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Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”

the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few

Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.

output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem

the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place

the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.

employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.

too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity

We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.

the government first needs to contain the spread of the left

The left, however, puts up genuine systemic resistance: They reject the idea that the Turkish nation is pure and infallible. Like leftists elsewhere, they deconstruct official history, focusing on massacres of minorities and exploitation of the working classes. There is also an inextricable tie to the Kurdish movement, which in turn is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an insurgency that has been waging war on the Turkish state for over four decades. The connection between the non-Kurdish left and the Kurdish movement is complicated and has gone through various stages in the recent past. For the Turkish right, there is little difference between leftist subversion and Kurdish insurrection. “I joined the police to beat up Communists” a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.

Many in the urban middle class, who are fairly indifferent about Kurdish rights, wanted to see Demirtas grow the HDP into a Turkish-Kurdish version of the European Greens. The idea at the time was to also expand into a grand center-left coalition that would prevent Erdoğan from establishing his hyper-centralized presidential system. Their momentum was cut short when months after the coup attempt, in December 2016, the government detained Demirtas on charges of terrorism and began a ruthless crackdown on the HDP’s activities that has since only gained in intensity.

The second part of the government’s strategy is to keep the left — crippled and branded as terrorists — within the political system. While Turkey’s politics is polarized between the government and the opposition, this creates a second polarization, this time within the opposition camp. It is this second polarity where the vast majority of political discourse takes place. From the perspective of a nationalistic system of valuation, in which being “local and national” reigns supreme, this is a fatal flaw. On the one hand, the various factions of the opposition can’t win a national vote unless they partner with the HDP to form a 50 percent bloc against Erdoğan. On the other, the nationalists within the opposition cannot be seen working with the “terrorists” of the pro-Kurdish left.

the People’s Republican Party (CHP), Turkey’s founding and currently main opposition party, has tried to contain this “patriot-terrorist” polarity. Its umbrella candidates for the presidency, ranging from the soporific Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu in 2014, to the firebrand Muharrem Ince in 2018, have failed. In the 2019 municipal elections, however, the CHP’s mayoral candidates did well, uniting the Kemalist-nationalist camp, Islamists, liberal cosmopolitans, as well as leftists and even some sympathizers of the Kurdish movement. These candidates won against Erdoğan’s men in all major cities, including Ankara and (in a repeat election) Istanbul. This was the first, and so far only, time Erdoğan’s containment of the left had been breached.

The absurd accusations of fraud and coup-abetting aside, there is something to the idea that the opposition wants things to get worse. The Erdoğan government’s consolidation over the past decade has been so suffocating for opposition voters that many do look for deliverance in economic or natural disaster.

restructuring of the media. For the past few years, the government has been taking over media channels that centrist voters traditionally follow, then gradually shifting their tone to favor the government. The Dogan Media Group, owner of Hurriyet (Turkey’s former newspaper of record) and CNN Turk (a 24-hour TV news channel) used to cater to a secular, urban, and increasingly progressive audience. The group’s main audience overlapped with the centrist-opposition CHP’s voter base, whose older members are secularist-nationalists and younger members (often their children) are leftist-progressives. In March 2018, the media group was sold to an Erdoğan-friendly conglomerate, which fired many of its veteran journalists and changed editorial guidelines. The result has been a desensitized, less colorful version of the jingoist carnival running across Erdoğan’s formal channels. CNN Turk, especially, became a tool for the government to enter the living rooms of CHP voters and tell them that they were voting for terrorist collaborators. So insidious were these attacks that the CHP had to ban its members from getting on the channel, and call upon its electorate to boycott it.

 Erdoğan said “We have 18 martyrs and close to 200 wounded. In our country, we have the terror group’s so-called political organism. Aside from that, our nation is now in a state of Yekvücut.” The term is a favorite of the president. It is a combination of the Farsi term “Yek” meaning “single” and the Arabic word “vücut” meaning “existence,” or in the Turkish use, “body.” Erdoğan was thinking of the nation as a single biological organism, with the leftists and the Kurdish movement as foreign bodies

The opposition media — largely relegated to the internet — was reporting on the plight of the working class and the brewing economic crisis. Like free media across the West, they also questioned the quality and veracity of their government’s COVID-19 data. In a speech delivered in May, Erdoğan was unusually angry. He had clearly expected a Yekvücut moment and was struggling to understand why it hadn’t come about. His strategy to create a “local and national” opposition wasn’t working, and the frustration of it seemed to hit him head on. “I want to warn once again the media and other representatives who are in league with the CHP’s leaders,” he said, before launching into what was — even for him — an unusually vituperative attack: “You are not national, and your localness is in question,” he said, “you have always sided with whoever was treacherous [bozguncu], whoever was perverted, whoever was depraved” adding, “you are like the creatures in mythology that only feed on enmity, hate, fear, confusion and pain.”

the Erdoğan government finally seeks to pull the entire bloc to the right. This means focusing on liberal-minded urbanites whose nationalism has lapsed, and rekindling their faith in the national mythos. This is the most challenging aspect of its effort, and where it has done most poorly.

