Introduction
Disinformation has been spreading like wildfire in Australia’s democracy. How can we combat it?
Watch this video of a forum featuring 3 case studies of disinformation. This forum was a PEN Melbourne event, partnered with non/fictionLab and RMIT Culture. It was held on 15 August 2024 in Naarm/Melbourne.
It featured the Legal Director from the Human Rights Law Centre, Alice Drury, in conversation with three experts who examined how disinformation is operating across the world. The case studies were:
- Australia and the organised distribution of disinformation during The Voice Referendum by Sushi Das (Associate Director, RMIT FactLab)
- Israel and the current war in the Occupied Palestinian Territories by Yousef Alreemawi (Averroes Centre of Arab Culture)
- China, in relation to its own citizens by Dr Biao Chen (Independent Chinese PEN Centre)
A lot of false information [related to The Voice Referendum] was harmful … it was harmful to democratic processes because it eroded trust in the actual voting system. Second it was harmful to the social cohesiveness of society because people were pitted against each other based on inaccurate information and this fuelled a polarised national debate. – Sushi Das
Sometimes disinformation simply aims to cause confusion, uncertainty and chaos. Why? Because this is the kind of environment that creates unease and fearfulness…and fear leads to mistrust in just about everything – government, media, science and each other. This fear and uncertainty feeds into the idea of a post truth world where people end up relying more on what they emotionally feel to make decisions in their lives rather than relying on factual evidence based information to make decisions. – Sushi Das
We Palestinians know disinformation… this is the beginning of our story. The first lie that the Palestinians were labeled or had to deal with, is that Palestine was a land with no people, or a people with no land. – Yousef Alreemawi
(Another aspect of) the disinformation campaign in China is the suppressing of dissent, especially for the activists, intellectuals and those who have the different opinion, dissidents. They use the smear campaign, to describe and portray them as a traitors, as foreign agents, just to minimize their credibility and discourage others from challenging the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. So in this way, they got a huge impact for the disinformation business in China by the Chinese Communist Party. For the many people who have very limited access to independent information will always take the position of the Party. – Biao Chen
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Chris Mckenzie
So I’m Chris McKenzie, and I’m going to welcome you here on behalf of PEN Melbourne, to this forum, which is a most important one, Combating the Threat to Freedom: Disarming Disinformation. And we’re here tonight with esteemed guests. I want to welcome Sushi Das, Yousef Alreemawi, Dr Biao Chen and Alice Drury. Alice is going to be our moderator tonight.
PEN Melbourne is very proud to be partnering with the RMIT University NonFiction Lab in hosting this event. So this evening, we’re meeting on the lands of the Woi-wurrung and Boonwurung language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation, the traditional owners of this land, land that has never been ceded. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present as custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture, and they have an ongoing connection to the land and the waters. From time immemorial, First Peoples have practiced their law, their customs and languages, and nurtured Country through their spiritual, cultural and material connections to land, water and resources.
You know these words that recognize the peoples whose country we are respectfully gathered on are not simply a nod to political correctness. They carry weight and they carry meaning. The acknowledgement of Country poses questions for those of us who are non Indigenous: What does it mean to live on stolen land? What can we do about it? So when you do hear an acknowledgement of Country, it’s not a throwaway gesture. It’s a serious proposition thatI believe is meant to demand something of us, and I think it demands of us that we think about these questions. It’s particularly relevant tonight, because I know the deep concern and sorrow about the referendum and the loss of the referendum will be talked about, and in the light of that, we’ve really got to keep working hard to doing the work. To right the historic and ongoing injustices experienced by First Nations people. And here we honour Victoria’s First Peoples Assembly as the independent and democratically elected body to represent the Traditional Owners of Country and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Victoria.
We support the Assembly in its upcoming negotiations with the Victorian Government about a statewide Treaty. We urge the Victorian Government to listen and to negotiate in good faith and in recognition of First Peoples’ right to self determination. Treaty is the process by which the Victorian Government guarantees this right. And here, I’m sorry to add, but I’m going to add it: it’s incredibly disappointing in the last couple of days that the Victorian Government has abandoned its promise that it would keep children under 14 out of prison. It’s pretty hard to swallow that. I reckon. It was a promise they made, and we know children who are criminalized and incarcerated in Victoria are disproportionately First Nations children, so I don’t think things have got off to a very good start with that, but we hope for the best, and we hope for better.
Just a few words about PEN Melbourne, for those of you who aren’t familiar with us, we are one of 148 PEN International centres around the world. Our members are united in a common concern for the art of writing and freedom of expression. So beneath the very, very broad umbrella of PEN International, are gathered the most culturally and linguistically diverse peoples who place the highest value on universal human rights, the freedom to write and the freedom to read. PEN Melbourne is run entirely by volunteers, and I reckon that’s the beauty and the power of our organization. No one gets paid. We are doing this work because we choose to, and in this spirit, tonight I’m going to give my thanks to Jackie and Josie from PEN Melbourne, who have undertaken this evening’s forum in such a creative and generous way. And I also want to thank writer, inspirational person at large, and collaborator, RMIT Senior Lecturer Peta Murray.
I have one more little bit to go. Where is the PEN empty chair? Oh, for a moment I thought we didn’t have one. Okay, tonight’s a little different. The PEN empty chair represents the writer who cannot be with us tonight, or on any night when we are gathered, because they’re incarcerated, they’ve been silenced or detained, or murdered. Tonight is a very special empty chair though. It’s one chair, but following data from the Committee to Protect Journalists – which we follow, it’s a really reliable and authentic website, we have this information.
As of August the 12th, 2024, just the other day, the committee’s preliminary investigation showed at least 113 journalists and media workers were among the more than 40,000 killed since the war began in Gaza. This makes it the deadliest period for journalists since the CPJ began gathering data in 1992. The empty chair is an attempt to represent them all. We want to remember them and honor all those people, because it’s the journalists on the ground, the people who actually are prepared to be in a horrible, horrible war zone so that they can get the truth of the matter out to us. As a friend of mine said to me today, they’re not just numbers, you know. And I’m going to read you the names of six people who have been killed in Gaza in the month of July, just in the month of July. We want to remember Ismail Al Ghoul, Rami Al Refee, Mohammed Abu Jasser, Saadi Madoukh, Mohmmed Abu Sharia.
So tonight, we’re here with our guests to discuss disinformation. A very real and active threat to freedom of exchange and information and a big threat to our democratic processes. PEN Melbourne is deeply concerned about current events here in Australia and overseas that reveal the depth of the challenge to peace in our community. It is now undeniable that social media has become a force to be reckoned with, and the rampant posting and reposting of disinformation is a menacing phenomenon. It’s a global occurrence. Note the recent horrific outbreaks of violence in the UK, which apparently allegedly grew up because of disinformation.
The PEN International charter states the importance of opposing the evils of mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts for political and personal ends. It’s necessary to get to the truth about disinformation. Who is telling us what to believe? How are they doing it? What do we think we know about disinformation, and most importantly, how can we combat it?
The moderator of this discussion tonight is Alice Drury, and I’ll introduce Alice, and she will in turn introduce our special guests. Alice is the acting Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Center, which she first joined in 2018. She works on systemic and emerging threats to Australian democracy, such as getting big money out of politics – yes! – and putting an end to mass surveillance – yes! Prior to joining the Human Rights Law Center, Alice was the legal director of GetUp!, and worked across varied campaign areas, including human rights, income inequality and environmental justice. Yes to all of those. But her primary focus was on democratic freedoms, electoral law reform and increased government accountability. At the state solicitors office of Western Australia, Alice assisted the state solicitor and Solicitor General on a number of constitutional matters before the High Court, in particular concerning the implied freedom of political communication. It’s my very great pleasure now to stop talking and to hand over to Alice. Thank you.
Alice Drury
Yes to you, Chris, Thank you very much for that, and thank you for that acknowledgement and invitation to action, and acknowledging that supporting Treaty right now is the action that we can all be taking. Can you hear me? Okay, not enough. I’ve got to speak louder by the sounds of it, I’ve got a soft voice. Sing out, yell out if I start to get quiet, I might trail off. I also just want to acknowledge that tonight, we’re talking about disinformation in a country that was founded on a lie of Terra Nullius. So if anyone ever asks, Where does disinformation lead us, we have a very, very real example in so-called Australia. It is really wonderful to be here tonight.
Big thanks to PEN for inviting me along to speak to these wonderful speakers. Firstly, I’ll be speaking with Sushi Das, who is an award winning journalist and Associate Director of RMIT FactLab, where she leads a team of researchers engaged in fact checking online misinformation and disinformation. Previously, Sushi worked at The Age newspaper for 22 years, where she held a series of senior positions, including News Editor, Senior Writer, Columnist and Opinion Editor, and her work has been recognized with two Press Club Quill awards. I could go on, but we’re very lucky to have her. Thank you Sushi.
Second we have Yousef Alreemawi. Welcome Yousef. He is a renowned Palestinian writer, academic, musician, translator and creator of online resources of Arabic language, and expert on Arabic culture and Palestine. He is the founder and leader of Palestine Remembered at 3CR, established in 2004, which is Australia’s only radio program totally dedicated to Palestine in the English language. He also set up the Aspire project in 2008 which led to the resettlement of 45 Palestinian families fleeing conflict in Iraq and Syria. So welcome.
And finally, we have Doctor Biao Chen, formerly Executive Secretary and Deputy Secretary General of the Chinese independent PEN Center, and he is now a member of its Writers in Prison committee. With 25 years of experience in the media industry in China and Australia, he is committed to monitoring human rights, freedom of speech and religious liberties in China. Thank you Biao.
So to kick us off, I’m going to turn to you Sushi to speak to us about your work at RMIT FactLab, and in particular, what’s the role that RMIT FactLab plays, and also, what are some of the challenges that you face in that role.
Sushi Das
Thank you, Alice and hello everyone. Yes, I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, and for the last decade that I worked at The Age, I was the Opinion Editor, and I moved from there to RMIT, where I’m a fact checker, and I’ve been a fact checker now for seven years. So somehow I managed to move from opinions to facts in one single leap, which was quite convenient. So, fact checkers at RMIT FactLab debunk and verify mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Instagram.
Last year, the bulk of our work focused on false information relating to the Voice referendum. We saw a significant rise in mis- and disinformation related to the Voice in the year leading up to the referendum, and in that period, we wrote over 100 fact checks, and about a third of them were Voice related. Overall, much of the false information that we saw was divisive, racially focused, sometimes abusive, and often involved false narratives borrowed from the United States. Basically this false information fell into two broad categories. One, disinformation about the impact that the Voice would have, and secondly, disinformation about the electoral process itself. A lot of this false information was harmful on a number of levels. First, it was harmful to democratic processes, because it eroded trust in the actual voting system. Second, it was harmful to the social cohesiveness of society because people were pitted against each other based on inaccurate information. And this fueled a polarized national debate.
I’d like to give you a taste of the kinds of false information we saw, but first, it’s important that we define what we’re talking about. As fact checkers, we are interested in information integrity. We talk about misinformation, which you would probably know involves the inadvertent spread of harmful and inaccurate information, and we talk about disinformation, which is content deliberately created to deceive and mislead and often something that starts as disinformation becomes misinformation as it gets spread. We don’t tend to talk in terms of ‘fake news’, because for some people, fake news is not just false information, it’s also information they simply don’t like, not naming any names. It’s also worth bearing in mind that disinformation doesn’t always aim to change the way people behave or the way that they vote. Sometimes disinformation simply aims to cause uncertainty, confusion and chaos. Why? Because this is the kind of environment that creates unease and fearfulness. And fear leads to mistrust in just about everything; government, media, science and each other. This fear and uncertainty feeds into the idea of a post-truth world, where people end up relying more on what they emotionally feel to make decisions in their lives, rather than relying on factual evidence-based information to make decisions. Disinformation that provokes strong emotions, like outrage, are elevated by social media algorithms, and when people make decisions based on disinformation, it gives rise to what we’ve recently seen in the UK with racist rioting, what we saw in the US over the Capitol Hill riots in 2021, what we saw during Covid years with vaccine resistance, and the polarization that we saw during the Voice referendum.
So just going back to what kinds of false information we saw in relation to the Voice. So I’m going to give you a quick rundown. People on social media were saying that the Voice would give Indigenous people special rights. That’s wrong. The Voice would create a third chamber of Parliament. That the Uluru Statement from the Heart was 26 pages long, and it contained hidden policies, such as reparations for First Nations people. That the Voice would create apartheid in Australia; it would lead to one set of laws for Indigenous people and another set of laws for non Indigenous people. That it would end private land ownership in Australia. That Indigenous people didn’t need a Voice because there were so many other organizations through which they had a voice. That the Voice would establish cultural heritage rights in the Constitution. The Voice would create a new veto power over every new piece of legislation. And that the Voice was actually a Treaty by another name.
Now, in terms of the misinformation that people were spreading in relation to the actual electoral process, they were saying that failure to vote in the referendum would count as a ‘yes’ vote, that the referendum itself was constitutionally illegal, that American Dominion voting machines would be used to give us an unreliable result, that the ballot paper would have two questions, one which was set up as a trick question. The ballot paper would only give you the option to vote yes. The Voice would also ask whether Australia should become a republic. And lastly, that the referendum was rigged in favor of a yes outcome. And if that was true, whoever was rigging it did a really crap job. So there’s lots of worrying stuff there. And of course, it’s all wrong, but some people who were fearful, uncertain, confused about things, actually believed this type of content and shared it. In other words, they amplified it.
What’s even more alarming is that politicians and mainstream media were part of the amplification process. It was politicians who said the Voice would create a third chamber of parliament: that was Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull. Both have since rode back on that. Advance Australia, the lobby group that campaigned against the Voice, was also found to be spreading false information, and the ABC has reported that Tony Abbott is on the advisory board of this group. And mainstream media also created and amplified disinformation. Mainstream media said the Voice would create apartheid and that the Uluru statement had hidden policies and was 26 pages, and that was Sky News.
As fact checkers, we made superhuman efforts to check claims from both sides of the debate, but what we kept seeing was that disinformation was mostly shared by social media users who supported the No campaign, academic research also shows this to be the case. So it came as no surprise to us when we as fact checkers came under attack from those who don’t like to be fact checked. Advance Australia attacked us. Sky News attacked us, and conservative politicians attacked us. But we won’t be scared off by them, because we believe that countering disinformation is important to protect democracy, because without access to accurate information, people cannot make informed choices, especially at the ballot box, and we also believe that our work has impact.
We know that social media platforms could do a lot more to contain the problem of disinformation, so we work in partnership with Meta, that’s the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to fact check their social social media content. When we publish an article saying that information in a particular post was wrong or false, Meta uses its technology to label that post as false and then algorithmically down ranks it so fewer people see it. So there is a real world outcome to our fact checking. Meta does not remove posts as a result of our us finding that the content is false, so there’s no censoring going on.
As a result of the attacks on us last year, we were forced to temporarily pause our fact checking work, but we are about to restart with a slight difference. I wish I could tell you more, but please watch this space. I’ve just come back from Bosnia, which is where the annual global fact checking conference was this year, organized by the International Fact Checking Network. And the two main things being discussed there were the ongoing attacks against fact checkers that are happening all over the world, not just in Australia, and they also talked about the impact of AI, and we’re already seeing how AI is taking things to the next level. There’s so much work to do, and we are doing it. The world is getting better at understanding the disinformation problem.
So I just want to finish up by saying there will be a federal election in this country, probably by May next year. We anticipate that there will be an increase in mis- and disinformation in the lead up to the election, because there always is. We wish we didn’t have to, but we are already preparing for the onslaught which we know is coming, and we think that you too should prepare for that onslaught by informing yourselves about disinformation, what it is, how it works, and the real world harm that it can do. So thank you so much for coming tonight.
Alice Drury
This is equal parts terrifying in that reference to AI, which is on its way, but also heartening, in that you feel like things are getting better. Conscious as well, that RMIT FactLab, you said it was attacked, but you yourselves were the subject of a disinformation campaign as well during the Voice campaign. Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened?
Sushi Das
Yeah, look, we’re constantly under attack, and there seems to be no end to the trolling and the abuse. We basically fact checked three Facebook posts that Sky put out there, and they were the Uluru Statement from the Heart was 26 pages and had hidden policies, that apartheid would be created in Australia, that was Andrew Bolt and Cory Bernardi, and that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People would allow Aboriginal people to create their own country within Australia. All of them were wrong. We found them to be false. We wrote our fact checks, Meta labeled their Facebook posts as false, and they sort of blurred them out. And Sky hated it because they were actively campaigning for the no side. They’re meant to be journalists. But I don’t know how they get away with doing that kind of stuff.
So basically, they attacked us on three fronts. One, they wrote negative stories about us on their platform and broadcast them. And a lot of those stories were basically incorrect, factually incorrect. They made legal threats against us, which they didn’t carry out, and that was directly letters to the Vice Chancellor, and they peppered us with freedom of information requests for internal documents. Of course, that ties us up, you know, in hours of looking for the kinds of things that they want. They’re still looking for information. It was only last week or the week before that, they were on the phone again trying to find out what we’re up to. We don’t know how long their attack is going to go on, but we know we’re not alone. We know that in America, academics at universities have been similarly threatened with legal action, with demands for internal information. We know that places in America, units in universities have actually closed down as a result of that as well.
So I feel like this is the sort of next frontier of what we’re dealing with, which is fact checkers are basically getting in the way of their business strategy, which is the flow of disinformation from them to citizens. And when fact checkers come along, they sort of disrupt the flow of that, and that’s why they don’t like what we do. So that’s essentially, in a nutshell, what happened with Sky News. And as a result of that, you know, we closed down for a short while. We lost a lot of staff, because you can’t expect them to sit around until you’re going to be open again. So we’re just taking on a few more staff, and we will be back. We will be back in a slightly different way, but we will be back. Or as somebody said, fight, fight, fight!
Alice Drury
Fight indeed. Thanks so much Sushi. So to yourself, Yousef, firstly, I want to start by giving you a special thank you for being here tonight and acknowledging like all of our thoughts and prayers in this room are with the people of Gaza and all of the occupied territories of Palestine. Tell us about your personal experience of being targeted by disinformation as a result of your advocacy in support of Palestine.
Yousef Alreemawi
One of the challenges of speaking about Palestine every time I am doing it, and I have been doing it for more than 20 years, is that I think of the absent. I think of those who are not with us today, and those who have attended our concert last month, Jackie, for example, may still remember that the name of the concert we chose was ‘In the Presence of Absence’, which is a reflection of Mahmoud Darwish’s, the Palestinian poet, collection of prose titled ‘In the Presence of Absence’, because since the beginning of our tragedy, absence has been imposed on us, on many forms, by death, by expulsion and by imprisonment, and by denial of freedom of movement, and by different forms. So I want to acknowledge the difficulty, and I want to apologize for every Palestinian who may see my talk later and feel that I wasn’t up to what he or she thinks, but I will try.
On a personal level, as a Palestinian of third or fourth generation Nakba survivors, I came to Australia in 2003 from Saudi Arabia. Most Palestinians are refugees. Most Palestinians do not live in historical Palestine. We are today, 14 million, and 7.5 million of them are in diaspora, and I’m one of them. And when we came here, of course, I didn’t know that I will have the opportunity to talk about Palestine in English, in the form of a radio program, but it was actually instigated by a discussion with one of the Palestinian Australians, who said that he had read something in maybe The Age about the tension between Israel and Lebanon. And the editor said that ‘Lebanon, which is, by the way, the same square kilometers as Victoria’ and then continued. And I said, ‘no, Lebanon is not the same size of Victoria’. Victoria is 200,000 square kilometers and Lebanon is 10,450 square kilometers. How can you get away with a fact error like this in a newspaper? So I said, with all the naivety of beginners, let me fix it.
So I then found 3CR and then started, you know, the segment, which is called Palestine Remembered. And Palestine Remembered was the second name of the show. My first name was ‘from the river to the sea’. And after doing a few episodes from the river to the sea, I thought maybe we need something with ‘Palestine’ in it, because the audience will not, it will not ring any bell if you say, ‘now good morning, dear listeners, you’re listening to from the river to the sea on radio 3CR on 855am’ it’s not gonna stand out as something about Palestine back then. Now everybody knows what it means when you say ‘from the river to the sea’.
Anyway, so when I started that, I was on a student visa and an international student, and it was in 2004, and it was in the atmosphere of post-9/11 and it was during the John Howard Government. And it was in a time where we are told in Australia that we are fighting terrorism in Iraq based on the two pillars of myths. You know, that the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam’s connection to Al-Qaeda, which is a lie, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is a lie. And you all may remember the famous, infamous speech of Colin Powell at the United Nations trying to convince the world that we should do something before Saddam starts a Third World War. So this is the type of atmosphere. Now, I didn’t know that talking in English about Palestine will set off some alarm bells. And of course, I learned it the hard way, because two years later I wanted to renew my student visa to finish my Masters degree. But then I was told that there is a No Further Stay condition on your visa. No Further Stay condition on your visa, which means that you have to go back to where you come from and apply again. You cannot renew your visa onshore.
And to cut a long story short, it was in line with the radio program, and it was based on a lie: that criticizing Israel is anti-semitism. It was a complaint by one of the pro-Israel lobby groups in Australia, who said that this person, this radio program, is anti-semitic, because he says Israel is such and such. And of course, back then I learned the hard way, because we knew that there was something called the flagging policy that the government introduced. Flagging policy is a policy that Howard introduced to Australia, where, if a person might be a source of problem in 10 years time, why don’t you put a flag next to his or her name now. If that person is on a visa, and you think that this person could be of a headache to us, maybe put a flag next to his or her name, and then what that flag means is that when that person comes back to us for renewing his visa, or for acquiring another visa, or for applying for permanent residency, eventually you will have to go back to the Department of Immigration. You have to reapply, the same rule, the harshest way. And then when they reapplied, extending the student visa on me, the extreme harsh way, I did not qualify based on health reasons, because of my disability. So I was told to go back to Saudi Arabia, where I came to Australia from, because you are medically unfit. And this is the price of disinformation. And this is also just an example.
But it’s not about me. It’s not about me. Now, this is just to attend to your question. But the fact that we Palestinians know disinformation, I mean, this is the beginning of our story. And the first lie that the Palestinians were labeled or had to deal with, is that Palestine was a land with no people, for a people with no land. And believe it or not, that was a very famous lie in the 19th Century. It was not even instigated by the Zionists, by the Jewish Zionists. It was instigated by the Christian Zionists. So the first founders of the Zionism, of the Zionist project in Palestine, which is a state of Jewish majority in Palestine, thought that this could work for us. But when they sent a convoy, when Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism and the State of Israel, sent two of the delegates to Palestine, they wrote back to him something simple: the bride is beautiful, but she is taken. Palestine is beautiful, but it’s not a land without a people for people without the land. They knew, but they used it. And I’m sure everyone in this room may have read or heard something about this until today.
And then came 1947. I’m just trying to reflect on disinformation from different parts of our timeline. 1947: the partitioning of Palestine. British Mandate failed to bring peace and law and order to Palestine, and took the Palestine question to the United Nations, which was newly born after the League of Nations, and then the United Nations in ’45. And then in ’47 the issue of what do we do with the conflict between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine? And there was the idea of partitioning. In November ’47, a General Assembly – not Security Council, so it’s non binding – a General Assembly Resolution, divided Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state. And Jerusalem had an international situation where it’s an international city. The Jewish state was 53% of Palestine to those who had controlled 6% of the land only the day before, the day before the partitioning of Palestine, the Zionists in Palestine had control over only 6% of the land, and they were given 53% of the land overnight. And that Jewish state would be maybe half a million to 600,000 Jewish citizens and 450,000 Arabs who have ownership over two thirds of the real estate. Again, more than nearly half a million Arabs lived for centuries, and some of them are the descendants of their Canaanite ancestors for millennia in the designated state for the Jewish state. And they owned two thirds of the real state. And then how can you set up a state without ethnically cleansing this group of people, but you know that ethnic cleansing is unethical, it’s unlawful, it’s illegal, it’s immoral, and you have to do it, and you want to do it, but you give it different names. That is the essence of disinformation.
They have started a campaign of violence and terrorism from the day of the UN resolution in November ’47 all the way to what led to what we call Nakba. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe. And Nakba has two pillars; the expulsion of people and the theft of land. So they went from being given 53% of the land to militarily controlling 78% of the land and ethnically cleansing 900,000 of the 1.4 million Palestinians in 1948. So Nakba is a series of violence and terrorism that’s not just started, but the highest peak of Nakba is November ’47 to January ’49 that led to the expulsion of two thirds of the Palestinian population, and the theft of 78% of the land. Now, what do you call these people who you have stolen their properties, and who you have turned into stateless refugees? Don’t call them refugees. You know what our name is in their books? Absentees. We are absentees. And of course, it took them a year or two to issue the law of absentees. So according to Israeli law, there is a law called the ‘law of absentee’. So the father of my mother, Abdul Karim al Hossari, was an absentee. And therefore, it is not illegal to confiscate his house in Safad to the northern part of Palestine. Safad. First you have to also change the name of Safad, because it’s all about terminology. Change the name, and it became Tzfat, and then confiscate the property under the pretext that Abdul Karim and his family, including my mother, who was born later, a year after that, are all absentees. And, of course, then you don’t say that we actually ethnically cleansed Palestine.
So what did we do? Seven Arab armies raided, you know, raided Palestine, and we defended ourselves, and the Arab armies lost. So excuse my language, shit happens, and we have to control whatever area, because they came to us. There’s no mention that the six or seven Arab armies were no more than 30,000 in total, and no mention that some of the Arab armies were led by Britain. The leader, the head of the Jordanian army that went to Palestine to stop the inception of a Jewish state in Palestine was Globe Pasha, a British officer, the head of the Jordanian army. So you have Jordan, Egypt and Iraq were still under the British Mandate. How do you expect, how do you expect an outcome of a war, when Britain is involved in what sounds like, what looks like, an Arab – Jewish war?
So first, the other thing is that the Palestinians, those 920,000 of the 1.4 million Palestinian population who became refugees and still are denied return themselves, and their second and their third and their fourth generations. They didn’t leave because of fear. They were just told by the Arab armies to go, and the Arab armies lost and some of them, even worse, sold their properties. The Palestinians sold out. This is one of the very bitter, very ugly myths that we had to deal with generation by generation, not just by the pro-Israeli media, but also by some of the Arab population. There is a book by the Saudi historian Fahad al Marek, who was young in ’48 and who had fought in the Saudi army in Palestine, later came back and had to write a book in 60s called ‘A myth fabricated by the Zionists and believed by the fool Arabs,’ [Iftaraaha assahaahiyah wa saddaqahaa mughaffalou al-Arab], to attend to this disinformation, to attend to this lie that the Palestinians sold out. We didn’t sell out. I mean, just imagine. I’m not going to refute this, but just imagine if the 900,000 Palestinians who became stateless and homeless in ’48 had sold out. Would they have lived in poverty afterwards in the camps in Lebanon, and internally displaced in West Bank and Gaza. All of them became poor. All of them were driven out. The father of my father, Sheik Yousef Alreemawi – I was named after him, which is a big responsibility. You know, if you are named after your grandfather, you have to be up to expectations. And now I have 60 something cousins watching closely, you know, being watched, ‘Yousef, you have the name, be careful’ – so Sheik Yousef Alreemawi, when he passed away in 1994 died when he still had the deeds of our land in what later became Israel, more than 200 done, I don’t know what’s equivalent in Australian terms, of green land, very fertile by the river, with a house.
Maybe later, I will be happy to share my personal story. When you know more about the life of Sheik Yousef, he went from this, to having to live in an inhumane condition in a refugee camp near Jericho, and starting, not just from scratch, from very way below zero. Had we sold our property, we wouldn’t have lived in poverty for the next 76 years. And I won’t say more than this on that lie. How many more minutes do I have? Can I wrap up?
Okay, so speaking about disinformation, I would say that Israel is using the general atmosphere, the global atmosphere in the world. When the Palestinian revolution broke out in 1967 it was the time of Cold War, and it was convenient for Israel to label us as ‘radical communists’ who do terrorist acts, because there was radical left groups in Spain, in Italy and around the world. So the Americans, the Australians, understood what it means to go far in your radical views. So labeling the Palestinian resistance as radical communists at the beginning was convenient. And now if you look how Israel is labeling the Palestinian resistance, they will say ‘militant Islam’, because that’s the general atmosphere. It’s everybody will say that there is ISIS, there is Al Qaeda, there is Hamas. And therefore we Israelis are like you Americans, are like you Australians, are like you French, and you European people, we are facing the same enemy, which is militant Islam. So let us do it before it gets back to us.
So I mean, it’s very hard to put boundaries to how we Palestinians have to deal with the price of disinformation, because every day we see new wave and new layers of lies. And the last chapter is October the seventh, which started with that Hamas is beheading babies. Lie. Hamas is setting people on fire when they were alive. Lie. Nobody hold them accountable for those who spread these lies. Nobody said ‘your newspaper said something that were proven to be a lie, and you didn’t issue an apology’, and that is what we need: accountability when it comes to fact checking and disinformation. Thank you.
Alice Drury
Thank you so much, Yousef. I think one thing that’s come up across across the night so far is if we talk about disinformation, it feels like a new word, and we talk about it, we think about online spaces, but actually we just mean lies, and they’ve been around as the justification for land theft and ethnic cleansing forever. And it’s so helpful to hear a concrete, blow-by-blow story of how it plays out. Biao, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a bit about what the experience is in China right now with disinformation? Who’s behind it? What are some of the key issues we might have heard about where disinformation has really been weaponized?
Biao Chen
Hello. So disinformation in China is a little bit different from the other countries. So yeah, it isn’t as we can see from the Voice, you can see lots of the different forces behind it, but in China it’s quite simple. It’s only one, the Chinese Communist Party, behind the disinformation. People from outside of China, we can get confused about the State, government, or the party. But for China, it is one for all. Everything has been controlled by the party, by the Chinese Communist Party. So for the Western democracy countries, everything is ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. But in China, is ‘by the party, of the party and for the party’.
So yeah, the disinformation is very crucial for the Chinese Communist Party and for its grip on the power domestically, and also for just projecting its influences globally. So when we come to how the Chinese Communist Party just operate this kind of disinformation business in China, first of all, you have the Chinese Communist Party just in control of the traditional media, all kinds of media. At the very beginning, it tried to use the form of the traditional media to consolidate its power. In China, all of the media, the traditional media, are state-run, state-backed, state-funded. So in China, people will have to refer to this kind of traditional media as the throat and tongues of the party. These media, the state run media such as Xinhua News Agency and CCTV just spread information or the false information, just aligning with the state policies and the Party’s narrative. And these kind of the traditional media become the primary source of news for many of the Chinese citizens. And also, when the digital age comes, the Chinese government just built the firewall of China, to have the blockage for the Chinese people to get access to the foreign website, to get information. And also get the censorship for all of the digital platforms for the website or search engine, they just apply all of these kind of sensitive words. And so the Chinese citizens get very limited access to the independent source information.
And beyond the censorship, the Chinese Communist Party, also employed, it is called ’50 cent party’. Anyone who posts pro-government comments online, why is it called ’50 cents party?’ It is one post for 50 cents. So in this way, it creates a kind of illusion that the public support the government policies or the Party’s narrative. So that 50 cent party are then posting a lot of the pro-government comments. And also just false information among as well. And also another way is interesting, they use the nationalism as a tool for the disinformation campaign. So in this way, they can then rally the public support, and also framing its policy as essential for the country’s security and greatness, they can then get the support from the people. And also the disinformation campaign will depict external threats, such as Western interference or the separatist movement in this way, to try to justify the Party’s action.
Another way is to use a kind of economic growth narrative. The Chinese rapid economic growth is a cornerstone for the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. The Chinese Communist Party highlights its role in lifting millions of people out of poverty and also transforming China into global economic powerhouse. But at the same time, the Chinese Communist Party downplays the problems, such as the income inequality, corruption, and the environmental degradation. And also another way is in using historical revisionism as a disinformation campaign. The Chinese Communist Party controls the narrative about historical events such as the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and also Tiananmen Square protests. So in this way, the Chinese Communist Party presents a sanitized version of the history so as to cultivate a positive image of itself. So just as the Chinese Communist Party always labeled itself as great, glorious, and correct always and forever.
And another way to do the disinformation campaign in China is just in the suppressing of the dissent, especially for the activists, intellectuals and those who have the different opinion, dissidents. They just use the smear campaign, to describe and portray them as a traitors, as foreign agents, just to minimize their credibility and discourage others from challenging the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. So in this way, they got a huge impact for the disinformation business in China by the Chinese Communist Party. For the many people who have very limited access to independent information will always take the position of the Party.
And also the Chinese domestic disinformation practice also cast the influence on international relationship as well, because the Chinese Communist Party’s disinformation always portrays the foreign countries and the policies in this way, to affect the Chinese people’s public opinion about the foreign countries, and also the international relationship as well. For example, the the disinformation campaign about Western interference. Which then leads to the anti-Western segment, which will just then complicate the diplomatic efforts and also increase tension as well.
So yeah, it is quite easy to see this kind of disinformation in China. So disinformation is not just merely a tool or strategy for the Chinese Communist Party to do it. It is actually a pillar industry. You can see just in the whole media, and also the online, the party the paid, yeah, the industry. It’s a whole industry, just to support its disinformation business. And so we can also see some individual events, such as the Covid-19 pandemics. At the time, early on, the Chinese Communist Party, they downplayed the severity of the outbreak, and also censor all of the information about the virus impact. But later on, just use the disinformation campaign to say how effectively the Chinese government can control the outbreak and also blame the other countries. And see their slow reaction, slow responses about that. And also we can see the the 2019/2020 Hong Kong movement, at the time, Democrat movement, the Chinese Communist Party, using a disinformation campaign, or smear campaign, against some distinguished figures such as Jimmy Lai. PEN Melbourne just held an event most recently about that.
So for the future of the disinformation business by the Chinese Communist Party in China, the new technology coming out will enable the Chinese Communist Party to to do the disinformation business more effectively. But on the other hand, for the Chinese people, they can get more access to the foreign websites or foreign independent information. Currently, if you go to China, you have to use a VPN just for working or just getting the email, just send regularly. And more and more Chinese people in mainland China are now using their VPN and get all of the information around the world. You can also get Facebook, YouTube, yeah, these social medias are forbidden in China. You cannot access it. So in this way, I think in the future, the Chinese government, their monkey business will continue, the disinformation business, but its people will know. They will not believe what the Chinese Communist Party says. Because as the famous Russian writer says, ‘we know they are lying, and they know we know they are lying’. Citizen. Now in China is this kind of situation. So it is a very high pressure for the Chinese Communist Party to control the information, still doing the disinformation business in China, but gradually, more and more people will just know the truth. They will not just believe what the Chinese Communist Party says, Yeah, this is the current situation about who is behind the disinformation business in China and how they did it, and what is the trend for the future. Thank you.
Alice Drury
Thank you Biao. A follow up question that I have for you Biao is: what impact has it had on civil society and people’s sense of trust in one another on the ground in China? Do you feel like, speaking in very broad terms here, but do have people, by and large in China, responded by believing the CCP and following the direction of the CCP? Do people believe wildly different things because they’re relying on very different sources of news? Yeah, what’s your what’s your read on that?
Biao Chen
I think, yeah, the Chinese Communist Party’s disinformation business, it is still working, because a lot of people, they cannot just get access to the outside information and also still take the information from the traditional media and the newspaper, TV station, radio station, as the primary source of the news. So once we just discussed with some friends or even relatives in China, we just talking about some kind of current affairs, we would very have very different opinions, because they still take the Government’s position. We have the different view on the same kind of policies. But some people, they already have the access to the outside world. They just don’t know the truth about it, but they still do not dare to speak, you know, in public, for their own safety. Or even within the WeChat group, or even today, I can see a comment say, then the situation get severe, don’t mention, or do implicate or to mention about somebody. So we all know somebody is who. So it isn’t… everybody know the government is lying, and everybody try to find ways to protect themselves. Yes, because they’re just waiting for the time to come. Yeah.
Alice Drury
Thank you very much. Are you happy to move to audience questions? Cool. So with PEN, they do something really lovely, which is encourage the audience to talk to one another. So I will ask each of you to turn to the person next to you and to discuss. From this discussion, what stands out to you as the most significant issue with this information from tonight’s conversation so far? I’ll call you back in five minutes.
Thanks everyone. I’m going to bring us back. If you can wind up your excellent conversations. We were having very interesting conversations here among the panel, which I might continue on just for a moment more. Yousef, you were speaking to how disinformation upsets social cohesion, something that Biao was just talking to. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that’s played out?
Yousef Alreemawi
The Arab world is a very vast region in the world. It’s 14 million square kilometers. It’s today home of 460 million population, not to include the Arabs who migrated, myself included. And it’s also, in addition to the mainstream ethnic group, which is the Arabs, it is also home for 35 ethnic and religious minorities, and that includes religious minorities, like, for example, the Copts of Egypt, the Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq, and also ethnic minorities, like, for example, the Amazigh of North Africa. They don’t like to be called Berber, Al Berber of North Africa, because this is a colonial term. Al, Amazigh Indigenous group of North Africa; Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. And what happened is that historically, the people of that region were mostly pro-Palestinian. And here in Australia, it’s very unlikely that you will see an Egyptian or Lebanese or, let’s say, Iraqi community organization that will publicly have a pro-Israel position. Or anti-Palestinian position.
But what happened is, in the last 10 to 15 to 20 years, Israel has been very active in upsetting that equilibrium by disinformation. What they did is that they started approaching and talking to the minorities in their land and in diaspora and saying, ‘You know what? We have two things in common. We the Israelis and you the Copts / Assyrians / whatever religious or ethnic minority of the Middle East and North Africa. First thing is that we are the Indigenous group of the land. We are the Indigenous group of Palestine’ – Not the Arabs. Of course, this with total disregard of millennia presence of the Canaanites. Al Canaan in Palestine, we are the descendants of the descendants of the Canaanites – So we are. This is the first pillar. This is the first thing in common. ‘We are the Indigenous group. We are the Indigenous in Palestine. You are the Indigenous in Iraq. You are Indigenous in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. And the Assyrians are Indigenous, and the Coptics are indigenous groups of Egypt, not the Arabs who came and imposed Islam on them.’
And number two, ‘we have in common that we are all the victims of militant Islam. Look what Qaeda did to you in Iraq. Look what ISIS did to you in Mosul. Look what also political Islam and militant Islam did to you in Cairo. And look what Hamas is doing to us. So let’s talk.’ And unfortunately, this is a simple, very simple answer. Of course it’s a myth, of course it’s a lie. But sometimes, and of course, maybe most of the time, the more simple, the more spread the piece of information or disinformation can go. And it was received by people here in Melbourne, to the extent that one day, I was invited to a debate on Palestine, expecting to have, you know, I was with an Australian pro-Palestinian advocate. And then I expected an Australian or maybe an Israeli, but then I found an Egyptian, a Coptic person at the other end. Which is, it wasn’t a surprise, but it was in line with this kind of disinformation. So disinformation upsets the equilibrium, and it turns it into tension. And of course, things can go very wrong from there.
Alice Drury
Common experience of a divide and conquer sort of approach, I suppose. Which we’re hearing across the board, and sounds quite similar, in a way, to the sort of social upset and the confusion that you spoke to Sushi, around the Voice referendum disinformation as well.
Sushi Das
Yeah, I mean, Aboriginal people themselves were divided. Black sovereign movement argued that that the Australian Government had no right to even hold the referendum because they were not sovereign. So in the end, and you know, we had Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who had her own views on how things were. So yeah, disinformation, that’s what it’s designed to do, cut everyone up, separate them. That’s what makes for instability. And of course, when you have instability, so much easier to control people. I mean, that’s really what it’s all about.
Alice Drury
Yeah let’s go to questions. I’ll take maybe one or two questions. We’re running a little behind so we won’t be able to take any more than that. Mic is on its way.
Speaker 1
Thank you. Sushi, starting with you, is there a way of combating some of this tactic that you’ve told us about by turning it back on those people, exposing, just like you have tonight, what they’re doing and doing that publicly? Is there any responsible media, do you think, who could take that on and just say, ‘look what we know what you’re doing’ and let the public know? What do you think?
Sushi Das
Look, I think fact checkers are doing that firstly, and I think the media is trying to do that. But I think the answer, I don’t think the answer actually lies in turning it around and saying, ‘we know what you’re doing’. I think the answer is going to lie in governments taking leadership on this issue and having some sort of legislation which holds the big tech companies to account.
In this country, we’ve got the ACMA bill. It’s just a shorthand for it. And I think there are problems with that bill, because the government’s trying to define what misinformation is here, and when governments define what misinformation and disinformation is, that way lies trouble, because there’s always going to be the Free Speech argument that they’re going to have to deal with. A better way might be to go in the direction of what the European Union has done, which is with the Digital Services Act, which what that does is it asks big tech to identify the issues on their platforms, to take measures to deal with them, and then report on what those measures were to the government. That’s probably a better way of doing it, and I think that that is what we need government to sort of come up with some sort of legislation to hold these big tech companies to account, because they are central to this issue. And the day that they introduced the Share button on Facebook was when it all went feral.
So I think that rather, I mean, we’re doing whatever we can in turning it back on them. We’re doing whatever we can. And of course, we’ve come under attack for just exposing them. We’re just the little guys. Our fact checking team was literally four or five people, but yeah, in the end, I think it’s going to be legislation. It has to be. And of course, that’s going to happen when people understand what the problem is and speak out and demand from their government.
Yousef Alreemawi
Can I reflect on how to convert it from the Palestinian context? I will be very quick. There’s always the question, why Palestine here in Australia? Why Palestine? Why not Democratic Congo? There are so many places in the world where there are injustices. Why single out the Palestinian issue as a non-domestic issue and talk about it? And in fact, Palestine has become one of the moral tests of our time, which is a very broad division between the far right movement and the progressive movement.
If we focus on within the progressive movement only, so you can have progressive views on climate change, and you can have progressive views on minorities rights, and you can have progressive views on LGBTQ, and you can have progressive views on combating fascism and Islamophobia, and you can have progressive views when it comes to the Rights of Indigenous Australia and First Nations, but when it comes to Palestine, all of a sudden you are either silent or even worse, pro-Israel. And that is why there is a concept called progressive except Palestine. PEP. If you look up, there is actually a Wikipedia page called ‘Progressive Except Palestine’ because of that very strong pro-Israel lobby, where it seemed it took out Palestine from that big movement, what you can call it, liberal Left, et cetera, and the progressive world. So how do we combat it? First we have to know that it has become the moral test of our time, just like South Africa was in the 80s, it was the moral test of our time. Yes, it was not an Australian problem to talk about the rights of Black people in South Africa. Yes, but it was a test, and you should stand for it, and rightly so. Now Palestine has become one of the moral tests. So in your discussions around dinner table, do not feel intimidated by this question, why Palestine? That’s one of the ways how we can combat it.
Alice Drury
I think we’ve got time for one more.
Speaker 2
Hi. Firstly, I just wanted to say thank you for such an informative talk. I have a question for Sushi, given that FactLab have re-partnered with Meta, do you believe that’s going to change the relationship that you have with the company, and the way that FactLab try to fight this disinformation going forward? Thank you.
Sushi Das
We always did work with Meta, even before. Sorry. Can you just say your question again?
Speaker 2
Given what happened with Sky News and the temporary ban or removal from the company, do you think that FactLab’s relationship has changed with Meta since that incident, and how you move forward with that?
Sushi Das
I see what you’re saying. So just so that you all know, Sky News wrote a story saying that we were not properly accredited with the International fact checking network, and you have to be accredited with the IFCN in order to be a partner with Meta. That’s how Meta ensures that it works with proper fact checkers at the time when Sky wrote that story, we were in the process of being reaccredited. And reaccreditation can take a long time, because it’s a really rigorous audit that they put you through every year. And we passed that. But Sky took the opportunity to say that it expired and that we were working, you know, somehow, illegally. They were wrong. So, and then, as a result of that, meta said, ‘oh, well, we got to suspend you’. We, when the IFCN came back and reaccredited us, Meta came to us and said, ‘well, what do you want to do? Do you want to continue fact checking or not?’ And we said, we want to continue fact checking.
And so that is what we plan to do. It did not affect our relationship with Meta. We don’t like what they did, and we’ve told them. But we want to carry on fact checking, and we believe in having an open line of communication with big tech, because when you don’t talk to the other side, you’re not going to go anywhere. And it’s the same with if you know anyone who’s gone down a rabbit hole and started believing all sorts of stuff, the first thing we always say, and people always come to us say, ‘Oh, my brother started believing this nonsense. What shall I do?’ Well, the first thing we always say is, don’t stop talking to them. Keep talking to them. Keep that line of communication open, and we believe that it’s really important for us to keep on working with big tech. We know that they’re problem, but we are happy to keep working with them, and they apparently appear to be happy to work with us now.
Speaker 3
Thank you, Alice and our friend in the front row. Just a question for Dr Chen. Thank you for coming and speaking this evening. You said that part of the reason the CCP can so strongly control the flow of information or censorship is through the economic strength of China. Recently, we’ve seen China considering sort of unprecedented things, like intervening in their own bond market. They’ve got mass unemployment, there are some problems mounting. Do you think there will be an inflection point or a collision between economic standards in China and the control the CCP has over information?
Biao Chen
Yeah, this is what we have talked about. What time will count for the people, for the collapse of the disinformation business of the Chinese Communist Party in China? So use the economic growth narrative. The Chinese Communist Party highlights its role in the economic growth, but actually, at the same time, it just downplays all of the other factors for the economic growth. For example, the role of China’s joining WTO, it is very big factor for that, and also the assistance helps them from Japan, Europe, the United States, all of that. The Chinese Communist Party only highlights its role in lifting millions of people out of poverty and transforming China into an economic powerhouse.
Now the time come, I think, or in other words, it is coming soon. Now in the time of the recession and very severe situation in China. Everybody can feel the suffering economically and also mentally as well. But yeah, we can hear a lot of the news, and people just commit suicide or jumping from the high buildings or something like that, just because of the tough situation. But still, nobody would just come up against this kind of the disinformation business. Why? Because it is, yeah, just afraid of the the kind of the high pressure and the power of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party can choose everything in China. So they just keep in silence. They just don’t wait for the time to come. So we just talk about what time the time will come. Nobody knows, could be tomorrow. Could be overnight, could be in 10 years. Just as the Bible says we don’t know that what time. It just says you don’t know when the thief will come to your house. Yeah, it’s a same kind of situation in China. Everybody just waiting for that.
Most recently, the kind of rumor just then spreading in social media about the health problem of Xi Jinping say, possibly just because of his health problem, we got some changes for the Chinese Communist Party. But actually, no, I think if Xi Jinping has a health problem or just an out of the office, as long as the Chinese Communist Party in office, it will be still the same situation. Everything will be kept the same. So everybody in China are just waiting for the time to come. So we know the time will come, and we are waiting for that. Just as we say then the Arab Spring, yeah, the spring just comes overnight. So also this kind of the change or revolution will happen in China soon.
Alice Drury
All right, so we’ve heard that the time will come in China. We’ve heard the one thing that we can do is when we’re having conversation, conversations with our friends and family and they say, ‘why all this talk about Palestine?’ We tell them, because this is the moral issue of our time. And we can also tell people about the Digital Services Act in the EU and tell people to get behind it and to hold our our government to the same standard so that we actually properly regulate platforms.
Yousef Alreemawi
I just want to recommend a theatrical play. Luckily, it’s on YouTube, and it was made by British Jewish writer Carol Churchill, and it’s called Seven Jewish Children. Seven Jewish Children is a 10 minute play by Carol Churchill, and the play takes the form of tell her, do not tell her, to reflect the tension within the Jewish community over how to describe events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which tells you that if you want to fabricate and spread disinformation, you have to internalize it first. Thus you have to really believe it. And I will just, I want you to look up. And this was written in 2009 after the Israel war on Gaza, we thought that this would have made the world to wake up and realize but we were wrong. I will just read a few lines from that theatrical play. ‘Tell her again. This is our Promised Land. Do not tell her. They said it was a land without people. Don’t tell her. I wouldn’t have come if I had known. Tell her. Maybe we can share. Don’t tell her that.’ So I will leave you with this recommendation, thank you.
Alice Drury
It’s perfect. Many thanks everyone for coming out on a Thursday night. Many thanks to PEN for hosting this great event, and thanks again to our panelists.
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