Tag: WhatsApp

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Taliban content material banned on Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp

Afghan war has entered 'deadlier and more destructive phase,' UN says

Taliban fighters with a vehicle on a highway in Afghanistan.

Saibal Das | The India Today Group | Getty Images

Facebook and TikTok said Tuesday that they will not lift the ban on content promoting the Taliban after the group takes control of Afghanistan.

The social media giants told CNBC that they consider the Afghan group, which has been using social media platforms to get their messages across for years, as a terrorist organization.

Facebook said it has a dedicated team of content moderators that monitor and remove posts, pictures, videos and other Taliban-related content. It is unclear how many people are on the team.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid criticized Facebook for censorship at a public press conference in the capital Kabul on Tuesday, claiming the group’s freedom of expression was stifled by the tech giant’s ban. Facebook reportedly removed several user accounts linked to Mujahid this week after they were reported to the company by New York Times journalists.

Afghanistan fell victim to the Islamic militant group over the weekend when they captured Kabul, including the presidential palace. After President Joe Biden’s decision in April to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban made breathtaking strides on the battlefield – and almost the entire nation is now under insurgent control.

A Facebook spokesman told CNBC: “The Taliban are sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our services under our dangerous organization policy.”

The Taliban have been banned from Facebook for several years, the spokesman said.

Facebook said it means removing accounts held by or on behalf of the Taliban, as well as those that praise, support and represent them.

“We also have a dedicated team of Afghanistan experts who are native Dari and Pashto speakers and who know the local context and who help us to identify and raise awareness of emerging problems on the platform,” said the Facebook spokesman.

Facebook said it doesn’t decide whether to recognize national governments. Instead, it follows the “authority of the international community”.

TikTok declined to issue a statement, but told CNBC that it has classified the Taliban as a terrorist organization and is continuing to remove content that it praises, glorifies, or endorses.

WhatsApp dilemma?

The ban on Facebook also applies to Instagram and WhatsApp, but reports suggest that the Taliban are still using WhatsApp to communicate. The chat platform is end-to-end encrypted, which means that Facebook cannot see what people are sharing on it.

“As a private messaging service, however, we do not have access to the content of people’s personal chats.

A Facebook spokesperson told CNBC that WhatsApp uses AI software to analyze unencrypted group information including names, profile photos and group descriptions to meet legal obligations.

Alphabet-owned YouTube said its community guidelines apply to everyone equally and that it enforces its guidelines on the content and the context in which it is presented. The company said it allows content that has sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic context.

“The situation in Afghanistan is developing rapidly,” a Twitter spokesman told CNBC. “We’re also watching people across the country use Twitter to seek help and advice. Twitter’s top priority is keeping people safe and we’re staying vigilant.”

“We will continue to proactively enforce our rules and review content that could violate Twitter rules, particularly the glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam,” added the spokesman.

Rasmus Nielsen, professor of political communication at Oxford University, told CNBC it was important that social media companies act consistently in crisis situations.

“Every time someone is banned, there is a risk that they are only using the platform for legitimate purposes,” he said.

“Given the disagreement over terms such as ‘terrorism’ and who can identify individuals and groups as such, civil society groups and activists will want clarity on the nature and extent of working with governments on these decisions,” added Nielsen. “And many users will be reassured that any technology used for enforcement will protect their privacy.”

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WhatsApp Sues India’s Authorities to Cease New Web Guidelines

WhatsApp Sues India’s Government to Stop New Internet Rules

SAN FRANCISCO — WhatsApp sued the Indian government on Wednesday to stop what it said were oppressive new internet rules that would require it to make people’s messages “traceable” to outside parties for the first time.

The lawsuit, filed by WhatsApp in the Delhi High Court, seeks to block the enforceability of the rules that were handed down by the government this year. WhatsApp, a service owned by Facebook that sends encrypted messages, claimed in its suit that the rules, which were set to go into effect on Wednesday, were unconstitutional.

Suing India’s government is a highly unusual step by WhatsApp, which has rarely engaged with national governments in court. But the service said that making its messages traceable “would severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally” and effectively impair its security.

“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to ‘trace’ private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,” a WhatsApp spokesman said. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so.”

