Panel 3 – The Global Geopolitics of Big Tech (Chaired by Zhao Alexandre Huang, Paris Nanterre University)
“The Great Game: How video game servers map Eastern Europe” by Françoise Daucé (CERCEC, EHESS)
“Content delivery platforms’ data storage practices’ unintended spillovers on emerging countries’ Internet resilience: the case of Pakistan” by Nowmay Opalinski (GEODE, Paris 8)
“Jerusalem contested: Israel, Palestine and U.S Big Tech in the Holy City” by Margherita Monti (Università di Bologna) and Davide Blotta (Università di Urbino “Carlo Bo”)
“Normative dislocation: how Brazilian militarism was left (un)moderated throughout the Brazilian elections of 2022” by Emilie V de Keulenaar (University of Groningen) and Marcelo Alves Dos Santos Junior (Pontíficia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
[Music] a lot of very present so I give [Music] to okay it’s super Sciences I’m also but I’m talking about this wonderful intitled the global politics is a big T so today we will have four presenters four papers okay five presenters so I we will organize this panel like that uh we each to present your work together so each one will have to present your work uh I will give you when it arrives 18 minutes and then after all presentation St everyone enjoy our EV so our first presenter will be on the day he will present uh word on the green game how now thank you Alexander thank you to the organizers and thank you for inviting me to present today my research um I will present a work in progress a new research for me and uh I thank you in advance for any comment you you will have about this new uh topic the aim of this uh presentation is to open up a new field of Research into the political social and technical issues concerning video games in Eastern Europe and Russia in the context of a large scale aggression against Ukraine when we speak about big Tech we don’t think first and foremost about the video game industry but I won’t come back to what said Elan this morning about the problem of definition of what is Big Big Tex or not the field of video game studies uh I wanted to to underline is very very inspiring to discuss geopolitical and security debates that are currently taking place in societies affected by arm conflict and political crisis video games bring together millions of players around the world and the political issues they raise deserve attention the video game industry is currently one of the most profitable Dynamic and widely consume uh industri uh it is closely integrated into the world of of big Tech uh I wanted to give you some examples uh epic games which is the editor of fortnite is an American video game studio uh but it is 40% owned by a Chinese internet giant denen for example in 2023 Microsoft acquired the Activision Blizzard Studio which is the editor of Call of Duty and con crush and if some major Studios such as Riot games or Ubisoft remain dep they generate a large Financial profits and they collaborate of course with big de um the social sciences are more and more interested in uh video game studies and there are multiple issues there is no vast bibliography about video game in contemporary societies some of the of course what I show on string is absolutely not exhaustive so I I just wanted to give you some references uh some of these academic works are based on the postcolonial and de Colonial epistemologies and discuss European Centric representations in video games they revealed the many inequalities that populate the world of video games and even suggest some of them to De colonized video games I wanted to give you the example of the book by Philip ping Staton video games and the global source which propose uh proposes a critical and decolonial reading of video games and shows that spes often considered as Tech peripheries are also in fact places where original and unique technocultures developed and this has led some theorists to Advocate the creation of I quote video games of the oppress as a means of education and raising political awareness and the the book highlights forms of resistance to the eurocentric values of games of course we are very far from Eastern Europe so what about Ukraine and Eastern Europe in these debates since February 2022 Russia’s massive war of aggression against Ukraine um has also given rise to New Reflections on Russia’s Colonial domination uh uh on Ukraine there is no vast body of work mobilizing the colonial epistemology to explain the war in Ukraine I I give you here some the two first references in this uh this kind of works while Eastern Europe and the post Soviet space have long remained outside postcolonial debates the later have grad emerged in recent years and have developed considerably since Russia’s aggression new conceptual Frameworks are emerging that denounce Russia Russia’s Colonial or over its near neighbors there these Reflections give rise to a double criticism the criticism against Russian domination on near on near abroad countries on one side and of the international actors that reproduce the dominant centrality of Russia in the post Soviet spat on the other side so what we face is what some Scholars consider as inter imperiality so a double Imperial Gaze on um on the on the post Soviet country countries uh oh can V studies contribute to these uh debates so you have here on the on the slide uh two references to Jacob Lin and the s y Works which raise the questions of uh vernacular geopolitics uh uh through video games uh in Ukraine and also this problem uh studied by S the problem of video G translation into the Ukrainian Lang language so we can see the um rising of new uh topic of research about video games in uh Ukraine um I want today to discuss the case of the geographical and cultural debates about video game servers using League of Legend as an example it will be my case study today this is just one case study with its specific uh chall is I could have used other examples of popular video games uh but I I choose this one because I I consider it’s aristic for discussion today for for the moment my work is based mostly on an ethnography of online discussions about video game in Russian and in Ukrainian on YouTube and on preliminary interviews so I work mostly with qualitative data um the empirical example of the League of Legends game is very enlightening in in uh in this uh in this sphere um servers of uh League of Legends are organized according to geographical zones and that’s why I what I wanted to to show you today in the case of League of Legends there are 12 servers managed directly by by Riot game game around the world to which must be added those were that have been outsourced in China and Southeast Asia this geography of servers is uh important because it determines the communities of players who play together and of course it’s prefer preferable to play on the server in the nearest Zone to avoid latency even if you can play on a server further away too when a player register in a so-call auto mode the application selects the region with the best latency the choice of server is based on the computer’s IP address and is ter invisible to the player and here you have the the maps of uh the servers of League of Legends in League of Legends case the European territory is organized around three servers Western Europe and the server is in Amsterdam Eastern Europe the server is in Frankfurt and Russia and the server for the Russian players is in Stockholm uh Riot gave dedicated a SP a separate server for what is called the CIS the community of independent states in 2013 so 10 about 10 years ago until 2013 most Russian users played in the eastern and northern European region but in 2013 players were offered to move to the new server to