Timor-Leste, the youngest independent nation and the most fledgling press in the Asia-Pacific, has finally shown how it’s done — with a big lesson for Pacific island neighbours.

Tackle the Chinese media gatekeepers and creeping authoritarianism threatening journalism in the region at the top.

In Dili on the final day of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s grand Pacific tour to score a multitude of agreements and deals — although falling short of winning its Pacific region-wide security pact for the moment — newly elected (for the second time) President José Ramos-Horta won a major concession.

Enough of this paranoid secrecy and contemptuous attitude towards the local – and international – media in democratic nations of the region.

Under pressure from the democrat Ramos-Horta, a longstanding friend of a free media, Wang’s entourage caved in and allowed more questions like a real media conference.

Lusa newsagency correspondent in Dili Antonió Sampaio summed up the achievement in the face of the Pacific-wide secrecy alarm in a Facebook post: “After the controversy, the Chinese minister gave in and agreed to speak with journalists. A small victory for the media in Timor-Leste!”

Small victory, big tick
A small victory maybe. But it got a big tick from Timor-Leste Journalists Association president Zevonia Vieira and her colleagues. He thanked President Ramos Horta for his role in ending the ban on local media and protecting the country’s freedom of information.

Media consultant Bob Howarth, a former PNG Post-Courier publisher and longtime adviser to the Timorese media, hailed the pushback against Chinese secrecy, saying the Chinese minister answering three questions — elsewhere in the region only one was allowed and that had to be by an approved Chinese journalist — as a “press freedom breakthrough”.

On the eve of Wang’s visit, Timor-Leste’s Press Council had denounced the restrictions being imposed on journalists before Horta’s intervention.

“In a democratic state like East Timor not being able to have questions is unacceptable,” said president Virgilio Guterres. “There may be limits for extraordinary situations where there can be no coverage, but saying explicitly that there can be no questions is against the principles of press freedom.”

The Chinese delegation justified the decision to ban questions from journalists or to exclude from the agenda any statements with “lack of time” and the “covid-19 pandemic” excuses.

However, Ramos-Horta was also quietly supportive of the Chinese overtures in the region.

According to Sampiaio, when questioned in the media conference about fears in the West about China’s actions in the Pacific, Ramos-Horta said “there is no reason for alarm” and noted that Beijing had always had interests in the region, for example in fishing.

‘A lot of lobbying’
“These Pacific countries have done a lot of lobbying with China to get more support and China is responding to that. These one-off agreements with one country or another, they don’t affect the long-standing interests of countries like Australia and the United States,” he said.

An article by The Guardian’s Pacific Project editor Kate Lyons highlighted China’s authoritarian approach to the media this week, saying “allegations raise press freedom concerns and alarm about the ability of Pacific journalists to do their jobs, particularly as the relationship between the region and China becomes closer.”

But one of the most telling criticisms came from Fiji freelance journalist Lice Movono, whose television crew reporting for the ABC, was deliberately blocked from filming. Pacific Islands Forum officials intervened.

“From the very beginning there was a lot of secrecy, no transparency, no access given,” she told The Guardian.

“I was quite disturbed by what I saw. When you live in Fiji you kind of get used to the militarised nature of the place, but to see the Chinese officials do that was quite disturbing.

“To be a journalist in Fiji is to be worried about imprisonment all the time. Journalism is criminalised. You can be jailed or the company you work for can be fined a crippling amount that can shut down the operation … But to see foreign nationals pushing you back in your own country, that was a different level.”

Media soul-searching

China was moderately successful in signing multiple bilateral agreements with almost a dozen Pacific Island nations during Wang’s visit to the region. The tour began 11 days ago in Solomon Islands — where a secret security pact with China was leaked in March — and since then Wang has met Pacific leaders from Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Niue (virtually), Cook Islands (virtually) and Vanuatu.

However, the repercussions from the visit on the media will lead to soul searching for a long time. Some brief examples of the interaction with Beijing’s authoritarianism:

Solomon Islands: The level of secrecy and selective media overtures surrounding Wang’s meetings with the government sparked the Media Association of the Solomon Islands (MASI) to call on local media to boycott coverage of the visit in protest over the “ridiculous” restrictions.

Samoa: Samoan journalist Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson criticised the Chinese restrictions on the media with only a five-minute photo-op allowed and no questions or individual interviews. There was also no press briefing before or after Wang’s visit.