The Erdoğan government may have cut short the HDP’s rise, but it hasn’t been able to prevent leftist ideas from spreading. The CHP’s youth wings today are highly class-conscious and hostile to militant nationalism. Figures like the CHP’s Istanbul provincial head Canan Kaftancıoğlu , who campaign on a mix of feminism, workers’ rights, and anti-fascist slogans, are gaining a national following. The polarization within the opposition is likely deepening, with part of the 30 million become more “national,” while another part is becoming more leftist. This means that the great mass of right-wing sentiment is growing, but so is the left-wing minority. The “problem,” in the government’s view, may no longer be 30 million strong, but it is more acute, and perhaps more vexing, than before.

(gun ownership has soared since the 2016 coup attempt)

To Turkey’s governing class, the military coup of their imagination is not a matter of defending against an armed force trying to take over the government. Rather, it is a night of free-for-all, in which politics is stripped down to its violent core, and a majority at the height of its powers can finally put down the enemy within: the haters, the doubters, the creatures of mythology.

“Turkey will not only reach its 2023 goals [the centennial of the Republic], it will also be rid of the representatives of this diseased politics,” he said in May, hinting that he might cut the left out of the political system entirely. If this should happen, politics would be an uneven contest between Islamist, pan-Turkic, and secularist hues of Turkish nationalism. Far off, in the back streets of the big cities and in the Kurdish provinces, in second-hand bookshops and hidden corners of the internet, there would be a progressive left, weathering out what is surely going to be a violent storm.

the Yellow Peril illustrations of the 19th century that shaped racist measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Across these movements, illustrators formalized Chinese influence as fictitious characters—ghosts, apes, Godzilla communists, Uncle Sam-eaters—neglecting the reality of what actually met the eye: exploited workers, opportunity-seeking immigrants, new markets for Western enterprise interests, etc.

Such visual shorthands are useful but also dangerous. They mirror the way America is depicted from the other side. China Daily’s political cartoons fanatically use Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty in any opportunity to portray American hypocrisy, in the same fashion as Soviet media did during the Cold War.

Every photo montage or threatening Maoist rendering of Xi promotes a simplified narrative of China and authoritarian horror.

The Chinese government has implemented an extremely comprehensive surveillance regime, especially in colonized areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Increased reporting on this topic has given way to a sub-branch of visuals characterizing China as a mass-surveillance state. Imagery of security cameras, facial recognition frames, and dramatically posed or saluting soldiers are among the usual suspects that are superimposed on a red background with the five gold stars of the Chinese flag.

These images also emphasize the technological aspect of surveillance over the human. Global tech runs on human power, from Facebook’s Philippines-based monitoring centers to the estimated 2 million workers who maintain China’s own firewall. It takes people to scrutinize and interpret behavior even if it has been filtered by artificial intelligence, to identify keywords for monitoring online, to decide whether an action crosses a line, and to choose what the punishment will be for crossing it

when the toll of COVID-19 on American lives became too real to ignore, U.S. coverage expanded to show its impacts in hospitals, schools, the workplace, and the home. As a result, we witnessed innovations in how we could tell these stories visually. The attitude went from “look at them” to “this is us.” Editors, photographers, and illustrators were obligated to consider how subjects would be depicted with respect, honesty, and care.

Authoritarianism can be treated as a threat to Chinese life, rather than a Chinese threat to the United States. To take China seriously means taking seriously the pain and deaths of the people in Wuhan alongside anxieties about how Xi’s leadership or surveillance affects the West. The focus must shift to processing life under the circumstances created by authoritarian rule, rather than reproducing the illusions spun by headline culture. It should center the people affected themselves. How might they reflect on China’s issues? How might we portray those views?

five of the seven libraries shut by East Sussex County Council last year, like Pevensey Bay, have yet to re-open, despite one county council chief boasting last July: “Six of the seven closed libraries have either already reopened or are reopening as community facilities”.

journalists under-report incidents they consider minor, commonplace or part of the job, or where they fear reprisals.

most corruption reporting did not take place in the mainstream media, except in France, Germany and Scandinavia, where journalism had a better standing. Independent and non-profit media outlets were among the most vulnerable to financial pressures and the target of frequent threats, whether in terms of staff safety or lawsuits

Media concentration has become a growing issue for journalists across EU35, notably in Hungary.

