Disinformation Is Spreading on WhatsApp in India—And It’s Getting Dangerous

Authentic news,No fake news.

| The Atlantic

BY 

TIMOTHY MCLAUGHLIN

kerala-flood.jpg

Two men stand atop the ruins of a building destroyed by the floods in Kerala. [CC by 3.0] from Wikimedia Commons. Kerala, 2018.

Kerala was drowning. For over a week, rains had inundated the state, located in southwest India, causing widespread flooding and leading to the deaths of hundreds. Disturbingly, agents of disinformation saw the disaster as the perfect time to strike. Taking to Facebook and to WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned encrypted messaging platform, they disseminated false news of a dam on the verge of bursting, circulated a fake phone number for a navy rescue helicopter, and spread an erroneous claim that the Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo had donated $11 million dollars to relief efforts. The sheer volume of disinformation that spread during the floods and the subsequent rescue operations was so great that the Indian army asked the public to help identify people sharing disinformation. Kerala’s chief minister issued a warning that “strict measures” would be taken against “cyber offenders.”

Meanwhile, some 800 miles away in Mumbai, a TV in the newsroom at BOOM flashed with images of people in Kerala stranded on rooftops, surrounded by brown, murky water, awaiting rescue. BOOM is one of a handful of websites in India dedicated to the seemingly quixotic task of debunking junk science, doctored photos, and false rumors that spread on social media and messaging platforms. Creators of this content—politicians, nationalists, and pranksters among them—have found a captive audience in India’s voracious tech consumers. While some hoaxes are fairly harmless, others have had far more serious consequences, including a recent string of killings that have been fueled in part by rumors that spread through WhatsApp. “What you are seeing is a phenomenon that is unlike anywhere else in the world,” Govindraj Ethiraj, BOOM’s founder and editor, told me.

On the day I visited BOOM’s offices, Karen Rebelo, the site’s deputy editor, sat at her desk and coordinated efforts with reporters to create a list of verified videos of the flood. (She had just set aside a project to debunk a journalist’s claim about an extravagant art purchase by a politician’s wife.) BOOM’s methods, she admitted, aren’t exactly sophisticated: running reverse image searches to identify the origins of photos taken out of context, or digging up the archived versions of web pages that have been taken down. The other methods include basic reporting—calling police or government officials to confirm information.

BOOM’s ambitious efforts face considerable challenges. In 2017, India became the second-largest market in the world for smartphones. It now has around 300 to 400 million smartphone users, a number that is expected to grow to more than 800 million by 2021. In addition, the recent rise of cheap data and faster internet speeds has kicked off a boom in the app economy, as Deloitte noted in a recent report.

As smartphone use spread in India, so did WhatsApp: It has over 200 million users in the country, according to a company spokesman. Soon, it became more than just a simple peer-to-peer communications tool. Indians now use it to disseminate political campaign platforms, distribute news and public announcements, and promote businesses, turning it into something resembling a broadcasting and publishing platform. According to WhatsApp, users in India forward more messages, photos, and videos than in any other country in the world—making it the perfect breeding ground for disinformation.

Rohit Chopra, an expert in Hindu nationalism and new media at Santa Clara University, said Hindu nationalists and members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have quickly adapted to platforms like WhatsApp to push their own inflammatory propaganda. “The nature of the internet is that it is not subject to the same constraints as TV or print news. The Hindu right has recognized that and been proactive in using this space,” he told me. “This technology has unleashed and exposed some of the darker elements of Indian society.”

When Ethiraj, a veteran business journalist, founded BOOM in 2014, he conceived of it as an investigative website. As the site struggled to find an audience, Ethiraj grew alarmed at the sheer volume of dubious information appearing on Facebook that would eventually migrate to WhatsApp. Such content emerged from what he referred to as the “subterranean,” where the creators or first posters were unknown. “You could see the first early signs of ... the fake-news phenomenon. Obviously the elections in the United States in mid-2016 were a big trigger to our understanding of what was happening,” Ethiraj said. (He clarified that he used the term “fake news” to describe things that are actually fake.) “As 2017 progressed, you could see this was beginning to have impact … on people’s perceptions, opinions, feelings. All of that.”

