Monthly Archives: May 2020

Chris Christie, a Trump supporter and a former New Jersey governor, pleaded with Americans on May 5 to risk disease and death by returning to work. Everybody wants to save every life they can, he said, but weve got to let some of these folks get back to work. Otherwise were going to destroy the American way of life in these families.

The American way of life is shaping up to be a battleground.

On one side is the working class. From Amazon warehouse workers to striking sanitation workers in New Orleans, there are limits to what ordinary people are willing to endure to secure their employers bottom line. Resistance to oppression and exploitation is a familiar experience for millions of workers in this country. And when workers have not found justice or relief in mainstream politics, they have turned to more combative ways of mobilizing to secure it.

On the other side is the Republican Party, led by the Trump administration, which has accelerated its call for states to reopen the economy by sending people back to work. While President Trump admits that some people will be affected badly, nonetheless we have to get our country open.

Public health experts disagree. Instead, they argue that testing rates must double or triple and that we need a more intense regime of contact tracing and isolation. This has been the established pattern in countries that managed the coronavirus with success. But without these measures, forecast models predict a sharp rise in fatalities. A conservative model that in mid-April predicted a ghastly death toll of 60,000 by August now estimates 147,000 fatalities by August. Just as the rate of infection drops in cities like New York and Detroit, new outbreaks threaten to emerge elsewhere where restrictions are being relaxed.

But if we expect tens of millions of people to stay at home for even longer, that is possible only if people have access to income, food, stable housing and reliable health care. If people cannot work, then these things will have to be provided by the federal government. It is that simple.

For Republicans, the American way of life as one with big government social welfare programs would be worse than the pandemic. At the core of their vision of the United States is a celebration of supposed rugged individualism and self-sufficiency where hard work is valorized and creates success. Of course, the contrapositive is also believed to be true, that when people have not been successful it is because they did not work hard enough.

Buried within this is the false notion that the U.S. is free from the hierarchies of class. Instead, Republicans and most mainstream Democrats would argue, America has fluid social mobility where a persons fortitude determines the heights of his or her success. This powerful narrative has motivated millions to migrate to this country. But for tens of millions, this view of the American way of life has no bearing on their lives.

Typically, the contradictions of our society are buried beneath the American flag, suffocating hubris and triumphalist claims of exceptionalism. But the pandemic has pushed all of the countrys problems to the center of American life. It has also highlighted how our political class, disproportionately wealthy and white, dithers for weeks, only to produce underwhelming rescue bills that, at best, do no more than barely maintain the status quo.

The median wealth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million as of 2018, and $900,000 for a member of the House of Representatives. These elected officials voted for one-time stimulus checks of $1,200 as if that was enough to sustain workers, whose median income is $61,973 and who are now nearly two months into various mandates to shelter-in-place and not work outside their homes. As a result, a tale of two pandemics has emerged.

The crisis spotlights the vicious class divide cleaving through our society and the ways it is also permeated with racism and xenophobia. African-Americans endure disproportionate exposure to the disease, and an alarming number of videos show black people being brutalized by the police for not wearing masks or social distancing, while middle-class white people doing the same things are left in peace. In New York City, 92 percent of those arrested for violating rules regarding social distancing and 82 percent of those receiving summons for the same offense have been black or Latino.

Our society imagines itself to be impervious to the rigidities of class, but it is overwhelmed with suffering, deprivation and hunger. Food banks across the country report extraordinary demand, producing an almost shocking rebuke of the image of a country of universal abundance. According to one report, a food bank along the affluent New Jersey shore has set up a text service allowing people to discreetly pick up their food.

Elsewhere, the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger dont have enough to eat.

That way of life may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent. And while more people paid in May, continued payments seem unsustainable as millions fall into unemployment. Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent. With only a few weeks left on many eviction moratoriums, there is a thin line between a place to shelter in and homelessness for tens of millions of Americans.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the risk of returning to work as an act of patriotism necessary to regenerate the economy. This is duplicitous and obscures the manipulation of U.S. workers.

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the financial sector, the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isnt just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the American way of life for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the essential work force stays shows up each day. In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption. The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

The statements of the two senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, vociferously opposing the extension of $600 supplemental payments to unemployment insurance, offer another stark example of how workers are being compelled to return to unsafe work environments. Mr. Scott referred to the supplement as a perverse incentive to not work. He and Mr. Graham argued that the payments were more than some workers salaries, which is an indictment of the jobs and the companies, not the employees.