The assassination of independent Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in a car bomb on 16 October 2017 marked a dark new trend emerging in the EU35: the murder of three investigative journalists in less than 12 months. Caruana Galizia’s death was followed by the murder of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová on 26 February 2018, and the rape and murder of Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova on 6 October 2018. Authorities say Marinova’s death is not connected to her being a journalist, a claim some colleagues have disputed.

“The Council of Europe study on self-censorship among journalists has shown that the main form of pressure is ‘psychological violence’, which is mainly visible by intimidation used by public authorities which has a clear chilling effects on media freedom. We are convinced that many investigative journalists are the target of this type of bullying,”

For journalists reporting on corruption, the threat of legal action is a very serious one, which impacts what one is able to write, particularly for investigative centres with limited resources

Official willingness to discredit and defame journalists is a Europe-wide phenomenon, but one that is especially acute for independent media outlets that specialise in investigative journalism into official corruption.

To DAU’s producers and editors, and some of its celebrity-artist guests, the project has become a vibrant creative and intellectual community, even a way of life. To anyone outside it, the project can seem unwelcoming

I’ve never encountered a project whose monumental, megalomaniacal ambitions are so dramatically at odds with the uneven final product. Although maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s all a big metaphor for the Soviet Union.

at turns maddening, boring, and pornographic

Khrzhanovsky moved to Kharkov, Ukraine, built a replica of a top-secret Soviet research facility, and commissioned about 400 people to live and work there for two years and reenact 30 years of Soviet history, from 1938 to 1968. The participants had to wear their period costumes even when the cameras weren’t rolling. More than 350,000 people auditioned. From 2009 to 2011, the director shot more than 700 hours of raw footage.

the set began to take on a life of its own, one that seemed to echo the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were told to act as prison guards and got overzealous about the job. The DAU films had no script, only guided improvisation. The line between reality and fiction began dissolving. Offscreen and on, the participants fell in love, and more than a dozen babies were born.

The director cast Radmila Shchegoleva, the only professional actor in the core group, to play Dau’s wife, Kora. Before filming began, Khrzhanovsky had Shchegoleva spend a year preparing for the role, working in a chocolate factory and living in a communal apartment as Kora had done.

He was self-consciously making fun of his Soviet affectations, while also embracing them. He was pretending to be a sadist, but also just might be a sadist. He certainly seemed like a man with teenage fantasies about sex and control and way too big a budget.

In their meticulous period reconstructions, the films operate as a critique of the Soviet regime, but also exude a genuine nostalgia for it

Filming ended in late 2011, when some neo-Nazis whom Khrzhanovsky invited from Moscow to spice up the narrative destroyed the film set, which the director had everyone refer to as “the Institute.” It was all captured in a DAU film that I’ve heard is engrossing. How could it not be? A Jewish director engaging with neo-Nazis. An artist turning the destruction of his own work into art, a not-so-subtle nod to Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century godfather of Russian anarchist thought. Perhaps it was the only way to end a film shoot that could have lasted forever.

Before entering the theaters you have to check your cellphone at the door. Instead of tickets, visitors are granted “visas” for six hours, 24 hours, or multiple-entry across the length of the run. I got an unlimited visa, which meant answering a psychometric questionnaire.

To help design a program that would create viewing itineraries based on people’s answers to the questionnaire, DAU’s producers spoke with Cambridge Analytica, the now-infamous British political-data firm that was hired by Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and which Special Counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating for alleged misuse of the private data of Facebook’s 50 million users. But DAU’s executive producer, Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon, told me they never hired the company. “They were just not very good,” she said. Instead, they hired Truth, a London-based agency that specializes in psychometric profiling.

a screen divided into 16 windows, exploring different plotlines and finding more information about the central characters—a project called DAU Digital that will soon go live online