To find stories to investigate, BOOM’s reporters spot posts and messages that are quickly picking up likes and shares. Some hoaxes—like a WhatsApp message claiming it could scan a phone user’s thumbprint and steal their biometric data—are easy to debunk. Others weave in true or partially true information, like a viral photo that claimed to show flood victims lining up to buy liquor. The photo itself was real, but the people pictured were waiting for fuel.

BOOM also relies heavily on a WhatsApp-based tip line to hunt down false news stories going viral. Through the tip line, people can submit content they’ve received or found online. It provides users a chance to ask if something they’ve read is true, and gives BOOM’s reporters another medium to distribute fact-checked, accurate content back to the public. Indians living overseas have even gotten involved, pinging the line with tips from as far off as Hong Kong and Germany. It has been such a success. “We take turns [manning the line] because it will drive you nuts,” Rebelo said.

Amid the overwhelming stream of potentially false stories, BOOM decides which ones to fact-check by asking, “What will happen if we don’t tackle it?” Rebelo said. Questionable content that could provoke actual physical harm takes precedence. In 2017, footage that circulated widely on WhatsApp claimed to show a small child being snatched by men on a motorbike. Searching on YouTube, Rebelo found its origin: a kidnapping-awareness campaign video created by a Pakistani charity, edited to remove a message warning parents to keep an eye on their children. It was a simple but effective means of distortion. Officials have linked this video to several instances of violence, including a spate of killings in Assam in early June. Police officers in Dhule also told me they believe this video played a role in the killings of five men there in July. The investigation is ongoing.

In May 2017, Rebelo published a piece debunking the video. Her story showed how the video that went viral was doctored. Yet as is often the case, her work did little to stop the video’s circulation online. In the spring, false reports spread through WhatsApp of child kidnappings, mainly in rural areas. Some of them used the exact video Rebelo fact-checked last year. The rumors often warned of outsiders traveling from town to town, searching for children to pluck off the streets. Images, including photos of children killed in the war in Syria, have circulated as well, providing a gruesome and false illustration of what supposedly happens to the abducted children. These reports have been linked to numerous incidents of mob violence and lynchings.

The Indian government does not track the number of deaths or acts of violence linked to false rumors that circulate on WhatsApp. But Brijesh Singh, the inspector general of Maharashtra’s state cyber-police division, estimated that around two dozen people have been killed nationwide since May. IndiaSpend, a sister site of BOOM, puts the figure at 33 deaths arising from 69 such incidents between January 2017 and July of this year.

In April, BOOM signed a deal with Facebook to serve as the company’s first-ever third-party fact-checking service. Through its deal with Facebook, BOOM reporters review articles and assign them accuracy ratings. Those found to be false should, in theory, show up less frequently in Facebook’s newsfeed. Rebelo and Ethiraj said that the fact-checking has appeared to slow the spread of false information on Facebook. But Rebelo admitted that “a lot of it is just feeling our way through.” (Facebook does not yet have data on the effectiveness of BOOM’s efforts.)

WhatsApp, which has worked with fact-checking sites in Mexico and Brazil, appears to be interested in pursuing a similar model in India before the country’s elections next year. It has also had initial conversations with BOOM about its work in India. But because WhatsApp is not a public platform and is encrypted, gauging the spread of false information and the effectiveness of fact-checking efforts is nearly impossible.

Rebelo said she would like to see tech companies take greater responsibility. “It’s their ecosystem at the end of the day,” she said. WhatsApp, for its part, has introduced a number of changes designed to limit forwarding and a tag that marks messages as “forwarded.” The thinking here: to get users to question the veracity of messages, rather than blindly forwarding them along. Greater digital literacy in parts of India where users are new to the internet and WhatsApp would help too, Rebelo said. But “sliced and diced” video clips and images can convince even the most seasoned internet user, Ethiraj said. “How do you make people aware that you should not believe what you see?” he asked.

