‘Risk of spreading’: Chinese city sounds alert for bubonic plague

Washington, Jun 27: Facebook has said that it will flag all "newsworthy" posts from politicians that break its rules, including those from President Donald Trump.

Separately, Facebook's stock dropped more than 8 per cent, erasing roughly USD 50 billion from its market valuation, after the European company behind brands such as Ben & Jerry's and Dove announced it would boycott Facebook ads through the end of the year over the amount of hate speech and divisive rhetoric on its platform.

Later in the day, Coca-Cola also announced it joined the boycott for at least 30 days.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously refused to take action against Trump posts suggesting that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud, saying that people deserved to hear unfiltered statements from political leaders.

Twitter, by contrast, slapped a "get the facts" label on them.

Until Friday, Trump's posts with identical wording to those labelled on Twitter remained untouched on Facebook, sparking criticism from Trump's opponents as well as current and former Facebook employees.

Now, Facebook is all but certain to face off with the president the next time he posts something the company deems to be violating its rules.

"The policies we're implementing today are designed to address the reality of the challenges our country is facing and how they're showing up across our community," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page announcing the changes.

Zuckerberg said the social network is taking additional steps to counter election-related misinformation.

In particular, the social network will begin adding new labels to all posts about voting that will direct users to authoritative information from state and local election officials.

Facebook is also banning false claims intended to discourage voting, such as stories about federal agents checking legal status at polling places.

The company also said it is increasing its enforcement capacity to remove false claims about local polling conditions in the 72 hours before the US election.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Civic Media, said the changes are a "reminder of how powerful Facebook may be in terms of spreading disinformation during the upcoming election".

He said the voting labels will depend on how good Facebook's artificial intelligence is at identifying posts to label.

"If every post that mentions voting links, people will start ignoring those links. If they're targeted to posts that say things like 'Police will be checking warrants and unpaid traffic tickets at polls' a classic voter suppression disinfo tactic and clearly mark posts as disinfo, they might be useful," he said.

But Zuckerman noted that Facebook "has a history of trying hard not to alienate right-leaning users, and given how tightly President Trump has aligned himself with voter-suppressing misinfo, it seems likely that Facebook will err on the side of non-intrusive and ignorable labels, which would minimize impact of the campaign."

Earlier in the day, shares of Facebook and Twitter dropped sharply after consumer-product maker Unilever announced a new ad boycott on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram through at least the end of the year.

The European company said it took the move to protest the amount of hate speech online.

Unilever said the polarised atmosphere in the United States ahead of November's presidential election placed responsibility on brands to act.

In addition to the decline in Facebook shares, Twitter ended the day more than 7 per cent lower.

Unilever, which is based in the Netherlands and Britain, joins a raft of other advertisers pulling back from online platforms.

Facebook in particular has been the target of an escalating movement to withhold advertising dollars to pressure it to do more to prevent racist and violent content from being shared on its platform.

"We have decided that starting now through at least the end of the year, we will not run brand advertising in social media newsfeed platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the U.S.," Unilever said.

"Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society."

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Thursday, Verizon joined others in the Facebook boycott.

Unilever "has enough influence to persuade other brand advertisers to follow its lead," said eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin.

She noted that Unilever pulled back spending "for longer, on more platforms (including Twitter) and for more expansive reasons" in particular, by citing problems with "divisiveness" as well as hate speech.

Sarah Personette, vice president of global client solutions at Twitter, said the company's "mission is to serve the public conversation and ensure Twitter is a place where people can make human connections, seek and receive authentic and credible information, and express themselves freely and safely."

She added that Twitter is "respectful of our partners' decisions and will continue to work and communicate closely with them during this time."

Brussels/Amsterdam, Apr 16: As the novel coronavirus continues to wreak havoc in the western world since its outbreak in Wuhan last December, researchers believe that the Chinese leadership is trying to absolve President Xi Jinping by using a section of the western media to influence public opinion globally.