The sex and manipulation didn’t seem to serve any greater artistic purpose, even if the participants had joined the project of their own free will. Also, if DAU isn’t scripted, were we seeing real drinking, real puking, and real sex?, I asked Khrzhanovsky. “Yes,” he said, they were having actual sex. So what kind of direction had he given the characters? What’s the difference between art and pornography? “You should answer me,” he said. I told him I wasn’t the creator. We went around in circles a bit. “It is sex, but I think it doesn’t matter if it’s with penetration or without penetration. What matters is what happens between people,” he said.Well, here I disagree. If there’s one line between art and pornography, it’s the line between simulated sex and real sex. Before filming, had he asked Natasha if she was comfortable having sex on camera? “When you invite people to this kind of project, generally you have all possible forces there and of course you discuss about sex, about arrest, about words you cannot pronounce,” Khrzhanovsky said. He said Natasha was Ukrainian, and not a sex worker, and that she and Bigé, her onscreen lover, continue to be part of the project. “Why do people try to be more moral than the people who participate? It’s a question about the question,” he told me.

an industrial soundscape composed by Brian Eno, who said at the press preview that DAU was “the most insanely ambitious project” he’d ever been involved in

From the outset, there have been complaints about the project’s working conditions. The writer Michael Idov visited the set in 2011 after hearing stories about the “survivalist camps” environment, and wrote a vivid, unsettling account in GQ. Some participants told Idov they thought their apartments had hidden cameras filming them at all times. Khrzhanovsky told me he’d installed the hidden cameras but never activated them and never forced anyone to do anything against his or her will. It was all a game, he said.

I don’t think the DAU films start the slightest serious debate about #MeToo or anything related to it, except a debate about the director’s own attitudes toward women on and off the set. I kept thinking back to the Cognac-bottle scene. The only thing that seemed to distinguish that movie from pornography was the involvement of serious artists and scientists in other aspects of the project. Their reputations gave cover to something quite creepy. DAU is a cagey project that largely gets a pass because it poses as an artistic exploration of control, authoritarianism, and the exploitation of women, when what’s going on here might just be plain exploitation.

DAU in Paris is a massive Gesamtkunstwerk without much Kunst. It’s a nightclub disguised as an art installation. It’s a party—and it makes you feel as if you’re not invited. DAU is a case study in how word of mouth spreads among artists, and how the Paris cultural establishment will seemingly embrace any project that affirms its commitment to the avant-garde, no matter how grotesque or banal. The true work of art here may be that Khrzhanovsky managed to pull it off at all.

The way we talk about social media is central to narratives that blame the oppressed for their own oppression. Online bigotry, abuse and trolling are often framed as problems of the unwashed masses, who need to be regulated by ‘benign’ institutions such as global data corporations or the police. In reality, whilst racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-immigrant hysteria and other forms of bigotry feature up and down the social spectrum, their recent mobilization is part of a different story. It has been led and co-ordinated by elite networks, seeking to reshape the world at the dusk of neoliberalism. And they are often in direct collaboration with these supposedly respectable institutions, from Facebook to the FBI.

the decade since the financial crisis has accelerated the emergence of a new global oligarch class. With growing wealth has come growing power and a growing ability to shape political debate through the dominant communications technology of the era: TV and the internet. As has long happened with right-wing movements, they have done so in close collaboration with military and security networks. Because the era is neoliberalism, those networks are largely privatised, made up of mercenary firms with names like Palantir, Arcanum, SCL, AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica.

Leave.EU, associated with the further-right UK Independence Party, fronted by iconic blazered bigot Nigel Farage and primarily funded by an insurance man called Arron Banks. (Banks, by my sums, claims to have funnelled about £15m into the group

We know that the person who introduced the UKIP frontman, Nigel Farage, to the supposed money man, Arron Banks, is the Isle of Man-based Brexit-backing billionaire Jim Mellon, who made millions from mass privatisations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And we know that Arron Banks lied about meetings with the Russian embassy, to which it now turns out he was a regular visitor, discussing various business opportunities.

The Commission has concluded that it has ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that Mr Banks was not the true source’ of the millions he poured into the Brexit campaign. After London’s Metropolitan Police didn’t bother to pick up the relevant files for months, Banks is now at last being investigated by the UK’s National Crime Agency.

How Banks’s millions were spent is, largely, a mystery. Under the referendum rules, Leave.EU could spend only £700,000 in the last ten weeks of the campaign, but spending before that period isn’t restricted and doesn’t have to be declared. When I compared the declared donations to Banks’s various groups and the amounts they said they spent in that limited period, there was a gap of £11m.We don’t know how that was spent. However, the most likely destination of the missing millions is online adverts

Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK where political donations aren’t public: a provision that the main parties had managed to smuggle into law during the peace process, in theory as a way to protect donors from reprisals. Someone was using this loophole to flood cash into the referendum campaign.

