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The French baguette has been included in UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage
⬇️ STARTER
Absolute free speech is a recipe for violence: notes from Paris for Monsieur Musk
Elon Musk bought Twitter in the name of absolute freedom. But numerous research shows that social media hate speech leads to actual violence. Musk and others running social networks need to strike a balance.
Elon Musk is the world's leading reckless driver. The ever unpredictable CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is now behind a very different wheel as the new head of Twitter.
He began by banning remote work before slightly backtracking and authorizing it for the company’s “significant contributors.” Now he’s opened the door to Donald Trump to return to Twitter, while at the same time vaunting a decrease in the number of hate-messages that appear on the social network…all while firing Twitter’s content moderation teams.
But this time, the world’s richest man will have to make choices. He’ll have to limit his otherwise unconditional love of free speech. “Freedom consists of being able to do everything that does not harm others,” proclaimed the French-born Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789.
Yet freedom on social networks results not only in insults and defamation, but sometimes also in physical aggression.
Indeed, researchers have accumulated an abundance of evidence to prove the effects that's becoming impossible to deny.
Donald Trump himself is a magnificent case study. The tweetomaniac and former U.S. President sent more than 50,000 tweets to his over 90 million followers, with sometimes undesirable effects. Not just his Dec. 19, 2021 messages calling for a large protest in Washington on January 6 to protest against alleged (but systematically disproven) electoral fraud: “Be there, will be wild!”
A team of economists at Texas A&M University worked on specific strand of Trump messages: those targeting the “China virus” in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first made inroads in the United States.
From March 16-18, Trump published six tweets focused on the “China virus,” an expression that had not appeared in public discourse until then. On March 19, the United States registered a spike in Google searches for “China virus,” often followed by Trump’s name. And March 20, a spike in assaults against Asians, twice as many as the day before.
This isn’t specific to Trump, or even to the United States, Ruben Enikolopov and Maria Petrova, from the Institute for Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona, showed in work done with Leonardo Bursztyn (University of Chicago) and George Egorov (Northwestern University) that there was a link between social networks and racist assaults in Russia.
The researchers studied VKontakte, the Russian alternative to Facebook, which was unevenly developed in different Russian cities. “Greater penetration of social media led to increased hate-crimes with a racist nature, and this effect was stronger in the cities that had greater nationalist sentiment before the arrival of the social network,” the researchers concluded.
Like in the United States, social media messages reinforce existing beliefs and incite people to act on them, more than they actually create the beliefs in the first place. Other research has shown the same mechanisms at work in Germany.
Even if banning social networks isn’t in the realm of possibility, moderating them is. That’s what Germany mandated in 2017 after the arrival of more than one million refugees and a torrent of racist messages on social networks. The “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” (NetzDG) law obliged social networks to remove hate messages within 24 hours of their being reported.
The law was a game changer in Germany. The two researchers who studied Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, Müller and Schwartz, examined what happened after the law’s entry into force, this time with Rafael Jiminez-Duran (from the Social Science Research Council). According to their recently published paper, the law has been associated with a decrease in the number of toxic messages, and a decrease in anti-refugee crimes in cities with a large number of far-right Facebook users.
Elon Musk is going to have to do something he’s not very used to: find a balance between freedom of speech and responsibility. The good news for him and other social media titans is that, while it might be complicated, it can be done.
— Jean-Marc Vittori / Les Echos
🎲 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ
What do you remember from the news this week?
1. What did Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko decide to do across his city, to prevent Putin from “stealing our Christmas”?
2. What item became the rallying symbol for China’s ongoing anti-lockdown protests?
3. What word, another way of saying “manipulating”, was picked as Word of the Year?
4. The music world mourned the death of singer-songwriter Christine McVie at age 79. What band was she in? Bananarama / Eagles / Fleetwood Mac / Wings
[Answers at the bottom of this newsletter]
#️⃣ TRENDING
A video of a South Korean influencer being harassed while she was livestreaming in Khar, India quickly spread across the internet. The influencer, known as Mhyochi, was streaming live from the streets of a Mumbai suburb when a man approached her and tried to pull on her hand. He showed up soon after on a motorbike, insisting on giving her a lift. “Last night on stream, there was a guy who harassed me. I tried my best not to escalate the situation and leave because he was with his friend. And some people said that it was initiated by me being too friendly and engaging the conversation. Makes me think again about streaming,” Mhyochi tweeted.
🎭 5 CULTURE THINGS TO KNOW
• Dua Lipa granted Albanian citizenship: Pop star Dua Lipa, who was born in the UK from Kosovan-Albanian immigrants, has been granted Albanian citizenship for promoting the country through her music. Albania’s president Bajram Begaj said the artist had made the country “proud with her global career and engagement in important social causes.”