This is not the first time Southern politicians have complained that government aid to poor or working-class people would undermine their perverse reliance on low-wage labor. During the Great Depression, Southern leaders opposed new systems of social welfare over fear it would undermine the civilization to which we are accustomed, as a newspaper in Charleston, S.C., described it. The crude version came from an official in Alabama who insisted that welfare payments to African-Americans should be lower because, Negroes just dont want to work. The logic was that if you could pay black men a nickel then white men would celebrate being paid a dime. Meanwhile, the prevailing wages elsewhere were significantly higher than both. This is why wages are still lower across the South than elsewhere in the country.

American progress means that Mr. Scott, an African-American senator from South Carolina, now voices these ideas. But then as now, complaints about social welfare are central to disciplining the labor force. Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to Americas peer countries.

This is at the heart of the conflict over reopening the country or allowing people to continue to shelter-in-place to suppress the virus. But if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers choices as a voluntary quit.

The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services is also instructing employers to report workers who refuse to go to work because of the pandemic. Part of whats going on is the crush of people filing for benefits means state funds are shrinking. This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of the American way of life that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

This cannot all be laid at the feet of the Trump administration, though it has undeniably made life worse for millions. These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

The attacks on welfare, food stamps, public housing and all of the attendant programs that could mitigate the worst aspects of this disaster continue to be bipartisan. The loud praise of Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, in contrast to the poor performance of President Trump, has overshadowed protests against his $400 million cuts to hospitals in New York as the virus was raging through the city.

There will be many more examples of Democrats wielding the ax in response to unprecedented budget shortages in the coming months. With the increasing scale of the crisis as unemployment grows to an otherworldly 36.5 million people while states run out of money and contemplate cutting Medicaid and other already meager kinds of social welfare the vast need for government assistance will test the political classs aversion to such intervention.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

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The American Way of Life Is Shaping Up to Be a Battleground - The New York Times

Utilizing cutting-edge technology, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is perfecting the religious oppression of millions at home and exporting the same capabilities abroad. The CCP's ongoing abuse of Christians, Muslims and Buddhists lays bare the stakes for human freedom in the United States' great power competition with China.

In its annual report released last week, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) concluded that the CCP is "engaging in systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations." Thanks to Western media investigations and courageous Chinese whistleblowers, many outside China are familiar with the CCP's deplorable persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. In the past year, Muslims have suffered "torture, rape, sterilization and other abuses," and authorities have "destroyed or damaged thousands of mosques."

Christians, who make up roughly five percent of China's population, have fared little better. Chinese officials "raided or closed down hundreds of Protestant house churches in 2019." Local officials continue to offer cash bounties for information on underground churches. Chinese authorities have burned unauthorized Bibles, ripped down crucifixes and replaced likenesses of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary with images of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Tibetan Buddhists continue to suffer "forced assimilation and suppression." Monks and nuns unwilling to subordinate their faith to the CCP's dictates have been "expelled from their monasteries, imprisoned and tortured." As an extraordinary sign of the hopelessness and desperation the CCP's oppression has caused, USCIRF noted that at least 156 Tibetans have self-immolated since February 2009.

While authoritarianism and religious persecution are sadly not new, the CCP leads the world in the abuse of advanced technologies to carry out its religious cleansing. In an update last September, USCIRF noted that authorities have often forced religious minorities to provide "blood samples, voice recordings and fingerprints." Government officials then employ "advanced computing platforms and artificial intelligence to collate and recognize patterns in the data on religious and faith communities." Surveillance cameras, sometimes installed inside places of worship, utilize advanced facial recognition software to assist these efforts.

Some may want to dismiss these concerning facts as the unfortunate but isolated plight of Chinese civilians struggling half a world away. But that would miss the true extent of the CCP's global program.

According to USCIRF, "China has exported surveillance technology and systems training to more than 100 countries," allowing them to "target political opponents or oppress religious freedom." With the technology in hand and international opprobrium still at a whisper, repressive regimes will see little downside to following suit.