the Russian server for free what is interesting here is that this mapping consider that Ukraine belongs to the post Soviet space to the CIS as can be seen from the map showing the distribution of players by server so if you consider this blue map so you have Russia of course but you have also the Baltic states uh Belarus Ukraine movia uh Caucasus States and the Central Asian States I was showing this map uh about um how is organized how organizer service now do a map geographically uh the community of players and uh I was insisting on the fact that the map is it’s called the Russia the map for Russia the the Russian server but on the Russian server you have also the Baltic states of these post Soviet countries and for a long time this distribution of players remain invisible un problematic until Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine un the geopolitical stakes of the existing uh organization um no okay thank you since 20 sorry for the technical problems since 2014 and 2022 so the geographical organization of servers has led to criticism from some Ukrainian players who no longer recogn recognize themselves in the organization of the game its languages and its Regional groupings I wanted to show you this message from a player an Ukrainian player on Reddit which deplores the absence of Ukraine on Riot Game servers which forces ukrainians to play on the Russian th following his message he published a map with a question mark over Ukraine you can see on the map in a context of large scale political confrontation is structuring effects brought about by video games infrastructures are revealed by the players themselves by ordinary players who are no longer satisfied with the usually accepted Regional and linguistic divisions the discussion shows the existence of critical sensibilities among Ukrainian Gamers who are demanding the right to exist on the video game map and I wanted to show you this second example you have a question in Ukrainian at the top uh how to CH server from uh Russian to EU West for free um in 2023 on YouTube UK Ukrainian players were looking how to leave the Russian server and migrate to the Western European server and two tutorials are available in Ukraine to explicit to explain how to migrate and I wanted to quote you this later from a an Ukrainian gamer who wrote hello Riot I live in Ukraine and I am about to transfer my account to another server can I ask you to do this why there is a war in my country now we are attacked by Russia and when playing League of Legends I constantly hear statements about my country and about me and my identity it offens me I don’t want to play with people with countries killing people in my country Ukraine has recently become a candidate for European membership and I really want to move to another server preferably EU West because I am tired of hearing insults from other players I think you will be able to help me so this is uh ordinary comments appearing on YouTube and which show the reflexivity the growing reflexivity of Ukrainian players uh U facing uh game industry and the game infrastructures and I will come to my conclusion uh in April 2022 two months after Russia’s large scale aggression against Ukraine oia hu Who is the historian and writer director of the Ukrainian Institute in London asked this uncomfortable question and a question was where is Ukraine on the mtal map of the academic Community addressing the scientific audience of the annual conference of the British Association for Slavic and East European studies in Cambridge to underline that Ukraine has existed on the map of Europe for 30 years but has been denied a historiographical existence according to to her this has set the stage for Putin’s rhetoric Ukraine is either to European or to Soviet among video Ukrainian video game players of course the discussion is not framed in the academic terms of the postcolonial debate but what they say themselves in the on this what I showed shows the existence of critical sensibilities among Ukrainian Gamers who are demanding their right to exist on the video game map Ukrainian gamers are contributing to the unveiling of the geopolitical imaginaries carried by the video game Industries and they are seeking seeking to emancipate themselves by developing vernacular the colonial arguments this is my conclusion thank you for your attemption so let’s move on to the next uh presenter n who will present his rest delivery yeah okay so I just have to share the screen [Music] uh okay okay great hello yes hello everyone so my name is Naya pinski I’m a PhD candidate from par State University so actually in s in the north of Paris um I’m working with the French Institute of geopolitics and the research project called gon geopolitics of the data spere so we are working on a specific project which looks at how to map the internet and how the geography of the internet is impacted by politics um we are Al conducting a research with counterparts in in Pakistan so I’m part of this research project it’s part of my PhD project search which is called epic exploring Pakistan’s internet connectivity and we are working with computer scientists from La University of management Sciences so that’s part of the research I did on the ground in Pakistan and today we will talk about the issue of how big teex on network planning can impact in countries internet resilience through the case study of Pakistan uh so to start uh when I started my investigations in Pakistan and I was talking about the internet infrastructure there everybody was asking me a question so what about those shks eating summering cbles uh every time like our network is just being impacted by issues we don’t really understand and everybody was asking me about this problem and by leing into the interviews and the fieldwork I understood that one of the issue Pakistan is facing is that uh contents that common users in Pakistan are using daily are actually hosted outside of the country and uh we we have seen such an issue in March 2023 uh in 13 western African countries where uh impacted by Network outage on four submarine cables and cut uh was not repaired in enough time and they had like n network downgrade for more than one week in Pakistan this kind of issue happened a lot like in 2017 their operations of Pakistan International Airlines so the national um airline company were impacted during one week because of the submarine cable cut in jeda uh in 2022 the country experienced six major submarine cable cuts with again Network downgrade so that’s a big problem especially when you know that 70% of the traffic of Pakistan’s local domestic internet is going to content delivery providers so that’s kind of the scope of the issue we are going to study today so the research questions we will try to answer today are how does the content da platforms on data storage practices have an impact on the resilience of Pakistan’s internet what does this tell us about the power as symmetry between platforms and internet service providers and also platforms and state in institutions in emerging countries um this reflection builds upon a lot of uh different work especially the work that academics did on on how local governments are trying to rescale their state control through territorialization strategy so asking platforms to locate their data on their national territory and we will look at how the Pakistani government is trying to do that and and the issue with raises and also uh looking at how grbach and Zana talked about the different categories of States and how do they interact with platforms uh Pakistan and also European countries standing in the what we could call dependent States whose regul regulatory power are overshadowed