In the Blind Spot (Operational naked shorting)

 

SNEAK PEEK

 

— Why is it so hard to get to the bottom of what’s really going on in Slovakia via Western reports? Dario investigates.

— It turns out Elon Musk reformed Twitter just the way Jack Dorsey would have had he been able to take the company private himself.

— Memestock hero Roaring Kitty is back, sparking expectations of an imminent “mother of all short squeezes”. But is it really all about the naked shorts?

VDL’s DEMOCRACY SHIELD: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week she would take firm action against foreign disinformation by proposing a new law if she secures a second term, according to Politico. “It is now time to take our action to the next level. We must be as ambitious as the threat is serious,” she said. “If I am re-elected as President, the Commission will put forward a European Democracy Shield as one of the key priorities of the next Commission,” she said. “This should be an ambitious European project that focuses on the biggest threats from foreign interference and manipulation.”

You say democracy shield, we say great firewall: The move comes months after MEPs greenlit new legislation to protect EU journalists and media from political or economic interference. As part of the rules, “all news and current affairs outlets regardless of their size will have to publish information about their owners in a national database, including if they are directly or indirectly owned by the state” so as to enable the public “to know who controls the media and what interests may influence reporting.” That’s not such a bad thing, we think. But it’s worth considering why countries planning similar disclosures are being lambasted by the Western press.

GEORGIAN FOREIGN AGENT LAW MOVES FORWARD: On that note, the Georgian parliament passed its third and final reading of a law that plans to label NGOs that receive a majority of foreign funding as an “organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power”. As Carnegie Europe noted: opponents fear a “Russian scenario” in which “foreign agents” are banned from participating in elections, and where constant harassment leads to the closure of most NGOs. Supporters of the ruling party, however, argue that the law will bring transparency to the NGO sector and limit Western influence. They also frame the bill as a way to protect Georgian religion and national identity from LGBTQ “propaganda” and liberal values.

POLISH BROADCASTER ON TRIAL: Notes from Poland writes that Poland’s ruling coalition is about to put the head of its main public broadcaster regulator, the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT) — an appointee of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government — on trial. They say Maciej Świrski, an outspoken conservative figure, of showing bias in favor of PiS-friendly media and of withholding money from public media after the new government took office.

CROATIAN MEDIA CLAMPDOWN: Croatia’s new right-wing ruling coalition is threatening to shut down one of the country’s main independent (albeit publicly funded) news outlets, Novosti, as it forms plans to stamp out “unpatriotic” behaviour by journalists in other media. The new coalition has provoked alarm from campaigners for a free press, Politico reported. But the nationalists who the Novosti paper criticizes have demanded that funding for the paper be cut and that the outlet be “subject to the free market” as part of coalition negotiations. 

SLOVAKIA’S NGO INDEPENDENCE DRIVE: Before being shot this week, Slovakia’s prime minister, had promised to introduce a law labeling NGOs as foreign agents if they were majority funded from abroad, with the amendment facing its second reading in the Bratislava legislature. The amendment was criticised this week by the EU’s Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty who wrote to Slovakia’s parliament on Tuesday asking them to reject it on grounds that it was potentially “incompatible with EU law, including on the ground of unjustified interferences with the right to freedom of association.”

NO MORE SAFE SPACES AT THE NYT? In a refreshing mood shift at the Gray Lady, the New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn tells Semafor’s Ben Smith it is not the job of the media to be the propaganda arm of a single candidate, becasue we prefer that candidate’s agenda. “The role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters,” Kahn said. He added that “the newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”

THE TIMES SLAMS SELF-APPOINTED TRUTH ARBITERS: “Self-appointed monitors of news accuracy such as the Global Disinformation Index can undermine objective reporting by penalising sites they disagree with,” a punchy editorial from The Times noted last week. The piece went on to argue that while the wilful dissemination of inaccurate stories by hostile foreign states is an obvious threat to well-functioning political life, so too is the attempt to clamp down by so-called disinformation experts.

Not cool: “The work of the Global Disinformation ­Index (GDI), a not-for-profit ratings agency founded in the UK in 2018, illustrates this chilling tendency,” the Times wrote, adding that over three years the Foreign Office had invested £2.6 million in its activities. “No government in a democratic society should have a hand in the covert suppression of free and open inquiry.” The government has since ended its financial relationship with GDI.

FAUX ACADEMIA

FAKE SCIENCE ALERT: Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in New Jersey announced it will close 19 journals after they were infected by large-scale research fraud, reported the Wall Street Journal. Wiley has retracted over 11,300 papers that appeared compromised and closed four journals over the last three years, a spokesperson said, while two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. While the large-scale fraud, sourced from pay-to-be-featured “paper mill” operations still represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, the WSJ writes that it threatens the legitimacy of the almost $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

Tactics in play: Some fraudsters have supposedly posed as academics “to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.”

Why is this happening? Citations generate legitimacy, and legitimacy creates a pathway to grants and thus to money. Rogue states might also have the incentive to muddy the academic literature to hinder the technological progress of their enemies, or to obfuscate their own advances.

Publish or perish: TBS reached out to some academics for their take on the problem. They told us, the practice was particularly notorious in China and India. “Like so much in China that is faked due to the metrics used to determine pay and promotion, the same is true for academics. And not just China, but they are probably the worst offender,” one Houston-based academic said.

Zero-sum “counterfeit consciousness”: Those bigging up the productivity windfalls from AI, meanwhile, should probably adjust their expectations, given — as per Geoffrey West’s famous adage — technology only generates net gains if it empowers more good actors than bad ones. But as the WSJ observes, generative AI has handed academic fraudsters a winning lottery ticket. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing,” a representative of IOP Publishing said. A key ploy is renaming established phenomena to get through the plagiarism filters, for example by calling artificial intelligence “counterfeit consciousness”.

Remember that alleged superconductor breakthrough? ICYMI, turns out the physicist, Ranga Dias, who claimed he had discovered what many thought was impossible, may in fact have engaged in research misconduct, according to an investigation into his work. The papers have since been retracted.

MEME STOCKS

GAMESTOP SHARES ROSE BY OVER 100% AS ROARING KITTY RETURNED on X/Twitter with a series of mysterious posts on Monday. While the internet doesn’t yet know RoaringKitty’s agenda, it means one thing is for certain: Gamestop is BACK.

Disclaimer: much of this was first reported on ZoomerLive on Coodash.

 

BRAVE NEW WORLD

QUANTUM NAVIGATION TECH IS A THING: A UK developer has tested the world’s first quantum navigation tech successfully. This system, created by Infleqtion, is designed to avoid the consequences of GPS jamming which, while relatively rare, can be incredibly destabilising — especially in a war situation — since it allows for spoofing of flight positions, and the cloaking of aircraft. Quantum systems should, in theory, provide another layer of anti-jamming security. The British government has backed Infleqtion, as well as its partners with £8 million of funding as part of its strategy to “make the UK a leading quantum-enabled economy.” In theory, quantum navigation would enable aircraft to remain independent of traditional satellite navigation with GPS.