Some have already made that calculation. The report notes that in August 2019, "Uzbek authorities forced approximately 100 Muslim men to shave their beards, claiming that the beards hindered Chinese facial recognition technology used by the government."

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) summed up the stakes in February. "China is exporting authoritarianism. And they are giving everyone a packageI mean a literal tech package," he said. "The surveillance cameras, the artificial intelligence, the databases, the ways to control a society, just like they do at home."

The technology is hardly safer in democratic hands. Some U.S. allies and partners already use CCP technologies, clinging to dangerously outdated notions of a Chinese private sector. The reality is that no "private" Chinese company will refuse a dictate from Beijing. As free nations become increasingly reliant on Chinese hardware, they give the CCP potential points of access into security infrastructure and sensitive information.

Additionally, the more reliant nations, companies and individuals become on Chinese technology for critical services, investments and trade, the more reluctant each becomes to criticize Beijing's foreign or domestic policiesexpanding Beijing's ability to act with impunity. Some of America's closest European allies are already beginning to suffer from this affliction.

An effective response begins with documenting and disseminating Beijing's violations of religious liberty. The U.S. has taken positive initial steps. In October, the administration imposed restrictions on Chinese companies and officials abusing minorities.

But meaningful relief for China's religious minorities will come quickest if the U.S. recruits other nations with the economic and diplomatic firepower to stand together against Beijing.

This requires buy-in from America's partners. It also means tireless engagement with international organizations and the difficult diplomatic work of coalition-building. If Washington neglects these partnerships or vacates these international fora, Beijing will simply fill the vacuum.

As the USCIRF report makes clear, the competition between the U.S. and the CCP is about more than fleeting economic or political primacy. Hanging in the global balance are the protections of minorities, of conscience, of worship and of a private life beyond the reach of government.

If Beijing displaces the United States as the leader in shaping international rules and norms, one need not wonder the direction they will take: China's minorities already know.

Bradley Bowman is senior director for the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mikhael Smits is a research analyst.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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Beijing Hones and Exports Religious Oppression | Opinion - Newsweek

Health and government officials around the globe are slowly and ever-so-tentatively moving to relax lockdowns due to coronavirus.

In Canada, where the possibility of health-care collapse seems to have been averted (for the time being), some are beginning to ask questions other than when will the pandemic end? Instead, theyre turning towards how will we move forward?

Young people have some answers that warrant our attention. Over the past five years, through my collaborative ethnographic research with 250 young people in drama classrooms in Canada, India, Taiwan, Greece and England, I have gained remarkable insight into these young peoples experiences and assessments of the world.

I found crisis after crisis being shouldered by young people. Through their theatre-making, they documented their concerns and hope, and they rallied around common purposes. They did this despite disagreement and difference.

Beyond simply creating art for arts sake, or for school credits, many of the young people I encountered are building social movements and creative projects around a different vision for our planet. And they are calling us in. This is an unprecedented moment for intergenerational justice and we need to seize it.

I have had an up-close look at how seemingly disparate crises around the globe are deeply connected through divisive systems that dont acknowledge or respect youth concerns. I have also learned how young people are disproportionately affected by the misguided politics of a fractured world.

In England, young people were burdened by the divisive rhetoric of the Brexit campaign and its ensuing aftermath.

In India, young women were using their education to build solidarity in the face of dehumanizing gender oppression.

In Greece, young people were shouldering the weight of a decade-long economic crisis compounded by a horrifying refugee crisis.

Read more: Solidarity with refugees cant survive on compassion in crisis-stricken societies of Greece and Italy

In Taiwan, young people on the cusp of adulthood were trying to square the social pressures of traditional culture with their own ambitions in a far-from-hopeful economic landscape.

In Toronto, youth tried to understand why the rhetoric of multiculturalism seemed both true and false, and why racism persists and, in so doing, they spoke from perspectives grounded in their intersectional (white, racialized, sexual- and gender-diverse) identities.

They embraced the reality that everything in popular culture may enter a drama classroom. But they responded to current news stories like the 2016 presidential debates in the United States by saying that they had different and more pressing concerns, like mental health support and transphobia.

Todays young people are a generation that has come of age during a host of global crises. Inequality, environmental destruction, systemic oppression of many kinds weigh heavily.

I found a youth cohort who, despite many not yet having the right to vote, have well-honed political capacities, are birthing countless global hashtag movements and inspiring generations of young and old.