We now know that the donation was £435,000 – around 20 times what the DUP spent in the general election in June 2017. We forced the DUP to reveal that the money had come via a previously unknown group in Glasgow called the Constitutional Research Council, chaired by the former vice-chair of the Scottish Conservatives, Richard Cook.We discovered that Richard Cook set up a company in 2013 with Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the former head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service, and with a man called Peter Haestrup, who admitted to us that he was involved in running hundreds of Kalashnikovs to Hindu terrorists in West Bengal in 1995 – though he hinted at intelligence service links, telling my colleague Peter Geoghegan that he was ‘on the right side – that time’.

Cook’s group, the Constitutional Research Council, also provided a route for cash to be funnelled into the key organisation of Brexit-backing Tory MPs, the European Research Group.

Ruling classes have always sought to blame bigotry on the working classes

Vote Leave was eventually fined by the regulators over a different affair, where it got round referendum spending limits by giving £675,000 to a small campaign run by a fashion student in his early twenties called Darren Grimes

Vote Leave gave £100,000 to another group, Veterans for Britain, which in many ways represents the core of the part of the establishment which brought Brexit to Britain.Veterans for Britain is more than the hobby of a few ex-squaddies. Its advisory board includes a collection of very senior retired military figures. Most senior of them all is Field-Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of British armed forces and chief of defence staff.

There is no evidence that Palantir was involved in the Brexit referendum. However, another mercenary surveillance/propaganda firm sat at the very centre of the Brexit solar system, arguably the star around which both campaigns orbited. And that company was Cambridge Analytica.

Vote Leave’s online operation was run by people who learnt their skills as mercenary military propagandists

while the supposedly respectable official Leave campaign had focussed on the economy in the traditional media, its targeted Facebook adverts, seen by millions of people across the country, focussed very heavily on immigration and on Islam

During the referendum, the ideas – often straight lies – promoted in these adverts took hold in the minds of many voters; particularly effective was the fiction that Turkey is on the verge of joining the EU. This social media campaign didn’t exist in a vacuum, of course – it acted in concert with the oligarch-owned tabloid press.

The idea that powerful groups would spread racist messages through the dominant media is nothing new. In the UK, we’ve had tabloid newspapers for decades. In Italy, similar ideas are promoted on TV by the Berlusconi-owned media, and across the western world powerful groups have always used the dominant communications technology of the era to shape political debate.

Online communications technology is sometimes described as though it’s some kind of voodoo – able to hypnotise audiences into doing anything. This is a mistake. But it’s also a mistake to discount it entirely: companies pay for advertising because it works.

like the traditional rightwing press, far-right groups tap into the neuroses of the societies in which they operate. They jump on reactionary backlashes to egalitarian movements, they pump up latent ideas of racism and sexism that exist throughout society. Brexit, Trump, Orbán, Salvini, Bolsonaro and Le Pen all tap into deep social and cultural crises in their countries

encouraging people to blame anyone but those with real power

Neoliberalism in general, and the asset-stripping of the former Soviet Union in particular, produced a new generation of oligarchs, expert in hiding money from the prying eyes of state officials. Traditional authoritarianism emerges from alliances between the very wealthy and military and police networks. But neoliberalism has also delivered a largely privatised military, and it is to them that this rising class has turned when it wishes to secure power.

While other metrics like race and gender representation had improved in recent years and were representative of the workforce overall, for class the number of people coming from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had risen by eight percentage points from 72% in 2016.

The report’s author, NCTJ research consultant Mark Spilsbury, suggested that the reason behind the rise in the number of journalists did not necessarily mean more people were working for newspapers or magazines, with content writing and journalism-adjacent roles now becoming more spread out across the economy.

According to one 2019 report, at half of UK universities fewer than 5% of students are classified as being from disadvantaged white backgrounds.

Mike Hill, director of the MA News programme at Cardiff University shared his experiences entering journalism as the son of a Yorkshire miner and shared concerns that his journey into the industry would be impossible now. He said: “Becoming a journalist to me was akin to getting onto the space programme. My dad was a miner, which when I tell that to my students now it’s a bit like saying he was a blacksmith or a thatcher.” He added: “Rather than this being an inspirational tale, it’s also a cautionary one. There are lots of things that have happened between me in the late 1980s and 1990s becoming a journalist and now that means I wouldn’t make it currently. “My local library is shut, my old school is in special measures, there isn’t the funding from employers to send people on training courses, people are spooked by the £10,000 figure to pay for postgraduate journalism training. “Then there’s the lack of cash, there being no network - I didn’t know anyone who went to university let alone who was a journalist - and then there’s the imposter syndrome.”

non-white staff were less represented in senior roles, with just 10% of editors being of non-white ethnicity

