Twitter shuts down 170,000 accounts for spreading Chinese govt narratives

The company said that accounts were “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China” and were removed for violating its platform manipulation policies

Twitter on Thursday announced that it has shut down over 1,70,000 accounts for “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable” to the Chinese government.According to CNN, experts working with Twitter said that these accounts were pushing deceptive narratives around the Hong Kong protests, COVID-19, and other topics.

Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that many of these accounts were set up in January and had been engaged in posting about Covid-19. “Narratives around COVID,” the SIO wrote in its analysis, “praise China’s response to the virus while tweets also use the pandemic to antagonize the U.S. and Hong Kong activists.”

Among the targets of the Chinese campaign were overseas Chinese “in an effort to exploit their capacity to extend the party-state’s influence,” according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a group Twitter worked with to analyze the accounts. Twitter said the accounts tweeted “predominantly in Chinese languages.”

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Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that many of these accounts were set up in January and had been engaged in posting about Covid-19. “Narratives around COVID,” the SIO wrote in its analysis, “praise China’s response to the virus while tweets also use the pandemic to antagonize the U.S. and Hong Kong activists.”

PM Modi raises Imran Khan’s ‘extreme’ anti-India rhetoric with Donald Trump

According to a government statement, Modi and Trump had a 30-minute telephonic conversation

Alluding to recent statements by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday told US President Donald Trump that extreme rhetoric and incitement to anti-India violence by certain leaders in the region were not conducive to peace.

According to a government statement, Modi and Trump had a 30-minute telephonic conversation. “In the context of the regional situation, the prime minister stated that extreme rhetoric and incitement to anti-India violence by certain leaders in the region was not conducive to peace,” it stated. Narendra Modi, the statement said, highlighted the importance of creating an environment free from terror and violence, and eschewing cross-border terrorism without exception.

The prime minister recalled his meeting with Trump in Osaka on the margins of G-20 summit in end-June. “The PM expressed the hope that the commerce minister of India and the US trade representative would meet at an early date to discuss bilateral trade prospects for mutual benefit,” the statement read..

India imposing tariffs on US products, no longer acceptable, says Trump

“India has long had a field day putting Tariffs on American items. No longer satisfactory!” Trump tweeted

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said India has long had a “field day” forcing taxes on American items, which is “never again adequate” to the US. Trump’s pithy remark came days after his gathering with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka on June 28 where the two heads circulated their worries over the reciprocal exchange debates and concurred for a gathering of their trade priests to deal with the issues.

“India has long had a field day putting Tariffs on American items. No longer adequate!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. In the not so distant future, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Energy Secretary Rick Perry are planned to address a noteworthy India driven gathering in Washington DC.

President Trump, advocating his ‘America First’ approach has been a vocal commentator of India for imposing “enormously high” obligations on US items, has portrayed the nation as a “levy lord”. In spite of the fact that exchange is a significant piece of the blasting two-sided relationship, a line over market access and taxes has raised as of late, prompting fears of an extended question.

Before his gathering with Modi, Trump tweeted, “I anticipate talking with Prime Minister Modi about the way that India, for quite a long time having set extremely high Tariffs against the United States, just as of late expanded the Tariffs considerably further. This is unsatisfactory and the Tariffs must be pulled back!” India has raised taxes on 28 things, including almond, heartbeats and pecan, traded from the US in counter to America’s withdrawal of particular access for Indian items.

Trump has likewise censured India’s high import duty on the notorious Harley Davidson bikes as “unsatisfactory”. President Trump ended India’s assignment as a recipient creating country under the key GSP exchange program from June 5 subsequent to establishing that New Delhi has not guaranteed the US that it will give “fair and sensible access” to its business sectors.

The Generalized System of Preference (GSP) is the biggest and most established US exchange inclination program and is intended to advance financial improvement by permitting obligation free section for a large number of items from assigned recipient nations.

Trump ends 'Dreamer' immigration programme, 800,000 face unsure future

The action was announced not by Trump but by Jeff Sessions

 

President Donald Trump on Tuesday scrapped an Obama-era programme that protects from deportation immigrants brought illegally into the United States as children, delaying implementation until March and giving a gridlocked Congress six months to decide the fate of almost 800,000 young people.

As the so-called Dreamers who have benefited from the five-year-old programme were plunged into uncertainty, business and religious leaders, mayors, governors, Democratic lawmakers, unions, civil liberties advocates and former Democratic President Barack Obama all condemned Trump’s move.

The action was announced not by Trump but by Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, who called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme an unconstitutional overreach by Obama. There will be an “orderly, lawful wind-down,” Sessions said.

Trump later issued a written statement saying that “I do not favour punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents. But we must also recognise that we are (a) nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

He denounced Obama’s programme as an “amnesty-first approach” toward illegal immigrants and pressed his nationalist “America First” message, saying that despite concerns voiced by his critics about the fate of the Dreamers, “Above all else, we must remember that young Americans have dreams too.”

On Tuesday evening, the Republican president tweeted that lawmakers now had six months to “legalize DACA” and that if they did not, he would “revisit this issue!”

Obama issued his own statement calling Trump’s action a political decision, defending DACA’s legality and urging Congress to protect Dreamers....(Read More)

Trump needs a brain

The dearth of Trumpists in official Washington was always going to be a major problem

 

The series of columns I’ve been writing lately, floating implausible proposals for an ideologically unstable age, has been a useful way of avoiding the depressing subject of the Trump administration’s first 100 days — because really, in the face of such incompetence and chaos, what is there to say?

But precisely because this administration seems so hopeless, any constructive advice for the Trump White House automatically falls into the category of implausible ideas. So I can continue my ongoing series while also talking about Donald Trump — by proposing, as this week’s unlikely-to-happen proposal, that our president should go out and get himself a brain.

I do not mean a vat-grown cerebral cortex cooked up in some underground anti-aging lab funded by Silicon Valley immortalists … though I gather those may be soon available as well. I mean a brain in the sense that people (unkindly, but not inaccurately) used the term to describe Bill Kristol when he was the aide-de-camp to Vice President Dan Quayle 25 years ago: a person, or better a group of persons, who can tell Trump what specific policies he ought to support.

Because a core weakness of this White House, more devastating (for now) than the pugilistic tweets and permanent swirl of scandal, is the absence of anyone who seems to have thought through how one might translate Trumpism, the populist nationalism on which the president campaigned, into substantive policy on any specific issue except a temporary visa freeze.

The dearth of Trumpists in official Washington was always going to be a major problem for this administration, both in staffing the White House and in negotiating with Congress. But it’s been worse than anticipated, because Trump himself doesn’t know what he wants to do on major issues and there’s nobody in his innermost circle who seems to have a compelling vision that might guide him......READ MORE