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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.

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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

With the Biden administrations efforts to vaccinate Americans hitting a brick wall and the delta variant wreaking havoc nationwide, lawmakers in recent weeks have increasingly pointed fingers at social media companies for allowing COVID-19 misinformation to spread on their platforms.

New Morning Consult polling suggests that much of the public agrees that social media plays a role in halting progress toward a true post-pandemic existence and nearly two-thirds back legislation that would punish the platforms that enable such misinformation to proliferate.

Sixty-three percent of adults said theyd support a federal bill holding internet platforms responsible if content generated by their users and other third parties spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and public health emergencies, including 78 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

By contrast, just over 1 in 5 adults including 12 percent of Democrats, 23 percent of independents and 32 percent of Republicans said they were against holding platforms accountable for the spread of misinformation amid public health crises. The share of those who didnt know or had no opinion ranged from 10 percent (Democrats) to 21 percent (independents).

The poll of 2,201 U.S. adults was conducted July 23-25, just days after Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced legislation that would revoke Section 230 liability protections for internet companies that fail to crack down on the dissemination of misinformation during public health emergencies, though the survey did not reference Klobuchar or Section 230 specifically. The poll has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

Klobuchars measure lacks any Republican co-sponsors and is considered a long shot to pass, but the publics support for legislation of that kind mirrors general sentiment about which entities deserve the most blame for the spread of false coronavirus information though maybe not at quite the same levels of scorn that President Joe Biden has recently reserved for them.

Biden slightly walked back comments made earlier this month that social media giants were killing people by allowing vaccine misinformation to run wild on their platforms, saying that his rhetoric was meant to prod tech companies to take more decisive action to stem the spread of false posts.

When respondents were asked who they think is most responsible for controlling the spread of false information about the coronavirus on platforms, 27 percent pointed fingers at social media companies a 4-point rise from a March 2020 survey. Thirty-four percent of adults blamed the users who originally posted false information, virtually unchanged from the poll taken 16 months ago.

On vaccine misinformation specifically, the problem appears to be centered on a small group of prolific posters: A recent Center for Countering Digital Hate report found that 12 individuals dubbed the Disinformation Dozen were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on social media platforms, including up to 73 percent on Facebook Inc.

Even though more adults attribute blame to the individual user than to social media companies, the Morning Consult poll suggests that the public believes those platforms are not doing enough to combat anti-vaccination content.

Thirty-five percent of adults said they think social media companies are doing a poor job when it comes to preventing the spread of false information about coronavirus vaccines on their platforms, while 27 percent said the performance of companies is just fair.

About 1 in 5 adults said social media platforms are doing a good job halting anti-vaccination content and just 6 percent said their work on that front is excellent. Republicans are slightly more critical of social media platforms than Democrats, with 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively, saying the platforms are performing poorly when it comes to vaccine-related moderation.

The pressure on social media companies from Capitol Hill to do a better job of policing anti-vaccine content is likely to ramp up as the Biden administration considers mandates and other avenues to meet its vaccination goals.

And as Facebook and other social media companies point to authoritative vaccine information as a means to drown out false content, lawmakers can note one last data point in arguing their case for stricter moderation: Just 10 percent of Americans believe that false or misleading information about the coronavirus that is posted online should not be removed.

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Social Media Companies Keep Taking Hits Over COVID-19 Misinformation. The Public Thinks There Should Be Consequences - Morning Consult

TOKYO (AP) The IOC says the Olympics are only about the sports; no politics allowed. This will be the mantra, as it always is, when the Beijing Winter Games open in six months.

Covering ski races or figure-skating finals should be painless; just stay in the sports bubble and out of trouble. But reporters from other countries who puncture the PR skin to explore other aspects of life in China as they have in Japan during the Tokyo Olympics could draw more than criticism.

They could face harassment and threats if portrayals are deemed by the government and the increasingly nationalist public to be giving a negative view of China.

China demands complete adherence to its position on a number of issues, Oriana Skylar Mastro, who researches China security issues at Stanford University, told The Associated Press.

It demands this from governments, but also corporations, media, and individuals, she said in an email. So, do I think China is going to go after anyone, including sports reporters during the Olympics, that deviate from the acceptable script? Yes, I absolutely do.

Chinas foreign ministry has repeatedly criticized the politicization of sports and has said any Olympic boycott is doomed to failure. It has not addressed journalism during the Games specifically.

The peril for journalists was evident last week when foreign reporters covering floods in central China were targeted. The Communist Youth League, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, asked social media followers to locate and report a BBC reporter on assignment. That expanded into broader accusations against foreign reporters for slandering China with coverage that could be seen as critical rather than focusing on government rescue efforts.

In a statement, The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said the rhetoric from organizations affiliated with Chinas ruling Communist Party directly endangers the physical safety of foreign journalists in China and hinders free reporting.

The organization added that staff from the BBC and the Los Angeles Times received death threats and intimidating messages and calls. This came after China last year expelled more than a dozen American reporters working for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Beijing was the IOCs unlikely choice for the 2022 Winter Olympics, a decision made in 2015 chiefly because European favorites like Oslo and Stockholm pulled out for financial or political reasons. The IOC was left with only only two candidates: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Beijing won by four votes, 44-40. The choice elicited sharp criticism from human rights groups, which continues.

The IOC has declined several recent demands to move the Olympics out of Beijing. China is accused by some foreign governments and researchers of imposing forced labor, systematic forced birth control and torture upon Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group Xinjiang, a region in the countrys west.

China has denied committing genocide against the Uyghur people, calling such accusations the lie of the century.