by Foreign platforms which is different for example in China or it tends to be in Russia or in the US where government there have a power to get platforms hosting their data on the national soil so we can understand the internet as a social technical construct and the way data is being rooted within the internet is also impacted about uh this different social technical construct and the way different stakeholders interact um I’m also using the methodology that people from my lab and my PhD supervisor develop uh which uh try to root the map the roots of the internet and we will see a little bit of that kind of work just after so the key findings of my research uh we can say that I have three key findings Pakistan is isp’s international connective choices are driven by the demand for overseas hosted content resulting in Reliance on submarine cable connectivity content delivery network data storage plans in India are at TOS with Islamabad security concerns and the Pakistani government is trying to draw new alternatives for alternative path in its neighborhood with China but it also has its own limitations so uh what did I do to find this this uh these different results so I had to map the infrastructure so we were talking about infrastru yesterday internet is based on the mesh of cables servers and you have a re real physical space within the internet so you need to understand where do you have the cables where do you have the internet exchange points to understand how the internet works then on top of that you have a logical architecture which means that the data which flows through this different different physical links um have their own way of going through one one way or another this is being um managed through a protocol called The Border Gateway protocol I will explain a little bit more about that just after and looking at the different agreements between networks enable us to understand how is the network actually going so when you connect from one IP address to another in the world what path your data is actually taking okay so uh so we first looked at Pakistan’s internet uh architecture through Network measurements and after from that mapping we understood which players are the most important in the country which internet service providers are actually making the international connectivities between Pakistan and the outside world so after I went to Pakistan and I talk to the people who actually managed the network so the people sitting at the international Gateway so so yeah I talked with ptcl and trans world and also the the authorities the Pakistan telecommunication Authority before we go to Pakistan I just want to precise briefly that now the internet is in increasingly being uh the flows of the internet are being increasingly concentrated around big platforms according to t t geography 2023 annual report uh about 69% of all used international capacity went to their infrastructure so it’s kind of huge it depends from one region to another but for example if you take the transatlantic data flows you have almost 90% or 95% of the capacity which goes to their nodes mostly Google meta Etc uh but the way this contents delivery providers so the providers which host the content that people will connect to um have a spefic specific way of um of being interconnected and each content provider will have different infrastructure all over the all over the globe that’s what we talked about yesterday I think Olivia shatan explained that they were trying to link their data centers with submarine cables and it’s important to understand that they have two different kind of INF infrastructure there so first you have content delivery networks we call them also media CBN that’s what we call content caches um that’s mostly audio visual contents that are hosted digitally on a data center or in a server so for example when you are sitting here and you want to connect to Netflix Netflix we have some contest contents hosted in a night just nearby so the the the connection we will have with a Netflix content will be quite fast because it’s just near you the problem is that in a lot of countries sometimes CDN are not hosted there so the latency is much higher and The Intern experience they get gets impacted then you have points of presence which are big infrastructure like physical infrastructure uh like Big Data Centers where this platform host uh what we call Dynamic services so it means for example when you do a video call through WhatsApp you will have to interconnect sometimes to a distant Data Center and the way these different providers plan and um serve the users has a impact on the usage and the internet experience so the way they they plan the network you can find these maps for example this is the the map of Google for Google cloud services so they have the what is the little points in Gray are the CDN so the caches and after you have what they call uh the 24 Cloud regions so that’s the points of presence that’s big infrastructure so they choose different geographies um according to their own Market interest and also according to the infrastructure available in the country and also about the regulations in uh the region and what you can see in that in South Asia and Middle East and even Africa in general you have uh you do not have so much big pops which creates issues in terms of latency and also internet resilience so now the methodology we use to understand Pakistan’s Network before going there so we we mapped what we call the autonomous systems so it means that every network uh in the internet has its own policy so it could be a university Network a bank Network or a government Network and so they have to Define policies on how they exchange data with other networks within the internet and this has to go through the Border Gateway protocol bgp protocol so as administrators they sign sign Partnerships agreements and you can map actually those agreements so without going into too much detail about this methodology we can talk about this later that’s how uh the Pakistani Network looks when we uh apply um some algorithm specialization algorithm to to the bgp feeds uh between these systems and what we see when we look at this network is that you have two main points that are actually the points of control of the network and the so Pakistan’s internet is very concentrated which means that most of the country’s Broadband has to go through these two points to interconnect to the outside world and that’s what you see in the second picture where you see all the agreements between Pakistani ases with foreign foreign systems and you see that these two points so ptcl and trans World actually connect the whole country this is because they own the submarine Cable Systems and this makes it easier also for the Pakistani government to apply uh some kind of DNS filtering and deep packet inspection and to monitor the contents um which this kind of network is very different for for example from another country in the region I don’t know why it’s Bing sorry yeah so if you look at Bangladesh which used to be part of Pakistan you see that the network of Bangladesh doesn’t have anything to do because the government doesn’t have such a a controlling uh uh way of engaging with isps in Bangladesh so the way they have agreements with other countries is much different and it’s much less controlled so in Pakistan we have another concentrated Network and everything has to go through these two isps so to do field work it was kind of easier because we just had to go to these two stakeholders so I went to Karachi and and talked with the people managing the international Gateway and it was very interesting because what they told me when I was asking about these