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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday that fully vaccinated people begin wearing masks indoors again in places with high Covid-19 transmission rates. The agency is also recommending kids wear masks in schools this fall.

Federal health officials still believe fully vaccinated individuals represent a very small amount of transmission. Still, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and potentially transmit it to others.

"This pandemic continues to pose a serious threat to the health of all Americans," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters on a call. "Today, we have new science related to the delta variant that requires us to update the guidance regarding what you can do when you are fully vaccinated."

The updated guidance comes ahead of the fall season, when the highly contagious delta variant is expected to cause another surge in newcoronaviruscases and many large employers plan to bring workers back to the office. In mid-May, the CDC said fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks in most settings, whether indoors or outdoors.

"In areas with substantial and high transmission, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people wear masks in public, indoor settings to help prevent the spread of the delta variant, and protect others. This includes schools," Walensky said. The CDC recommends that everyone in grade schools wear masks indoors, "including teachers, staff, students and visitors, regardless of vaccination status."

Walensky said new data shows the variant behaves "uniquely differently from past strains of the virus," indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant "may be contagious and spread the virus to others."

Read More: Americans will need masks indoors as U.S. heads for 'dangerous fall' with surge in delta Covid cases

Health experts fear delta, already the dominant form of the disease in the U.S., is hitting states with low vaccination rates. Those states are now being forced to reintroduce mask rules, capacity limits and other public health measures that they've largely rolled back in recent months.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the CDC was considering whether to revise mask guidance for vaccinated Americans, saying it was "under active consideration."

"It's a dynamic situation. It's a work in progress, it evolves like in so many other areas of the pandemic," Fauci, also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. "You've got to look at the data."

The CDC's guidance is only a recommendation, leaving it up to states and local officials on whether to reintroduce their mask rules for certain people. But even before the CDC's anticipated guidance Tuesday, some regions were reintroducing mask mandates and advisories as Covid cases began to spike again.

Walensky said a majority of the hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S. are occurring among unvaccinated people, pointing to vaccines she said worked well in protecting against severe illness and death. "But the big concern is that the next variant that might emerge, we're just a few mutations potentially away where it could potentially evade our vaccines," she said.

President Joe Biden said the CDC's updated guidance was necessary to defeat the virus, and that he will lay out "next steps" to get more Americans vaccinated on Thursday.

"Although most U.S. adults are vaccinated, too many are not.While we have seen an increase in vaccinations in recent days, we still need to do better," he said in a statement. "More vaccinations and mask wearing in the areas most impacted by the Delta variant will enable us to avoid the kind of lockdowns, shutdowns, school closures, and disruptions we faced in 2020."

Several counties across California and Nevada were already advising all residents to wear masks in public indoor settings whether they are vaccinated or not. In Massachusetts, officials in Provincetown advised all individuals to resume wearing masks indoors after Fourth of July celebrations led to an outbreak of new cases.

Experts say Covid prevention strategies remain critical to protect people from the virus, especially in areas of moderate-to-high community transmission levels.

The CDC defines "substantial transmission" as counties that have 50 to 100 cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period and "high transmission" is more than 100 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, Walensky said.

"We have places and counties and states here that are now reporting over 300 cases per 100,000 over a seven day period. So really an extraordinary amount of viral transmission, which is what we're concerned about," she added.

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine advocate who has served on advisory panels for both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC earlier this month that the U.S. was still "undervaccinated," with about half of the population not fully inoculated.

Even people who are fully protected have cause for concern when it comes to Covid variants, Offit said. While the vaccines protect well against severe disease and death, they may not protect as well against mild disease or spreading Covid to others, he said. No vaccine is 100% effective, he noted.

"It is not a bold prediction to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is going to be circulating two or three years from now. I mean there are 195 countries out there, most of which haven't been given a single dose of vaccine," Offit said. "Will it still be circulating in the United States? I think that would be very, very likely."