• Egyptians ask UK to give Rosetta Stone back: As the British Museum is busy marking the 200-year anniversary of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, two petitions signed by thousands of Egyptians are demanding the return of the museum’s most visited piece, the Rosetta Stone. The petitions argue the stone was seized illegally and that it is “a symbol of Western cultural violence against Egypt.”
• Movie about Kashmir starts row at India film festival: Nadav Lapid, jury chief at the International Film Festival India (IFFI), has caused outrage at the event’s closing ceremony after he criticized the inclusion of a controversial Bollywood film on Kashmir. Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker, described The Kashmir Files as “propaganda” and said he was “shocked” at the screening of the film. A box office hit set during the exodus of Hindus from Indian-administered Kashmir in the 1990s, the movie set off a heated debate in India with some arguing it aimed to stoke anti-Muslim sentiments.
• Nigeria artist tops first ever Official Mena Chart: The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has launched this week the Official Mena Chart, its first ever musical ranking in the Middle East and North Africa. Its inaugural No 1 song: Calm Down by Nigerian artist Rema.
• UNESCO World Heritage list now includes French bread & Japanese dance: A UNESCO committee has approved several proposed “human treasures” to add in its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, including the French baguettes, Japan’s ritual furyu-odori dances, and “Alheda'a,” the oral traditions of calling camels in Saudi Arabia and Oman. The committee has gathered in Rabat to examine 56 nominations until Dec. 3.
🇨🇳✊ The deeper reasons behind China’s protests
For Chinese language media The Initium, Changren Zheng explores how the protests across the country, in reaction to Beijing’s tough Zero-COVID policy, have taken form over the past weeks — suggesting that perhaps more is brewing under the surface, and that these protests are a starting point for a new civic movement.
“General belief about the Chinese people was that they lacked the awareness and experience for mass political action,” Zheng writes. “Opposition to ‘Zero-COVID’ has become a fight against tyranny and a possible starting point for China's civic movement.”
Read the full story: How China's Mass Protest Took The World By Surprise — And Where It Will End
🇷🇺 The Arctic, a strategic region for both Russia and the West
The Arctic holds significant importance for Russia, which owns 60% of its coastline — in particular because of its natural resources, from oil and gas to its deposits of rare earth metals, that have become more accessible for mining due to climate change.
And while NATO has not been overly concerned with the defense of the region so far, it is now changing since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “Arctic countries are actively arming themselves and coordinating their actions. Recent events in Norway confirm that Russia poses a threat in the north,” writes Kateryna Mola in Ukrainian media Livy Bereg.
Read the full story: How The War In Ukraine Could Overturn Everyone's Plans For The Arctic
😷 To mask or not to mask?
“During the pandemic, and for what seemed like an eternity, masks became our outside faces,” writes Worldcrunch’s Emma Albright.
But now that the immediacy and necessity of mask-wearing has gone out the window (even in crowded places like Paris’ metro), she can’t let them go completely, particularly with COVID-19 cases on the rise again as winter approaches.
Read the full story: Masks And Me: Take This Pandemic Story At Face Value
📱🦠 BRIGHT IDEA
Alarmed by the lack of understanding of long COVID, a British innovator named Harry Leeming — suffering from the condition himself — created an app, called “Visible”, that allows patients to track symptoms. The app, currently downloadable for free, offers morning and evening check-ins and enables users to keep an eye on the quality of their sleep and menstrual cycle. According to its creator, the aim is to make long-COVID symptoms more visible “to the patient, to clinicians, and to research” so the disease can be better understood.
🐫🏆 SMILE OF THE WEEK
While soccer teams are battling it out at the World Cup, another contest is underway is Qatar: The country hosted a camel beauty contest — with more than 700 camels from across the Arab world competing in a beauty pageant. The camel deemed best-looking was awarded a 45,000-euro prize.
⏩ LOOKING AHEAD
• The memorial service for former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who died Wednesday at age 96, is scheduled for Dec. 6 at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
• Newly-elected Brazilian President Lula da Silva is set to announce his first cabinet minister picks.
• The knockout stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup begins for the remaining 16 teams, with the quarterfinals slated for Dec. 9 and 10.
News quiz answers:
1. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced that Christmas trees would be put up around the Ukrainian capital, despite the ongoing war with Russia.
2. Blank sheets of paper became the rallying symbol for China’s ongoing anti-lockdown protests, hinting at everything demonstrators wish they could say, but cannot.
3. Online dictionary Merriam-Webster has named “Gaslighting” as its 2022 Word of the Year, after “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage” saw a 1,740% increase in definition searches throughout 2022.
4. Singer-songwriter Christine McVie, who rose to fame with the British-U.S. band Fleetwood Mac, died on Wednesday, at age 79, following a brief illness. McVie was behind some of the band’s most famous hits, including “Everywhere,” “Little Lies,” and “Songbird.”
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*Photo: Jules Darmanin
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