As India’s 2019 elections approach, BOOM expects its already heavy workload to increase. Politicians and political parties are some of the worst “habitual disseminators of false information,” Ethiraj said. Parties have begun building teams for the specific purpose of pushing out a huge volume of propaganda and disinformation, Chopra said. These efforts ramp up in the months before elections. And with more people connected to WhatsApp than in previous elections, Ethiraj and his staff are bracing for an unprecedented amount of false news. He seemed stunned by how quickly and thoroughly misinformation has infiltrated the news ecosystem. “I don’t think in 2017 I could have seen how big it would become, at all,” he said.

While the problem is a global one, “the amount of noise we are creating on WhatsApp in India is absurd,” Chopra said. The daily deluge of false messages on the platform amounted to what he called a “colossal, Herculean level of bullshit.”

Google Is Handing the Future of the Internet to China

Authentic news,No fake news.

The company has been quietly collaborating with the Chinese government on a new, censored search engine—and abandoning its own ideals in the process.

BY SUZANNE NOSSEL

 | SEPTEMBER 10, 2018, 4:37 PM

A Chinese flag flies over the company logo outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing on January 14, 2010. (LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images) 

In May, Google quietly removed “Don’t be evil” from the text of its corporate code of conduct, deleting a catchphrase that had been associated with the company since 2000. Amid startling revelations of how social media and internet platforms can enable political interference and new forms of stealthy cyberwarfare, avoiding evil in Silicon Valley has turned out to be harder than it looks. In a world where Twitter’s terrorist may be Facebook’s freedom fighter, decisions over what content to algorithmically uplift or suppress can involve agonizing questions of interpretation, intent, and cultural context.

But amid all the moral ambiguity and uncharted terrain of running an internet platform that controls vast swaths of global discourse and reaps commensurate revenues, some dilemmas are more straightforward than others. That’s why word of Google’s plans to substantially expand its currently minimal role in the Chinese market—through the potential launch of a censored search engine code-named Dragonfly—has provoked such uproar.

The plans were revealed through documents leaked to the Intercept, which reported that prototypes and negotiations with the Chinese government were far along, laying the groundwork for the potential service to launch as soon as early 2019. In late August, a group of free expression and human rights organizations published a joint letter proclaiming that the launch of a Chinese search application would represent “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights.” Six U.S. senators, led by Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding answers to a series of queries about the company’s intentions. Last week, PEN America sent a detailed letter to Google executives spelling out specific human rights issues and subjects that, per Chinese censorship rules, would be treated repressively and deceptively by any information platform operating in the country. Google’s own employees are also up in arms: More than 1,400 signed a letter to management saying the floated China project “raise[s] urgent moral and ethical issues” and demanding greater transparency before any plans are implemented.

In demonstrating that a company as mighty as Google was unable to resist the allure of the Chinese market, despite the terms of entry, Beijing will advance its campaign to remake global internet governance on its own terms. The utopian notion of an internet that unifies people across borders, fosters the unfettered flow of information, and allows truth and reason to triumph is already under attack on multiple fronts. The trade-off, to date, has been that countries insistent on controlling the internet have had to forfeit access to the world’s most powerful and innovative online services in favor of local providers.

If Google is willing to play along with China, governments in Russia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere will have little reason not to fortify their own measures to control content and opinion. At a time when even the U.S. president is attacking Google and other platforms as biased and rigged, for the company to signal a new willingness to bow before an overreaching government would represent a grave setback for the rights of citizens to harness digital technology as a tool of empowerment.

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Nossel is executive director of the Pen American Center and was formerly deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the U.S. State Department.