Israel released preliminary data last week that showed the Pfizer vaccine is just 39% effective against the virus there, which officials attributed to the rapidly spreading delta variant. Its effectiveness against severe disease and death remained high, the data showed.U.S. and world health officials said they are looking at the Israeli research, which was not peer-reviewed and was scant on details.

Executives from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have said they expect Americans will need booster shots, and Pfizer has said it plans to ask the FDA to authorize boosters as it sees signs of waning immunity. Federal health officials say booster doses of the vaccines are not needed for otherwise healthy people at this time, although they may recommend it for the elderly or people with compromised immunity.

CNBC's Meg Tirrell and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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CDC reverses indoor mask policy, saying fully vaccinated people and kids should wear them indoors - CNBC

Every Thursday at 5 p.m., my grandmother would go into her bedroom in Havana, lock the door, and tune her Soviet-made radio to Radio Mart, a Miami-based station run by Cuban exiles who had fled Fidel Castros revolution. She always set the volume barely above a whisper. Walls have ears, she would say. Despite being an ordinary and compliant citizen, she, like the rest of my family, avoided controversial political topics on the phone, afraid that the lines were tapped. We acted as if the state were always staring directly at us. Its presence was everywhere.

For my mothers generation, the following things, among others, were forbidden: listening to the Beatles, being openly gay, displaying religious beliefs, and reading certain books. As a kid in the late 1980s, I wore the same clothes as everybody else did, received an identical education, and even used the same and only toothpaste brand, Perla. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice did not exist.

Modeled after and subsidized by the Soviet Union, the Cuban government exercised unfettered control over every aspect of its citizens lives. The agents of state security, trained by the East German Stasi and the Russian KGB, made sure that not a leaf moved without their knowledge. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the unthinkable happened: People marched in the streets, demanding freedom. Where was Big Brother and his omniscient eye?

The recent nationwide protests in Cuba are symptomatic of a much deeper underlying condition than decades of scarcity and a systemic lack of civil liberties. The Cuban political system is cracking. The structures upholding its authority have been slowly but steadily weakening for the past three decades, and the people living beneath them have not only taken notice but are reacting in ever more public ways.

Jorge Felipe Gonzalez: Black Lives Matter misses the point about Cuba

As a child growing up in Castros long shadow, I saw the scaffolding of the state begin to crumble. I remember being 9 years old in 1992 and seeing empty store shelves where Soviet apples used to be, and the tragic day when my little red fire truck, made in East Germany, broke. It was the last toy I had. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and Cuba, a parasitic economy that had little to offer the global market and was further suffering under the U.S. embargo, lost 85 percent of its trade, triggering a severe humanitarian crisis. Soon we were without electricity. To cope with the intense Caribbean heat, we took our mattresses to the roof. The mosquitoes made sure that sleeping under the tropical stars was not the romantic experience many may imagine.

The good old times are coming back, my grandfather said one day in 1994, placing his newspaper on the table. Castro had just allowed Cubans to establish small businesses, reopened tourism to Westerners (the embargo kept Americans away, except for Cuban Americans, who were allowed to visit family), and legalized the domestic use of U.S. dollars. For ordinary Cubans, the liberalization and later subsidies from Hugo Chvezs Venezuela slightly alleviated the crisis. But for the state, the ideological and political consequences would be devastating.

As teenagers in the late 90s, my friends and I gawked at the sight of Western tourists and Cuban Americans walking around Havana with their shiny sneakers, glimpses of a more prosperous world beyond the sea. It became harder for Castro to keep us convinced that socialism was the next logical step in human progress. As time went on, any remaining loyalty to the state was eroded by the seemingly endless stream of new stores packed with colorful products we couldnt afford and hotels we couldnt stay in, or even enter.

Back in the mid-80s, my father worked as the accountant for a factory that made the Cuban version of Coca-Cola. Like every Cuban, he was a state employee, and as such, he had to demonstrate political obedience. For example, he was required to attend monthly meetings and do voluntary work for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), a neighborhood-based organization that Castro had established in 1960 for collective revolutionary surveillance. He also had to join the state-controlled Workers Central Union of Cuba. In that Cuba, social existence was impossible outside the domain of the state.