There is a jamming upside. While most commercial aircraft have work-a-rounds in the event they are targeted by jamming technology, GPS navigation is also the only form of navigation for some private jets meaning they are uniquely vulnerable.

HOLY WARS

NOT SO SUPERNATURAL: The Vatican released new guidelines for ‘apparitions’ and other ‘supernatural phenomena’. But they were a disappointing snore.

The last time the Vatican offered such guidance was in 1978, in a proclamation titled “Norms regarding the manner of proceedings in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations.” These new guidelines have outlined that alleged Marian apparitions or other spiritual phenomenon should no longer be deemed “supernatural”. Instead, six “prudential conclusions” are given on a case-by-case basis which “do not include the possibility of declaring that the phenomenon under discernment is of supernatural origin”.

60 MINUTES POPE: In a first of its kind, Pope Francis has sat down with 60 minutes for a long-form interview which will be aired on Sunday. 

 

COVID

THE NEW YORK POST CALLS IT: “COVID-19, which killed 1.1 million Americans and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions more, is a manmade virus that escaped from a Chinese lab partly funded by the US government,” the New York Post’s editorial board announced on May 16.

Censored no more: “Anyone who questioned this claim — including The Post — was censored online in 2020. The reason? A statement published in Lancet by 27 scientists calling it a “conspiracy theory.”

COVID CENSORSHIP was part of a broader military psyop by the Five Eyes group of nations, an investigation by Michael Shellenberger’s Public in conjunction with Jake Hurfurt of campaign group Big Brother Watch found. The censorship op plugged into a broader plan for global censorship created by US and UK military contractors in 2018.  A whistleblower from the 77^th Brigade, who spoke to Big Brother Watch on condition of anonymity, said it did so by pretending that the British citizens who UK soldiers were spying upon could, perhaps, be foreigners.

Backgrounder: According to the report, the MoD created the 77th Brigade in 2015 to serve as its “information warfare” or “psychological operations” unit. The 77th Brigade would consist of “a new generation of ‘Facebook warriors’ who will wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns,” reported the Financial Times in 2015.

Incidental meeting: A former army officer last year who worked adjacent to the 77th brigade confirmed to TBS last year in a chance meeting that the outfit had been operating since 2015, and had started its operations in Ukraine.

VDL’s DEMOCRACY SHIELD: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week she would take firm action against foreign disinformation by proposing a new law if she secures a second term, according to Politico. “It is now time to take our action to the next level. We must be as ambitious as the threat is serious,” she said. “If I am re-elected as President, the Commission will put forward a European Democracy Shield as one of the key priorities of the next Commission,” she said. “This should be an ambitious European project that focuses on the biggest threats from foreign interference and manipulation.”

You say democracy shield, we say great firewall: The move comes months after MEPs greenlit new legislation to protect EU journalists and media from political or economic interference. As part of the rules, “all news and current affairs outlets regardless of their size will have to publish information about their owners in a national database, including if they are directly or indirectly owned by the state” so as to enable the public “to know who controls the media and what interests may influence reporting.” That’s not such a bad thing, we think. But it’s worth considering why countries planning similar disclosures are being lambasted by the Western press.

GEORGIAN FOREIGN AGENT LAW MOVES FORWARD: On that note, the Georgian parliament passed its third and final reading of a law that plans to label NGOs that receive a majority of foreign funding as an “organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power”. As Carnegie Europe noted: opponents fear a “Russian scenario” in which “foreign agents” are banned from participating in elections, and where constant harassment leads to the closure of most NGOs. Supporters of the ruling party, however, argue that the law will bring transparency to the NGO sector and limit Western influence. They also frame the bill as a way to protect Georgian religion and national identity from LGBTQ “propaganda” and liberal values.

POLISH BROADCASTER ON TRIAL: Notes from Poland writes that Poland’s ruling coalition is about to put the head of its main public broadcaster regulator, the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT) — an appointee of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government — on trial. They say Maciej Świrski, an outspoken conservative figure, of showing bias in favor of PiS-friendly media and of withholding money from public media after the new government took office.

CROATIAN MEDIA CLAMPDOWN: Croatia’s new right-wing ruling coalition is threatening to shut down one of the country’s main independent (albeit publicly funded) news outlets, Novosti, as it forms plans to stamp out “unpatriotic” behaviour by journalists in other media. The new coalition has provoked alarm from campaigners for a free press, Politico reported. But the nationalists who the Novosti paper criticizes have demanded that funding for the paper be cut and that the outlet be “subject to the free market” as part of coalition negotiations. 

SLOVAKIA’S NGO INDEPENDENCE DRIVE: Before being shot this week, Slovakia’s prime minister, had promised to introduce a law labeling NGOs as foreign agents if they were majority funded from abroad, with the amendment facing its second reading in the Bratislava legislature. The amendment was criticised this week by the EU’s Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty who wrote to Slovakia’s parliament on Tuesday asking them to reject it on grounds that it was potentially “incompatible with EU law, including on the ground of unjustified interferences with the right to freedom of association.”

NO MORE SAFE SPACES AT THE NYT? In a refreshing mood shift at the Gray Lady, the New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn tells Semafor’s Ben Smith it is not the job of the media to be the propaganda arm of a single candidate, becasue we prefer that candidate’s agenda. “The role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters,” Kahn said. He added that “the newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”

THE TIMES SLAMS SELF-APPOINTED TRUTH ARBITERS: “Self-appointed monitors of news accuracy such as the Global Disinformation Index can undermine objective reporting by penalising sites they disagree with,” a punchy editorial from The Times noted last week. The piece went on to argue that while the wilful dissemination of inaccurate stories by hostile foreign states is an obvious threat to well-functioning political life, so too is the attempt to clamp down by so-called disinformation experts.

Not cool: “The work of the Global Disinformation ­Index (GDI), a not-for-profit ratings agency founded in the UK in 2018, illustrates this chilling tendency,” the Times wrote, adding that over three years the Foreign Office had invested £2.6 million in its activities. “No government in a democratic society should have a hand in the covert suppression of free and open inquiry.” The government has since ended its financial relationship with GDI.

FAUX ACADEMIA

FAKE SCIENCE ALERT: Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in New Jersey announced it will close 19 journals after they were infected by large-scale research fraud, reported the Wall Street Journal. Wiley has retracted over 11,300 papers that appeared compromised and closed four journals over the last three years, a spokesperson said, while two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. While the large-scale fraud, sourced from pay-to-be-featured “paper mill” operations still represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, the WSJ writes that it threatens the legitimacy of the almost $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

Tactics in play: Some fraudsters have supposedly posed as academics “to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.”