"There are clear indications that China is conducting activities in a persistent and systematic manner to influence public opinion-making, academia, think tanks and political decision-making among the member states of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in general and western capital cities in particular," Siegfried O Wolf, Director of Research at Brussels-based think tank South Asia Democratic Front, said.

Some western media say some Chinese officials were secretly aware that they were facing a pandemic from the new coronavirus but allowed Wuhan to host a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people and millions began their annual trip home for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

The pandemic has since then affected 210 countries and territories around the world. Over 2 million people have been declared positive in which over 134,000 lost their lives.

"The frequency and extra-ordinary large scale of Chinese sponsored events in European political hubs, like in Brussels, and the subsequent media coverage can be seen as evidence for Beijing's public diplomacy efforts. However, the rising skepticism within the EU regarding Xi Jinping's development projects and the emerging questioning of Chinese sources funding Free Universities, like the one in Berlin, shows that this strategy produced mixed results so far," Wolf said.

He added, "However, one must also state that these efforts helped China to gain certain leverage among many non-Chinese media, western as well as non-western ones. Today, we can observe that China's political leadership tries to instrumentalise this influence for a major image campaign to distract from the fact that it carries the initial responsibility for the dramatic spread of COVID-19 by holding back key information."

Wolf also said that the current internal dynamics in China, like the shirking of responsibilities by the local authorities, are most-likely part of a twofold strategy. Firstly, there is the strategic component - namely, to reaffirm to the general public that the Communist Party of China is still in full control of the situation. The second strategic pillar is one of 'whitewashing'.

"Concretely, Beijing's obvious aim is to distract the domestic and international attention from the real, but hidden causes of the Coronavirus outbreak and its potential reputational and political consequences for Xi Jinping and his BRI," he stated.

Yoana Barakova, a Research Analyst at European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS), an Amsterdam-based think-tank, said, "The death of Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the very few medical professionals who tried to warn the world in December 2019 about the looming threat, sparked widespread condemnation around the international community in early February. Yet, little did he know that his legacy would continue much later after his demise, with the emboldened Chinese government trying to cover up its missteps through hardcore censorship after being exposed for undermining and underestimating the initial danger."

The researchers believe that the deterioration in press freedom under Jinping's regime has become more evident in recent days, with local authorities trying to control the state narrative by cosmetically placing media's focus on government's superficial attempts to tackle the crisis.

Canadian researchers are developing a DNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and has currently infected nearly 5,00,000 people worldwide and crippled the global economy.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a health-care biotechnology company headed by a University of Alberta researchers, develop new therapeutic compounds using the company's proprietary drug-delivery platform and has begun manufacturing vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus.

"Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that it's a race to get it into clinical trials," said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Lewis said in comparison to a traditional vaccine, DNA-based vaccines hold several advantages.

Nucleic acids are introduced directly into the patient's own cells, causing them to make pieces of the virus--tricking the immune system into mounting a response without the full virus actually being present, the researcher said.

According to the company, the approach is recognised as being easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, offers improved vaccine stability and works without needing an infectious agent.

In the current absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, several companies around the world are mounting efforts to begin similar work.

The first clinical trial using a DNA-based vaccine developed by Moderna Inc.in the US on March 13.

Their approach allows for antibodies to be made in the human trial volunteers against a specific protein on the surface of the coronavirus that lets the virus enter human cells.

The hope is that the antibodies will stop the interaction.

Though this approach is designed to be effective against COVID-19 specifically, Lewis said Entos is taking a different tack.

The company plans to use plasmid DNA to amplify the production of key coronavirus surface and structural proteins with each injection, with an eye to the bigger picture.

"Many of the structural proteins in the virus are pretty well conserved across all the coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS," said Lewis.

"We're hoping that if we express more of the structural proteins that are common to most coronaviruses, we can inhibit the current COVID-19, and also potentially protect against all coronaviruses both past and future," Lewis added.

To move the project forward quickly, the company is seeking financial support from both provincial and federal levels of government.

"We have the opportunity to save a lot of lives, and I think it's really upon us and governments to find solutions for that," Lewis said.