Today, nearly one-third of the workforce is employed by the private sector. My best friend, Yunior, now rents a room in his house to tourists and pays a housekeeper to clean it. Like all workers in the private sector, neither of them is required to join the state-controlled union, participate in state-led demonstrations, or provide government paperwork to keep their jobs. They are independent of the state and earn 10 times as much as a doctor. Yes, the cleaning lady too.

The early-90s crisis triggered an exodus to Florida of nearly 35,000 people on small boats and makeshift rafts. I vividly remember my neighbors assembling rustic boats made of tables and tires tied with ropes and crowning the bow with a statuette of Our Lady of Charity, the patron of Cuba and protector of sailors. Many people did not make it. Those who reached American soil were able to stay because of the 1995 wet foot, dry foot policy and get permanent-resident status through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Years later, in 2019, that Cold War law would open my own path to American citizenship.

Read: How education shaped Communist Cuba

For many Cubans desperate to leave the island and for Cuban Americans wishing to reunite with their relatives, these U.S. policies were joyfully received. They were convenient for Castro as well. Since taking power in 1959, the Communist leader had used migration as a political pressure-relief valve to rid the island of dissatisfied citizens, most famously in 1980, when 125,000 people left the countrymany under government coercionduring the Mariel Boatlift.

Now that relief valve is closed. Days before leaving office, President Barack Obama ended the wet foot, dry foot policy. His successor reduced the U.S. embassys personnel and stopped issuing visas on the island. Cubans are now trapped, and instead of looking to the horizon, they are looking upward to those in power.

This months demonstrations were not the islands first. Three decades ago, on August 5, 1994, a smaller group of Cubans protested in Havana, chanting freedom and Down with Castro. They were beaten and arrestednot that you would have known it from watching the coverage on state media. What we were shown back then was an edited version without the repression, highlighted by images of Castros arrival at the protest site, riding in a jeep and welcomed with chants of Viva Fidel!

That disinformation strategy is impossible today. In 2018, the Cuban government reluctantly authorized internet usage via cellphones. Three years later, the internet turned a local protest into a nationwide rebellion. Cellphone videos documented the ongoing repression and contradicted state-media manipulations. The information monopoly the government once enjoyed is gone.

After a half century in power, Fidel Castro, the embodiment of the state, got sick, stepped down as president, and died in 2016. Neither his brother Ral nor his handpicked successor as president, Miguel Daz-Canel, has come close to capturing the charisma, or commanding the respect, of the elder Castro. (Daz-Canel singao, a slur better left untranslated, was chanted during the recent protests.)

Read: How did Fidel Castro hold onto Cuba for so long?

Today there is a new generation of Cubans who grew up without the omnipresent figure of Fidel and the prying eyes of the state. To these young people, the old-fashioned socialist rhetoric that still plays on state TV is unconvincing, alien, and frankly ridiculous. Unlike my generation, they did not watch Soviet cartoons but Disney and Pixar. They know the government has little to offer them. They want a political change and they want it now. Instead of fearing walls with ears or tapped phone lines as my late grandmother did, they want to be heard. To ensure that they are, they have taken to social media to amplify their voices.

To be sure, Cuba remains under Communist control, and the government can unleash its might at will, as ongoing violent repressions and summary trials show. But its totalitarian structures are irreversibly damaged. People sense the governments weakness and will continue testing its rusty chains. Those in power should acknowledge that their time is overdueand that they cant solve the countrys never-ending economic and political crises with old formulas. They must open venues for liberalization before it is too late and the worst happens: a total collapse of the state, and a civil war.

A photo caption in this article originally misidentified the origin of the tank shown in the picture.

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I Watched Cuba Crumble From the Inside - The Atlantic

The exchange on Friday between Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle WalenskyRochelle WalenskyCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 New mask guidelines trigger backlash US vaccinations tick up as delta variant spreads MORE perfectly encapsulatedthe federal governments patently poor communications on the COVID-19 virus.

"Are you for mandating a vaccine on a federal level?" Baier asked.