Why is this happening? Citations generate legitimacy, and legitimacy creates a pathway to grants and thus to money. Rogue states might also have the incentive to muddy the academic literature to hinder the technological progress of their enemies, or to obfuscate their own advances.

Publish or perish: TBS reached out to some academics for their take on the problem. They told us, the practice was particularly notorious in China and India. “Like so much in China that is faked due to the metrics used to determine pay and promotion, the same is true for academics. And not just China, but they are probably the worst offender,” one Houston-based academic said.

Zero-sum “counterfeit consciousness”: Those bigging up the productivity windfalls from AI, meanwhile, should probably adjust their expectations, given — as per Geoffrey West’s famous adage — technology only generates net gains if it empowers more good actors than bad ones. But as the WSJ observes, generative AI has handed academic fraudsters a winning lottery ticket. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing,” a representative of IOP Publishing said. A key ploy is renaming established phenomena to get through the plagiarism filters, for example by calling artificial intelligence “counterfeit consciousness”.

Remember that alleged superconductor breakthrough? ICYMI, turns out the physicist, Ranga Dias, who claimed he had discovered what many thought was impossible, may in fact have engaged in research misconduct, according to an investigation into his work. The papers have since been retracted.

MEME STOCKS

GAMESTOP SHARES ROSE BY OVER 100% AS ROARING KITTY RETURNED on X/Twitter with a series of mysterious posts on Monday. While the internet doesn’t yet know RoaringKitty’s agenda, it means one thing is for certain: Gamestop is BACK.

Disclaimer: much of this was first reported on ZoomerLive on Coodash.

 

BRAVE NEW WORLD

QUANTUM NAVIGATION TECH IS A THING: A UK developer has tested the world’s first quantum navigation tech successfully. This system, created by Infleqtion, is designed to avoid the consequences of GPS jamming which, while relatively rare, can be incredibly destabilising — especially in a war situation — since it allows for spoofing of flight positions, and the cloaking of aircraft. Quantum systems should, in theory, provide another layer of anti-jamming security. The British government has backed Infleqtion, as well as its partners with £8 million of funding as part of its strategy to “make the UK a leading quantum-enabled economy.” In theory, quantum navigation would enable aircraft to remain independent of traditional satellite navigation with GPS.

There is a jamming upside. While most commercial aircraft have work-a-rounds in the event they are targeted by jamming technology, GPS navigation is also the only form of navigation for some private jets meaning they are uniquely vulnerable.

HOLY WARS

NOT SO SUPERNATURAL: The Vatican released new guidelines for ‘apparitions’ and other ‘supernatural phenomena’. But they were a disappointing snore.

The last time the Vatican offered such guidance was in 1978, in a proclamation titled “Norms regarding the manner of proceedings in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations.” These new guidelines have outlined that alleged Marian apparitions or other spiritual phenomenon should no longer be deemed “supernatural”. Instead, six “prudential conclusions” are given on a case-by-case basis which “do not include the possibility of declaring that the phenomenon under discernment is of supernatural origin”.

60 MINUTES POPE: In a first of its kind, Pope Francis has sat down with 60 minutes for a long-form interview which will be aired on Sunday. 

 

COVID

THE NEW YORK POST CALLS IT: “COVID-19, which killed 1.1 million Americans and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions more, is a manmade virus that escaped from a Chinese lab partly funded by the US government,” the New York Post’s editorial board announced on May 16.

Censored no more: “Anyone who questioned this claim — including The Post — was censored online in 2020. The reason? A statement published in Lancet by 27 scientists calling it a “conspiracy theory.”

REVISITING THE LDI DRAMA: On the topic of who did and didn’t see the LDI crisis coming, we’ve resurfaced a research report prepared by OMB Research on behalf of the Pensions Regulator in 2019 aimed at understanding how the risks associated with liquidity and collateral in the DB investment space should be monitored and which foreshadowed much of the mini-budget era trouble. It should, presumably, have been a signal that 7 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know what methods they were using to estimate potential collateral needs in a market stress scenario.

   

SOCIAL MEDIA

WHO IS JACK DORSEY, REALLY? The left hate him for behaving like a bitcoin bro, backing RFK Jr, tweeting esoterically and encouraging Elon to take over Twitter. The right hate him for turning Twitter into a vehicle for establishment censorship, and then quitting unceremoniously for BlueSky. But, if the Twitter founder’s latest long-form interview with Mike Solana is anything to go by, the real Jack Dorsey is arguably a far more thoughtful and calibrated individual than either side appreciates. Even if he’s not your cup of tea, it’s worth committing some time to reading the full 2,000+ word piece, since it provides a fascinating insight into how corporate power really works in the tech space.

Backgrounder: On May 4, Dorsey surprised the world (again) by announcing he would be departing BlueSky, the decentralised Twitter copycat he helped fund in 2019 and which in 2024 became the primary destination for Twitter refugees upset with Elon’s X platform reforms. Dorsey marked the occasion with a cryptic tweet advising followers: “don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights. defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one)”. Nobody had seen it coming. And nobody really understood what had driven the departure.

But the clues to Dorsey’s true mindset were always there. As we argued in November, 2022 (just after Musk announced his plan to charge users $8 for Twitter blue checkmarks) those longing for the return of “the good old days” of Dorsey’s leadership, had failed to grasp the dire economics and power struggles that had been tearing up Twitter behind the scenes for years. These had been apparent long before Musk had ever considered acquiring the platform. Dorsey, we always contended, capitulated to the censors not because he wanted to, but because he had lost control. Or, as we wrote back then: “His power was in appearance only. The true control was in the hands of the bureaucratic, increasingly woke, nomenklatura who were happy to pander to the advertisers and other powers for internal advancement.”

Founder and CEO in name only. As we further noted: “That’s why, for a long time Dorsey seemed like a man communicating in encrypted doublespeak. On one hand, he was confirming Twitter’s commitment to tackling disinformation and hate speech, at the same time he was promoting the antithesis of everything he was saying publicly by going all in on censorship-resistant bitcoin. “

Our conclusion at the time: “When Dorsey eventually resigned [from Twitter] in November 2021 to pursue his crypto and decentralised interests it was the strongest signal yet that Twitter’s technocracy was beyond reform. It had been, arguably, totally corrupted. And since actions speak louder than words, the world should have been wise to this.”

Speculation confirmed: Thanks to Solana’s interview we now know our assessment was not far from the truth. Dorsey left Twitter because he felt he had created a monster. He left Bluesky, meanwhile, because his whole rationale for funding the project — that it would create a decentralized protocol beyond the grasp of censors — had been hijacked by the same censorious mob that had pushed him out of Twitter. Bluesky had become an “Anti-Twitter”.

