How the Arab uprisings were weakened by online fakes
Fauci warns of post-Thanksgiving Covid-19 surge in US
America should prepare for a "surge upon a surge" in coronavirus cases as millions of travellers return home after the Thanksgiving holiday, top US scientist Anthony Fauci warned Sunday.
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The United States is the worst-affected country, with 266,074 Covid-19 deaths, and President Donald Trump's administration has issued conflicting messages on mask-wearing, travel and the danger posed by the virus.
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"There almost certainly is going to be an uptick because of what has happened with the travel," Fauci told CNN's "State of the Union."
Travel surrounding Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday made this the busiest week in US airports since the pandemic began.
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"We may see a surge upon a surge" in two or three weeks, Fauci added. "We don't want to frighten people, but that's the reality."
The trend is ominous, Fauci and other government scientists said, with the Christmas holidays soon bringing more travel and family gatherings.
Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, noted a surge in Covid-19 after a holiday weekend in May.
"Now we're entering this post-Thanksgiving surge with three, four and 10 times as much disease across the country,' she told CBS's "Face the Nation."
"We are deeply worried."
The US surgeon general, Jerome Adams, was equally blunt.
"I want to be straight with the American people," he told "Fox News Sunday." "It's going to get worse over the next several weeks."
Desperate wait for vaccine
Elsewhere, thousands of health workers marched in Madrid in support of the public health system in Spain, one of the European countries hardest hit by the pandemic.
And guards opened fire to quell a prison riot in Sri Lanka, where four inmates were killed while protesting a surge of coronavirus infections.
In France, the highest administrative court ordered the government to loosen rules allowing no more than 30 people at religious services, in the face of angry objections from church leaders.
Around 9,000 runners -- some wearing face masks -- took part in the Shanghai International Marathon, according to Chinese media, a mass-participation sports event rare during the pandemic.
And New York City again took a small step back toward normality, as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that elementary schools would reopen for in-person instruction on December 7.
The US news media, meantime, reported that first shipments of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 -- one of the first to claim high effectiveness, along with a Moderna product -- had arrived in the United States from a Pfizer lab in Belgium.
Pfizer was using charter flights to pre-position vaccine for quick distribution once it receives US emergency authorization -- expected as early as December 10 -- the Wall Street Journal and other media reported.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, both said to be safe and perhaps 95 percent effective, have introduced a glimmer of hope after months of gloomy news.
"This is the way we get out of the pandemic. The light is at the end of the tunnel," Admiral Brett Giroir, the US official overseeing coronavirus testing, told CNN.
But like Fauci and the other scientists, he expressed grave concerns about the months immediately ahead.
"About 20 percent of all people in the hospital have Covid, so this is a really dangerous time," Giroir said.
Europe struggles to reopen
Until large numbers of Americans have been vaccinated -- Giroir said half the eligible population might be by March -- much will still depend on people taking precautions, including mask-wearing and distancing, he and Fauci said.
Giroir said it might take until the second or third quarter of next year for most Americans to be vaccinated, but that substantial benefits would accrue much sooner.
By first vaccinating those at highest risk, he said, "we can absolutely get 80 percent of the benefit of the vaccine by only immunizing a few percent of the population."
Adams, the US surgeon general also expressed cautious optimism, saying, "We are mere weeks away from starting to vaccinate the vulnerable, and we can significantly protect people who are at risk for this virus.
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"So hang on just a little bit longer."
The novel coronavirus has killed at least 1,453,074 people worldwide since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT on Sunday.
Europe on Saturday crossed a grim barrier, registering 400,649 deaths.
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Germany, once a beacon of hope in Europe's coronavirus nightmare, reached on Friday the mark of more than one million cases.
The Arab uprisings a decade ago were supercharged by online calls to join the protests -- but the internet was soon flooded with misinformation, weakening the region's cyber-activists.
When Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country in January 2011, rumours and uncertainty created "panic and hysteria", said ex-activist and entrepreneur Houeida Anouar.
"January 14 was a horrible night, so traumatic," she said. "We heard gunfire, and a neighbour shouted 'hide yourselves, they're raping women'."
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As pro-regime media pumped out misinformation, the flood of bogus news also spread to the internet, a space activists had long seen as a refuge from censorship and propaganda.
Journalist and researcher Hakim Beltifa said the ground was ripe for "the spreading of fake news".
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"Fake news fed off people's mistrust" of traditional, state-owned media outlets which "obscured the reality and kept the people in ignorance," he wrote for online magazine The Conversation.
When Egyptian state TV accused American fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken of giving free meals to pro-democracy protesters at Cairo's emblematic Tahrir Square, the rumours were repeated online, amid a string of reports of foreign powers allegedly infiltrating the protest movement.
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But activists and journalists on the ground found little evidence of fried chicken. Most demonstrators were getting by on pita bread and kushari, a popular, ultra-cheap street dish of rice, pasta and lentils.
- Ghost bloggers -
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Soon, a slew of fake stories originating online was undermining trust in internet sources. One example was the infamous case of the "Gay Girl of Damascus".
Amina Abdallah Arraf was a young Syrian-American lesbian, anti-regime activist and author of a blog widely followed by observers of the Syrian uprising.
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Except she never existed.
When Amina was reported "kidnapped" in Damascus, her worried followers mobilised to rescue her from the hands of the Assad regime.
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But they discovered that the blogger, who had been an icon of Syria's pro-democracy movement, was in fact Tom MacMaster -- a bearded American in his 40s living in Scotland and hoping to achieve some literary fame.
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"That seems fairly bland today as we've learned to be more suspicious of this type of fabrication, but at the time, suspicion was far less prevalent," researcher Yves Gonzalez Quijano said.
Another invented personality was Liliane Khalil, supposedly a US journalist covering the "Arab Spring" for a number of media outlets, and who had indirectly expressed support for the Bahraini government.
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Despite a mass of public information about Khalil, who was accused by many activists and researchers of being a fake, her true identity has never been revealed.
- Online mistrust -
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The two cases, with their carefully-crafted back stories and manipulated images, were early examples of what soon became a trend of misinformation online.
Researcher Romain Lecomte said that regimes were soon able to "infiltrate discussions" online, spread doubt about reported abuses and "sow confusion and misinformation".
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"Mass political use of the internet" was a game-changer, said Lecomte.
Many online activists began to question the democratic power of the internet.
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That has sparked the phenomenon of fact-checking services, along with dilemmas about whether to allow "fake news" to flourish or to censor it and risk compromising democratic freedoms.
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In the early years of the Arab uprisings, chat rooms and sites such as Lina Ben Mhenni's blog "A Tunisian Girl" had fuelled growing protest movements and side-stepped censorship.
But the flood of misinformation took away much of the credibility of cyber-activism, said Gonzalez Quijano.
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It "has never recovered from being used, or rather manipulated, by political powers that are better organised than activists on the ground," he said.