Abramovich—who, like many of the most prominent Russian oligarchs, is Jewish—has for years been a prolific donor to Jewish philanthropies. He has given half a billion dollars to Jewish charities over the past two decades, sending money linked to Putin’s kleptocratic regime circulating through Jewish institutions worldwide

Among other things, he has profoundly influenced Jewish life on three continents, developing deep financial ties with major communal institutions. He is partly responsible for the preeminent role played by Chabad in the religious life of post-Soviet Russia, for the growth of major Jewish museums from Russia to Israel, for a raft of anti-antisemitism programming involving leading American and British Jewish organizations, and for the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem

the Jewish world is forced to reckon with its long embrace of Abramovich, and with the moral costs of accepting his money

Certain Soviet Jews of Abramovich’s generation found themselves at the forefront of an emerging market economy. Concentrated in white collar professions but systematically excluded from desirable posts and from the top ranks of the Communist Party, they were unusually prepared—and, perhaps, motivated—to find legal and semi-legal points of entry into the tightly-regulated commerce between the Soviet Union and the West. This helps explain why, as the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in The Jewish Century, six of the seven top oligarchs of 1990s Russia (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) were ethnic Jews.

Boris Yeltsin soon initiated the firesale privatization of state-controlled industries at the urging of Washington and the IMF—a reckless transition from a command economy to a capitalist one that drove millions of Russians into poverty

In 2008, Berezovsky sued his former protege over his confiscated Sibneft shares; then, in 2012, seven months after a judge rejected all of his claims, Berezovsky died in his London home in an apparent suicide. Some former associates believe he might have been murdered

In 1996, the handful of leading oligarchs pooled their financial resources—and directed their media companies’ coverage—to reelect the deeply unpopular Yeltsin over his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, whose platform of re-nationalizing industries terrified both the Russian and Western business classes

Fearing that it was unsustainable for a small group of mostly Jewish billionaires to prop up an ailing, visibly alcoholic president—especially after the ruble collapsed in 1998, dragging down a generation’s living standards and initiating a hunt for scapegoats—Berezovsky spearheaded an effort the following year to replace Yeltsin with a young, healthy, disciplined, and then-obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. It was a decision he would come to regret.

wealth so easily acquired could just as easily be taken away. In 2001, Putin hounded Berezovsky and Gusinsky—whose TV networks had criticized the president’s mishandling of a naval disaster—with criminal indictments for tax fraud, forcing them to sell their media and energy holdings at a fraction of their true cost. As a result, Abramovich, who had never challenged Putin, acquired control of Sibneft, while Berezovsky fled to the United Kingdom and Gusinsky departed for Spain and then Israel. Abramovich again came out ahead in 2003, when the oligarch Khodorkovsky was sent to a Siberian prison on tax charges after criticizing Putin for corruption, leaving his assets in the energy sector to be redistributed among those on good terms with the president.

“I don’t think there is a percent of independence in Abramovich,” said Roman Borisovich, a Luxembourg-based Russian banker turned anti-corruption activist who once encountered Abramovich through Berezovsky in the 1990s. “For Abramovich to stay alive, he had to turn against his master [Berezovsky], which is what he did, and he has served Putin handsomely ever since.”

Whereas in the Yeltsin era, the term identified a system dominated by truly independent tycoons, “Putin’s top priority when he came to power was to break that system, replacing it with a system of concentrated power in which men who are inaccurately referred to as oligarchs now have only as much access to wealth as Putin allows them to have,”

Even as he built up his credibility with Putin, he joined many of his fellow oligarchs in stashing his billions in Western financial institutions, which proved eager to assist. “Elites in the post-Soviet space are constantly looking to move their assets and wealth into rule-of-law jurisdictions, which generally means Western countries like the US or UK,”

the Yeltsin administration implemented its infamous loans-for-shares program, selling off key state industries in rigged auctions to Russia’s new business elite for a fraction of their real value in order to stabilize the state’s finances in the short term. Berezovsky and Abramovich gained ownership stakes in Sibneft, one of the world’s largest energy companies, and became instant billionaires.

“No one forced the British or American real estate industries to toss their doors open to as much illicit wealth as they could find, or the state of Delaware to craft the world’s greatest anonymous shell company services,” said Michel. “Western policymakers crafted all of the policies that these oligarchs are now taking advantage of.”

Abramovich also safeguarded a significant part of his fortune in the US, especially during his third marriage to the Russian American socialite and fashion designer Dasha Zhukova. Even after their 2018 divorce, Abramovich began the process of converting three adjacent townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side into what will eventually become the largest home in the city, an “urban castle” valued at $180 million—making him one of the many wealthy Russians sheltering assets in New York’s booming and conveniently opaque real estate sector. (The mansion is intended for Zhukova and their two young children; Abramovich also has five children from his second marriage based primarily in the UK.) He also owns at least two homes in Aspen, Colorado, a gathering place of the global elite.

Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan joined the heads of multiple Israeli charitable organizations in urging the US not to sanction Abramovich. The letter was also signed by Chief Rabbi of Israel David Lau and representatives of Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University, and Elad

the oligarchs are now credibly threatened with exile from the West. Countries like France and Germany have already begun confiscating yachts owned by select Russian officials. And although the UK is still struggling to come up with a legal basis for following suit, leading politicians like Labour Leader Keir Starmer are urging direct sanctions against Abramovich. “Abramovich’s reputation has finally collapsed, along with the other supposedly apolitical oligarchs,” Michel said four days after Russia invaded Ukraine. “There’s no recovery from this. This is a titanic shift in terms of how these oligarchs can operate.”

Israel has been more hesitant to hold him to account.

In 2018, Abramovich acquired Israeli citizenship through the law of return, immediately becoming the second-wealthiest Israeli, behind Miriam Adelson. As a new Israeli citizen, he joined several dozen Russian Jewish oligarchs who have sought citizenship or residency in the Jewish state—a group that includes Fridman, Gusinsky, and the late Berezovsky. Since 2015, Abramovich has owned and sometimes lived in the 19th-century Varsano hotel in Tel Aviv’s trendy Neve Tzedek neighborhood, and in 2020 he purchased a mansion in Herzliya for $65 million—the most expensive real estate deal in the country’s history

As an Israeli passport holder, Abramovich is eligible to visit the UK for six months at a time and is exempt from paying taxes in Israel on his overseas income for the first decade of his residency

Given his increasingly precarious geopolitical position, Jewishness has become Abramovich’s identity of last resort—and Jewish philanthropic giving has provided him with an air of legitimacy not only in Israel but throughout the Jewish world. Abramovich and his fellow oligarchs “need to spend some money to launder their reputations,” said Borisovich, the anti-corruption activist. “They cannot be seen as Putin’s agents of influence; they need to be seen as independent businessmen. So if they can exploit Jewish philanthropy or give money to Oxford or the Tate Gallery, that’s the cost of doing business.”

A 2017 article in Politico, which identified Abramovich and Leviev as “Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide,” also referred to Lazar as “Putin’s rabbi.” Lazar has often run interference for the Russian president—for instance, by defending his initial crackdown on oligarchs like Gusinsky as not motivated by antisemitism, or by praising Russia as safe for Jews under his governance. (The researcher noted that Putin has also cultivated prominent loyalists in other Russian religious communities, including the Orthodox Church and Islam.)

Abramovich also significantly funded the construction of the $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012 (and to which Putin pledged to donate a month of his presidential salary). In a 2016 article in The Forward, the scholar Olga Gershenson suggested that the museum’s narrative bordered on propaganda, framing Jews as “a model Russian minority” and “glorifying and mourning . . . without raising more controversial and relevant questions that would require the viewer to come to terms with a nation’s difficult past.”

“It concentrates on the Soviet victory over the Nazis, and then it ends by saying that Jews in Putin’s Russia are all good and content.”

“Say No to Antisemitism” has brought together Chelsea players and management with many top Jewish groups; the currents heads of the ADL, the WJC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Holocaust Educational Trust, among others, are all listed on its steering committee. The campaign is at least in part intended to address the antisemitism of some Chelsea fans, who have been known to shout “Yid!” and hiss in imitation of gas chambers when taunting fans of the rival club Tottenham, which has a historically Jewish fan base that proudly refers to itself as “the Yid Army.” Last November, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the campaign as “a shining example of how sports can be a force for good and tolerance.”

Abramovich is also one of the primary benefactors of a Holocaust museum that opened in Porto last May. As of last year, Abramovich is a newly minted citizen of Portugal (and by extension, the European Union), which offers such recognition to anyone who can prove Sephardic ancestry dating back before the Portuguese expulsion of Jews in 1496.

Berel Rosenberg, a representative of the museum, denied that Abramovich had given the Porto Jewish community any money besides a €250 fee for Sephardic certification; regarding reports to the contrary, he alleged that “lies were published by antisemites and corrupt journalists.” However, Porto’s Jewish community does acknowledge that Abramovich has donated money to projects honoring the legacy of Portuguese Sephardic Jews in Hamburg, and he has been identified as an honorary member of Chabad Portugal and B’nai B’rith International Portugal due to his philanthropic activities in the country.