These marginalized youth are aware that their communities have been living with and responding to catastrophic impacts of crises of injustice and inequalities long before now.

How do these youth live with their awareness of global injustices and what these imply for the years ahead? We learned some disturbing things: as young people age and move further away from their primary relationships (parents, teachers, schoolmates), they feel less optimistic about their personal futures.

But in terms of hope, we learned something very recognizable to many of us now: many young people practise hope, even when they feel hopeless. They do this both in social movements they participate in and in creative work they undertake with others.

This is something we can all learn from. In Canada, we are maintaining social distancing as a shared effort. Acting together by keeping apart is how we are flattening the curve, as all the experts continue to tell us.

We know that in communities around the world, government leadership matters enormously. But citizens, social trust and collective will matter at least as much.

In this pandemic, institutions, like universities, businesses and individual citizens have stepped up remarkably in the interests of the common good and our shared fate.

However, Jennifer Welsh, Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University, argues that the defining feature of the last decade is polarization, existing across many different liberal democracies and globally.

Along with this, the value of fairness has been deeply corroded because of growing inequality and persistent historic inequalities we have failed to address, like Indigenous sovereignty and land rights in Canada.

Read more: The road to reconciliation starts with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In the context of the rise of populist politicians and xenophobic policies globally, and also the rise of the most important progressive social movements in decades, my research has taught me that in this driven-apart, socio-economic landscape, the social value of art has never been more more important.

People are making sense of the inexplicable or the feared through art, using online platforms for public learning. Art has become a point of contact, an urgent communication and a hope.

But some are still without shelter, without food, without community and without proper health care. The differences are stark.

Arundhati Roy has imagined this pandemic as a kind of portal we are walking through: we can walk through it lightly ready to imagine another world. We can choose to be ready to fight for it.

Read more: What is solidarity? During coronavirus and always, it's more than 'we're all in this together'

Its time to put global youth at the centre of our responses to crises. Otherwise, young people will inherit a planet devastated by our uncoordinated efforts to act, worsening a crisis of intergenerational equity.

We should of course develop a vaccine and, in Canada, stop underfunding our public health-care system. But we must also flatten the steep curves we have tolerated for too long. For a start, we could act on wealth disparity and social inequality.

But our response to the pandemic could also illuminate new responses to fundamental problems: disrespect for the diversity of life in all its forms and lack of consideration for future generations.

Youth expression through theatre and in social movements are valuable ways to learn how youth are experiencing, processing and communicating their understandings of the profound challenges our world faces. How powerfully our post-pandemic planning could shift if we changed who is at decision-making tables and listened to youth.

Continued here:

After coronavirus: Global youth reveal that the social value of art has never mattered more - The Conversation CA

A book has hit Kazakhstan like a storm and is exposing the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party there. Turarbek Kusainov, the leader of the independent human rights organization Demos, has just publishedGloom: Sunset on East Turkestan, exposing the CCPs lies on the dreaded transformation through education camps. This is the first, exclusive interview with the author for an international media outlet. The interviewer is Serikzhan Bilash, a leading human rights activist in Kazakhstan.

What is the purpose of your book, exactly?

My book is not a literary work, it is a documentary analysis, characterizing and revealing the ultimate culprit of the brutal repressions the CCP is perpetrating. It is aimed at the forcible destruction of the language, religion, national customs, and traditions of the peoples that have inhabited present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region since ancient times.

The inhuman conditions of detention in the Xinjiang transformation through education camps, which are really concentration camps, the bullying of the inmates, the unspeakable horrors are shown through the real stories of former prisoners thrown into camps for long periods without any court verdict.

Thus, the story of the physical and mental suffering experienced by the prisoners of concentration camps is revealed, and the purpose of the criminal CCP policy is exposed. In addition, on the basis of evidence, the situation of total horror that has developed outside the walls of concentration camps, as well as the current predicament of Xinjiang residents, whose rights are unceremoniously violated, are analyzed.

We all know very well that repression is taking place in Xinjiang. The title of the book itself is bleak, one might even say tragic. And the conclusion of the analysis ends on a terribly sad note. Dont you think that such a book, and even its title, was unexpected in Kazakhstan, which is a country on friendly terms with China?