Google is no stranger to the Chinese market or to the moral dilemmas it poses. Google first began offering a Chinese-language version of its search engine back in 2000. Periodic blocking and slowdowns caused by filtering through China’s Great Firewall made the service clunky and unreliable on the mainland. In 2006, Google launched a Google.cn service based in China, agreeing to block certain websites in return for being licensed to operate in the country. The company promised to tell mainland users when results were being withheld and to avoid offering services that would require housing confidential user data on Chinese servers. At the same time, native Chinese internet services such as Baidu and Tencent began to gain steam. Chinese authorities were brazen in utilizing Western online services to surveil and track down dissenters. In a notorious 2007 incident, it was revealed that Yahoo had turned over private information about two journalists at the request of Chinese authorities, resulting in 10-year prison sentences for the men and a global uproar at the spectacle of a U.S. company betraying its users to an authoritarian regime. The company settled a lawsuit with the families of the two men, established a $17 million fund to support Chinese dissidents, and faced a congressional investigation in which Rep. Tom Lantos infamously chided, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

It’s not just Yahoo. In 2008, the Chinese human rights scholar and activist Guo Quan threatened to sue Yahoo and Google for omitting his name from search results inside China. He wrote in an open letter: “To make money, Google has become a servile Pekinese dog wagging its tail at the heels of the Chinese Communists.” He has been serving a 10-year prison sentence since 2009. That same year, the Chinese government punished Google, purportedly for failing to adequately screen out pornography, by limiting its reach and advantaging its leading local search competitor, Baidu.

In January 2010, Google issued a detailed statement declaring that it would stop censoring Chinese search results and was prepared to pull out of the market. It announced that the service had been targeted by attacks aimed at hacking the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights defenders and their supporters around the world. The corporate release reflected on Google’s aspirations and trajectory in China, saying it had entered the country “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.” The statement went on to say that four years later, in the face of continued attacks and surveillance, “combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web … we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn. … We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” After failed attempts to negotiate a way to remain in China by redirecting local traffic to Google’s Hong Kong site, the company effectively pulled out of the market later that year, maintaining only a token presence and small staff.

It is not hard to understand why Google’s corporate bosses have grown wistful about the Chinese market. According to a September 2017 report by the Boston Consulting Group, with more than 700 million users (nearly as many as the next two biggest markets—India and the United States—combined) and close to $100 billion in revenue, China has become the world’s largest internet market by several measures, behind only the United States in terms of online spending. The future upside seems nearly boundless. With its vast and upwardly mobile rural population, growth rates in Chinese internet use far outpace any other market, with internet penetration rates still lagging well behind those of other G-20 countries. Right behind the U.S. tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook, five of the world’s 10 largest internet companies are Chinese, including Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu. China is also home to 29 to 40 percent of the world’s “unicorns,” defined as privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion. For a leading global player to be shut out of an increasingly critical and dynamic market could pose long-term risks for Google’s business.

Given those metrics, it is no surprise that Google’s management has continued to explore ways to re-enter the country. For a long time, Western CEOs and politicians expounded the view that deepening commercial and cultural ties between China and the rest of the world would inevitably crack open Beijing’s tight stranglehold on political freedom and freedom of speech. This theory conveniently dictated that even if, in the near term, companies such as Google were forced to jettison corporate values in order to take part in the market, that sacrifice could be justified over time since their very presence in China would steadily foster a loosening of constraints. In 2005, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair gushed at the end of a visit to China that “in a country that is developing very fast, where 100 million people now use the internet, and which is going to be the second-largest economy in the world … there is an unstoppable momentum toward greater political freedom.”

UN Begins Talks on World’s First Treaty to Regulate High Seas

Authentic news,No fake news.

A trawler in Johnstone Strait, BC, Canada. Human activities such as pollution, overfishing, mining, geo-engineering and climate change have made an international agreement to protect the high seas more critical than ever. Credit: Winky/cc by 2.0

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 7 2018 (IPS) - After several years of preliminary discussions, the United Nations has begun its first round of inter-governmental negotiations to draft the world’s first legally binding treaty to protect and regulate the “high seas”—which, by definition, extend beyond 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) and are considered “international waters” shared globally.