Abramovich has made a $30 million donation for a nanotechnology research center at Tel Aviv University; funded a football-focused “leadership training program” for Arab and Jewish children; and supported KKL-JNF’s tree-planting campaign in the southern Negev, which is dedicated to Lithuanian victims of the Holocaust—and which has drawn opposition from local Bedouin communities who view it as a land grab.

he has kept his support for Israeli settlements well-hidden

Abramovich has used front companies registered in the British Virgin Islands to donate more than $100 million to a right-wing Israeli organization called the Ir David Foundation, commonly known as Elad, which has worked since the 1980s to move Jewish settlers into occupied East Jerusalem. Elad also controls an archeological park and major tourist site called City of David, which it has leveraged in its efforts to “Judaize” the area, including by seizing Palestinian homes in the surrounding neighborhood of Silwan and digging under some to make them uninhabitable.

“In order for settlers to take over Palestinian homes, they need a lot of money,” said Hagit Ofran, co-director of the Settlement Watch project at the Israeli organization Peace Now, “both to take advantage of poor Palestinians for the actual purchases, and then for the long and expensive legal struggle that follows, and that can bankrupt Palestinian families. The money is crucial.” Of Abramovich’s support for Elad, she added, “That’s a lot from one source; I assume that if you give such a big donation, you know what it is for.”

Just two days before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, it was reported that Abramovich is donating tens of millions of dollars to Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem

In 2017, BuzzFeed reported that US spy agencies suspect Russian involvement in as many as 14 mysterious deaths in Britain over the previous decade, including Berezovsky’s. In the wake of the 2018 poisoning of the defected double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, British intelligence services became increasingly wary of wealthy expats with close ties to the Kremlin. Diplomatic strain stymied Abramovich’s effort to acquire a Tier 1 British visa, which would have enabled him to stay in the country for 40 months.

Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman, were already calling for peace negotiations just three days after the invasion. (Fridman and Deripaska are also major Jewish philanthropists, as are other Russian oligarchs including Petr Aven, Yuri Milner, and Viktor Vekselberg. All of them now face global scrutiny.)

Even before he announced he would be setting up a charity to help victims in Ukraine, members of Abramovich’s family were quick to distance themselves from the war: A contemporary art museum in Moscow co-founded by Abramovich and Zhukova has announced that it will halt all new exhibitions in protest of the war. Abramovich’s 27-year-old daughter Sofia, who lives in London, posted a message on her popular Instagram account that read, “The biggest and most successful lie of the Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin.”

Abramovich and others have spent more than two decades loyally serving and profiting off Putin’s corrupt and violent regime—one that has been accused of murdering and jailing journalists and political dissidents and of committing war crimes from Chechnya to Syria. And for much of that time, Jewish institutions worldwide have been more than happy to take money from Abramovich and his peers

longstanding philanthropic ties may affect the Jewish communal world’s willingness to hold Russia accountable for its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty

“I think the view of much of Jewish philanthropic leadership, right and left, conservative and liberal, has been the bottom line: If the purposes for which the philanthropy is given are positive, humane, holy, and seen to strengthen both the Jewish community and the whole of society, then to sit and analyze whether the donor was exploitive or not, and whether this was kosher or not, would be hugely diverting, amazingly complicated, and divisive.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, acknowledged the difficulty of making ethical calls about donors, but argued that the attempt is still necessary. “In philanthropy, nearly all money is tainted, either because it was acquired by exploiting workers, by harming the environment, by selling harmful products, or by taking advantage of systems that benefit the wealthy to the detriment of others. That said, we can’t throw up our hands and say that we can either take no money or all money; there have to be red lines,” she said.

Berman, the scholar of Jewish philanthropy, agrees. “It is tempting to say all money is fungible, so where it came from does not or cannot matter,” she said. “But no matter how much we might want to launder the money, wash it clean of its past and its connections to systems of power, the very act of doing so is an erasure, an act of historical revisionism. Even worse, it can actually participate in bolstering harmful systems of power, often by deterring institutions reliant on that money from holding a person or system to account.”

Eighteen media workers, including eight from Ukraine, are currently imprisoned in Russia

The RSF said nearly 80 percent of media professionals killed around the world in 2022 were “deliberately targeted in connection with their work or the stories they were covering”, such as organised crime and corruption cases.

The NGO awarded its Prize for Courage on Monday to Iranian journalist Narges Mohammadi, who has been repeatedly imprisoned over the past decade.

Three-quarters of jailed journalists are concentrated in Asia and the Middle East, said the RSF.