So this is how liberty dies: “…little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately, they followed through with it,” Dorsey explained to Solana. “That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.”

Dorsey HEARTS Elon. Solana’s interview also confirmed that, contrary to the popular media narrative, Dorsey approved of almost all of Elon’s actions since acquiring Twitter. “Twitter is still a corporation. X is still a corporation. It has to make a conscious choice about the rights it grants to users, based on its policies.” Dorsey told Solana. “The fortunate thing is it’s no longer a public company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model that can be wildly swayed by the whims of advertisers moving their budget elsewhere if they don’t like what you’re doing.”

Dorsey continued: “So Elon made a choice, and I think it’s the right choice. I think he bought it at the wrong time in the market, obviously, but the choice was, I’m just going to suffer that cost to maintain these policies that I want. And that means the advertisers have left, predominantly, and the business model is going to struggle.”

Elon, in other words, had the balls and wallet to do what Dorsey never could. 

Spin resistance: That’s not all Dorsey had to say about Elon’s reforms of the platform. “You have to build up a lot more than advertising to make that model work. You have to build subscriptions, which Elon is doing,” he noted. “You have to build commerce. You have to base more of your model on these internet primitives that can monetize better than advertising if you’re going to have policies like [Elon’s].”

Boardroom drama: Another fascinating revelation is that the main reason Dorsey left Twitter’s board is because they wouldn’t approve his push to bring Elon onto the board earlier.

And finally… “I was extremely challenged by my board,” Dorsey revealed. “The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end. But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that’s the greatest act.” So there you have it.

Do read the full piece.

MEDIA MATTERS

COVID CENSORSHIP was part of a broader military psyop by the Five Eyes group of nations, an investigation by Michael Shellenberger’s Public in conjunction with Jake Hurfurt of campaign group Big Brother Watch found. The censorship op plugged into a broader plan for global censorship created by US and UK military contractors in 2018.  A whistleblower from the 77^th Brigade, who spoke to Big Brother Watch on condition of anonymity, said it did so by pretending that the British citizens who UK soldiers were spying upon could, perhaps, be foreigners.

Backgrounder: According to the report, the MoD created the 77th Brigade in 2015 to serve as its “information warfare” or “psychological operations” unit. The 77th Brigade would consist of “a new generation of ‘Facebook warriors’ who will wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns,” reported the Financial Times in 2015.

Incidental meeting: A former army officer last year who worked adjacent to the 77th brigade confirmed to TBS last year in a chance meeting that the outfit had been operating since 2015, and had started its operations in Ukraine.

VDL’s DEMOCRACY SHIELD: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week she would take firm action against foreign disinformation by proposing a new law if she secures a second term, according to Politico. “It is now time to take our action to the next level. We must be as ambitious as the threat is serious,” she said. “If I am re-elected as President, the Commission will put forward a European Democracy Shield as one of the key priorities of the next Commission,” she said. “This should be an ambitious European project that focuses on the biggest threats from foreign interference and manipulation.”

You say democracy shield, we say great firewall: The move comes months after MEPs greenlit new legislation to protect EU journalists and media from political or economic interference. As part of the rules, “all news and current affairs outlets regardless of their size will have to publish information about their owners in a national database, including if they are directly or indirectly owned by the state” so as to enable the public “to know who controls the media and what interests may influence reporting.” That’s not such a bad thing, we think. But it’s worth considering why countries planning similar disclosures are being lambasted by the Western press.

GEORGIAN FOREIGN AGENT LAW MOVES FORWARD: On that note, the Georgian parliament passed its third and final reading of a law that plans to label NGOs that receive a majority of foreign funding as an “organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power”. As Carnegie Europe noted: opponents fear a “Russian scenario” in which “foreign agents” are banned from participating in elections, and where constant harassment leads to the closure of most NGOs. Supporters of the ruling party, however, argue that the law will bring transparency to the NGO sector and limit Western influence. They also frame the bill as a way to protect Georgian religion and national identity from LGBTQ “propaganda” and liberal values.

POLISH BROADCASTER ON TRIAL: Notes from Poland writes that Poland’s ruling coalition is about to put the head of its main public broadcaster regulator, the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT) — an appointee of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government — on trial. They say Maciej Świrski, an outspoken conservative figure, of showing bias in favor of PiS-friendly media and of withholding money from public media after the new government took office.

CROATIAN MEDIA CLAMPDOWN: Croatia’s new right-wing ruling coalition is threatening to shut down one of the country’s main independent (albeit publicly funded) news outlets, Novosti, as it forms plans to stamp out “unpatriotic” behaviour by journalists in other media. The new coalition has provoked alarm from campaigners for a free press, Politico reported. But the nationalists who the Novosti paper criticizes have demanded that funding for the paper be cut and that the outlet be “subject to the free market” as part of coalition negotiations. 

SLOVAKIA’S NGO INDEPENDENCE DRIVE: Before being shot this week, Slovakia’s prime minister, had promised to introduce a law labeling NGOs as foreign agents if they were majority funded from abroad, with the amendment facing its second reading in the Bratislava legislature. The amendment was criticised this week by the EU’s Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty who wrote to Slovakia’s parliament on Tuesday asking them to reject it on grounds that it was potentially “incompatible with EU law, including on the ground of unjustified interferences with the right to freedom of association.”

NO MORE SAFE SPACES AT THE NYT? In a refreshing mood shift at the Gray Lady, the New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn tells Semafor’s Ben Smith it is not the job of the media to be the propaganda arm of a single candidate, becasue we prefer that candidate’s agenda. “The role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters,” Kahn said. He added that “the newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”

THE TIMES SLAMS SELF-APPOINTED TRUTH ARBITERS: “Self-appointed monitors of news accuracy such as the Global Disinformation Index can undermine objective reporting by penalising sites they disagree with,” a punchy editorial from The Times noted last week. The piece went on to argue that while the wilful dissemination of inaccurate stories by hostile foreign states is an obvious threat to well-functioning political life, so too is the attempt to clamp down by so-called disinformation experts.

Not cool: “The work of the Global Disinformation ­Index (GDI), a not-for-profit ratings agency founded in the UK in 2018, illustrates this chilling tendency,” the Times wrote, adding that over three years the Foreign Office had invested £2.6 million in its activities. “No government in a democratic society should have a hand in the covert suppression of free and open inquiry.” The government has since ended its financial relationship with GDI.

FAUX ACADEMIA

FAKE SCIENCE ALERT: Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in New Jersey announced it will close 19 journals after they were infected by large-scale research fraud, reported the Wall Street Journal. Wiley has retracted over 11,300 papers that appeared compromised and closed four journals over the last three years, a spokesperson said, while two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. While the large-scale fraud, sourced from pay-to-be-featured “paper mill” operations still represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, the WSJ writes that it threatens the legitimacy of the almost $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

Tactics in play: Some fraudsters have supposedly posed as academics “to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.”