submarine cable cuts and how could they manage it they said that for them uh they didn’t have so much Choice actually all of their traffic or most of of their traffic they have to manage has to go to Western Europe or Singapore because that’s the two edges where you have important internet exchange points and where you have content so whenever you have a cut on the submarine cables connecting these two uh these two extremities Pakistan’s network is being impacted so most of the cuts which are impacting Pakistan’s Network happen in the Red Sea or next to Egypt also in the Bay of Karachi and next to Singapore but the big problem is Egypt mostly because it’s a big hub for the whole Asia Europe Transit uh so what was interesting when I I talked with them they that they didn’t have actually any option on the short term and they they just have to rely on these on these different um on these different locations so what is interesting also is that you have kind of a postcolonial geography of the infrastructure there and a lot of countries still depend of on contents being hosted in Europe and that’s also the case in in Africa and and so when I talk to them they explain that uh what they try to do daily is that they try to outreach to the different content service providers and asking them to host part of their contents in Pakistan so they have managed from some part of the contents but not for the points of presence the big hubs and they explained that there are different reasons for that is that first they don’t see a commercial option in Pakistan they see that the regulatory environment is not that interesting and also they um they say that it’s difficult for them to add reach to the platform so actually the platform don’t come to them they have to go to them and ask them to put infrastructure in the country so they have better connectivity and and that’s kind of a hle for them so for example I know that Amazon refused to set foot in Pakistan because they said that there might be also some international issues another problem to that is that these platforms so you look at this is the Google infrastructure these platforms are using India as their war base for the whole region so now they have invested heavily in India and so when a country in South Asia ask them to set foot in Pakistan they would say no but just connect to India but in Pakistan this is forbidden it’s not in the law it’s not written but they are forbidden to interconnect to India and to Israel so this creates a lot of frustrations on the Pakistani side they say that they are a country of 230 million inhabitants why wouldn’t they matter you know and uh and so this was just for the Amazon also how they they plan the network so you have kind of an asymmetry of of power between the platforms and the isps also at the government side the government of Pakistan during Imran Khan’s tenure tried to impose harsh rules on the platforms uh so they Tred to adopt a law called the citizens protection against online harm rules and they so they asked all the big platforms which had more than 500,000 users in Pakistan to settle an office in the country to host their citizens data within Pakistan and also um to so to understand the religious cultural ethnic and National Security sensitivities of Pakistan they also asked that any contents that would be asked from the security agencies would be given to them in decrypted readable and comprehensible format uh they also said that if the companies didn’t comply they would be fined and uh they couldn’t like working in the country anymore so what what happened is that the lobby of this platform the Asia internet Coalition responded to the government and threatened them that if they would go that way they would stop their services in the country so finally the government didn’t have any choice and had to backtrack so they didn’t enact the law but so when you look at Pakistan’s internet connectivity in the region Pakistan doesn’t have so much options actually with Iran it has a direct physical link but it’s not being used because of us sanctions Afghanistan is buying b band from Pakistan but it’s not like it wouldn’t give any other connectivity options uh with India they have a physical connection but it’s not being used and so China is an option and so they have built a they have built a a fiber optic cable with China and the Pakistani government was saying okay now we will have a backup if the submarine cable breaks this this goes fine but the isps when I went to talk to them they told me actually we won’t use the China cable and I said why it’s it could be a backup no but China doesn’t Host this contents we are using so what’s the point of connecting to China I mean they do not have any Google Notes they don’t have any meta notes so even if the Pakistani government wants to create New Alternatives and building digital Bridges with friendly countries uh they are limited so so the only option they have remains in the gulf and they have they are building more and more infrastructure towards the UAE om man and also Saudi Arabia which is coming with a new policy and is trying to become a new um node and Crossroad in the region so what is interesting is that now country are trying to attract platforms so they become become themselves Crossroads within the internet so you see how this asymmetry of power can be also used by different actors and also within the Pakistani context you have this kind of thing thank you move on to the third presentation okay and contest is and okay [Music] sorry um so we will uh present today um our work on um on Jerusalem okay um that started um two years ago uh from a when we when we visited the country um it’s still in the process but we we found interested to uh underline the Jerusalem context and in the specific the year to 2021 because we found it as a as a key year to explain how a huge wave of protest of May then wrote about uh the signing of many contracts between the Israeli State and Amazon Google and Microsoft so um the main hypothesis is how this big Tech are acting as essential intermediaries uh between states market and civil institutions and we find that this can be analyzed into in two ways from a bottomup approach uh we’ll bring the a case study of Sheik jar of the 2021 which has been a huge wave of projects um the shik is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem occupied in 1967 and in May 2021 April 2021 uh six families were um under the trust of eviction uh from the Israeli Supreme Court decision and this Foster um a great wave of protest um that used the social media and Google Twitter and meta especially as practices of reterritorialization um of what we that that was called the unity in um on the other on the other hand from a top- down perspective since 20121 um there’s been a huge uh rising in the surveillance um Technologies especially from for AI recognition vocal recognition and uh um artificial intelligence recognizing emotions of the Palestinians Crossing these spaces in in Jerusalem um yeah methodologically speaking we we mainly on um based our research on the um Nos and researches and Records such as Amnesty International for the first part uh directly digging into Twitter and Instagram of uh um Muhammad and M alur which were the two main um they City journalism so people leaving in the neighborhood that brought about this huge wave of protest and um and for the second part especially uh the Amnesty International Record called automa of 2023 um Jerusalem is a place of religious significance for Muslim and Jewish people just to uh give a little bit of context and since his occupation in 1976 um Israel has to reduce the Palestinian geographical interdependence particularly