Last week a vice president of Intel, one of the IOCs top 15 sponsors, said he agreed with a U.S. State Department assessment that said China was committing genocide against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. Other sponsors including Coca-Cola, Visa, Procter & Gamble, and Airbnb appeared in a congressional hearing but wouldnt answer most questions directly.

Its what I refer to as the Olympics Catch-22 for illiberal regimes like China, Victor Cha, an Asian specialist at Georgetown University, wrote in an email to AP. Cha surveyed the politics of sports in Asia and the 2008 Beijing Olympics in his book Beyond the Final Score. He also served from 2004-2007 in the Bush White House as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

They want all the glory and attention of hosting the world for the Winter Games, but they want none of the inevitable criticism that comes with the media magnifying glass, Cha said. All hosts have to deal with this; witness all of the scrutiny over COVID pre-Tokyo. The difference is how the hosts handle it.

The IOC says its focus is only sports, though its a highly political body with an observer seat at the United Nations. IOC President Thomas Bach touted his efforts to bring the two Koreas together during 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. He also addressed world leaders in 2019 in a G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.

Our responsibility is to deliver the Games, said Mark Adams, the IOCs spokesman. That is our responsibility. It is the responsibility of others the United Nations, who have been very supportive of the Olympic Games, and governments to deal with this and not for us.

He added: Given the diverse participation in the Olympic Games, the IOC has to remain neutral. Thats clear.

Adams was asked in an email if the IOC was willing to condemn Chinas policy of interning Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities. He did not answer the question and referred to previous statements. At all times, the IOC recognizes and upholds human rights within its remit, Adams wrote. This includes the rights of journalists to report on the Olympic Games.

The IOC included human rights requirements several years ago in the host city contract for the 2024 Paris Olympics, but it did not include those guidelines the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights for Beijing. Paris is the first Olympics to contain the standards, long pushed for by human rights groups.

In countless interviews about China and its preparations for the Winter Olympics, Bach has not mentioned the situation of the Uyghurs. Nor has he said it was a topic covered in meetings of his executive board.

The IOC, however, has promoted press statements about conversations Bach has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though it has not revealed the content.

The Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, reacting to the BBC incident, essentially said the British news organization had it coming.

The BBC has a long history of ideological bias against China, ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. It has been producing and broadcasting fake news, spreading false information on issues related to Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the COVID-19 epidemic to attack and discredit China.

The BBC has been reporting on China with tinted glasses for a long time, which brought down its reputation in China, Zhao added.

Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who grew up near Shanghai, said the foreign media had brand credibility five or six years ago. But she said increasing information control by the Chinese state does not allow average Chinese to get a fair assessment of what the Western press is saying about China.

Wang said the mood is vastly different from 2008, when Beijing held the Summer Olympics. Many outside China hoped the Olympics would improve human rights, and some Chinese saw it as period of optimism. Controls over the foreign media were relaxed in the runup to the Olympics, which some interpreted as a relaxation on the political front after decades of reform and opening-up, as China refers to its 40 years of economic reconfiguration.

The hostility among the people is real, much more real than before,, Wang said. That kind of hostility did not exist in 2008, but it exists now. Among average people, they know that saying bad things about the West or being hostile, they know its in your interest to do that.

If you go to a stadium, it will be all good if they feel you are covering something good, Wang added. But say you speak to some dissidents or somebody who is a victim of some kind of abuse, you could be in a dangerous position.

___

AP Sports Writer Stephen Wade reported from Beijing for 2 1/2 years covering the runup to the 2008 Olympics, the Games, and its aftermath. More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2020-tokyo-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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Beijing Games: Sports coverage fine, other things maybe not - Associated Press

A prominent Hong Kong singer and pro-democracy activist has been arrested by the citys anti-corruption watchdog over accusations he broke the law by singing at a political rally three years ago.

The arrest of Anthony Wong on Monday is the latest official move against those who had been pushing for greater democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

Hong Kongs independent commission against corruption said Wong performed two songs at the 2018 rally and urged attendees to vote for the pro-democracy candidate Au Nok-hin in a byelection.

The watchdog also charged Au, who won the election, in part for publicising the rally on social media and saying that Wong would be performing.

The watchdog said in a statement that providing others with refreshments and entertainment at an election event was a corrupt conduct and a serious offence and against the elections ordinance.

Local media reported Wong was released on bail. Au has been in jail since March after being one of the 47 pro-democracy activists arrested for alleged subversion over an unofficial primary election they held last year. The unofficial polls, which have historically been held by both sides of the political divide, were attended by more than 600,000 people and were widely seen as an unofficial statement on the government.

The arrests come as authorities crack down on dissent in Hong Kong following the 2019 anti-government protests sparked by concerns that the former British colony was losing the freedoms it was promised when it was handed over to Chinese control in 1997. Opposition figures, media, legal groups, unions and activists have been targeted.

China last year imposed a sweeping national security law that has since been used to arrest more than 100 pro-democracy figures. Changes have also been made to Hong Kongs election laws to reduce the number of directly elected legislators and give a largely pro-Beijing committee the leeway to nominate legislators.

The crackdown has drawn criticism from many governments around the world.

Wong rose to fame in the 1980s as the vocalist for pop duo Tat Ming Pair and later embarked on a solo career.

In 1989 Tat Ming Pair played at a benefit concert after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and travelled with the 1990 North American Concert for Democracy in China tour. Wong also co-founded the LGBTQ+ rights group BigLove Alliance.

He became an outspoken supporter of the citys democracy movement, backing the 2019 protests as well as the umbrella revolution protests that hit the city in 2014. His support for the 2014 protests led to a ban on performing in mainland China and his music was removed from streaming sites.

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Hong Kong singer and activist arrested over corrupt conduct - The Guardian