Why is this happening? Citations generate legitimacy, and legitimacy creates a pathway to grants and thus to money. Rogue states might also have the incentive to muddy the academic literature to hinder the technological progress of their enemies, or to obfuscate their own advances.

Publish or perish: TBS reached out to some academics for their take on the problem. They told us, the practice was particularly notorious in China and India. “Like so much in China that is faked due to the metrics used to determine pay and promotion, the same is true for academics. And not just China, but they are probably the worst offender,” one Houston-based academic said.

Zero-sum “counterfeit consciousness”: Those bigging up the productivity windfalls from AI, meanwhile, should probably adjust their expectations, given — as per Geoffrey West’s famous adage — technology only generates net gains if it empowers more good actors than bad ones. But as the WSJ observes, generative AI has handed academic fraudsters a winning lottery ticket. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing,” a representative of IOP Publishing said. A key ploy is renaming established phenomena to get through the plagiarism filters, for example by calling artificial intelligence “counterfeit consciousness”.

Remember that alleged superconductor breakthrough? ICYMI, turns out the physicist, Ranga Dias, who claimed he had discovered what many thought was impossible, may in fact have engaged in research misconduct, according to an investigation into his work. The papers have since been retracted.

MEME STOCKS

GAMESTOP SHARES ROSE BY OVER 100% AS ROARING KITTY RETURNED on X/Twitter with a series of mysterious posts on Monday. While the internet doesn’t yet know RoaringKitty’s agenda, it means one thing is for certain: Gamestop is BACK.

Disclaimer: much of this was first reported on ZoomerLive on Coodash.

 

BRAVE NEW WORLD

QUANTUM NAVIGATION TECH IS A THING: A UK developer has tested the world’s first quantum navigation tech successfully. This system, created by Infleqtion, is designed to avoid the consequences of GPS jamming which, while relatively rare, can be incredibly destabilising — especially in a war situation — since it allows for spoofing of flight positions, and the cloaking of aircraft. Quantum systems should, in theory, provide another layer of anti-jamming security. The British government has backed Infleqtion, as well as its partners with £8 million of funding as part of its strategy to “make the UK a leading quantum-enabled economy.” In theory, quantum navigation would enable aircraft to remain independent of traditional satellite navigation with GPS.

There is a jamming upside. While most commercial aircraft have work-a-rounds in the event they are targeted by jamming technology, GPS navigation is also the only form of navigation for some private jets meaning they are uniquely vulnerable.

HOLY WARS

NOT SO SUPERNATURAL: The Vatican released new guidelines for ‘apparitions’ and other ‘supernatural phenomena’. But they were a disappointing snore.

The last time the Vatican offered such guidance was in 1978, in a proclamation titled “Norms regarding the manner of proceedings in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations.” These new guidelines have outlined that alleged Marian apparitions or other spiritual phenomenon should no longer be deemed “supernatural”. Instead, six “prudential conclusions” are given on a case-by-case basis which “do not include the possibility of declaring that the phenomenon under discernment is of supernatural origin”.

60 MINUTES POPE: In a first of its kind, Pope Francis has sat down with 60 minutes for a long-form interview which will be aired on Sunday. 

 

COVID

THE NEW YORK POST CALLS IT: “COVID-19, which killed 1.1 million Americans and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions more, is a manmade virus that escaped from a Chinese lab partly funded by the US government,” the New York Post’s editorial board announced on May 16.

Censored no more: “Anyone who questioned this claim — including The Post — was censored online in 2020. The reason? A statement published in Lancet by 27 scientists calling it a “conspiracy theory.”

Welcome to Sunday. Oh yeah!

It’s a short greeting today as the Antiques Road Show is in town and I still need to rummage through the attic to get my hands on an appropriately aged heirloom to take to the experts for a valuation. I’ll let you know how I get on.

As usual, this newsletter is brought to you by me, Izabella Kaminska, and my trusty compatriot Dario Garcia Giner.

Things we didn’t manage to expand on this week, but which we will revisit next week include what’s going on in New Caledonia, and more on China and Russia’s growing economic cooperation (plus why every analyst told you it couldn’t happen). And if you haven’t seen this clip of a member of Taiwan’s parliament stealing a bill and running off with it to prevent it from being passed, enjoy.

Send tips to [email protected] and [email protected]

 

THE BIG BLIND SPOT THIS WEEK

T+1 SETTLEMENT D-DAY: The US is set to go from a T+2 regime to a T+1 regime on May 28. That means back offices across America’s financial markets will have one day instead of two days to deliver stocks that have been traded in the market. But, as the FT also pointed out this week, the ETF market is likely to be disproportionately impacted by the change due to the number of rebalancings occurring the week of the regime shift. The fact there’s a public holiday to contend with too may add further instability, others warned. Gerard Walsh, who heads Northern Trust’s global banking and markets client solutions group, told the FT “the real crunch is those rebalances. Those rebalances happening around that week will put stress on the system immediately.”

What does settlement even mean? John Welborn, a finance academic at Dartmouth College who has spent most of his career researching market structure and settlement systems, has a nifty way of describing settlement regimes to lay people. As he told TBS this week, it’s good to think of it in terms of a plane coming into land. “Clearing”, from that perspective, constitutes everything air traffic control has to do to get an aircraft cleared for landing. “Settlement”, on the other hand, constitutes the actual act of landing the plane on the tarmac.

Why the push for T1?  Market convention historically allowed trades to go unsettled for up to 13 days. But the practice led to a number of high-impact settlement crises, with investors discovering they didn’t really own the stocks they thought they owned. In terms of the aviation analogy, a settlement crisis is a bit like a plane being cleared for landing, but never actually arriving. For years, those highlighting the issue of settlement failure were mostly ignored or laughed at by market players. In recent years, however, there has been a surprising regulatory shift in favour of pushing markets toward real-time settlement in markets, fanned in part by the popularity of blockchain. But not everyone’s convinced it’s been all that it seems.

See it, to believe it: The first big push towards tighter settlement times came in 2017 when US markets adopted a T+2 norm regime, but the tighter window did little to alleviate the problem of settlement fails. As Welborn explained, one of the reasons the regime shift had little effect is because the underlying regulation, known as Regulation SHO, did not apply any penalties to those delivering stocks late. Instead, the regulation merely called for stocks that failed-to-deliver (FTDs) more than a certain number of days, and which met a certain minimum threshold of stock outstanding, should be listed on an SHO threshold security list. For Welborn, that was akin to policing crime by posting a list of liquor stores that were actively being robbed but doing nothing about it. Due to the lack of consequences, Welborn says many stocks can stay on the list for years, with almost nobody in the industry bothered by it.