Fiji: No questions were allowed during the brief joint press conference between Wang and Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama. Local media later reported that, according to Fijian officials, the no-question policy came from the Chinese side.

Examples of local media publishing propaganda were demonstrated by the pro-government Fiji Sun, with a full page “ocean of peace” op-ed written by Chinese Ambassador Qian Bo claiming China’s engagement with Pacific Island countries was “open and transparent”. The Sun followed up with report written by the Chinese embassy in Fiji touting the “great success” of Wang’s visit.

Tonga: Matangi Tonga also published an article by Chinese Ambassador Cao Xiaolin a day before Wang’s visit claiming how “China has never interfered in the internal affairs of [Pacific Island countries]” and would “adhere to openness.”

Global condemnation
The secrecy and media control surrounding Wang’s tour was roundly condemned by the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and other media freedom watchdogs.

“The restriction of journalists and media organisations from the Chinese delegation’s visit … sets a worrying precedent for press freedom in the Pacific,” said the IFJ in a statement.

“The IFJ urges the governments of Solomon Islands and China to ensure all journalists are given fair and open access to all press events.”

#RSF condemns #Chinese curb on #reporters during #Pacific island tour #AsiaPacificReport @PNGAttitude @pngfacts @RSF_AsiaPacific #mediafreedom #pressfreedom #ChinaInPacific #WangYi #securitypacthttps://t.co/CGxwNn2O5U pic.twitter.com/XbBIfDIt2u

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 3, 2022

Likewise, RSF’s Asia-Pacific director Daniel Bastard said the actions surrounding the events organised by the Chinese delegation with several Pacific island states “clearly contravenes the democratic principles of the region’s countries”.

He added: “We call on officials preparing to meet Wang Yi to resist Chinese pressure by allowing local journalists and international organisations to cover these events, which are of major public interest.”

University of the South Pacific journalism head Associate Professor Shailendra Singh also criticised the Chinese actions, saying “we have two different systems here. China has a different political system — a totalitarian system, and in the Pacific we have a democratic system.”

In Papua New Guinea, the last country to be visited in the Pacific before Timor-Leste, “there appeared to be little resistance” to the authoritarian screen, according to independent journalist Scott Waide, a champion of press freedom in his country.

“There’s not a lot of awareness about the visit,” he admits. “I would have liked to have seen a visible expression of resistance at least of some sort. But from Hagen, where I was this week. I didn’t see much.”

Waide has been training journalists as part of the ABC’s Media for Development Initiative (MDI) programme as a prelude to the PNG’s general election in July.
https://www.abc.net.au/abc-international-development/projects/

The #WangYi Pacific tour reached #Fiji to tight security and a clear message that #China doesn’t welcome foreign media coverage around its officials. Were it not for Pacific media solidarity that is inclusive of ANZ press, today would have been (even more) interesting. #FijiNews pic.twitter.com/C3xwARRGuc

— Lice Movono (@LiceMovono) May 29, 2022

‘Problems to be resolved’
“We have problems that need to be resolved. Over the last month, I’ve tried to impart as much as possible through training workshops on the elections,” he told Pacific Media Watch But there are huge gaps in terms of journalism training. I believe that is a contributor to the lack of obvious pushback over Wang’s visit.”

Reflecting on China’s Pacific tour, Lice Movono, said: “At the time of my interview with The Guardian, I think I was still pretty rattled. Now I think the best way to describe my response is that I feel extremely disturbed.”

She expressed concerns that mostly women journalists from the region noted “but that didn’t get enough traction when other media covered the incident(s) — that China was able to behave that way because the governments of the Pacific allowed it, or in the case of Fiji, preferred it that way.

Movono said that since her criticisms, she had come in for nasty attention by trolls.

“I’m getting some hateful trolling from Chinese twitter accounts – got called a ‘fat pig’ yesterday,” she told Pacific Media Watch.

“Also I’m being accused of lying because some photos have come out of the doorstop we did on the Chinese ambassador here and some have purported that to be an accurate portrayal of Chinese ‘friendliness’ toward media.”

So the pushback from President Ramos-Horta is a welcome sign for media freedom in the region.

Timor-Leste rose to 17th in the 2022 RSF World Press Freedom Index listing of 180 countries — the highest in the Pacific region — while both Fiji and Papua New Guinea fell in the rankings. There are some definite lessons there for media freedom defenders.