“The high seas cover half our planet and are vital to the functioning of the whole ocean and all life on Earth. The current high seas governance system is weak, fragmented and unfit to address the threats we now face in the 21stt century from climate change, illegal and overfishing, plastics pollution and habitat loss”, says Peggy Kalas, Coordinator of the High Seas Alliance, a partnership of 40+ non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“This is an historic opportunity to protect the biodiversity and functions of the high seas through legally binding commitments” she added.

The two-week Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), which concludes 17 September, is described as the first in a series of four negotiating sessions which are expected to continue through 2020.

Asked about the contentious issues facing negotiators, Dr Veronica Frank, Political Advisor at Greenpeace International, told IPS “although it is still early, we can expect that some of the potential issues that will require attention include the relationship between the new Global Ocean Treaty and existing legal instruments and bodies.”

These will include those who regulate activities such as fishing and mining, and what role
these other organizations will play in the management of activities that may impact on the marine environment in future ocean sanctuaries on the high seas.

“Also tricky is the issue of marine genetic resources, especially how to ensure the access and sharing of benefits from their use,” Dr Frank said.

Asked how different the proposed treaty would be from the historic 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Essam Yassin Mohammed, Principal Researcher on Oceans and Environmental Economics at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), told IPS: “This new treaty is particularly significant because it is the first time the high seas will be governed.”

These negotiations are an opportunity, not just to protect the health of the oceans, but also to make sure all countries ― not just the wealthy few ― can benefit from the ocean’s resources in a sustainable way, he pointed out.

“As important as The Law of the Sea is, it only covers the band of water up to 200 miles from the coast. It does not cover the use and sustainable management of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction,” he added.

While this was acceptable in an era when the technological capacities that enabled people to venture beyond this area were limited, rapid innovation and technological advancement has changed this. Increasingly, economic activities are taking place in the high seas, he noted.

Most are unregulated and pose a major threat to marine biodiversity. It is more urgent than ever to fill this governance gap and monitor and regulate any activity in the high seas and make sure they benefit everyone ― particularly the poorest countries, he argued.

According to the High Seas Alliance, the ocean’s key role in mitigating climate change, which includes absorbing 90% of the extra heat and 26% of the excess carbon dioxide created by human sources, has had a devastating effect on the ocean itself.

Managing the multitude of other anthropogenic stressors exerted on it will increase its resilience to climate change and ocean acidification and protect unique marine ecosystems, many of which are still unexplored and undiscovered. Because these are international waters, the conservation measures needed can only be put into place via a global treaty, the Alliance said.

Dr Frank said the new treaty must create a global process for the designation and effective implementation of highly protected sanctuaries in areas beyond national borders.

Such global process must include the following elements: (a) a clear objective and a duty to cooperate to protect, maintain, and restore ocean health and resilience through a global network of marine protected areas, in particular highly protected marine reserves, and (b) the identification of potential areas that meet the conservation objective.

Asked about the existing law of the sea treaty, she said UNCLOS, which is the constitution of the ocean, sets the jurisdictional framework, ie general rights and obligations of Parties in different maritime zones, including some general obligations to cooperate and protect marine life and marine living resources that also apply to waters beyond national borders.

However, the Convention doesn’t spell out what these obligations entail in practice and puts much more emphasis on the traditional freedoms to use the high seas.

The Convention does not even mention the term biodiversity, she said, pointing out that
the treaty under negotiation will be the third so-called “Implementing Agreement” under UNCLOS – after the agreement for the implementation of Part XI on seabed minerals and one on fish stocks – and it will implement, specify and operationalise UNCLOS broad environmental provisions in relation to the protection of the global oceans.

Dr Frank said this is the first time in history that governments are negotiating rules that will bring UNCLOS in line with modern principles of environmental governance and provide effective protection to global oceans.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

UN teams to assess migrant treatment in Austria, Italy

Authentic news,No fake news.