The ETF factor: Another longstanding curiosity relates to why so many ETFs make-up some of the most frequently posted threshold securities. Notable names that have made very lengthy appearances on the threshold list include … Gamestop ($GME) and Trump Media ($DJT).

BUSINESS, ECON AND FINANCE

ESTONIA VETOED THE EU’s DIGITAL TAX RAID: Estonia’s finance minister blocked an EU initiative this week that would force tech platforms, such as Bolt and Airbnb, to pay more in sales tax. As Politico reported, the Baltic country feared that Brussels would kill its golden goose: Ride-hailing giant Bolt. The European Commission, however, believes that digital transport and accommodation rental companies which are worth billions should pay their fair share of dues and wants to level the playing field. Brussels says that value-added-tax exemptions give these tech companies a massive advantage over their rivals, including hotel owners and taxi drivers.

But Tallinn doesn’t agree: The small Baltic state argued that Brussels’ proposal would put digital firms at a disadvantage. Estonian officials told Politico that under the EU’s draft rules, booking an apartment through Airbnb, for example, would cost more than going to another website or a travel agency.

RUSSIAN SEIZURE: The FT reported that a St Petersburg court has seized €463mn worth of assets belonging to Italy’s UniCredit, following a claim from Ruskhimalliance, a subsidiary of Gazprom, on the back of noble gas giant Linde suspending work in Russia due to EU sanctions. Ruskhimalliance then turned to the guarantee banks, which refused to fulfill their obligations because “the payment to the Russian company could violate European sanctions.” They are also suing the other guarantee banks, including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Bayerische Landesbank, and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg.

Is it really a seizure though? Not everyone’s convinced that the seizure constitutes a breach of international law or banking covenants. Technically, the banks defaulted as guarantors of a liability, and the claimant sought recourse in court against assets available in Russia.

UNREALISED BOND LOSSES: Japanese agricultural lender Norinchukin Bank said it was seeing a 1.2 trillion yen ($7.7 billion) capital raise to cover unrealised losses from the declining value of overseas bond holdings. 

CANADIAN WIRECARD? Canada’s second-largest lender, TD Bank, has found itself embroiled in a multi-million-dollar anti-money laundering investigation. It began on April 30 when the bank disclosed it had set aside $450 million to settle allegations it violated AML and Bank Secrecy rules in the Untied States. On May 2, meanwhile, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada fined the bank nearly $6.7 million for failing to prevent drug traffickers from laundering proceeds of fentanyl sales via its platform.

More to come? Sources tell us this could be just the tip of the iceberg. But the allegations need a lot more fact-checking before they can be publicised.

WAREHOUSE QUEUES ARE BACK: Orders to deliver out aluminum at LME warehouses jumped by 183,975 tons on Thursday, after a 100,325 ton increase the previous day, inviting the return of an old enemy, the warehouse queue, reported Bloomberg.

POLITICS, POLITICS, POLITICS

TORY PACT TIME: Jacob Rees Mogg has called on Sunak’s Tories to pursue an election pact with Reform UK and offer Nigel Farage a governmental role as a Conservative minister. For now, Richard Tice, Reform’s leader, has ruled out doing any type of election deal with the Conservative Party. It’s also similarly unlikely that Sunak will make a deal with Reform, considering the modicum of the British PM’s existing support lies in the centre. But stranger things have happened.

RELIGIOUS SYMBOL BAN: The Mayor of Warsaw banned the display of religious symbols such as crosses in the city hall, while telling officials they must respect people’s preferred pronouns. 

THE SLOVAKIAN PRIME MINISTER WAS SHOT by a would-be assassin after a rally on Wednesday. While Robert Fico was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, it was announced shortly afterwards the wounds were not life-threatening.

 

CENTRAL BANKING

FISCAL VS MONETARY POWER: In extracts from an exclusive interview with POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast, out this morning, former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss blasted the Bank of England for failing to recalibrate monetary policy around the new fiscal reality she was trying to implement as PM in 2022. It’s not, after all, like her plans were a secret, she says.

Everyone was in the know: “This is a package that had been heavily flagged in advance. We’d literally had a leadership contest about it,” she told POLITICO’s Sascha O’Sullivan. She added the final figures had been fully signed off by the Treasury, and neither she nor the Chancellor had been alerted to any issues. The BoE, in her opinion, even had a duty to work around the government’s policies.

Who bends to whose policy? “What I’m saying is…” Truss says, “I don’t think Chancellors should be involved in the operations of monetary policy and setting interest rates. I think they should be setting out the broad strategy and the Bank of England should be operating within that remit.”

No course correction: Instead of adjusting its course, however, the BoE stuck stubbornly to a plan it hatched in February to begin gilt sales by the fall as part of a quantitative tightening strategy. Adding to the instability, says Truss, the Bank then failed to raise interest rates, as expected, the day before her mini-budget announcement on September 23.

Communication breakdown: Part of the issue, according to Truss, is that she never considered the BoE wouldn’t be in the know about her plans. “I would assume that they [the Treasury] would be communicating with the Bank of England about that package and coordinating fiscal [and] monetary policy. Maybe that was a wrong assumption, but that is what the Treasury ought to be doing. I assume that it happened.”

Major LDI failing: An even bigger question is why nobody had informed her about the pre-existing problems in the market related to leveraged Liability-Driven Investment funds. “I’d never heard of a liability-driven investment…” she says. “The Bank of England governor was responsible for financial stability and yet he had not dealt with this tinderbox … so even Treasury officials say we were completely blindsided.”

So who knew what, when? Truss wants an investigation to find out. “I know they [the Treasury] regularly talk to the Bank of England. This was a major fiscal package, one that had been flagged in advance. It would be extraordinary if they hadn’t briefed the Bank of England on the contents.”

And who’s to blame really? No surprises there. It’s former Labour PM Gordon Brown, she says. “The original act gave the Bank of England too much leeway. So I think it goes right back to Bank of England independence, and the problems have just got worse.” And, by problems, she means everything from inflation to quantitative easing. “The decisions being made by the Bank weren’t necessarily the right decision.”

CONSPIRACY CORNER: While the BoE has pushed back strongly against all of Truss’ claims of an establishment conspiracy against her premiership, they’ve still been tight-lipped on just how much they knew about LDI stress and when.

Market contact group role? One little nugget worth flagging is that in the bowels of most central banks are departments specifically tasked with maintaining relations with market participants. These are channels that are supposed to alert Bank officials to market stress scenarios. So how did they function back then? Well, we understand BoE officials in these departments were informed of collateral issues related to LDI stress by market participants as early as June, 2022. What they did with that information remains unknown.