um with the occupied city of Jerusalem in order uh to establish a coher is Israeli um settlement entity uh pursuing pursuing a demographic balance of 70% Jewish population in the uan municipality of the holy city so since then the pal Palestinians uh living in the Arabic PL of Olden in Jerusalem has become subject to the fear of losing the state parents as this is the case for the two um Brothers of of shik Shar according to Amnesty International this sentiment of Perpetual trat and I prior gu uh has been stranded by the Israeli politics of surveillance infrastructure since since 20 2021 with one camera every 125 people in all Jerusalem and one camera every five matters in East Jan for uh the system of Maat is in place which is a surveillance system of the of Jerusalem um exist in 2000 but after 2021 it was increasingly strengthened with AI facial recognition um so this technology is uh not only having an impact of on the emotional feeling of the Palestinian living there but it’s transforming the landscape of East Jerusalem as um as Israel Security Forces they monitor um specific places such as the Damascus gate which is the mainly interest for people entering the the holy city um and Sh so the neighborhood and close close to the gate which are used also for people to to gather and proest is it has a a social meaning uh this is just an example of the neighborhood of still one close to sh it was one also of the neighborhood of um under the threat of for eviction in 2021 um is very small little white dots um showing the camera surveillance in um in 2008 and then the red dots of 2023 so we can see how it spread the technology of surveillance and in the meantime we have the area um of colors yellow green yellow sorry orange and red of the the rising settlement until 2023 so there’s we can we can see a correlation between surveillance technology and um rise and settlement um so in 2020 in 2021 um the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court to bring about the force eviction of six families uh from the shik and San neighborhood um compounding a wave of political protest and movement forced by online activists and citizen journalism of the neighborhood um uh I I’m bringing the Tweeter uh as a case from Muhammad Al and Ma Al they are brothers they saw uh in 2009 half of their home taken by uh a settler and in 2021 they were um under threat of of eviction of the W house so they uh played a great role in creating this campaign and um ashtan campaign sa sh um first of all uh by telling their personal stories and then involving people people from the neighborhood and outside the neighborhood yeah these are example of post from Twitter um that are just not calling for a storm campaign online but actually inviting people in presence to be uh present daily in shal neighborhood and uh and we see you here tomorrow at the entrance of the towns um calling for Mass mob mobilization um this was in April uh March and April and in May uh the neighborhood of shik jerra uh was declared under uh no no media could enter the the neighborhood it was uh um declared to be on The Siege uh by the Israeli police and um and we can see here how Again by being inside the neighborhood when no media was allowed to enter the fact that citiz and journalist were inside they were able to actually tell the stories from the inside so for example Al Jaz was coming to in contact with the people inside the neighborhood uh because of of the impact of social media um and then yeah U I think this is a very explicative uh tweet by muhammadur like remember you control the news cycle the contact your content your rage what you force the war to talk about so keep talking about uh Palestine Gaza sh um in the meantime violence escalated in 2021 there was um um a confrontation confrontation between Gaza and in Israel and um which caus also uh 255 people were killed in Gaza and 25 26 people were killed in W West Bank and 30 people were killed in Israel [Music] um this huge wave of protest has been called later as the unity and father I think in interest it is interesting also to to call it unity and then the impact to that social media had in United people uh despite the physical borders so um it was led by a young generation of Palestinians actually like citizen generalist like normal people just uh seeing what was happening and fighting um organized outside traditional political structures uh Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp they played a key role for alerting people were about um about where police and and sers were carrying out attacks and for organizing events and protests while Instagram was crucial in raising awareness internationally uh as well as unifying Palestinians Beyond physical borders um MAA alur say we feel social media is the only way left to get attention every post TW video makes a difference this is how we reach out the messes of of people and government around the world um after that um of course um as it has been reported by sevenet uh there’s been a great shut down of profiles of this uh social media of these activists um Muhammad Al and M they were both arrested uh both their profiles were shuted down then reopen thanks to the uh the seven amlet rep um they reported uh 500 um censored the um profiles 50% from Instagram 35% from Facebook 11 Twitter and 1% on Tik Tok um Instagram on May the 8 blame technical errors for deleting the post um this did not just happen in part the time that it happened also in in Colombia and in the Indigenous community at the same time um on March 11 Israeli um intelligence sent a text message to the warship ala mosque informing that they were they been classified as participants in violence in the alaka mosque um and they were held accountable at the same time they also contacted these Palestinians and treated them with arrest and trial in case they did not remove uh their documents and posts on social media platforms regarding the Israeli police violence against them so this shows also the connection between the intelligence Israel intelligen use of GPS um and um their contact with the social media companies as in the May the 13 Israeli Minister of Justice and defense met with Facebook and Tik Tok executive asking for the removal of Palestinian contct which is violence and spread disinformation that was also um a case of um viist the spread on both sides online um the fact is that um this intensifies the intensified uh censorship so underlining the um that meta was completely unable to to deal with this with this conflict and um and the Israeli cyber unit um was asking proactively Facebook uh to remove removing content it was given uh the green light by the Supreme Court in 2021 to operate let’s say in the dark so um removing post without consultation with the users and without further documentation about it um um on May the 20 Facebook finally set up a special operational Center to monitor content on its platform about the escalation Israeli Palestinian conflict so this shows how how not it’s not just users that can shape the the whole platform inter out but also the opposite way uh that uh sorry not just the platform um have an impact of how people interact in the case escalating violence organizing protest but also the other way around so Facebook at in 2021 he said we will open a Special Operation Center so something is not working um and we can uh also underline the fact that Facebook uh Dio so dangerous individuals and organization is really connected to um the American foreign policies after 911 so a list of dangerous organization and and individuals um let’s say according to the intercept it’s like a list of anxieties from the American policy um in the first of June Jo Facebook