Frustrated Pacific journalists hope that there will be a more concerted effort to defend media freedom in the future against creeping authoritarianism.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By CIVICUS in Manila

There has been a hostile environment for civil society in the Philippines since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016. Killings, arrests, threats, and intimidation of activists and government critics are often perpetrated with impunity.

According to the United Nations, the vilification of dissent is being “increasingly institutionalised and normalised in ways that will be very difficult to reverse.”

There has also been a relentless crackdown against independent media and journalists.

Threats and attacks against journalists, as well as the deployment of armies of trolls and online bots, especially during the covid-19 pandemic, have contributed to self-censorship—this has had a chilling effect within the media industry and among the wider public.

One tactic increasingly used by the government to target activists and journalists is to label them as “terrorists” or “communist fronts,” particularly those who have been critical of Duterte’s deadly “war on drugs” that has killed thousands.

Known as “red-tagging” in the Philippines, this process often puts activists at grave risk of being targeted by the state and pro-government militias.

In some cases, those who have been red-tagged were later killed. Others have received death threats or sexually abusive comments in private messages or on social media.

Rampant impunity means that accountability for attacks against activists and journalists is virtually non-existent. Courts in the Philippines have failed to provide justice and civil society has been calling for an independent investigation to address the grave violations.

Filipina journalist Inday Espina-Varona tells her story:
‘Silence would be a surrender to tyranny’

The sound of Tibetan chimes and flowing water transformed into a giant hiss the night dozens of worried friends passed on a Facebook post with my face and a headline that screamed I’d been passing information to communist guerrillas.

Old hag, menopausal bitch, a person “of confused sexuality”—I’ve been called all that on social media. Trolls routinely call for my arrest as a communist.

But the attack on 4 June 2020 was different. The anonymous right-wing Facebook page charged me with terrorism, of using access and coverage to pass sensitive, confidential military information to rebels.

That night, dinner stopped at two spoonsful. My stomach felt like a sack with a dozen stones churning around a malignant current. All my collection of Zen music, hours of staring at the stars, and no amount of calming oil could bring sleep.

Strangers came heckling the next day on Messenger. One asked how it felt to be “the muse of terrorists”. Another said, “Maghanda ka na bruha na terorista” (“Get ready, you terrorist witch”).

A third said in vulgar vernacular that I should be the first shot in the vagina, a reference to what President Rodrigo Duterte once told soldiers to do to women rebels.

I’m 57 years old, a cancer survivor with a chronic bad back. I don’t sneak around at night. I don’t do countryside treks. I don’t even cover the military.

Like shooting range target
But for weeks, I felt like a target mark in a shooting range. As a passenger on vehicles, I replaced mobile web surfing with peering into side mirrors, checking out motorcycles carrying two passengers—often mentioned in reports on killings.

I recognised a scaled-up threat. This attack didn’t target ideas or words. The charge involved actions penalised with jail time or worse. Some military officials were sharing it.

Not surprising; the current government doesn’t bother with factual niceties. It uses “communist” as a catch-all phrase for everything that bedevils the Philippines.

Anonymous teams have killed close to 300 dissenters and these attacks usually followed red-tagging campaigns. Nineteen journalists have also been murdered since Duterte assumed office in 2016.

Journalists, lawmakers, civil liberties advocates, and netizens called out the lie. Dozens reported the post. I did. We all received an automated response: It did not violate Facebook’s community standards.

It feels foolish to argue with an automated system but I did gather the evidence before getting in touch with Facebook executives. My normal response to abusive engagement on Facebook or Twitter is a laughing emoji and a block. Threats are a different matter.

We tracked down, “Let’s see how brave you are when we get to the street where you live,” to a Filipino criminology graduate working in a Japanese bar. He apologised and took it down.

Threat against ‘my daughter’
After I fact-checked Duterte for blaming rape on drug use in general, someone said my “defending addicts” should be punished with the rape of my daughter.

“That should teach you,” said the message from an account that had no sign of life. Another said he’d come to rape me.

Both accounts shared the same traits. They linked to similar accounts. Facebook took these down and did the same to the journalist-acting-as-rebel-intel post and page.

The public pressure to cull products of troll farms has lessened the incidence of hate messages. But there’s still a growth in anonymous pages focused on red-tagging, with police and military officials and official accounts spreading their posts.