 

FROM THE ARCHIVE

REVISITING THE LDI DRAMA: On the topic of who did and didn’t see the LDI crisis coming, we’ve resurfaced a research report prepared by OMB Research on behalf of the Pensions Regulator in 2019 aimed at understanding how the risks associated with liquidity and collateral in the DB investment space should be monitored and which foreshadowed much of the mini-budget era trouble. It should, presumably, have been a signal that 7 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know what methods they were using to estimate potential collateral needs in a market stress scenario.

   

SOCIAL MEDIA

WHO IS JACK DORSEY, REALLY? The left hate him for behaving like a bitcoin bro, backing RFK Jr, tweeting esoterically and encouraging Elon to take over Twitter. The right hate him for turning Twitter into a vehicle for establishment censorship, and then quitting unceremoniously for BlueSky. But, if the Twitter founder’s latest long-form interview with Mike Solana is anything to go by, the real Jack Dorsey is arguably a far more thoughtful and calibrated individual than either side appreciates. Even if he’s not your cup of tea, it’s worth committing some time to reading the full 2,000+ word piece, since it provides a fascinating insight into how corporate power really works in the tech space.

Backgrounder: On May 4, Dorsey surprised the world (again) by announcing he would be departing BlueSky, the decentralised Twitter copycat he helped fund in 2019 and which in 2024 became the primary destination for Twitter refugees upset with Elon’s X platform reforms. Dorsey marked the occasion with a cryptic tweet advising followers: “don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights. defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one)”. Nobody had seen it coming. And nobody really understood what had driven the departure.

But the clues to Dorsey’s true mindset were always there. As we argued in November, 2022 (just after Musk announced his plan to charge users $8 for Twitter blue checkmarks) those longing for the return of “the good old days” of Dorsey’s leadership, had failed to grasp the dire economics and power struggles that had been tearing up Twitter behind the scenes for years. These had been apparent long before Musk had ever considered acquiring the platform. Dorsey, we always contended, capitulated to the censors not because he wanted to, but because he had lost control. Or, as we wrote back then: “His power was in appearance only. The true control was in the hands of the bureaucratic, increasingly woke, nomenklatura who were happy to pander to the advertisers and other powers for internal advancement.”

Founder and CEO in name only. As we further noted: “That’s why, for a long time Dorsey seemed like a man communicating in encrypted doublespeak. On one hand, he was confirming Twitter’s commitment to tackling disinformation and hate speech, at the same time he was promoting the antithesis of everything he was saying publicly by going all in on censorship-resistant bitcoin. “

Our conclusion at the time: “When Dorsey eventually resigned [from Twitter] in November 2021 to pursue his crypto and decentralised interests it was the strongest signal yet that Twitter’s technocracy was beyond reform. It had been, arguably, totally corrupted. And since actions speak louder than words, the world should have been wise to this.”

Speculation confirmed: Thanks to Solana’s interview we now know our assessment was not far from the truth. Dorsey left Twitter because he felt he had created a monster. He left Bluesky, meanwhile, because his whole rationale for funding the project — that it would create a decentralized protocol beyond the grasp of censors — had been hijacked by the same censorious mob that had pushed him out of Twitter. Bluesky had become an “Anti-Twitter”.

So this is how liberty dies: “…little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately, they followed through with it,” Dorsey explained to Solana. “That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.”

Dorsey HEARTS Elon. Solana’s interview also confirmed that, contrary to the popular media narrative, Dorsey approved of almost all of Elon’s actions since acquiring Twitter. “Twitter is still a corporation. X is still a corporation. It has to make a conscious choice about the rights it grants to users, based on its policies.” Dorsey told Solana. “The fortunate thing is it’s no longer a public company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model that can be wildly swayed by the whims of advertisers moving their budget elsewhere if they don’t like what you’re doing.”

Dorsey continued: “So Elon made a choice, and I think it’s the right choice. I think he bought it at the wrong time in the market, obviously, but the choice was, I’m just going to suffer that cost to maintain these policies that I want. And that means the advertisers have left, predominantly, and the business model is going to struggle.”

Elon, in other words, had the balls and wallet to do what Dorsey never could. 

Spin resistance: That’s not all Dorsey had to say about Elon’s reforms of the platform. “You have to build up a lot more than advertising to make that model work. You have to build subscriptions, which Elon is doing,” he noted. “You have to build commerce. You have to base more of your model on these internet primitives that can monetize better than advertising if you’re going to have policies like [Elon’s].”

Boardroom drama: Another fascinating revelation is that the main reason Dorsey left Twitter’s board is because they wouldn’t approve his push to bring Elon onto the board earlier.

And finally… “I was extremely challenged by my board,” Dorsey revealed. “The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end. But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that’s the greatest act.” So there you have it.

Do read the full piece.

MEDIA MATTERS

COVID CENSORSHIP was part of a broader military psyop by the Five Eyes group of nations, an investigation by Michael Shellenberger’s Public in conjunction with Jake Hurfurt of campaign group Big Brother Watch found. The censorship op plugged into a broader plan for global censorship created by US and UK military contractors in 2018.  A whistleblower from the 77^th Brigade, who spoke to Big Brother Watch on condition of anonymity, said it did so by pretending that the British citizens who UK soldiers were spying upon could, perhaps, be foreigners.

Backgrounder: According to the report, the MoD created the 77th Brigade in 2015 to serve as its “information warfare” or “psychological operations” unit. The 77th Brigade would consist of “a new generation of ‘Facebook warriors’ who will wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns,” reported the Financial Times in 2015.

Incidental meeting: A former army officer last year who worked adjacent to the 77th brigade confirmed to TBS last year in a chance meeting that the outfit had been operating since 2015, and had started its operations in Ukraine.

VDL’s DEMOCRACY SHIELD: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week she would take firm action against foreign disinformation by proposing a new law if she secures a second term, according to Politico. “It is now time to take our action to the next level. We must be as ambitious as the threat is serious,” she said. “If I am re-elected as President, the Commission will put forward a European Democracy Shield as one of the key priorities of the next Commission,” she said. “This should be an ambitious European project that focuses on the biggest threats from foreign interference and manipulation.”

You say democracy shield, we say great firewall: The move comes months after MEPs greenlit new legislation to protect EU journalists and media from political or economic interference. As part of the rules, “all news and current affairs outlets regardless of their size will have to publish information about their owners in a national database, including if they are directly or indirectly owned by the state” so as to enable the public “to know who controls the media and what interests may influence reporting.” That’s not such a bad thing, we think. But it’s worth considering why countries planning similar disclosures are being lambasted by the Western press.