GENEVA (AP) — The new U.N. human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, on Monday announced plans to send teams to Italy and Austria to examine the treatment of migrants, drawing a quick retort from Vienna and Rome after her first big appearance in the job.

(1 of 2) U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Chilean Michelle Bachelet addresses her statement during the opening of 39th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, Sept. 10, 2018. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

September 10, 2018

Both governments take a hard line on migration. The rebuttals from two key Europe Union states — Austria now holds the rotating EU presidency — suggested Bachelet is already ruffling governmental feathers after becoming High Commissioner for Human Rights on Sept. 1.

A former Chilean president who was once a political detainee herself, Bachelet said that "prioritizing the return of migrants from Europe, without ensuring that key international human rights obligations are upheld, cannot be considered a protection response."

Bachelet said her office expects to dispatch a team to Austria to "assess recent developments in this area," and also send staff to Italy to "assess the reported sharp increase in acts of violence and racism against migrants, persons of African descent and Roma."

She didn't say when either team would travel, or give other details in a written statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council, posted on her office's website , in which she also called on the European Union to set up a dedicated search and rescue operation for people crossing the Mediterranean Sea. She didn't mention sending teams to Austria and Italy in shorter oral remarks to the council in Geneva.

On Facebook, Italian Foreign Minister Matteo Salvini insisted that his country has been largely forced to manage an influx of refugees and migrants to Europe on its own and suggested — like Austria's leader — that the United Nations should focus its attention elsewhere.

"Before carrying out checks on Italy, the U.N. should investigate its own member states that ignore basic rights such as freedom and parity between men and women," he wrote. "Italy in the last years has accepted 700,000 immigrants, many of them clandestine, and has never received the collaboration of other European countries," he added. "We therefore do not accept lessons from anyone, let alone from the U.N."

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that he welcomed Bachelet's announcement as offering an "opportunity to rectify prejudices and deliberate false information about Austria," the Austria Press Agency reported.

Kurz said in a statement that "living conditions for migrants" in Austria are among the best in the world and added that Austria had taken in some of the highest numbers of migrants per capita in Europe.

"We hope that, after this examination, the U.N. will again have time and resources to dedicate to those countries where torture and the death penalty are on the agenda and the freedom of opinion, the press, assembly and religion are trampled on," Kurz said.

The conservative leader added that the check was ordered by a "former socialist politician and member of the Socialist International." Bachelet served two terms as Chile's president, the last of which ended earlier this year.

Geir Moulson reported from Berlin. Colleen Barry contributed from Milan.

Colour me right: It's time to end colourism in India

Authentic news,No fake news.

Until society's perceptions change, my daughter will continue to think her worth is determined by the colour of her skin, writes Beatty [Courtesy of Muna Beatty]

MORE ON INDIA

• India: Opposition parties stage protests against high fuel pricestoday
• Ghazipur landfill: Despair over Delhi's deadly rubbish dumptoday
• Voices From Assam: India's Four Million Unwanted3 days ago
• India decriminalises gay sex: Another win for the Supreme Court3 days ago

My name means "wish", but over the years I have been called many other names that mean "black".

This is because I'm a dark-skinned woman from India.

My father is dark-skinned, while my mother has fair skin. I took after my father. My skin tone is neither "wheatish" nor "dusky", as some beauty companies prefer to label darker complexions - it is simply dark brown.

From a very young age, I felt I did not fit in. I was made to believe I was not good enough because of the colour of my skin. People constantly compared my complexion to others. It was impossible to escape their comments and judgements.

READ MORE

Fighting India's ugly fancy for fair skin

Even members of my own family made jokes about the way I look. A popular one was that "the electricity went out in the hospital when my mother was about to deliver me, and that's how I got my dark colour".

At school, one of my teachers once asked me, with a smirk, "Are you from Africa?".