You know, thats something that I think the administration is looking into. Its something that I think we are looking to see approval of from the vaccine,"Walensky replied.

"Overall, I think in general, I am all for more vaccination. But, you know I have nothing further to say on that except that were looking into those policies," she added.

The answer quickly caught fire on social media, prompting Walensky to directly respond to a CNBC reporter who noted in an ALL-CAPS tweet the revelationaround federally mandating vaccinations:

U.S. CDC DIRECTOR SAYS FEDERALLY MANDATING COVID-19 VACCINATION IS SOMETHING THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS LOOKING AT -FOX NEWS INTERVIEW

.@BerkeleyJr To clarify: There will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government. There will be no federal mandate.

Portions of the federal government? That's quite a difference from Walensky's original answer, which was seen by infinitely more people than her clarification on Twitter.

It's no wonder trust in the CDC has plummetedsince riding highlast year during the early months of the pandemic. A recent NPR poll shows barely half of Americans have a great deal of trust in the CDC. A May WebMD-Medscape poll gets even worse, with 77 percent saying their trust in the CDC has decreased since the start of the pandemic. It's hard to see how that number isn't even higher as we enter August.

Poll Finds Public Health Has A Trust Problem https://t.co/yGoBN8ByJn

Trust in CDC, FDA Took a Beating During Pandemic. Many healthcare professionals no longer trust the CDC and FDA. Maybe that's one reason why many of them are refusing the Covid vaccine. #Covid_19https://t.co/30kn6OfwK5

To be fair, Walensky isnt the only one to blame for all of this; the problem started during the Trump administration. But Walenskys flip-flops have become all too common. It was just two months ago that she went on The Rachel MaddowRachel Anne MaddowCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 Budowsky: How Biden can defeat COVID-19 for good Democratic group launches seven-figure ad campaign on voting rights bill MORE Showto declare that vaccinated people didn't have to wear masks anymore. And, yes, cases of the delta variant had been recorded for some time before that declaration was made.

How did CDC Director Rochelle Walensky go from asserting so definitively *just 2 months ago* that there is no health reason for vaccinated people to wear masks, to issuing today's alarmist message about vaccine-resistant strains? There were variants then:pic.twitter.com/apSDki3JV5

"Forgive me for speaking in impersonal terms and I dont mean to be too blunt about this, but how sure are you? Maddow asked Walensky about dropping maskmandates on May 13. Because this feels like a really big change.

We're sure, Walensky responded. Theres an extraordinary amount of evidence now that demonstrates the vaccines are working in the real world, in cohort studies, in care facilities, in across all states, that these vaccines are working the way they worked in the clinical trials. Importantly, theres also new data just even in the last two weeks that demonstrates these vaccines are working in against the variants that we have circulating here in the United States, and also data has emerged that has demonstrated that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely, not likely, to asymptomatically shed the virus and give to it others."

That narrative of which Walensky was so sure then has now, of course, been completely turned on its head. Masks are back. Breakthrough cases are primarily driven by the delta variant. Vaccinated people with COVID can shed the virus at the same rate as the unvaccinated,per Walensky's CDC.

Predictably, there have been conflicting reactions to the CDC's new mask mandate, with the American Medical Association agreeing and former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb insistingits overly broad.

"I trust the experts at the CDC to follow the science but the C clearly doesnt stand for COMMUNICATIONS! tweeted David AxelrodDavid AxelrodCDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 Unscripted remarks start to haunt President Biden The Memo: 'Hillbilly Elegy' author binds himself to Trump after past criticism MORE, former senior adviser to President Obama.Too little has been done to foreshadow and explain the changing directives that variable conditions require,"

I trust the experts at the CDC to follow the science but the C clearly doesnt stand for COMMUNICATIONS! Too little has been done to foreshadow and explain the changing directives that variable conditions require.

Moving forward, the CDC needs to take a walk out to the figurative media mound, send Walensky back to the bench and replace her with a competent, professional, disciplined spokesperson. One who understands that words have consequences.One who understands word economy.One the public can trust.

