunts our technological edge, and threatens our alliances and our influence in international organizations.”
On Wednesday, during a White House press briefing, Kerry sought to put rest any concern that the Biden Administration would cede ground on other concerns to pave the way for a climate deal. “Obviously we have serious differences with China on some very, very important issues,” he said. “Those issues will never be traded for anything that has to do with climate. That’s not going to happen.”
Still, even if an Obama-era like partnership is out, there are a range of ways U.S.-China engagement on climate could unfold, with a variety of implications for the global fight against climate change.In Dec. 2019, weeks before the first presidential primary, Kerry laid out a model for competition with China in an op-ed co-written with Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat. The pair called for a “clean energy race” in competition with China, whereby the U.S. invests in a slew of new technologies that will play a crucial role in a 21st century decarbonized economy.
“Energy is the largest market the world has ever seen,” they wrote. “Our China strategy should be premised on becoming the undisputed global leader in the new-energy market, and the nation all others seek to emulate in tackling the climate change crisis.” Framing the U.S. posture toward China on climate as a competition also sends an important signal to Republicans on Capitol Hill who in recent years have cited China’s emissions as a reason the U.S. should be wary of reducing its own.
Climate policy experts say the two countries, now that they’re both back at the table, will need to find some common ground. Development finance and aid offer a critical area where the two could collaborate, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor of energy and environmental policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who formerly advised on China and climate policy at the U.S. State Department. In recent years, China has offered billions to finance fossil fuel projects abroad while the U.S. has shrunk its international development commitments. If both committed to finance green projects, it would be a breakthrough, Gallagher says.“It will be important for the two countries to break the ice in a very pragmatic way.”
One thing everyone agrees on is this: For Kerry’s mission to succeed with China, or any other country, the U.S. first needs to get its act together at home. That means enacting a broad suite of policies that will bring down U.S. emissions — and doing it fast. On Wednesday, Biden signed executive orders to do just that, from a policy pushing the federal government to buy electric vehicles to a moratorium on new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land. In the end, experts say, concrete policy moves are far more likely than harsh rhetoric to convince China that the U.S. poses serious competition in the race for a clean energy future. “Each action the United States takes will build confidence” that the U.S. is committed to climate policy, says Gallagher. If that happens, she says, it may once again feel like “we’re on a race to the top.”
It was minus-61 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk, about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, on Saturday, but the people still came. The scene was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie: a queue of dimly visible figures against the whited-out backdrop of a snow squall. They had come to show solidarity with Alexey Navalny, the imprisoned leader of the Russian opposition, who had been arrested upon his return from Germany where he was recovering from an attempt on his life. Navalny had called for a January 23rd nationwide protest on social media.
So they came, without government permits, all across Russia’s eleven time zones. They were on rooftops in Vladivostok. Protestors thronged the city squares of Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, where they chanted “We will not leave.” Authorities roughed them up, even the kids, in Moscow, where as many as 20,000 turned out, some to chant the common refrain “Putin is a thief!;” others to pelt riot police with snowballs. In St. Petersburg, during daylight hours, one young couple carried flowers and told reporters they were on a date; in the same city, after nightfall, a cop kicked an elderly woman in the stomach, launching her backward, onto the ground. (She’d simply asked why he and his colleague were detaining another demonstrator.) In all, a reported 3,000 Russians across 100 cities were arrested this weekend on behalf of one man.
Who is Navalny? To the Kremlin, officially, he’s either a nonentity, a convicted fraudster, or a dangerous CIA agent sent to foment regime change, or all of the above. To Westerners, he’s the dissident who survived a state assassination plot, then helped solve his own attempted murder. To millions of Russians, Navalny is the country’s most famous and persistent gadfly, the unavoidable vivisectionist of its crooked ruling class. He’s also very funny.
The videos his Anti-Corruption Foundation put out mix satire, pop culture, and zippy animation with a connect-the-dots forensic approach to exposing oligarchs, ministers and law enforcement officials, who aren’t exactly hiding their ill-gotten gains by showing up in public with wristwatches worth many times their annual salaries. If there’s a theme to Navalny’s oeuvre, it is that Russia’s modern kleptocracy is the offspring of an unholy matrimony between former mid-level KGB officers and a post-Sovietnomenklaturaof bandits in business suits. Both species, he insists, are singularly embodied in Vladimir Putin.