Everything has its own specific name. The Xinjiang region, now considered a Chinese province, until recently was the eastern edge of the Turkic world. Therefore, I personally believe it should be called East Turkestan. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communists are trying to erase the national uniqueness of the peoples that have inhabited this region for several thousand years, and thus finally destroy East Turkestan.

Let me be clear on one point, however. Even the representatives of the Turkic-speaking people who have become the object of severe pressure in Xinjiang that I know of do not call for a violation of the territorial integrity of the PRC, nor for the separation and creation of an independent state.

No one of those I interviewed has any separatist intentions. Neither do I. The main issue is human rights. You cannot prosecute a person for her national characteristics and religion, or for her political views. This principle is written down in international conventions, and even in the constitution of the Communist PRC. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist authorities repeat the atrocities of Nazi Germany that shocked the world eighty years ago, as well as of the Stalinist repression.

As for the countries of the Turkic world and the Arab countries, where the overwhelming majority of the population is professing Islam, they are completely under the political and economic influence of China, and pretend that they do not see and do not know about the genocidal policy in Xinjiang.

There are two main minorities in Xinjiang, Uyghurs and Kazakhs. We know that the ethnic Kazakh population is less numerous than the Uyghurs, yet the territory where they are living takes almost half of all the Xinjiang territory and includes some of the best lands and pastures. How did you describe in your book the position of oil-rich Kazakhstan, which is a neighbour of China, towards the ethnic Kazakhs who are living and are persecuted in Xinjiang?

The book clearly describes the position of the authorities in the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan. Kazakhstan is in the sphere of political and economic influence of China. In the early 1990s, to improve its internal demographic situation, Kazakhstan turned to the Kazakh diaspora abroad, with an appeal that they return to their historical homeland. A law on migration was adopted specifically for this.

However, this law has now been sacrificed to Sino-Kazakh economic relations. Moreover, there are a lot of cases when former residents of Xinjiang, who received citizenship of the Republic of Kazakhstan, were detained in the transformation through education camps and subjected to bullying. Several Kazakh citizens still cannot return to their homelandthey are being held under house arrest in Xinjiang. The government of Kazakhstan knows this but did not even send a note of protest to China.

Kazakhstan found itself in a miserable situation, being unable to get out of the influence of China, and also to properly fulfill its obligations to protect human rights. Of course, all this will negatively affect the international image of Kazakhstan.

When, in your opinion, will the repression end?

It will not end. I think the Chinese authorities already took their final decision regarding the fate of the Turkic populations of East Turkestan. Whatever the pressure from international organizations, the plan to force Xinjiang to be sinicized will be implemented in a short time. Some experts believe that at least 400,000 ethnic Kazakhs will try to escape from China, no matter how great the risk.

In general, the CCP repression in Xinjiang will have a negative impact on the socio-economic situation and on the life of the Kazakh people as a whole. Kazakhs wishing to leave China are deprived of their business, they are not given the opportunity to sell their real estate and other property. As a result, those who manage to escape from China join the ranks of the socially vulnerable segments of the population in Kazakhstan. This will undoubtedly aggravate anti-Chinese sentiment in Kazakhstan. All these circumstances will increase the destabilization of the region.

Despite all the above, the reader should pay attention to the positive points noted in the book. Its about the potential of the Kazakh society. Your own human rights organization established in Kazakhstan revealed the truths on human rights violations in Xinjiang and offered evidence, putting this burning issue on the UN agenda. Kazakh society now knows about the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang and the pursuit of a policy of genocide by the CCP, associated with repression against the local population in order to erase its national identity. This is a big success for human rights activists.

The next step should be legal action: every person who suffered in a concentration camp should apply to Kazakh courts and demand compensation from the Chinese government for moral and material damages, and these cases should also be brought before international courts. Only then will the monstrous intent of the CCP be finally exposed.

This interview has been republished with permission from Bitter Winter.

Excerpt from:

Telling the truth about China's oppression of Uyghurs MercatorNet - MercatorNet

Regulation of online content has received little attention amid a global health crisis. But violent extremist activity has not stopped, and we need to get our response right, writes Anjum Rahman.

Today marks the first anniversary of the Christchurch Call, a response to the mass murder at two Christchurch mosques last year, a massacre livestreamed by the killer.

