“This is Why the World Needs War Photographers,” a blog post from Peta Pixel promoting a short video by Reporters Without Borders on the role photographers play in conflict zones.
The number of conflict photographers covering wars has dwindled 40% over the past 15 years, the organization says, but without them, we would never know the realities of war. Governments paint a heroic and rosy picture of war through their official photos and videos, but it’s the front-line photographers that show us the realities of violence, injustice, and suffering.
Renowned war photographer James Nachtwey says: “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.”
“American Democracy Betrayed” by Elizabeth Drew for The New York Review of Books. In North Carolina, just over 50 percent of voters identify as Democrats, yet only three of the state’s 13 congressional districts are represented by a Democrat. How can that be? In Drew’s review of David Daley’s book, Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, she explains how the data-driven gerrymandering that takes place today makes early versions of the practice look “quaint.”
REDMAP [the Redistricting Majority Project] was a new way to aim for successful partisan redistricting by concentrating first on winning the greatest majority possible in the congressional and state elections preceding the next Census and using the state majorities to redraw the districts. So successful was the Republican-dominated redistricting after 2010 that, in 2012, while the Democrats won 1.5 million more votes for Congress than the Republicans did, they gained only eight seats, hardly a change at all. Thus the Republicans, sheltered by the previous redistricting, held a thirty-three-vote advantage in the House despite the fact that they’d been decisively outvoted.
“The Agency,” by Adrian Chen for The New York Times. Social media as a tool against oppression? That is so 2011. In this piece, Chen meticulously details how “troll farms” in Russia flood social media with pro-Russian propaganda. He also ties a St. Petersberg troll farm to several disruptive social media-based disinformation campaigns that took place in 2014 on the anniversary of 9/11. The campaigns are sophisticated and include comments on websites, social media accounts, YouTube videos, and fake news websites.
The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged. The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet. Volodin, a lawyer who studied engineering in college, approached the problem as if it were a design flaw in a heating system. Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.” Or, as Forbes put it, “Prism sees social media as a battlefield.”
… The government consulted with the same public relations firms that worked with major corporate brands on social-media strategy. It began paying fashion and fitness bloggers to place pro-Kremlin material among innocuous posts about shoes and diets, according to Yelizaveta Surnacheva, a journalist with the magazine Kommersant Vlast. Surnacheva told me over Skype that the government was even trying to place propaganda with popular gay bloggers — a surprising choice given the notorious new law against “gay propaganda,” which fines anyone who promotes homosexuality to minors.
During an interview for the Longform podcast in which Chen discussed this piece (among others), he noted that many of the same pro-Putin troll accounts he had followed for the story were now flooding the Internet with pro-Trump messages.