As Navalny sat in his Moscow jail cell, the Anti-Corruption Foundation released a two-hour video he’d recorded in Germany about a corruption scandal implicating Putin, which had originally been brought to light ten years ago. The new video, “Putin’s Palace: History of the World’s Largest Bribe,” has been viewed more than 100 million times and counting, and is astonishing in its tawdry revelations. Relying on leaked architectural plans, the testimony of former project insiders, and drone aerial footage, Navalny narrates how Putin has built himself the world’s biggest private residence on an estate 39 times the size of Monaco. A virtual country-within-a-country, this Xanadu on the Black Sea is inaccessible to the ordinary Russian by land, air or sea and was financed through a complex network of kickbacks from billionaire cronies and misappropriated taxpayer funds. The centerpiece of it all, the eponymous palace, would make a Bond villain wince. An underground hockey rink, an aquadisco, a movie theatre, a private casino, and a velvety hookah lounge outfitted with its own retractable stripper pole. Never has something so cheap cost so much: a cool $1.5 billion. And it all belongs to a “mentally ill” Putin, as Navalny calls him, who is “obsessed with wealth and luxury.”
Putin is also obsessed with keeping his wealth and luxury hidden from view. His motive for ordering an unprecedented influence and interference campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is rumored to have been retaliation. For what? For what Putin believed was Washington’s recondite plot to divulge some of his secret net worth through the “Panama Papers,” in reality a massive journalistic expose based on leaked law firm documents and compiled by hundreds of investigative reporters from around the world. It is unfathomable to the paranoid master of the Kremlin that the mere pursuit of the public interest moves his critics to undertake such muckraking; there are always cynical, powerful forces behind them.
The obvious question, then, was why Navalny chose to go back to Russia after proving just how much his enemies want him dead?
He has repeatedly ruled out becoming another exile of Putin’s regime because, as he explains, that would be its most sought-after outcome after his physical elimination. It’s easy to ridicule and dismiss a Kremlin opponent hurling invective from abroad, but much more difficult to do so when he does so from within the lion’s den. Independent pollsters show Navalny not cracking single digits in his quest for the presidency, though such numbers miss the point. By returning to Moscow, he conducted his own qualitative plebiscite: how much power does he really wield if tens of thousands across Russia are willing to defy truncheons, cages and below-freezing temperatures to set him free?
For one thing, Navalny has put Putin in an obvious bind: killing him now means creating a martyr and precipitating even more domestic unrest, not to mention incurring increased Western sanctions at a time when a new White House has shown a far greater willingness to confront Moscow than its predecessor did. The State Department issued a statement on Jan. 23 calling for Navalny’s release and for the Russian government to respect the right to peaceful assembly. And on Jan. 26, President Biden raised Navalny in his first call with his Russian counterpart.
Older ralliers in the protests said they hadn’t taken to the streets since the collapse of the Soviet Union. By one estimate, nearly half of those who turned out on Saturday are newcomers to political activism. Navalny’s suffering combined with his relentless exposure of corruption—something Putin’s own lieutenants have described as a pathology eating away at the nation—have won him admirers in the unlikeliest precincts of Russia’s vast demography. Children in primary schools were reportedly warned by their teachers not to attend the weekend protests—a haunting throwback to the age of Communist youth indoctrination and intimidation. A large segment of Navalny’s online fan base consists of those who were bornafterPutin became president for the first time, in 2000. Even North Korea and Syria have seen changes in their dynastic leadership since then.
None of this means that Putin’s reign is in immediate jeopardy. It just means it’s found its most effective opponent. Unlike so many other dissidents in recent years, Navalny is untainted by any past entanglement with the system he now opposes. He never served in the Russian government, nor made a fortune by enabling, only to later repudiate his former masters out of principle or opportunism or a combination of both. Try though his enemies might to silence him, Navalny won’t shut up. And he speaks in a 21st-century, digitally savvy language—mordant, ironic and thoroughly unimpressed by authority—which even some of his detractors must at least find ballsy. More importantly, he gets results.