Because not to do so will only lead to more public mistrust, more anger and more confusion over how best to defeat this virus, once and for all.

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill and a Fox News contributor.

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CDC's Walensky is the wrong media messenger on COVID-19 | TheHill - The Hill

Geoff Golberg watched his own face flicker across the screen in disbelief. A short video clip posted to YouTube and Twitter this March characterized him as a mortal enemy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The narrator, Hussain al-Ghawi, alleged Golbergs entire work aims at smearing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE the United Arab Emirates by publishing fake analytics banning patriotic accounts and foreign sympathizers.

Posted in Arabic with English subtitles, the eight-minute video, overlaid with fiery graphics and sound effects, was part of a regular series posted by al-Ghawi, a self-proclaimed Saudi journalist. A clip showed a photo of Golbergs face, incorrectly describing him as a CNN journalist. Al-Ghawi said that Golbergs work mapping state-directed social media manipulation had put Golberg in league with the kingdoms top adversaries namely the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. It was an accusation that Golberg found shocking, as well as frightening.

It made me feel like its not safe for me to be doing the type of work that I do, even in the United States.

Seeing that video, with those types of accusations against me, it made me feel like my life might be in danger, said Golberg, an expert on tracking social media manipulation and the founder of Social Forensics, an online analytics firm. At the very least it made me feel like its not safe for me to be doing the type of work that I do, even in the United States.

In the hands of an authoritarian state, social media can indeed be deadly. No more harrowing example of thiswas seen in the campaign of Saudi state-directed online attacks that preceded the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. In the months before he was killed inside Istanbuls Saudi consulate, Khashoggi was the subject of an intense campaign of online harassment orchestrated by a Saudi government-backed network of political influencers and bots.

Referred to inside the kingdom as the flies, the network swarmed Khashoggi with threats and defamation, an effort that was documented in the 2020 documentary The Dissident. They painted him on social media as a treasonous enemy of the Saudi state no small matter in a country where public discourse is tightly controlled and Twitter is the primary outlet for political conversation. Al-Ghawihimself has been accused of helping instigate the online campaign that marked Khashoggi as an enemy of the state.

The avalanche of attacks online culminated with Khashoggis murder at the consulate by an assassination squad believed to have been dispatched directly by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Golberg was well aware of the history. So when he showed up in al-Ghawis video, he was deeply alarmed: The threatening manner of the message felt not so different from the way Khashoggi was discussed before his death. Coming from a state where all media is tightly controlled, Golberg thought al-Ghawis video seemed calculated to send a message on behalf of the Saudi government to its perceived enemies in the United States.

Golberg said, Characterizing my work as defending Hezbollah or Qatar these are the types of baseless accusations from a government that has killed people for less, that make me want to look over my shoulder when Im walking.

Sarah Leah Whitson from Human Rights Watch offers her report at U.N. headquarters in New York City on April 27, 2016.

Photo: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Golberg wasnt the only one to come in for al-Ghawis ire. The same clip characterized several Saudi activists with ties to the West as traitors and denounced a number of American activists and think-tank experts. Sarah Leah Whitson,the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, also known as DAWN, a Washington think tank focused on democratic norms in the Middle East, made an appearance, as did Ariane Tabatabai, a State Department official and American academic of Iranian descent who had worked for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that does frequent research work for the U.S. government.

Online harassment and disinformation have become political issues in the U.S., but in authoritarian countries the threat can be more immediately grave. Under the control of ruling regimes, the public sphere, including social media, can be completely weaponized. Saudi Arabia, ruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has in particular demonstrated a willingness to go the distance and back up its online threats and intimidation by actually abducting and killing its perceived critics, even those living abroad.

An important thing to keep in mind is that free expression in Saudi Arabia has been totally crushed under MBS, DAWNs Whitson said, referring to the crown prince by his initials. These online messages are not coming from independent actors inside Saudi Arabia. There are no independent voices left coming out of that country today. (Neither al-Ghawi nor the Saudi embassy in Washington responded to requests for comment.)