own on Instagram and made changes also to its algorithm after 200 employees signed an open letter complaining that Pro Palestinian cont was not viewable for users during the so again we have this um uh social media platform trying to respond to um a case of of of violence of two parties asking uh for for for for more digital rights and at the same time trying to not to um make violence escalating so this I think is um shows the the the relationship between um um users and platforms and after 2021 I’m um also because mainly because of the sh J cases and protest uh many contracts have have been signed between Israeli government and uh Google Microsoft and sorry we forgot to present our Margarita works with the UN and me I’m doing a PhD in glal studies and I’m sorry in the middle of allergic crisis so we took the 2021 as a tyal key point because um we we observed that uh there was an increase of eff Technologies Technologies are faal recognition Technologies and also artificial intelligence Technologies who can Define the the vocal Expressions the sentiment emotions of the people um actually this kind of technologies have been ped uh especially U with the uh European Union B externalization in the B I’m part another in so we have trous so this is the complex the surveillance complex of jeral uh we can go to the to the next slide we access to uh 200 Pages uh of pro confidential doc between and Google very sorry next one next one we link our work to previous one because this project that is a projectus project of two data centers one of the other of Google is nam the cable the F of the cable called J will be Italy to India we have toine that there is a military agreement between the Italian of defense and Google and the cable is made to byass Egypt because as you can see a critical not next one this [Music] is next and in the document we saw and we test the technology they have been using so recognize the expression of the people um these are not scientific data these are AR St but it’s uh useful to see how does it work because um next one because actually um project name for the contract of 2021 in the contract as G stated uh the extra territoriality of the cloud region of Google Amazon permitted to Israel to Lo the data in the case of and investigations by the international crial Cod this is 2021 cont um the next the next one the next okay okay no I don’t actually we can arrive to our days because um actually this kind of Technologies are the same who have been doing list of previous ebook in the West Bank and in Gaza and these are list of almost uh 37,000 people actually uh not very scientifically uh um because there was actually a training of these Technologies on between 2021 and uh now next one the the soldiers the had 20 seconds per Target to decide say yes or no to targeting uh this talking BS um actually the the system found was linked to the system of where is daddy where is daddy is a software that can trace uh the GPS of the the targets um and try to collocate try to selection the Target when they turn home um actually in this case we can see uh that the majority of people who were he were actually families so this can explain the uh the Absol number of civilians AB number of children and uh women uh ke so um as for the conclusion uh we we can we can of course say that big Tech are trying to I don’t know working as States uh I don’t know actually uh when we before talked about uh the big Tech involvement in Wars uh we rightly understood that this for profit um actually I think that we are how to say we are witnessing the ability to create extra territorial spaces because uh is within this priorities that the between the states and the B are unfolding and yeah I think that uh having a a Long View of this kind of relationship can help to forther understand on the to let’s move forward to our last presentation from uh presentation focus on normative is loc uh analyze how great hello um let’s see is it right okay perfect all right well nice to meet you indirectly through this panel also very happy to be here under this uh honorable man with Lors showing his sexy legs um okay so I think that to begin also in connection to how how Z presented the paper briefly is that what is interesting so far about studies that have to do more or less with big Tech and content moderation is that generally speaking there seem to be a number of framings in which those two topics appear to be analyzed so the first one for example is mostly deontological right so it’s a question of what should or should not big Tech moderates on the basis of which legal standards the second is a question of speech rights which is particularly important in the United States so does Big T on existing civil or constitutional speech rights and if so how or also what we talked about yesterday particularly with n’s presentation or in the case of more institutional framing so what kind of Proto institutional if you will is Big Tech or what kind of institution is it emerging to be in the way that it competes with State Powers but the interesting thing with moderation is that especially when one looks at censorship studies that tend to look into censorious practices from a much long longitudinal perspective there’s a case to be made about the fact that moderation is a much U longer practice in history in various ways um so in Liberal democracies in particular there is a case to be made that from the 20 first or 20th century onwards moderation practices which may Encompass censorship in that sense it is a sort of sincer practice has largely reduced and tried to consistent in reducing the reach of problematic information however that is defined by trying to um use censorship as least as possible but perhaps use other techniques that are very visible today in social media platforms such as maybe countering problematic information or marginalizing it or ausca it or embarking it in a given public sphere and I’ll give you a number of examples of what that is about so then the the followup question is of course what is problematic information I think I mean that’s like pendos box but perhaps it’s not so much what they’re about or what they say I mean of course that is very much historically determined but it’s more how they sort of bump against historically determined boundaries of acceptable Norms of public culture that are historically determined that I said so in Western Europe in particular um we might think of problematic information as being U yeah objectionable in some days or not others there are things that become problematic today but were not yesterday and vice versa but there are other things that are really considered systematic threats in the sense that they might disrupt fundamental historical consensus or norms and these might be censored by law so here in France in particular and in Germany even more there are laws against historical revisionism relating to the Holocaust or in Germany there is a lot of protections against Nazi Insignia or expressions of political extremism particular ha speech a potential to lead to genocidal harm and now that we um see particularly in Ukraine in Eastern European countries a lot of laws that are beginning to forbid Expressions relating to Soviet history so lots of lenon statues that are abandoned in the streets or just uh used for other materials or not a possibility to speak Russian anymore and so on so so these are sort of in a sense um could be considered part of transitional Justice processes or Les nationalization processes that use moderation techniques to kind of protect the big normative core um and in in this sense if we take someone like Carl poer um or or people that ascribe to his theory we can consider