The lawsuit is part of a broadening battle between the biggest tech companies and governments around the world over which of them has the upper hand. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online speech, while other countries are trying to rein in the companies’ services to stifle dissent and squash protests. China has recently warned some of its biggest internet companies against engaging in anticompetitive practices.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for several years to corral the power of the tech companies and more strictly police what is said online. In 2019, the government proposed giving itself vast new powers to suppress internet content, igniting a heated battle with the companies.

The rules that WhatsApp is objecting to were proposed in February by Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s law and information technology minister. Under the rules, the government could require tech companies to take down social media posts it deemed unlawful. WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging companies would also be required to create “traceable” databases of all messages sent using the service, while attaching identifiable “fingerprints” to private messages sent between users.

WhatsApp has long maintained that it does not have insight into user data and has said it does not store messages sent between users. That is because the service is end-to-end encrypted, which allows for two or more users to communicate securely and privately without allowing others to access the messages.

More than a billion people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with friends, family and businesses around the world. Many users are in India.

Critics said the new rules were being used to silence government detractors. Last month, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were ordered to take down dozens of social media posts that were critical of Mr. Modi’s government and its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the country. Government officials said the posts should be removed because they could incite panic and could hinder its response to the pandemic.

The social media companies complied with many of the requests by making the posts invisible inside India, though they were still visible to people outside the country. In the past, Twitter and Facebook have reposted some content after determining that it didn’t break the law.

Tensions between tech companies and the Indian government escalated this week when the police descended on the New Delhi offices of Twitter to contest labels affixed to certain tweets from senior members of the government. While Twitter’s offices were empty, the visit symbolized the mounting pressure on social media companies to rein in speech seen as critical of the ruling party.

Facebook and WhatsApp have long maintained working relationships with the authorities in dozens of countries, including India. Typically, WhatsApp has said it will respond to lawful requests for information and has a team that assists law enforcement officials with emergencies involving imminent harm.

Understand the Covid Crisis in India

Only rarely has WhatsApp pushed back. The service has been shut down many times in Brazil after the company resisted requests for user data from the government. And it has skirmished with U.S. officials who have sought to install “back doors” in encrypted messaging services to monitor for criminal activity.

But WhatsApp argued that even if it tried enacting India’s new “traceability” rules, the technology would not work. Such a practice is “ineffective and highly susceptible to abuse,” the company said.

Other technology firms and digital rights groups like Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week that they supported WhatsApp’s fight against “traceability.”

“The threat that anything someone writes can be traced back to them takes away people’s privacy and would have a chilling effect on what people say even in private settings, violating universally recognized principles of free expression and human rights,” WhatsApp said.

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Mob Violence In opposition to Palestinians in Israel Is Fueled by Teams on WhatsApp

Mob Violence Against Palestinians in Israel Is Fueled by Groups on WhatsApp

Last Wednesday a message appeared on a new WhatsApp channel called “Death to the Arabs”. The embassy urged the Israelis to join a mass brawl against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Within hours, dozens of other new WhatsApp groups appeared with variations of the same name and message. The groups soon organized a start time at 6 p.m. for a clash in Bat Yam, a town on the Israeli coast.

“Together we organize and together we act,” says one of the WhatsApp groups. “Tell your friends to join the group because this is where we know how to defend Jewish honor.”

That evening, live scenes were broadcast of Israelis dressed in black breaking car windows and roaming the streets of Bat Yam. The mob pulled a man they suspected was an Arab out of his car and knocked him unconscious. He was hospitalized in serious condition.

The episode was one of dozens across Israel that authorities have linked to a surge in activity by Jewish extremists on WhatsApp, Facebook’s encrypted messaging service. According to analysis by the New York Times and by FakeReporter, an Israeli surveillance group that investigates misinformation, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups have been formed to commit violence against Palestinians since the violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalated last week.

WhatsApp groups with names like “The Jewish Guard” and “The Revenge Troops” added hundreds of new members daily over the past week, according to the Times analysis. The Hebrew groups have also been featured on email lists and online forums used by right-wing extremists in Israel.