These online messages are not coming from independent actors inside Saudi Arabia. There are no independent voices left coming out of that country today.

For Whitson, the burden is particularly heavy: DAWN was Khashoggis brainchild and created in the wake of his assassination to carry the deceased dissidents banner.

There had been on a campaign to harass me for a long time even before the murder of Jamal, but it is has only escalated since then, said Whitson. There have been very coordinated attacks against our organization and against individual staff members.

In many cases, such attacks start with al-Ghawi, one of a number of major pro-government Saudi influencers whose messages are amplified and shared by a network of pro-Saudi nationalists, bots, and other inauthentic accounts online.

Al-Ghawis video denouncing the likes of Golberg, Whitson, and others is part of a regular series posted on Twitter and YouTube called Jamra, or the hot coal. The short-form show, narrated as a monologue, is focused entirely on naming lists of enemies of the Saudi regime around the world.

There is little information online about al-Ghawi himself, whose bio on Twitter identifies him simply as a Saudi Journalist. The Jamra program, broadcast in Arabic with English subtitles, is published on al-Ghawis YouTube channel. Boasting over 120,000 subscribers, Jamra describes itself as a political program that connects you with hidden information. Al-Ghawi promotes the videos from the series on his verified Twitter account, where he has over a quarter of a million followers.

For Golberg, who says he does not have any interest in Middle Eastern politics, his appearance in a Jamra video indicated that he had provoked the anger of powerful people in Saudi Arabia. These actors, he suspected, were upset about his work tracking social media activity in support of the kingdom. Golberg had found analytic data showing widespread manipulation by bots and other inauthentic accounts on Twitter promoting pro-Saudi government messages.

Saudi Arabia was just one interest among many Golberg previously published analytics studies of social media manipulation by supporters of XRP, a popular cryptocurrency, as well as supporters of President Donald Trump but the kingdoms pushback proved different. Nothing has triggered as much backlash or fear as his work on the Saudis, Golberg said. Worse still, when faced with these threats, which included a previous tweet from al-Ghawi in September 2020 accusing him and others of working for the government of Qatar and Hezbollah, the platforms themselves did nothing to help him.

I wish that I were a celebrity or someone with a large, verified account, so that if I were to start sharing information about attacks against me on Twitter and YouTube, the platforms would feel compelled to remove it, Golberg said. People with big platforms have the power to get things like doxxing and death threats removed. But for the average person, when this happens, there is not much they can do.

Golberg, for now, plans to keep documenting the phenomenon of online harassment networks. Yet the threats and attacks against him have had a deep psychological and emotional impact and left him conflicted about whether to continue. I feel its important to keep shining light on the underbelly of platform manipulation, Golberg said, but the work I have been doing the past few years has really started taking a toll on me. It can be harrowing.

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan speaks during an interview with Agence France-Presse in New York City, on April 23, 2018.

Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

In the summer of 2020, a report published in the New Yorker highlighted another target of al-Ghawi: former FBI agent Ali Soufan. After Soufan was alerted to credible threats against his life by the CIA that May, he also found himself being targeted by a virulent campaign of online threats and defamation. Soufan hired a cybersecurity firm that determined at least part of the online campaign involved officials of the Saudi government and that the effort was started by Hussain al-Ghawi, a self-proclaimed Saudi journalist.

According to the New Yorker, the analysis found that al-Ghawi had also played a key role in leading the online campaign against Khashoggi in the months before his death.

Soufan, who declined to comment for this story, is a decorated former FBI agent with close ties to current and former U.S. government officials. His stature and relationships might make Soufan a costly target for the Saudis. Other Americans who have come onto the radar of their defamatory social media campaigns, however, are more vulnerable, as are their families.

Mohamed Soltan is an Egyptian American who spent nearly two years in an Egyptian prison in the aftermath of a 2013 military coup, coming to the brink of death behind bars during a hunger strike that lasted over a year. Following an international outcry, he was finally released and returned to the United States in May 2015.Despite being a U.S. citizen living at home, his freedom from prison has not meant freedom from further harassment and threats, he said, whether by Egyptian officials or their Saudi allies including Hussain al-Ghawi.