moderation as a sort of an instrument of democratic self-defense right so it’s it’s the famous theory of of the Paradox of Tolerance if you end up tolerating everything then in the end you won’t have something like a coherent Society normatively or otherwise speaking of course this theory has a lot of criticism but that’s one that is usually uh reused to be able to justify a number of sorious practices today so then what happens with big Tech well of course we know that there are a number of things that are not allowed or deplatformed by law um I still remember in the days of my teenagerhood when I was using Sky blog I’m not sure if anyone has remembers here but there was like a popular social media platform in France back then and I was trying to put a picture of Hitler because it was sort of a funny joke with a friend a high school friend or but I couldn’t that they kept removing it they didn’t want the picture of Hitler but of course that’s a funny example of of a broader phenomenon where certain States enforce a certain laws to to prevent the demoralization of historically problematic language and from a more technical perspective big Tech platforms have actually sort of continued the number of moderation practices that had already existed before in Legacy Media however we defined that television printed newspaper and so on so so um there is as I said the sanctioning of problematic language that today is spoken as as deplatforming or a marginalizing problem problematic language which is the equivalent of maybe you know putting a little erotic ad on the last page of a newspaper so you don’t really see it so easily or broadcasting something in very late hours is the equivalent of something like demotion which is downranking problematic content over time or confronting or denying problematic speech which is a more popular technique in in United States it’s what they call counter speech and that’s very popular in sort of you know talk show hosts or radio programs and so on is could be considered the equivalent of context labels today so the fact that you in Twitter that’s particularly frequent it’s like those little context uh readers adding context and saying or correcting a certain information that appears to be to blly false or incorrect and so on so forth um but the the the most important thing here is that big Tech is seen as from a mod moderation perspective a sort of destabilizing factor in the sense that it either kind of moderates too much or too little um too little in the sense that it has tended to give as we know a much bigger platform to actors that were gate capped by Legacy Media before and these are mostly sort of farri right populist voices that we hear today and so some like to classifi this phenomenon as part of the sort of the overtone Window Theory and at the same time it also has facilitated of sort of democratization of censorship in the sense that not only can platforms especially in the US determine their own speech Norms their own conditions under which language can be uttered or not but they also facilitate the sort of the balcon isation of different political communities with their own speech Norms or or what’s sort of collo called safe spaces in United States now the EU as we know is very responsive to these kind of destabilization and the digital Service Act has in a sense introduced both technical adjustments and normative adjustments technical one includes flagging affordances so if the platforms doesn’t allow you to flag something that you think is problematic then now you may with the digital service act so there there are a couple of ux adjustments that have been made on Twitter at this point and I will refuse to call it X um platforms also are obliged to explain why they remove what so to add more context and justifications to to cont moderation decisions and there are a number of additional measures for elections and so on and and that applies not only to what we call Big Tech platforms or what the DSA calls um very large online platforms but also smaller ones that have users in the so that could also include something like telegram or forchan you know um so to get to the specific research questions my interest was in understanding how this applies to Latin America so the countries or regions that are usually not very much under the political interest of these platforms that’s particularly Brazil so the specific empirical question I ask is how have Twitter meta and that is Instagram and Facebook YouTube and telegram moderated content related to Brazilian mil militarism at the wake of the January 8th riots so right after the elections of last year 2003 now when we talk about transition Justice and the formation of speech Norms thereafter first we’d have to ask what is there to transition from in Brazil what what what is exactly the sort of the the thing that speech moderation practices would like to counter contain um well it was a military regime that lasted about 40 years from 63 till 88 and it was accused of widespread um Exile or torture or extrajudicial killings and force disappearances of um about thousands of political dissidents it had no direct elections and it had reduced um parliamentary capacities and it has widespread censorship amongst other things and so the way that that Brazil or the Brazilian State tried to sort of exit from that period was in a sort of cumbersome process that wasn’t as clear as a sort of a TRC committee Truth Truth and Reconciliation committee or transitional Justice committee as in Argentina or Chile but in this case was actually um by using an amnesty law and what was that about the amnesty law was actually promulgated under the military dictatorship itself and it consisted in giving um in sort of forgiving sort of you scratch your back and I scratch mine so forgiving both the political dissidents and the militaries for for crimes whatever those crimes were and it it didn’t go so well this cartoon was published at the time I’m not sure if can see it very well but it’s a it’s a cartoon that says uh all right opposition you are surrounded put your hands up for reconciliation it felt a little bit forced for for the dissidents in particular now the new constitution puts in place Democratic rule of law and uh Speech uh laws that are colloquially called sort of communal speech laws so there’s respect for freedom of expression but to the extent that that speech doeses not harm a number of communities so that’s based on race and gender religious orientation and so on so forth so a very classical understanding of it what follows is a sort of a period of pacification so first the the the one of the presidents of the time Fernando card was responsible putting up all these different commissions to um let’s say forgive or repair relations with political dissidents then there was a truth commission that was put in place by Juma HFI then she was impeached and then there was the sort of this the period that we know as more recently that was more sort of dominated by a kind of more far right Brazilian political discourse by particularly presided by by B uh where with the use of social media certain kinds of political cultures and language have reemerged which is sort of um let’s say a form of historical historical revisionism military historical revisionism According to which the kind of historical version that these this period was trying to put into place is trying to rewrite and in that process Bonar was accused of usurping his power in the sense of trying to overthrow just like had happened in 1964 with the establishment of the military regime overthrow the Democratic rule of law with various kinds of language and actions used online and offline so at some point um