For the first time, in Paris on May 15 2019, technology companies and governments made a commitment to work together. Hurriedly, civil society organisations were invited to meet and be part of the Call. This was formalised in the creation of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, of which, for full disclosure, I am one of three co-chairs.

The wording of the Call provided a narrow focus on areas that were less likely to be disputed. There has been general agreement that livestreaming of a mass murder is not desirable. Tech companies signed up to the Call have been successful in preventing sharing of livestream video footage of other mass murders.

The Call aims to eliminate terrorist and violent extremis content online. Defining who is a terrorist and how that is different from a violent extremist very much depends on ones viewpoint. The cynic in me thinks terrorism has become solely associated with attacks perpetrated by Muslims and the term violent extremist seems to be designed to keep it that way. Do white supremacist or incel killers not have a political agenda? They do seek to change behaviour and perceived power structures, along with terrorising the target population.

Resistance to state oppression has often involved violence. All countries recognise war heroes who fight for the state. Sometimes we recognise those who have fought against oppressive or enemy states the French resistance, anyone? We havent come to any global consensus of when violence is or isnt justified and calling armies peacekeepers cant hide that they commit violent acts.

Some of the governments that have signed up to the Call have engaged in problematic activities in the online space. Whether its the misuse of Facebook users data, posting of inflammatory material, or other breaches of human rights.

Violence can be perpetrated by words and by moving and still images. In the domestic violence sphere, we recognise the impact of emotional abuse and harm. Depictions of violent acts can be traumatising, though they can also be evidence of crimes. Hate-filled language excludes and silences those who are subject to it, whether they are individuals or communities. Even moderators suffer the consequences.

Violent acts offline are preceded by violent speech, much of which is spread online. Mass murderers described as lone wolf attackers have significant histories of belonging to online chat groups, with like-minded members egging each other on. Dealing with expressions of online hate must be part of any successful counterterrorism effort and needs to be factored into the work of the Call. To be meaningful, the work has to move beyond livestream videos.

Along with the blocking of violent content, the achievements of the Call have included the development of a shared online crisis response protocol, and growth in the number of countries who have signed on. A major announcement in New York last September was the restructuring of the Global Internet Forum for Countering Terrorism (GIFCT).

While the move to independence is a positive one for GIFCT, in that it will now be an organisation with its own staff and director, it is still an organisation funded and governed by tech companies. The additional of an Independent Advisory Committee will give the forum access to the views of government and civil society representatives, those representatives have no voting powers or any effective way to exercise accountability other than through public and media channels.

Decisions made by the GIFCT have major impacts globally, both online and offline. There is a huge need for transparency and accountability in the way content moderation decisions are made. There have been concerns about the lack of transparency in the selection process for the Independent Advisory Committee. Individual platforms continue to have issues with their approach to fake news, bots, and the unwillingness to take down accounts of politicians and public figures who post content clearly in breach of the platforms stated community standards.

The pressure for moderation of online violent extremist content can and will be used by governments to suppress opposition voices in their own countries. While the supporting governments of the Call are required to sign up to certain human rights commitments (notably, the United States is missing), there are limited policing mechanisms for those who breach those commitments.

All of this is why it is important to have a power sharing structure, where civil society organisations are effective in holding government and tech companies to account. Currently, the Christchurch Call framework has the greatest potential for civil society to have a meaningful input in the way technology is regulated, and to keep a watchful eye on the activities of the GIFCT. However, there remain challenges.

The Christchurch Call Advisory Network has no funding and is reliant on member organisations donating time and resources. Civil society organisations cannot match the profits of tech companies nor do they have the power to raise funding through taxation. There is still work to be done to ensure that there is adequate consultation, and mechanisms are put in place to ensure that the voice of the network is not simply ignored.

Regulation of online content moderation has not received much attention while the world is gripped by the global pandemic of Covid-19. Terrorist and violent extremist activity, however, has not stopped and marginalised communities continue to be at risk in almost every country. Technological developments have advanced at a much greater rate than governments and communities ability to respond to the dangers posed. This is why the work of the Call is urgent, and why it is so important to get the structures right.

The Spinoff Daily gets you all the days' best reading in one handy package, fresh to your inbox Monday-Friday at 5pm.

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A year on, the Christchurch Call must go beyond dont livestream mass murder - The Spinoff