Some officers were actually exposed as the masterminds of these pages. When Facebook recently scrapped several accounts linked to the armed forces, government officials erupted in rage, hurling false claims about “attacks on free expression.”

This reaction shows the nexus between unofficial and official acts and platforms in our country. It can start with social media disinformation and then get picked up by the government, or it leads with an official pronouncement blown up and given additional spin on social media.

Official complaints
We’ve officially filed complaints against some government officials, including those involved with the top anti-insurgency task force. But justice works slowly. In the meantime, I practise deep breathing and try to take precautions.

Officials dismiss any “chilling effect” from these non-stop attacks because Filipinos in general, and journalists in particular, remain outspoken. But braving dangers to exercise our right to press freedom and free expression isn’t the same as having the government respect these rights.

Two years ago, journalist Patricia Evangelista of Rappler asked a small group of colleagues what it could take for us to fall silent.

“Nothing,” was everyone’s response.

And so every day I battle fear. I have to because silence would be a surrender to tyranny. That’s not happening on my watch.

Inday Espina-Varona is an award-winning journalist from the Philippines and contributing editor for ABS-CBNNews and the Catholic news agency LiCASNews. She is a former chair of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the first journalist from the country to receive the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Prize for Independence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As covid-19 spreads around the world, it can be daunting keeping up with the information. For RNZ, the news organisation’s responsibility is to give you verified, up to the minute, trustworthy information to help you make decisions about your lives and your health. Questions will also be asked of officials and decision makers about how they are responding to the virus. The aim is to keep you informed.

New Zealand’s Chief Censor says the country has an opportunity to be leading the world in fighting against covid-19 disinformation online.

Nasty rumours, inaccurate advice and bullying has circulated through social media following the second wave of infections.

Health Minister Chris Hipkins gave those responsible a serve at the 1pm briefing yesterday after a racist and misogynist rumour about a woman breaking into an isolation facility had done the rounds.

He said it had reached a “new and concerning level”, and was “not only was it harmful and dangerous, it was totally and utterly wrong”.

But other than a good telling off, the government was limited in what action it could take to starve the online world of fake news.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are just some of the places where information is shared, but the big platforms seem to do little to moderate.

Chief Censor David Shanks said Sweden had been teaching kids for nearly a decade how to both spot and verify misinformation.

World-leading response
He said New Zealand was world-leading with its response to the extremists using the internet as a weapon following the mosque shootings.

“The Christchurch Call was one of the first moves led out which really brought an integrated, transnational, governmental and industry accord in thinking about how we could deal with the weaponisation of the internet in terms of the spread of violent extremist material.”

And similar leadership from New Zealand could also help stop the spread of covid-19 misinformation, Shanks said.

“In a way some of the extreme disinformation and conspiracy theories could be seen as the next layer out from that and is, in a way, connected with violent extremism when you trace through to the origins of some of this material.

“I think New Zealand can and should have a role in leading some thinking about how we can deal with this sort of issue,” Shanks said.

Social media commentator Anna Rawhiti-Connell said the second wave of the coronavirus had split the online community, increasing both the attacks and the severity of them.

“Part of that is around just fatigue, people are weary and they are tired.

‘A lot of uncertainty’
“There’s a lot of uncertainty and that will naturally create a splintering kind of effect.”

Patriotism was a very big part of the last conquering of covid, she said.

“I think we have splinted far more than we did around that initial lockdown.

“We kind of got through a lot of that on the sort of spirit and smell of a patriotic oily rag, and this time around, I don’t know if that’s quite as strong, and so that does breed a much more fractious kind of environment.”

Rawhiti-Connell said throughout the second outbreak there was lots of racial overtones and people looking for something to blame.

Indigenous Rights advocate Tina Ngata said Māori were particularly vulnerable to the disinformation because of a deep-rooted distrust of the government and its failure to uphold treaty obligations.

“Some of the concerns are very valid and they don’t come from nowhere, they generally find fertile soil where there is disenfranchisement,” she said.

“That’s why we see it over in the United States, the working class are really engaged in some of these conspiracy theories and that’s because they do feel let down by the system.

“And there are whole communities that feel let down by the system here and Aotearoa as well.”

Honouring the Treaty in a pandemic
Ngata said the Māori pandemic response group Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā wanted to be more involved in the decision making and felt the decisions that were made were not as representative as they could have been.