As I grew older, I was pressured to change the way I look, to become lighter-skinned. Desperate measures were taken. From homemade - turmeric, curd, gram - to store-bought, many cosmetic products were applied on my skin to make me fairer.

As soon as I entered my late teens, there were talks within the family about finding me a suitable groom. Once, an elderly relative approached my parents with a proposal from a young man.

My father declined and I heard the relative tell him: "How can you decline? What does your daughter possess that makes you think she could get a better proposal? Have you not seen her? She is dark!"

I never responded to people's cruel comments or jokes. I never shared my insecurities or feelings of resentment with anyone. I just became numb and shut down. Soon I was not comfortable being in photographs or attending social functions. I wanted to be invisible.

Over the years, I buried the pain deep inside of me. So deep that when I look back today, I find it difficult to recall most of these episodes.

Instead of dealing with my feelings, I chose to live my harsh reality in silence.

My reality was simple: In India, I as a person had less value because of the colour of my skin.

A deep-rooted obsession

India's obsession with fair skin is well known and deep-rooted. Colour prejudice is widespread and practised openly across the country.

Indian society believes skin colour determines a person's worth. In our culture, all virtues are associated with "fair" while anything dark has negative connotations. TV programmes, movies, billboards, advertisements, they all reinforce the idea that "fair is beautiful".

The Advertising Standards Council of India attempted to address skin-based discrimination in 2014 by banning ads that depict people with darker skin as inferior.

This was a step in the right direction, but it failed to change much.

Four years later, India's media and advertisement industries are still promoting the idea that women with dark complexions should aspire to be fairer.

And most dark-skinned women are still desperately trying to look fair. Some use makeup that is meant for lighter skinned women, choosing to look "whitewashed" rather than embracing their natural skin tone. Others use bleaching products.

I know people who are at least a good 10 shades lighter than me who feel their skin colour is not good enough.

In India, everyone wants to be fairer.

I want change for my daughter

Today, I am a mother blessed with a son and a daughter. My husband and my son are lighter skinned, while my daughter has a darker complexion, like mine.

READ MORE

Whitening cream: Fair deal for India's women?

When she was born, we vowed to never let her feel less valuable because of the colour of her skin. From a very early age, we told her that she is beautiful, that her skin colour is beautiful, and tried to teach her a person's worth is not determined by the way he or she looks.

However, when she was just three years old, a boy at her preschool wanted to play with her and she was reluctant. When we asked her why, to our astonishment, she said: "because he is brown".

We were shocked, not understanding what caused her to think like that. We tried to explain to her that she is also brown.

After that incident, it became apparent to us that we cannot protect her from the outside world forever. As soon as she steps outside our house, she is exposed to a culture that values brown-skinned people less.

For example, when her school put on a performance, fair skinned kids were placed at the front regardless of their heights, and darker skinned children were all made to stand at the back, including my daughter. It broke my heart.

After watching that event, I realised that, until society's perceptions change, my daughter will continue to think her worth is determined by the colour of her skin, just as I did when I was younger. So I decided to do something to facilitate change.

#ColourMeRight

I'm now running a campaign called #ColourMeRight, to help give my little girl a better future. With this campaign, I want to make Indian media stop portraying people with darker complexions as inferior and make sure there are dark-skinned role models for young children like my daughter to look up to.

One may think there are bigger issues we are grappling with in India and that this campaign is dealing with a somewhat trivial issue. That may well be the case, but prejudice is prejudice, and I believe by changing the way people think about skin colour, I can make life so much better for millions of little girls just like my daughter.

As a result of the prejudice I suffered as a dark-skinned woman from a very young age, I still lack confidence. I don't want my daughter to go through all this. I want her to grow up in a progressive society that accepts her for who she is - recognises her for her character, individuality, strengths and values.

The first petition I started via change.org as part of the #ColourMeRight campaign was directed at a leading jewellery brand in India, named Tanishq. The brand used the tagline "Jewellery for every bride in India" in one of its advertisement campaigns. However, these ads featured only fair-skinned brides.