This March, al-Ghawi released a video on Twitter and YouTube as part of the Jamra series that described Soltan as an extremist who had plotted to carry out attacks against the Egyptian government. Al-Ghawi also painted Soltan as an enemy of the Saudi kingdom who was defaming its rulers through his support of U.S.-based human rights organizations. As evidence, al-Ghawi displayed an old photo of Soltan with Qatar-based cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a cleric often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which Saudi sees as a threat.

Soltan, who had been personal friends with Khashoggi in Washington and has familiarity with the modus operandi of dictatorial Arab governments, viewed the character attacks against him by al-Ghawi and others as a straightforward attempt to retroactively justify any future harm that he may suffer.

These attacks are pretexts that they create so that later it plants seeds of doubt in the mind of the public, Soltan said. They pick a target and then character assassinate them to such a degree that if anything happens later, people will refrain from speaking about it. This is what they did to Jamal. They paint as much of a negative picture as they can in order to make people later say, Its complicated if and when something does happen.

Mohamed Soltan, a U.S. citizen who became a prominent Egyptian political prisoner, at his home on May 31, 2020, in Fairfax, Va.

Photo: Pete Marovich for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Twitters ties to Saudi Arabia have come under scrutiny in the past. In 2020, two employees at the company were the subjects of an FBI complaint: They were accused of spying inside the firms office on behalf of the Saudi government, including passing along the phone numbers and IP addresses of dissidents.

Twitter periodically launches removal campaigns of pro-Saudi accounts found to be abusing the platform. In December 2019, several thousand pro-Saudi accounts were removed for violating Twitters platform manipulation policies shortly after public allegations about the two spies came to light. Last year, another 20,000 accounts said to be linked to the Saudi, Egyptian, and Serbian governments were also purged from the site.

Both Twitter and YouTube, however, seem content to allow ongoing campaigns of pro-government platform manipulation in English. The lack of moderation is even more pronounced in Arabic and other non-English languages. Golberg, the social media analyst featured in one of al-Ghawis videos, estimates that the ongoing pro-Saudi information campaigns on Twitter involve tens of thousands of inauthentic accounts.

Ive identified entire Saudi-based marketing firms that are helping run inauthentic accounts for the Saudi government, he said. Judging from the messages theyre amplifying, they are working with the government to not just push certain narratives but also to continue character assassinating journalists and members of civil society that the government dislikes. With those prior suspensions of pro-Saudi accounts, Twitter wanted to give the appearance that they cleaned up their platform a little bit. And they did, but there is still an incredible amount of the same activity taking place today.

Al-Ghawi has continued to regularly broadcast his Jamra program, posting it on Twitter and YouTube. In early July, he released another video targeting the Quincy Institute, a noninterventionist think tank based in Washington, D.C. Like many of the other Jamra videos, the one on Quincy obsessively listed off individuals working for the organization who al-Ghawi said were of Iranian-origin. He also maintained his characteristic looseness with facts, falsely accusing at least one Quincy Institute employee, Eli Clifton, of having previously worked in the Iranian capital.

Its concerning to see a prominent Saudi Twitter troll, who played a central role in the social-media campaign against Jamal Khashoggi, targeting staffers at a U.S.-think tank with outright lies and fabrications, Clifton, who has contributed to The Intercept, said in response to his inclusion in the latest episode of Jamra. But its downright shocking that American tech companies Twitter and Google are knowingly hosting and assisting in the dissemination of this content.

Protecting the safety of people who use Twitter is of paramount importance to us, a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. We have clear policies in place on abusive behavior, hateful conduct and violent threats on the service. Where we identify clear violations, we will take enforcement action. According to Twitter, al-Ghawis tweets did not violate any policies. (YouTube did not respond to arequestfor comment.)

In the video on Whitson, al-Ghawi accused the DAWN executive director of taking $100,000 to criticize Saudi Arabia and Egypt an accusation that she described as ludicrous. Whitson said that the online campaign directed by al-Ghawi and others has been a clear attempt to silence outside criticism of the kingdom over its foreign policy and human rights abuses, including the murder of Khashoggi.

