Imagine a place where what you write on Facebook brings military officers to your door. There are a few countries that might spring to mind. Is Thailand on your list? Episode 4 of Undercurrents tells you why it should be.

audible.com/undercurrents Wanchalearm Satsaksit, or Tar, escaped the Thai officers who hunted him down because of his Facebook posts and spent years living in exile. He carried on criticizing Thailand’s leaders on social media. Until one day, he was abducted. “Disappeared.”

China has cracked down on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Now, it’s expanding its reach all over the world. In the first episode of Undercurrents, @isocockerell and @Beckstatic meet the Uyghurs who fled all the way to the Arctic and still don’t feel safe. 🧵

audible.com/undercurrents In recent years, China’s northwest region of Xinjiang has transformed into one of the most closely-watched police states in the world. The resident Uyghur population have become guinea pigs for the latest advances in surveillance tech.

Nostalgia—a sentimental longing for an imagined past—has overtaken communities and cultures. Our special issue brings you stories of people who find solace in mythologized histories and grieve for foreclosed futures in a time of existential threats. 🧵

codastory.com/idea/age-of-no… In Cambodia, @fiona_kelliher profiles a community that’s chosen to rewrite its painful history. War criminals become war heroes. Genocide committed by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge becomes the work of Vietnamese spies.

codastory.com/rewriting-hist…

For the final installment of our Age of Nostalgia series, @katia_patin attends the Kurultaj festival in Hungary and finds a surreal cocktail of nationalism, genetics, linguistic revisionism, colorful costumes and curious characters.

codastory.com/rewriting-hist… Meet Andras Biro, Kurultaj’s master of ceremonies. Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s new brand of ethno-nationalism. The movement, called Turanism, asserts that Hungary’s true roots lie with Turkey and Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia — not Europe.

Our word of the day is solastalgia. It’s a term coined to describe the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. This emotion is gripping California as communities on the frontlines of climate change grieve what they’ve lost. 🧵

codastory.com/rewriting-hist… “Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home,” Glenn Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term, wrote. It’s a mix of solace, desolation and nostalgia. “It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present.”

Many residents of Anlong Veng, Cambodia, falsely hold Vietnam responsible for the Cambodian genocide. They hail the Khmer Rouge — the real perpetrators — as heroes. Ly Sok Kheang is working to educate the younger generation about what really happened. 🧵

codastory.com/rewriting-hist… Ly Sok Kheang works for the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which manages Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge archives. For a few years, Kheang has been holding regular workshops for Anlong Veng teens to teach them about the Cambodian genocide and the role the Khmer Rouge played in it.

Events in Ukraine are moving fast. Understanding the undercurrents of this conflict is more important than ever.

At Coda, we’ve spent years reporting on the root causes of the war that is ripping the world apart. Here’s a thread. 🧵 Plans for the new Russian empire have long been in the making. Back in 2018 we reported on a secret club of intellectuals who wanted Russia to take over the world

codastory.com/disinformation…

With the flood of information surrounding the ongoing war in Ukraine it can be difficult to find reliable sources. Here are some of our local partners whose reporting we trust. Our partner @HromadskeUA publishes in three languages, from live reports to analysis and explainers. They also have a YouTube channel with shorter video coverage and documentaries.
hromadske.ua

As Germany prepares to vote on who will replace Angela Merkel, far-right leaders are spreading disinfo about vote-by-mail and alleging that the election has already been fixed. @emilyrs reports

But it’s not the only disinfo circulating in Germany. Thread
codastory.com/disinformation… One force pushing this disinfo is Querdenken, an anti lockdown group. Back in Feb, @_andrew_green reported that Querdenken may be setting its followers on a path toward extremism and dragging German politics at large further to the right.
codastory.com/waronscience/q…

For people who are homeless in San Francisco, their chance of getting housing is decided by an algorithm meant to prioritize the most vulnerable. But 69% of single adults who took the assessment didn’t meet that bar, @caitlin_reports found

Thread👇

codastory.com/authoritarian-… Let’s take a step back. Cities around the US use these types of scoring algorithms to match homeless people with housing resources. Iain De Jong, who created one of these tools, says cities are now misusing it and he wants it to stop. codastory.com/authoritarian-…

Facebook is responding to pressure to combat #COVID19 disinfo and removing dozens of accounts. Among them is News Front, a pro-Kremlin site operating out of Russian-occupied Crimea and a major force behind disinfo in Europe

A look at News Front & founder Konstantin Knyrik👇 Set up just after Russia annexed Crimea, News Front has developed a reputation for its staunchly pro-Kremlin line and a steady output of false, deliberately inflammatory stories. Recently its accounts have been circulating false #COVID19 theories.

Extraordinary images of Russian military trucks, flags waving, driving across Italy. Kremlin says this is a “humanitarian” operation—dubbed From Russia with Love—designed to help Italy fight the #COVID19 outbreak.

But things aren’t adding up.

Thread (1/7) Last weekend, after a call with Italy’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin ordered his government to send humanitarian aid to Italy. We reported that Russian media said they were sending several planes of protective equipment + 100 doctors to fight #covid19

codastory.com/waronscience/c…

I'm @SofiyaVoznaya, Coda's visual artist. Right now, my two girls, my journalist husband and I can't leave our flat in Moscow. So I am taking over Coda's Twitter account to share what #Covid19 quarantine is like with Big Brother watching. Sunday, we flew home from Berlin to surprising news: Moscow put all travelers from Germany on a #Covid19 quarantine list. So here we are, headed for a 14-day confinement.

The Gulag was one of the darkest chapters in Russia’s past. The Russian government is airbrushing it away.

We set out to find as many living survivors as we could. They told us their stories, some for the first time. They are Generation Gulag.
codastory.com/series/generat… Stalin, who sent millions to Gulag camps, has never been more popular in Russia. 70% of Russians say they approve of his legacy.

This is the result of a Kremlin campaign, spearheaded by Vladimir Putin, to rewrite Soviet history.

Xinjiang, China is an information vacuum. With reports of a million Uyghurs in detention, plus censorship, surveillance and a blackout on outside communication, it’s hard to know what’s happening. So Uyghurs abroad turned to an unlikely resource: TikTok codastory.com/authoritarian-… If you think of Tiktok, ByteDance’s phenomenally successful Chinese-owned video-sharing app, you’ll probably think of videos like this.

Snappy. ✅ Short. ✅ Cut to pop music. ✅

And in Xinjiang, most of the videos are no different.

Digital micro-loan apps are huge in Kenya. You log in with Facebook, hand over a few details, and get quick cash within moments. Sounds ideal, right?

Our reporter @KerenWeitzberg dug deeper into privacy issues, debt, and how the President profits.
codastory.com/authoritarian-… Today, there are around 50 mobile lending apps in Kenya, and dozens more in neighboring African countries. Philanthropists, such as Melinda Gates, say microloans transform the lives of people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access them.

So far, so good.

In Italy, politician @lauraboldrini stands out from the crowd. A big part of her political mission involves campaigning for migrant and women’s rights.

And it’s made her a target.
codastory.com/disinformation… Italy’s ruling parties have weaponized social media against @lauraboldrini, using her gender as a tool in online disinformation campaigns.