this person that you see here his name is Alexandra J Mor he’s locally known as sh he is the president or he’s one of the M Ministers of the federal uh Supreme Court and he is also the president of the there’s particular Supreme Court in Brazil called the the federal electoral court so it’s Supreme Court that’s responsible for regulating elections he decides to take matters in his own hands like the Sher sheriff in town and commands the deplatforming or moderation of various bista or let’s say what he would call anti-democratic agents on social media so he tells these different platforms to deplatform all these different political uh personal so what does this look like in practice we don’t need to go through every little detail but since we’re talking about method yesterday I thought I would just show you a little bit what this would look like from the perspective of of what we called digital methods or more sort of data analysis oriented analysis um what this looks like is is first I collected a lot of data from different social media platforms from the most mainstream to the most Fringe the most Fringe because that’s where actors uh related to the to the Riots of January the E8 were most um were inhabiting and I I used their apis which for the for Unfortunately today are becoming increasingly more unavailable and I collected about from Millions to hundreds of thousands of posts from each of those uh platforms with a number of keywords that are pronounced or used by uh let’s say militaristic uh actors that were involved in in the rides and the most important thing is that I wanted to see moderation so moderation is a tricky thing to analyze because it’s not available through the API so one has to scrape it which is a different technique than data collection right you have to copy information from the interface systematically so I scraped the moderation statuses of a number of um of all these different posts over time so I made sure that I got indications of the platforming or or flagging or whatever whatever it is so um this is an example what it looks like on telegram for now and I can zoom in a little bit if you can’t see very well but so this is a a timeline where shortly before and after the Riots of January the 8th um and of course you don’t have to pay attention to every little thing it’s it’s a very sort of detailed bew but I I’ll you know I’ll guide you through it um the size of the nodes is refers to engagement which goes somewhere from zero views all the way to um 100,000 views and the color of the nodes the color of the of the little bubbles is the content the theme of the post so the very dark red is calls for the Genera riots which is was essentially for to overthrow the government so a call for a kud and earlier in December it was more um strikes in support of a military intervention or things generally about General military intervention and then yellow is more things about claims of election frauds and the circle around it is the moderation status so everything that’s green was at the time of the collection which was January 8th online and and everything that was orange was actually self- censored so it was users Who removed their own stuff because they knew they were going to get investigated after the the riots so what the the graph explains here is the the ongoing planning of the riots happening primarily on telegram so first there’s discussion about the need to to cause this government to fall or cause an Institutional rupture which is a sort of code name for military intervention and then there is a very interesting phenomenon which is that uh on on the sort of safe uh space that telegram was outside of platform moderation because it’s not platform moderated not significantly at least uh they they plan to use this kind of code name which is Festa the Salma for the riots so we’re going to Selma’s party for the riots wink wink and so they begin to use this code name to spread it to other platforms that are more moderated to in order to evade moderation so let me see if I can no oh here okay so what does Twitter looks like and and this is already by the time that Elon Musk had been empow mind you so some posts are removed by so-called shaone right the things in in in Black here so there’s this person here that is inciting again could and this is this is removed by the Supreme Court this however is suspended by Twitter and this is still online so for the most part the things that incite the the assemblers to go to the right remain online with a few Exceptions there are just a few things that are suspended and the minority things that are suspended by the spring point then uh Windows no okay now Facebook and Twitter sorry Facebook and Instagram it’s more or less the same story except that they use flagging much more so for the most part these calls for the riot are still online except for a number of posts that are about yeah other topics that are just flagged so this this example here is this just flagged thanks uh I’m just going to skip YouTube really quickly and then so this is just an overall results of what was moderated and what wasn’t and how and what we find is that for the most part the calls for military intervention or strikes in favor of military pool or calls to join the generary riots remain at least half of them were online the other part were deleted or they were deleted by the users themselves for fear of reprisal and the things that were mostly labeled or deleted in Twitter Facebook or Instagram were allegations of electoral fraud were not necessarily calls for military intervention so this is what then I referred in the title as a sort of normative dislocation or dislocated moderation in the sense that what was supposed to be moderated as as by sort of speech Norm traditions in in Brazil um were not exactly moderated what was moderated instead was what was already moderated in the experience of the US elections which was these allegations of fraud so what’s the aftermath very quickly um well in Brazil then later they introduced a bill to try to reinforce moderation they called this the anti-fake news law bill so it was a sort of anti- disinformation Bill but a lot of platforms were very opposed to it so they also put banners on their own website so if you would log in Google on Brazil it would show something like the anti fake news laws proposal can increase public confus on what is in IND result they have very active Lobby and then of course this happened more recently is that Elon Musk decided to sort of take revenge on having been pushed so much to moderate the elections and publishes what he calls the Twitter files that reveal how much the Supreme Court was try was involved in pushing them to moderate content um and then the the judicial committee here in in the US takes up this this concern by Elon Musk and sort of presents it or frames it as as a problem of sensorship so in this sense it also complicates The Narrative of moderation across States and across understandings of what should and should not be moderated so just to conclude really quickly um I think it’s fair to say with that us-based social media platforms have sort of destabilized relatively fragile set of speech Norms in in in Brazil in a number of ways right because they have another set of norm standards and also because they they broughten the sort of the combat field between um different political actors in Brazil um and so in a sense it would be interesting to to as other people yesterday have mentioned consider a local legal platform structure for writing joint speech moderation policies also with the help of civil society and legal Representatives so that’s it thank you okay thank you for all the and it’s have