The Biden administration has made public some of its own intelligence pointing to the Saudi crown princes role in the Khashoggi murder, but earlier this year stopped short of directly imposing sanctions onCrown Prince Mohammedand other high-level officials believed responsible for the killing. The failure to impose serious accountability, alongside the continued threats leveled by the Saudi regime against Americans and Saudi dissidents abroad, appear to be signs thatthe crown prince is unchastened and potentially willing to strike out at his critics with violence again. Pro-government influencers, prominent among them Hussain al-Ghawi, seem to be favored tools.

In one Jamra video, responding to allegations that he was marking out enemies of the kingdom for future harm, al-Ghawi characterized himself as merely a journalist performing a public service. A journalist does not threaten, nor assassinate, nor kill, al-Ghawi said. A journalists ammunition is information, and their weapon is words.

The language of al-Ghawis reassurance did little to comfort the Americans and others who are on the receiving end of his online campaigns, broadcast from an authoritarian country with a track record of killing its critics, wherever they may be.

The Biden administration should ask itself what it is going to do to protect Americans from these attacks, said Whitson. As long as the Saudis feel that they have this uncritical U.S. backing, theyre going to continue to believe that they have a license to attack their critics in whichever way that they like. These coordinated attacks against people they dislike that begin online have already proven that they can be deadly in the real world.

See the rest here:
A Government That Has Killed People for Less: Pro-Saudi Social Media Swarms Leave Critics in Fear - The Intercept

The co-hosts of The Nod are back, and this time, theyve separated from Gimlet Media and Spotify and are instead taking their work to SiriusXMs Stitcher. Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings tell The Verge today that theyre relaunching their Black culture show For Colored Nerds this fall, which they created, hosted, and produced prior to working at Gimlet. The podcast will be available widely and isnt exclusive to one platform.

Stitcher will produce the show along with them, and SXM Media will exclusively sell ads for it. The co-hosts last published a For Colored Nerds episode in 2017, but the same feed will be revived for the comeback.

Notably, Eddings and Luse retain total control over their show they own the audio masters, the feed, and rights to derivative works and theyve landed on a revenue sharing agreement with Sirius. (The specifics of the deal, like how much Stitcher paid them to come over and the percentage of ad revenue theyll receive, werent disclosed.)

I cant tell you how great it feels to be able to have the type of flexibility, and independence, and true support, that we have right now, Luse says in a chat with The Verge. The industry is no longer in its infancy; the industrys maturing, and so I think peoples desires for what theyre looking for out of ownership deals and things like that are changing.

The ownership part of the deal was especially critical for Luse and Eddings, who spoke out in June 2020 about their frustration with Gimlets control over The Nods feed and IP. The two pitched, hosted, and produced the show and felt like they owned it, but they never did.

Providing institutional support is not the same as producing the actual product, Luse says in this recent chat. So I think that eventually the industry is going to have to bend toward a situation where there are organizations that are providing institutional support to people who want to make quality audio without demanding that they also hand over all of their ownership.

The industry still faces challenges around IP and ownership, even if its a top-of-mind issue. The Ringer and Gimlet unions strived to reach an agreement on IP, but werent able to secure anything in their final contract with Spotify. In a chat with Hot Pods Nick Quah last August, prior to any finalized contracts, Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, called fighting for IP rights an uphill battle.

Having some ability to share in the fruits of the creative labor and maybe even exploit it on your own or stay with it either financially or creatively if it becomes something bigger yes, thats definitely been an issue, he said at the time.

And Eddings acknowledged in our recent chat that more resources need to be readily available to independent creators who might not know how to get started with creating, pitching, and ultimately owning a show, especially when negotiating with massive corporations.

I feel like we have to whisper sometimes in terms of asking about a lawyer, he says as one example. It needs to become a thing that that is normalized and standardized because its super important.

Excerpt from:
The Nod hosts ditch Spotify to relaunch their original show - The Verge