While social media and messaging apps have been used in the past to spread hate speech and incite violence, these WhatsApp groups go even further, according to researchers. This is because the groups explicitly plan and carry out acts of violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up around 20 percent of the population and lead a largely integrated life with Jewish neighbors.

This is far more specific than previous WhatsApp mob attacks in India, which calls for violence were vague and generally not directed at individuals or companies, the researchers said. Even the Stop the Steal groups in the US that organized the January 6 protests in Washington did not openly target attacks through social media or messaging apps.

The proliferation of these WhatsApp groups has alarmed Israeli security officials and disinformation researchers. Attacks have been carefully documented in the groups, and members are often happy to be involved in the violence, according to The Times. Some said they would take revenge for rockets being fired at Israel by militants in Gaza, while others cited various grievances. Many asked for names of Arab-owned companies that they could target next.

“It’s a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own names and phone numbers to openly call for violence and have a tool like WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs,” said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter .

He said his organization had reported many of the new WhatsApp groups to the Israeli police, which initially took no action “but are now starting to act and try to prevent the violence”.

Israeli police did not respond to a request for comment, but Israeli security officials said law enforcement began monitoring the WhatsApp groups after being alerted by FakeReporter. The police, Schatz said, believed attacks by the Jewish extremists were inflamed and organized by the WhatsApp groups.

An official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that police had not seen any similar WhatsApp groups among Palestinians. Islamist movements, including Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that controls the Gaza Strip, have long organized and recruited followers on social media but are not planning any attacks on the services for fear of being discovered.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Updated

May 19, 2021, 6:37 p.m. ET

A WhatsApp spokeswoman said the intelligence service was concerned about the activities of Israeli extremists. She said the company removed some accounts from people who participated in the groups. WhatsApp cannot read the encrypted messages on its service, she added, but it acted when accounts were reported to it for violating its Terms of Service.

“We are taking steps to ban accounts that we believe could cause imminent harm,” she said.

In Israel, WhatsApp has long been used to form groups so that people can communicate and share interests or plan school activities. When violence between Israel’s military and Palestinian militants in Gaza increased last week, WhatsApp was also one of the platforms on which false information about the conflict was spread.

Tensions in the region were so high that new groups seeking revenge on Palestinians appeared on WhatsApp and other news outlets like Telegram. The first WhatsApp groups appeared last Tuesday, Schatz said. By last Wednesday, his organization had found dozens of groups.

People can join the groups through a link, many of which are shared in existing WhatsApp groups. As soon as they join a group, other groups will be announced to them.

The groups have grown steadily since then, Schatz said. Some have grown so large that they have branched into local chapters dedicated to specific cities. To avoid detection by WhatsApp, the group’s organizers are asking people to screen new members, he said.

According to FakeReporter, Israelis have formed around 20 channels in the Telegram to commit and plan violence against Palestinians. Much of the content and messages in these groups mimics the content of the WhatsApp channels.

In a new WhatsApp group that reviewed The Times, “The Revenge Troops,” people recently shared instructions on building Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosives. The group asked its 400 members to also provide addresses of Arab-owned companies that could be targeted.

In another group of just under 100 members, people exchanged photos of guns, knives, and other weapons while discussing street fighting in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Another new WhatsApp group was dubbed “The Non-Apologetic Right-Wing Group”.

After participating in attacks, members of the groups posted photos of their exploits and encouraged others to emulate them.

“We destroyed them, we left them in pieces,” said a person in the WhatsApp group “The Revenge Troops” next to a photo showing the broken car window. Another group uploaded a video of Jewish youths dressed in black stopping cars on an unnamed street and asking drivers if they were Jewish or Arab.

We have “defeated the enemy car for car,” said a comment below the video with an expletive.

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Lod, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel that was the site of the recent clashes.

“There is currently no greater threat than this unrest and it is important to restore law and order,” said Netanyahu.

In some WhatsApp groups, Mr. Netanyahu’s calls for peace have been ridiculed.

“Our government is too weak to do what is necessary, so we take it into our own hands,” wrote one person on a WhatsApp group dedicated to the city of Ramle, central Israel. “Now that we are organized, they can no longer stop us.”

Ben Decker contributed to the research.