“This is an opportunity for the government to reflect on why it’s picked up so well here in Aotearoa and what has been the government’s role in that disenfranchisement and the lack of trust because, you know, similar to any relationship, if the trust is in place, it doesn’t really matter what other people say.”

She said the government needed to acknowledge the role of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi within the pandemic.

“There are some issues that feed into our trust relationships in the past and a lot of that, for Māori in particular, comes back to Treaty violations.

“Making sure that Te Tiriti is centred and upheld and honoured and not looked at as a ‘nice to have’ but looked at as a constitutional underpinning for all of our decisions as a nation moving ahead,” Ngata said.

Tech commentator Paul Brislen was alarmed at how many people relied solely on social media for their news when these platforms were not policed in the same way the mainstream media was.

“Social media outlets, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, all the rest of them, they simply refuse to accept that they are publishers of the content that is shared as widely as it is.

“They claim to be a platform totally neutral, they have no control over it.

“Because the government buys into that that really gives them nowhere to go in terms of enforcement of decency or any of the things that aren’t in law but are in common practice that we get with professional media.”

Brislen said without someone to hold them accountable, the government did not have a leg to stand on.

Instagram, however, has taken some action. It has teams actively removing posts that breached the covid-19 policy.

“We remove content that could lead to imminent harm, and we’ve applied warning labels to millions of pieces of misinformation.

“Conspiracies around the virus continue to be fact-checked by our partners around the world, and we block vaccine-related hashtags which contain known misinformation to reduce its visibility on Instagram.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Miss Universe NZ 2019 beauty queen Diamond Langi is being trolled by thousands of Indonesians on social media for speaking up about discrimination against West Papuans.

“The post I had made was #FreeWestPapua with a video showcasing the discrimination West Papuans have had to endure for years,” she declared on Coconet TV’s Facebook and Instagram pages two days ago.

READ MORE: Seven Papuans jailed for treason amid drop charges call

On her “Women of the Islands – Diamond Langi” webpage on the Coconet TV website, the Auckland-born Tongan beauty queen is quoted as saying:

“I shared it because I wanted to bring awareness with what was happening with West Papuans, especially now with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I had kindly asked Miss Indonesia (Frederika Alexis Cull), who I had met last year in America while competing at Miss Universe, to speak to the president of her country [Joko Widodo] to free the seven activists who were found guilty of treason for protesting against racism. 

She says that from that one post she has been hounded by Indonesian trolls who still exist on her Facebook page.

While there was support for her stance, some of the abuse from some Indonesians bordered on plain hatred, whereas others claimed the Melanesian region of West Papua belonged to Indonesia [it was annexed by Jakarta in in 1969 in a disputed colonisation process that has resulted in armed struggle and peaceful resistance ever since – Pacific Media Watch].

‘My Instagram was flooded’
“From that one post, my Instagram was flooded with abusive comments (at least 10,000 comments in a day) and they also started abusing my family, close friends, and even organisations that I work with,” she says on her Coconet TV webpage.

“I was like, wow if this is happening to me just from making a post, imagine what is happening to the people of West Papua!

“I’ve had to deactivate some of my social media for a little bit but don’t worry I’ll be back,” she says.

But she also had support for her stance.

“Very concerning that our beautiful Pacific sister, Diamond Langi’s public Facebook page is under attack by a few propaganda-fuelled keyboard warriors from Indonesia, because she’s chosen to use her emerging platform and political freedom to stand in solidarity with our indigenous whanau in West Papua,” @Oceania Interrupted said on Facebook.

“Black Lives Matter all over the world, even in the Pacific – and bullying someone for standing in solidarity with indigenous people in our Pacific context, who continue to be brutally oppressed, exploited, silenced and killed in their own land is sickening!

“If you haven’t already, please go on her page, show some love for what she is standing in solidarity for; And if you know a thing or two about THE REAL WEST PAPUA [sic] situation, please school the ignorant bullies on her page and in our world,” the cultural activist group says.

Earlier this year, Langi acted in a Polish-American feature film titled, Sosefina. The film is written by Manu Tanielu and Namualii Tofa and directed by Hinano Tanielu.

The theme of Sosefina has been to tell the story of a marginalised and overlooked Polynesian community. The movie was released in the United States on 31 January 2020.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz