28, May 2020
Bill Gates conspiracy theories echo through Africa 0
As the novel coronavirus wreaks global havoc, Bill Gates is the new bete noire for conspiracy theorists worldwide including in Africa where a Kenyan politician’s false online post has added major fuel to the spread of misinformation.
While Gates’s vaccine programmes on the continent have long provided ample fodder for speculation, the bogus claims have gained new traction amid the pandemic.
On March 15, Nairobi governor Mike Sonko published an old video of Gates warning about the consequences of a future pandemic, with the caption “Bill Gates told us about the corona virus 2015 (sic)”.
While the clip shows the philanthropist telling an audience that the world was unprepared for global outbreaks in his TED talk five years ago, he made no mention of the coronavirus.
Sonko’s post generated so many interactions among his two-million plus Facebook followers that it remains the most prolific global post about Gates in the COVID-19 era, according to social media analysis tool CrowdTangle.
So far, it has been shared more than one million times and has garnered 38 million views on social media.
The post highlights the role played by local public figures in spreading false or misleading claims in different parts of the world, according to the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which studies disinformation globally.
“They typically travel beyond… niche communities when an influencer, such as a prominent celebrity, or even mainstream media source, amplifies them,” DFRLab’s Zarine Kharazian told AFP.
“Once they’ve achieved this level of spread, they migrate across languages.”
– ‘All-powerful elites’ –
Rumours about links between Gates and the current pandemic have enjoyed particularly broad appeal among different conspiracy communities worldwide since the virus erupted in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.
Since January, more than 683,000 posts globally from public Facebook pages and groups mentioned Gates, producing nearly 53 million likes, shares and views.
“One commonality of conspiracy theories that seems to span borders, languages, and cultures is a mistrust in ‘all-powerful elites’ and institutions,” Kharazian said.
“Gates’s prominent profile, outspokenness and active engagement in international public health work has made him a prime target for this particular strain of conspiracy.”
Among the most popular claims in Africa is the idea that Gates wants to control mankind with the use of microchip implants or digital tattoos.
Conspiracy theorists have also alleged that Gates stands to profit handsomely from an eventual vaccine and that his foundation patented a treatment years ago before unleashing the novel coronavirus.
Others again believe he created the virus for population control — a sensitive point in Africa where much of the visible push-back online has focused on the issue of a COVID-19 vaccine and experimental trials on local test subjects.
– Past controversies fuel suspicion –
A history of Western medical abuses in Africa explains some of the backlash, said Sara Cooper, senior scientist at the South African Medical Research Council’s Cochrane Centre.
“Over the last few decades, there have been various incidents of medical research conducted in Africa which have involved gross human rights abuses,” she told AFP.
They range from forced sterilisation experiments carried out in Namibia when it was part of Germany’s colonies in the late 1800s, to controversial drug trials conducted by Western pharmaceutical giants in various African nations in the 1990s.
The distrust of Western vaccines was evidenced by a recent viral post, which claimed that French maverick scientist Didier Raoult had warned Africans against using “the Bill Gates vaccine” because it contained “poison”.
AFP Fact Check debunked the claim — Raoult never made the comments and a vaccine does not yet exist.
But it struck a chord: the French version of the post was shared more than 47,000 times before it was taken down.
Politicians in Nigeria have also pushed similar narratives including Femi Fani-Kayode, a former aviation minister notorious for sharing misinformation along political and religious lines.
Fani-Kayode, who has a strong following among Christians from southern Nigeria, has shared multiple posts claiming Gates was part of a secretive power elite, which wanted to achieve world domination using the coronavirus and 5G technology among other things.
– WHO fights back –
As the virus numbers and rumours spiralled, agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO) raced to stem the spread of misinformation by running online campaigns and helping governments to set up dedicated web portals.
The WHO also held a workshop with more than 50 journalists in Nigeria in February. “Journalists and media are critical to getting the right messages to the community,” emergency officer Dhamari Naidoo said.
“We want you to transmit the right information to the people, and to contribute in stopping the spread of rumours.”
Source: AFP
29, May 2020
Riots erupt in several US cities over Minnesota police killing of handcuffed black man 0
Protesters angered by the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who died while in police custody, gained access to a Minneapolis police precinct on Thursday, the third straight night of violent protests spreading beyond the city.
Livestream video showed the protesters entering the building, where fire alarms blared and sprinklers ran as blazes were set. Police appeared to have left the building located in the neighborhood not far from where Floyd died Monday. A spokesman didn’t immediately respond to messages left by The Associated Press.
The Minneapolis unrest ravaged several blocks in the Longfellow neighborhood, with scattered rioting reaching for miles across the city. It was the second consecutive night of violent protests following Floyd’s death, which was seen in a video that showed him gasping for breath while an officer kneeled on his neck for almost eight minutes. In footage recorded by a bystander, Floyd pleads that he cannot breathe until he slowly stops talking and moving.
Another protest was announced for Thursday evening near county offices in downtown Minneapolis. Some stores in Minneapolis and the suburbs closed early, fearing more strife. The city shut down its light-rail system and all bus service out of safety concerns.
Around midday Thursday, the violence spread a few miles away to a Target in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, where police said 50 to 60 people rushed the store attempting to loot it. Police and state patrol squad cars later blocked the entrance, but the looting then shifted to shops along nearby University Avenue, one of St. Paul’s main commercial corridors, and other spots in the city.
St. Paul spokesman Steve Linders said authorities were dealing with unrest in roughly 20 different areas.
“Please stay home. Please do not come here to protest. Please keep the focus on George Floyd, on advancing our movement and on preventing this from ever happening again. We can all be in that fight together,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter tweeted.
Erika Atson, 20, was among several hundred people who gathered for the planned demonstration outside government offices in downtown Minneapolis, where organizers called for peaceful protest.
Atson, who is black, described seeing her 14- and 11-year-old brothers tackled by Minneapolis police years ago because officers mistakenly presumed the boys had guns. She said she had been at “every single protest” since Floyd’s death and that she worried about raising children who would be vulnerable in police encounters.
“We don’t want to be here fighting against anyone. We don’t want anyone to be hurt. We don’t want to cause any damages,” she said. “We just want the police officer to be held accountable for his actions.”
The governor’s order did not say how many Guard members were mobilized and whether they would be in service Thursday night. After calling in the Guard, Walz urged widespread changes in the wake of Floyd’s death.
“It is time to rebuild. Rebuild the city, rebuild our justice system and rebuild the relationship between law enforcement and those they’re charged to protect. George Floyd’s death should lead to justice and systemic change, not more death and destruction,” Walz said.
By Thursday morning in Minneapolis, smoke rose from smoldering buildings in the Longfellow neighborhood. In a strip mall across the street from the police’s 3rd Precinct station, the focus of the protests on both nights, the windows in nearly every business had been smashed, from the large Target department store at one end to the Planet Fitness gym at the other. Only the 24-hour laundromat appeared to have escaped unscathed.
“WHY US?” demanded a large expanse of red graffiti scrawled on the wall of the Target. A Wendy’s restaurant across the street was charred almost beyond recognition.
Among the casualties of the overnight fires: a six-story rental building under construction that was to provide nearly 200 apartments of affordable housing.
“We’re burning our own neighborhood,” said a distraught Deona Brown, a 24-year-old woman standing with a friend outside the precinct station, where a small group of protesters were shouting at a dozen or so stone-faced police officers in riot gear. “This is where we live, where we shop, and they destroyed it.”
“What that cop did was wrong, but I’m scared now,” Brown said.
Others in the crowd saw something different in the wreckage.
Protesters destroyed property “because the system is broken,” said a young man who identified himself only by his nickname, Cash, and who said he had been in the streets during the violence. He dismissed the idea that the destruction would hurt residents of the largely black neighborhood.
“They’re making money off of us,” he said angrily of the owners of the destroyed stores. He laughed when asked if he had joined in the looting or violence. “I didn’t break anything.”
The protests that began Wednesday night and extended into Thursday were more violent than Tuesday’s, which included skirmishes between offices and protesters but no widespread property damage or looting.
Mayor Jacob Frey appealed for calm. “Please, Minneapolis, we cannot let tragedy beget more tragedy,” he said on Twitter.
The city’s response to the protests was being questioned even as things started spiraling Wednesday night into violence. “If the strategy was to keep residents safe — it failed,” City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison, who is black, tweeted. “Prevent property damage — it failed.”
“We failed last night. We are failing our city again,” he tweeted Thursday, urging police to leave the scene of the overnight violence, saying their presence brings people into the streets.
Protests also spread to other U.S. cities. In California, hundreds of people protesting Floyd’s death blocked a Los Angeles freeway and shattered windows of California Highway Patrol cruisers. Memphis police blocked a main thoroughfare after a racially mixed group of protesters gathered outside a police precinct. The situation intensified later in the night, with police donning riot gear and protesters standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of officers stationed behind a barricade.
Amid the violence in Minneapolis, a man was found fatally shot Wednesday night near a pawn shop, possibly by the owner, authorities said.
Fire crews responded to about 30 intentionally set blazes, including at least 16 structure fires, and multiple fire trucks were damaged by rocks and other projectiles, the fire department said. No one was hurt by the blazes.
There was no sign of police at the destroyed shopping center, though a couple dozen officers were outside the precinct house. One man standing outside the building used a bullhorn to shout “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Mama, I can’t breathe,” repeating some of Floyd’s pleas for relief.
Across from the precinct, someone had spray-painted the sidewalk in red: “Where’s humanity?”
The 46-year-old Floyd died as police arrested him outside a convenience store after a report of a counterfeit bill being passed. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI in Minneapolis said Thursday they were conducting “a robust criminal investigation” into the death and making the case a priority. The announcement came a day after President Donald Trump tweeted that he had asked an investigation to be expedited.
The FBI is also investigating whether Floyd’s civil rights were violated.
The officer who kneeled on Floyd and three others were fired Tuesday. The next day, the mayor called for him to be criminally charged. The mayor also appealed for activation of the National Guard.
Source: AP