GEORGIAN FOREIGN AGENT LAW MOVES FORWARD: On that note, the Georgian parliament passed its third and final reading of a law that plans to label NGOs that receive a majority of foreign funding as an “organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power”. As Carnegie Europe noted: opponents fear a “Russian scenario” in which “foreign agents” are banned from participating in elections, and where constant harassment leads to the closure of most NGOs. Supporters of the ruling party, however, argue that the law will bring transparency to the NGO sector and limit Western influence. They also frame the bill as a way to protect Georgian religion and national identity from LGBTQ “propaganda” and liberal values.

POLISH BROADCASTER ON TRIAL: Notes from Poland writes that Poland’s ruling coalition is about to put the head of its main public broadcaster regulator, the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT) — an appointee of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government — on trial. They say Maciej Świrski, an outspoken conservative figure, of showing bias in favor of PiS-friendly media and of withholding money from public media after the new government took office.

CROATIAN MEDIA CLAMPDOWN: Croatia’s new right-wing ruling coalition is threatening to shut down one of the country’s main independent (albeit publicly funded) news outlets, Novosti, as it forms plans to stamp out “unpatriotic” behaviour by journalists in other media. The new coalition has provoked alarm from campaigners for a free press, Politico reported. But the nationalists who the Novosti paper criticizes have demanded that funding for the paper be cut and that the outlet be “subject to the free market” as part of coalition negotiations. 

SLOVAKIA’S NGO INDEPENDENCE DRIVE: Before being shot this week, Slovakia’s prime minister, had promised to introduce a law labeling NGOs as foreign agents if they were majority funded from abroad, with the amendment facing its second reading in the Bratislava legislature. The amendment was criticised this week by the EU’s Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty who wrote to Slovakia’s parliament on Tuesday asking them to reject it on grounds that it was potentially “incompatible with EU law, including on the ground of unjustified interferences with the right to freedom of association.”

NO MORE SAFE SPACES AT THE NYT? In a refreshing mood shift at the Gray Lady, the New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn tells Semafor’s Ben Smith it is not the job of the media to be the propaganda arm of a single candidate, becasue we prefer that candidate’s agenda. “The role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters,” Kahn said. He added that “the newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”

THE TIMES SLAMS SELF-APPOINTED TRUTH ARBITERS: “Self-appointed monitors of news accuracy such as the Global Disinformation Index can undermine objective reporting by penalising sites they disagree with,” a punchy editorial from The Times noted last week. The piece went on to argue that while the wilful dissemination of inaccurate stories by hostile foreign states is an obvious threat to well-functioning political life, so too is the attempt to clamp down by so-called disinformation experts.

Not cool: “The work of the Global Disinformation ­Index (GDI), a not-for-profit ratings agency founded in the UK in 2018, illustrates this chilling tendency,” the Times wrote, adding that over three years the Foreign Office had invested £2.6 million in its activities. “No government in a democratic society should have a hand in the covert suppression of free and open inquiry.” The government has since ended its financial relationship with GDI.

FAUX ACADEMIA

FAKE SCIENCE ALERT: Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in New Jersey announced it will close 19 journals after they were infected by large-scale research fraud, reported the Wall Street Journal. Wiley has retracted over 11,300 papers that appeared compromised and closed four journals over the last three years, a spokesperson said, while two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. While the large-scale fraud, sourced from pay-to-be-featured “paper mill” operations still represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, the WSJ writes that it threatens the legitimacy of the almost $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

Tactics in play: Some fraudsters have supposedly posed as academics “to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.”

Why is this happening? Citations generate legitimacy, and legitimacy creates a pathway to grants and thus to money. Rogue states might also have the incentive to muddy the academic literature to hinder the technological progress of their enemies, or to obfuscate their own advances.

Publish or perish: TBS reached out to some academics for their take on the problem. They told us, the practice was particularly notorious in China and India. “Like so much in China that is faked due to the metrics used to determine pay and promotion, the same is true for academics. And not just China, but they are probably the worst offender,” one Houston-based academic said.

Zero-sum “counterfeit consciousness”: Those bigging up the productivity windfalls from AI, meanwhile, should probably adjust their expectations, given — as per Geoffrey West’s famous adage — technology only generates net gains if it empowers more good actors than bad ones. But as the WSJ observes, generative AI has handed academic fraudsters a winning lottery ticket. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing,” a representative of IOP Publishing said. A key ploy is renaming established phenomena to get through the plagiarism filters, for example by calling artificial intelligence “counterfeit consciousness”.

Remember that alleged superconductor breakthrough? ICYMI, turns out the physicist, Ranga Dias, who claimed he had discovered what many thought was impossible, may in fact have engaged in research misconduct, according to an investigation into his work. The papers have since been retracted.

MEME STOCKS

GAMESTOP SHARES ROSE BY OVER 100% AS ROARING KITTY RETURNED on X/Twitter with a series of mysterious posts on Monday. While the internet doesn’t yet know RoaringKitty’s agenda, it means one thing is for certain: Gamestop is BACK.

Disclaimer: much of this was first reported on ZoomerLive on Coodash.

 

BRAVE NEW WORLD

QUANTUM NAVIGATION TECH IS A THING: A UK developer has tested the world’s first quantum navigation tech successfully. This system, created by Infleqtion, is designed to avoid the consequences of GPS jamming which, while relatively rare, can be incredibly destabilising — especially in a war situation — since it allows for spoofing of flight positions, and the cloaking of aircraft. Quantum systems should, in theory, provide another layer of anti-jamming security. The British government has backed Infleqtion, as well as its partners with £8 million of funding as part of its strategy to “make the UK a leading quantum-enabled economy.” In theory, quantum navigation would enable aircraft to remain independent of traditional satellite navigation with GPS.

There is a jamming upside. While most commercial aircraft have work-a-rounds in the event they are targeted by jamming technology, GPS navigation is also the only form of navigation for some private jets meaning they are uniquely vulnerable.

HOLY WARS

NOT SO SUPERNATURAL: The Vatican released new guidelines for ‘apparitions’ and other ‘supernatural phenomena’. But they were a disappointing snore.

The last time the Vatican offered such guidance was in 1978, in a proclamation titled “Norms regarding the manner of proceedings in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations.” These new guidelines have outlined that alleged Marian apparitions or other spiritual phenomenon should no longer be deemed “supernatural”. Instead, six “prudential conclusions” are given on a case-by-case basis which “do not include the possibility of declaring that the phenomenon under discernment is of supernatural origin”.

60 MINUTES POPE: In a first of its kind, Pope Francis has sat down with 60 minutes for a long-form interview which will be aired on Sunday. 

 

COVID

THE NEW YORK POST CALLS IT: “COVID-19, which killed 1.1 million Americans and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions more, is a manmade virus that escaped from a Chinese lab partly funded by the US government,” the New York Post’s editorial board announced on May 16.

Censored no more: “Anyone who questioned this claim — including The Post — was censored online in 2020. The reason? A statement published in Lancet by 27 scientists calling it a “conspiracy theory.”