At a virtual meeting with Russian university students on Jan. 25, Putin was asked about his seaside pleasure dome. Although he couldn’t bring himself to utter Navalny’s name (he never does), he disclaimed ownership of the palace, saying he only saw clips of the video prepared by his assistants. So now the dictator is answering his prisoner’s questions.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is escorted out of a police station on January 18, 2021, in Khimki, outside Moscow, following the court ruling that ordered him jailed for 30 days. – Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Monday urged Russians to stage mass anti-government protests during a court hearing after his arrest on arrival in Moscow from Germany. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP)
In another highly circulated photograph from last week, Navalny was shown sitting at the police station in front of a recognizable portrait on the wall behind him: that of Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s secret police chief during the 1930s liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks. (Yagoda, too, was eventually arrested and shot.) No Russian observer will have missed the ominous symbolism: Navalny has willingly put himself at the mercy of a totalitarian security apparatus, the very same one he’s explicitly blamed for corroding all aspects of Russia’s economy and politics and the very same one in which his Putin got his professional start in life.
Navalny is hardly naive about just how vicious and dangerous that apparatus is: he has the medical bills to prove it. But he’s also not afraid.In a clever and darkly comic video released in December, he reconstructed the who, what and why of his own poisoning. The video went viral. He then followed up that intervention with an even more jaw-dropping act of forensic jujitsu, getting one of his would be killers to confess to the crime. Pretending to be a high-ranking member of Russian Security Council, Navalny persuaded FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev to divulge sensitive operational details of the botched assassination, including the article of clothing—Navalny’s underwear—where the Novichok was administered. Putin’s reconstructed Chekist state, with all its irradiated and immolated and bullet-strewn corpses, suddenly seemed ridiculous and pathetic. No one has ever done this before.
And Navalny remains uncowed. On Instagram, from his cell in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina federal prison, where at least one other Russian whistleblower has been tortured to death, he wrote that he had no interest in hanging himself from his window bar or slitting his wrists or throat with a sharpened spoon; nor was prone to a heart attack or some other ailment. If anything should happen to him, in other words…. “I know that outside my jail there are a lot of good people and help will come,” the leader of Russia’s opposition wrote, before signing off with a winky face emoji.
Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the growing influence of U.S. social media companies and said their impact on society now puts them in competition with elected governments on Wednesday, at the “Davos Agenda” summit organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Putin’s virtual address, his first to the WEF since 2009, comes amid international condemnation over the arrest of opposition activist Alexei Navalny on Jan. 17 and crackdown on mass protests that surged in at least 100 Russian cities and towns last Saturday and saw police detain more than 3,700 people.
The Russian President did not address the protests in his speech. Among the broad range of topics he did discuss — his recent phone call with President Joe Biden, global economic inequality and the coronavirus pandemic — Putin spoke about how the social and economic problems facing the world have the potential to lead to division and public discontent. Big Tech companies posed a particular challenge to “legitimate democratic institutions” over the next decade, he said.
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society,” Putin said via videoconference. “In certain areas they are competing with states … Here is the question, how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest? Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”
His comments about the U.S. apparently referred to American social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter imposing a ban on former President Donald Trump after his supporters violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
His remarks struck an ironic tone given Putin has been making significant attempts to restrict content on social media at home. At the end of December, the Kremlin passed laws that enable the country’s media watchdog Rozkomnadzor to fully or partially block online resources that restrict publicly significant information in Russia, including foreign social media. The laws also impose harsher fines on providers and site owners who refuse to remove information banned in Russia. Penalties for repeatedly refusing to remove banned content will amount to 10 to 20 percent of company revenue, meaning tech giants like YouTube and Facebook could in theory be fined millions or even billions of dollars.
Ahead of Saturday’s protests, Rozkomnadzor demanded that social media platforms remove posts publicising the rallies, warning that they were encouraging minors to break the law. Failure to remove “banned information”—posts encouraging people to join the protests — could result in fines of up to 4 million rubles ($53,000), it said. The warning came as social media was flooded with videos promoting the protests. TikTok videos using the hashtag “Free Navalny” (#свободунавальному) had brought in more than 120 million views. According to a report on Friday from Roskomnadzor, TikTok had deleted 38% of its content with videos about Saturday’s protest, while YouTube and Russian social media site VKontakte has removed half of their content calling on minors to join the rallies and Facebook-owned Instagram 17%.
Russia has also taken advantage of the power of social media for its own ends. The U.S. government accused Russia of “pervasive” election meddling in the 2016 American presidential election by spreading disinformation through social media. Last summer, the U.K. government said it was “almost certain” Russia tried to interfere in the country’s 2019 general election by illicitly acquiring and leaking government documents on social media platform Reddit. The Kremlin has consistently denied these claims.