There is already a stigma around marrying a dark-skinned woman in India - one has to only look at the matrimonial ads seeking "fair" brides. This is why advertisement campaigns directed only at fair-skinned brides-to-be are not acceptable.

I was pleased to see many people agreed with me. And after gathering over a thousand signatures, my petition got a response from Tanishq. The company issued a statement assuring us that they will "create commercials that reflect the truly diverse nature of the country".

We face colour prejudice and we somehow choose to remain silent in a country obsessed with fair skin
The first petition owes it success to the many women & men who declared their support showing me that I am not alone#ColourMeRighthttps://t.co/qF1597rGEe via @ChangeOrg_Indiahttps://t.co/aa34FZAHCm

— Dark Brown Woman (@mChangemaker) 18 Temmuz 2018

It was a small victory, but it gave me hope. It made me feel I was not alone. It made me realise there are many men and women across India who care about this issue and want to change the way our society perceives skin colour.

#ColourMeRight campaign against #colourism DBW tweets per signature!@disbcampaign 
Lakme Fashion Week is a complete misdirection! Where is the celebration of beauty without bias in Lakme product ads? #ColourMeRight - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/E2qL8yEmwd via @ChangeOrg_India

— Dark Brown Woman (@mChangemaker) 17 Ağustos 2018

Recently I started the second petition, this time against India's cosmetics giant, Lakme.

Lakme is India's first homegrown cosmetics brand and after over 50 years in the business, it is still the market leader. It is a well-known brand that plays a prominent role in many Indian women's beauty routine.

However, when you look at their website, you see that their products cater only one skin colour: fair.

The theme of this year's Lakme Fashion Week was "Celebrating beauty without bias" and "beauty beyond boundaries" - so the company is well aware that cosmetics could and should be inclusive. It has the capability and the potential to do the right thing and cater for the cosmetic needs of all Indian women - fair, dark and every shade in between.

With this petition, I'm hoping Lakme to see its mistake and take a step in the right direction. If a company as big as this one starts catering for darker shades, it may help change the Indian society's perception of dark skin.

Ending colourism in India

We still have a long way to go to end colourism in India. #ColourMeRight is just the start of a very long and undeniably difficult journey. This campaign aims to give a voice to countless women like myself who have been made to feel invisible and forced into silence because of their skin colour. I don't know how effective it will be, how many people it will reach or how many minds it will change … but I do know it already made a difference in my little daughter's life.

The same child that once refused to play with a little boy because he is brown recently told me, "I am brown like you. I love brown".

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Muna Beatty

Muna Beatty is an anti-colourism advocate based in India.

YouTube shuts down pro-Syrian government channels

Authentic news,No fake news.

US sanctions forbid American firms from providing services to Syria [Screengrab/YouTube]

MORE ON SYRIA'S WAR

• YouTube shuts down pro-Syrian government channelstoday
• Syria: Rebel-held areas bombed as Turkey reinforces outpoststoday
• Hunger as a weapon 'on the rise' in warzonestoday
• Syrians flee Idlib offensivetoday

YouTube has suspended the accounts of at least three media outlets run by the Syrian government, weeks after a report claimed the channels were violating US sanctions and generating revenue from ads.

The video streaming giant appeared to suspend the accounts of Syria's public international news organisation, SANA, the Ministry of Defence and the Syrian Presidency.

All three accounts appeared on Monday with a message, which read: "This account has been terminated due to a legal complaint," or "This account has been terminated for a violation of YouTube's Terms of Service." 

The Damascus-based Sana TV's channel also appeared to be taken down, with a message reading: "This page isn't available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else."

The move comes just weeks after online news website TomoNews revealed the government-run accounts were generating advertising revenue in violation of US sanctions.

US sanctions prohibit American companies from providing services to Syria without obtaining a licence from the Treasury Department, according to the report.

Syria is in the middle of bloody civil war that has raged since 2011 and claimed more than 500,000 lives.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWs