Which Side Are You On?

Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Big Tech and progressive movements for change.

Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please sign up!

A week ago, if you thought that a possible invasion of Ukraine by Russia would result in such a clarifying moment in the global struggle between democracy and autocracy, congratulations for your foresight. Given how much those lines have been blurred by rampant disinformation campaigns, willful collusion from the Republican right (to the point that a recent Economist/YouGov poll found that more Republicans had a favorable view of Vladimir Putin than Joe Biden), and a kind of squeamishness from Democratic leaders to talk resolutely and repetitively about the threat of authoritarianism at home, it’s understandable if you were skeptical of such a transformation. It was only weeks ago, for example, that the Biden Administration held a global “Summit for Democracy” with all the impact of a feather hitting the ground, and afterwards a long list of American civil society organizations decided to send the White House an open letter pleading with it to do more to lead on domestic efforts to implement new policies and live up to commitments to strengthen democracy at home. And, as I noted here just a few issues back, most Americans don’t intuitively rally to the banner of “democracy” in the abstract.

Today, though, it feels like we have all read the title of Astra Taylor’s terrific book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and decided we don’t want to miss democracy. Thanks to Putin’s decision last Thursday February 24th to attack the heartland of Ukraine, the global stakes have been clarified. If, as some more perceptive observers have argued, we’ve been in a new world war since 2014, when Putin first moved on Ukraine and began aggressively targeting the West with information warfare, then the full-scale invasion now underway has finally brought into sharp relief what it means to stand for democracy (however flawed it may be in practice). In that context, here’s a quick tour of The Connector’s  horizon, looking first at how the tech sector is responding to the war and then at how social movements are responding.

The day of Putin’s invasion, my friend Justin Hendrix, CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, put out a clear call for change, titled “Silicon Valley Must Pull the Plug on the Kremlin.” Analogizing the attack to Hitler’s September 1939 invasion of Poland, he asked:

“Imagine there is a set of major publishers based in the United States who channel Hitler’s propaganda campaign across the globe, including to a substantial American audience. Imagine Hitler has built an incredible capacity to manipulate media, use out of context images and film, create the impression of support by inventing false personas, and to engage in a variety of other tactics that have been observed to advance his aims, taking advantage of the capabilities these publishers provide and their lax enforcement of their own standards. Imagine that every official and government entity loyal to Hitler also has a deal with these publishers, and their own means to easily reach a global audience instantly. Would you demand those publishers pull the plug on Hitler, or would you defend the German state’s right to some confused notion of ‘free speech,’ even as Hitler sets out to destroy the lives of millions?”

So far, Big Tech’s response to Putin has included Meta/Facebook first prohibiting Russian state media from running ads or monetizing its platforms anywhere in the world and more recently announcing that it would block key Russian media outlets like Russia Today across Europe; Twitter pausing all Russian ads in Ukraine and labeling Tweets that share links to Russian state-affiliated media; Google providing free security protection to a number of Ukrainian websites; and YouTube stepping up its efforts to remove misinformation. It’s a start, but the tech platforms are still enabling all kinds of troubling behavior.

For example, Russia Today is still being hosted on YouTube, where it has close to 5 million subscribers. Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Federov has written YouTube CEO Susan Wojkicki asking her to block RT along with other Russia-backed media sites, to no avail so far, though two days ago the platform suspended several Russian channels, including RT, from monetizing its presence. Of all the major platforms, Meta seems to be the most pro-active, perhaps a reflection of how much its newly elevated VP of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, a Brit, understands the stakes and also wants to make his own mark. But Facebook can certainly do a much better job of labeling and blocking Russian propaganda than it is currently doing. So far Apple has said and done little about Ukraine’s requests to choke off Russian access to its platforms, most notably its App store, while Microsoft president Brad Smith has made clear that his company is working in close cooperation with Western governments and striving to defend Ukraine’s digital infrastructure from cyber-attacks. MSN.com and other Microsoft properties are blocking all RT and Sputnik content and de-ranking their search results on Bing. (The Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center is tracking how social media companies are responding to pressure from both Ukraine and Russia, if you want to dig deeper.)

Over in the alternative universe that is Big Crypto, major exchanges are balking at requests from Ukraine to block Russian and Belarusian users. Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and KuCoin all said they wanted to remain neutral and would not freeze the accounts of innocent users without a legal requirement to do so. (The zeal for legitimizing crypto—even as it emerges as a key backstop for corrupt transfers of money worldwide—hasn’t abated in the slightest; see for example Bradley Tusk’s comments over at Protocol, where he wishes that President Biden would come out for the industry tonight during his State of the Union speech.)

Big Tech platforms like Meta argue that they don’t want to pull the plug on their services in Russia because so many ordinary Russians use them, in some cases for socially beneficial purposes like protesting and organizing against the invasion, as Clegg recently tweeted. The ethos of “We don’t want to be in the business of deciding what kind of political speech is OK” is still strong at these places, even though what it really stands for is: “It’s really expensive for us to have to moderate speech responsibly and that department is too much of a cost-center already.” So tech platforms that are centered on fast, cheap growth and high profits love to turn the tables and claim to be agents for good even in bad places. Of course, the same argument could be made about Russia’s access to the international monetary system, which is being choked off by tough new Western sanctions, causing a crash in the ruble. Undoubtedly that is hurting ordinary Russians as well and making it more expensive for them to organize protests against the war, but you don’t hear any banks trying to make that argument. What this means is those of us who care about democracy, abroad or at home, still have much to do both to pressure Big Tech to stop servicing dictatorial regimes and to get our own government—which too often is in the thrall of corporate interests—to force it to choose sides.

While choices made by the Big Tech platforms still have inordinate influence over the health and future of democracy here and abroad, so too do the choices of mass social movements and their organizations. On the Right, there are some signs that the pre-Trump GOP hasn’t completely disappeared, with many Republican senators voicing their support for tough sanctions against Putin. On the other hand, the MAGA wing of the GOP hasn’t backed down on its affection for the strongman and his “anti-woke” politics, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it. The “People’s Convoy” has experienced some hiccups out west, but is still on the road to Washington, DC, with hundreds if not thousands of anti-vaxxers and election deniers still hoping that their rhetoric about Democratic tyranny in America will somehow still resonate with their fellow citizens, who are right now paying far more attention to a miles-long convoy of Russian armor on its way to besiege Kyiv.

On the left, as usual, things are a muddle.

While humanitarian and refugee aid organizations like Amnesty International and the International Rescue Committee have sprung into action mobilizing funds and other forms of support for civilians in Ukraine, much of the civil society ecosystem is still thinking about events overseas and pondering what to do. Many of the biggest organizing groups in the country are also still implementing plans that pre-dated the Ukraine invasion. So, for example, right now the Sunrise Movement is all in for Jessica Cisneros, who is challenging Rep. Henry Cuellar in a Texas primary today; the climate justice group has yet to fully mobilize to challenge efforts by American energy companies to get the Biden administration to loosen up domestic rules on oil and gas drilling in response to the global energy crunch. Civil rights groups like the NAACP, the Leadership Conference and Color of Change are focused on Biden’s new Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, on fighting the backlash against teaching about racism, and on intersectional issues like abortion rights.

To be sure, it’s only been a few days since Russian forces invaded, and bricks and mortar organizations don’t pivot as fast as digital-first e-groups. About 153,000 people have signed a petition created by MoveOn Civic Action expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine that went up last Thursday. Indivisible National sent out an email urging solidarity with Ukraine. So did J Street. On the other hand, Color of Change, the country’s premier online racial justice organization, has yet to even tweet about the Ukraine war, even as African students and other people of color trying to leave Ukraine along with other civilian refugees face blatant discrimination.

Among longstanding antiwar organizations that aim to organize Americans concerned about US foreign policy, imperialism, colonialism and nuclear proliferation, there’s a split. Win Without War, a coalition of 37 national groups that was founded to try to head off the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, supported the Biden Administration’s efforts to head off Putin’s attack and has tried to emphasize diplomacy over war. It has stayed silent about the possibility of NATO sending military aid to Ukraine, only insisting that any new military deployments by the US to the region be done in full compliance with Congress’ constitutional war powers. Win Without War opposed US military intervention in the Syrian civil war, back when the Obama administration teetered toward same, and as a peace organization it understandably wants to head off framing that tends to lead to more money for the Pentagon. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, that is the path of least resistance in Washington. And there are rumors that the GOP will respond to Putin’s provocation by demanding the Pentagon budget be increased another $100 billion a year, to nearly $1 trillion. (Build the Military Back Better, they would call it.)

World Beyond War, a more leftwing formation, is calling for two things: “Russia Out of Ukraine” and “NATO Out of Existence.” CodePink, a key partner in World Beyond War and a longstanding antiwar group, seems more focused on criticizing the US and NATO for “setting the stage for this crisis,” as if Putin’s xenophobia, corruption and authoritarianism was incidental to the current situation. (An online petition from Code Pink that urges a diplomatic end to the war, criticizes Biden for imposing sanctions that will hurt ordinary Russians and harps on the NATO expansion issue currently has about 7,000 signatures). The same seems to be true for the Democratic Socialists of America, which issued a statement condemning Russia’s invasion and calling for the dissolution of NATO that used language straight out of an old Comintern playbook. (To wit: “While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative.”) Whatever you may say about NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s post-Soviet borders and the path not taken after the end of the Cold War, the fact is that the newly independent countries formed after the USSR collapsed asked voluntarily to join NATO, they were not pushed.

So, at a moment when the most obvious thing to do is stand with Ukrainian patriots and democrats who want to keep their country independent of dictatorial Russian rule, progressives in America want to debate the finer points of history. Even as history delivers an international hero in Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is both standing up against one of the world’s most corrupt and dictatorial men and for democracy. Does everything really need to be so complicated?

Related: Here are some Ukraine-based organizations to donate to:

-Razom for Ukraine: Expat pro-democracy organization founded to support the 2014 Maidan movement

-Come Back Alive: purchasing equipment in support of the Ukrainian Army

-Hospitallers: a civilian medical battalion

-The Kyiv Independent: an English-language journalists collective born out of the closing of the Kyiv Post.

Also related: Say hello to Action for Democracy, a new US-based 501c4 nonprofit that wants to empower democratic actors around the world to rebuild and defend their democracies. First stop, Hungary.

—War has changed: The Ukrainian newspaper Pravda has posted the leaked personal data of 120,000 thousand Russian soldiers purportedly fighting in Ukraine, obtained by the Center for Defense Studies think tank. And the former head of Yandex’s news division, a leading Russian news site, has called on his colleagues to “stop being accomplices to a terrible crime” and start posting true information about the war.

—If you need just one: Here’s a stunning visualization of how attention has shifted in the English-speaking world, based on which pages were most viewed on English Wikipedia between February 20-26.

Odds and Ends

—Congrats to the civic tech team at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, which just announced more than $5.75 million in new funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Blue Meridian Partners, the Ballmer Group, the Knight Foundation, the Siegel Family Endowment for a portfolio of projects focusing on improving digital benefits provision, strengthening government digital infrastructure, helping cities with dedicated tech teams and sharing software across governments.

—Blue Ridge Labs, the Brooklyn-based civic tech accelerator that spawned successful civic tech start-up Propel (among many), is looking for applicants for its 2022 Fellowship round. They provide a full-time stipend, health insurance, a research budget and valuable coaching. The deadline to apply is March 24.

—Civic tech platform NationBuilder has rolled out access to ActionButton, a simple tool for building shareable buttons that anyone can use to prompt their community to do things like donate, petition, contact your representative, take a poll or volunteer.

—Say hello to Nonprofit Cyber, a coalition of 22 global cyber-security organizations.

—BlueTent’s team has reviewed the Movement Voter Project, reporting that it “fills a valuable niche in the ecosystem and we highly recommend it.”

End Times

An apropos and rare version of a familiar song from Patti Smith that she posted on her and Fred’s anniversary.