Fighting Fake News: Can Technology Help The Middle East Throw Off The Shackles Of Censorship?

News reports in the Middle East can sometimes feel like an echo-chamber for autocrats, as pliant media organisations relay events and opinions in a way that keeps the region’s myriad dictators happy, or at least keeps their henchmen away.

In the days when newspapers and television were dominant, it was relatively easy to control what emerged from printing presses and broadcast studios, but in recent years governments have shown themselves to be adept at controlling the conversation on social media too, whether that is the Egyptian government persuading Twitter to suspend the accounts of its critics or Saudi Arabia launching an army of cyber-warriors to shut down any unwanted debate. But the information arms race has not yet stopped and the development of new services based on blockchain technology may yet provide the sort of tools that journalists and citizens need to avoid the overbearing scrutiny of the state.

The horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi by his own government in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 has brought state repression of Middle East journalists into the international spotlight. Sadly, that was merely a particularly extreme example of the sort of thing that happens on an all-too-frequent basis across the region.

Yemeni men gather at a newsstand on November 8, 2014, in the capital Sanaa (Photo: MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images)Getty

The World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters without Borders (known by its French acronym RSF) lists eight Middle East states among the 21 worst countries in the world. They include Syria, which is ranked 177 out of 180 countries, as well as Saudi Arabia (169), Bahrain (166) and Iran (164).

Across the region, journalists are often arrested and jailed for simply doing their jobs. To take just a couple of recent examples, in August Iran jailed seven reporters who had covered protests by the Dervish religious sect; a month later the Egyptian courts finally sentenced photographer Mahmoud Abou Zeid to five years in prison, five years after he had been arrested while covering political demonstrations.

There are many other similar tales. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there were 56 reporters in jail across the Middle East in 2017 and an estimated 451 journalists have been killed in the region since 1992: 205 of them murdered, 204 caught in crossfire and the rest killed while on a dangerous assignment. Nearby countries are often just as bad if not worse. Turkey currently holds 73 journalists in jail, even as it continues to criticize Saudi Arabia for the murder of Khashoggi.

Fake news

RSF notes that “Saudi Arabia permits no independent media and tolerates no independent political parties, unions, or human rights groups,” while Iran “keeps a tight grip on most media outlets and never relents in its persecution of independent journalists, citizen-journalists, and media outlets.”

The censorship does not just involve direct action against individual journalists and publications. In many cases it also stems from self-censorship by writers and publishing houses keen to protect their livelihoods and their liberty.

Finding a way around the restrictions is not simple. News organisations can emerge with the best of intentions but all too often end up either falling into line with the authorities’ preferences or being shut down. The National, an English-language daily based in Abu Dhabi, is one example of what can happen. When it was set up in 2008 it did so with an army of international industry veterans and a promise to emulate Western newspaper standards, but before long critics began to note how it had succumbed to the usual pressures.

The Al Arab news channel set up by Saudi tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in February 2015 in Bahrain is another cautionary tale. It was closed soon after launch, after broadcasting an interview with Bahraini opposition politician Khalil Al Marzooq (the channel’s editor was Jamal Khashoggi).

One U.S. start-up thinks it may be able to help journalists resist some of these pressures. Harvard-based Inkrypt approaches the problem with a liberal zeal. “Institutions are made strong and civic society is made robust when information can flow freely and it’s that realization that Inkrypt is grounded upon,” says Farhan Javed, a Pakistani-American who was born in Saudi Arabia and is one of the tech company’s co-founders.

News distribution

The company, which has raised $1.3m in funding to date, is developing a platform which uses blockchain technology to provide “censorship-resistant” publishing. The system allows information to be stored in small, encrypted chunks of data which are distributed across a wide peer-to-peer network, rather than centralized on servers which can be easily attacked by hackers or government lawyers. Each part of the network is cloaked in anonymity so that one storage “node” does not know the identity of any other node.

“A government is not able to shut down a node using an IP block and you can’t geolocate these nodes, you can’t subpoena these nodes,” says Javed. “Even if a single node or laptop within the network were to go down, the information retains resilience.”

Other methods of distributed storage already exist, such as IPFS, although that proved vulnerable to government action in Spain during the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. There have also been plenty of other attempts to use blockchain technology to develop communications platforms which cannot easily be censored, although their impact will remain small unless and until they gain sufficient scale.

Inkrypt has the potential to bypass such difficulties by integrating directly with browsers and popular web content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, making it easier for writers to reach a wide audience.

“Currently it’s very simple for a government to shut down a website,” says Javed. “With the Inkrypt protocol we can allow for censorship resistant web hosting as well. The goal is to provide a strong degree of censorship resistance to websites by creating APIs [application programming interfaces] with whatever people use to create websites and having them integrated with the underlying Inkrypt storage and relay network.”

As with any anonymous platform, there is a balance to strike between enabling free speech while not providing a service which could be misused by those intent on doing harm to others. “We don’t want to be the next hub for child pornography or the next database for Al Qaeda’s tactics or documentation,” says Javed.

With that in mind, he says Inkrypt is working with the likes of Po.et to develop content curation services which can check what its network is being used for. It is an imperfect policing system, not least because there is no obligation for anyone using Inkrypt’s network to use any content vetting system. There is also the risk that the content curation services might themselves fall victim to being gamed by a government unhappy at what is being said about it, although systems such as quadratic voting can help to deflect such attempts.

Javed says that, if a decentralized application (dapp) on its network is being used to spread malicious information, it will be possible to find out who developed that dapp by checking a database of open-source software, but the individual users will even then remain anonymous.

“All of the code would be open-source and it would be very easy to identify whoever the developers are,” says Javad. “As to who actually uses this decentralized application, people can use anonymous identities and still use the application to publish whatever content they like.”

Inkrypt is itself developing a dapp called nLightn which it plans to offer as a censorship-resistant publishing tool to freelance and citizen journalists in censorship-prone corners of the world, not least in the Middle East.

“There are countries like Syria or Iraq where there’s been a huge rise in the amount of citizen journalism,” says Javad. ”They will be able to use nLightn to anonymously publish content. Our goal is to allow the globalization of local niche content, empower citizen journalists within the Middle East to be able to express their ideas and cover their own geographies so that they can push out their content. We can send it to the world in general.”

History shows that governments have yet to face a communications tool that they can’t monitor closely, or even bend to their will. But in the cat-and-mouse game of the authorities versus citizens, the latter might at least have a fresh opportunity to test the boundaries of free speech and create a bit more room for political debate for a while.

 

source: forbes.com