Iraq in a hard place: deadly protests continue

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Fake news is a threat to civil discourse everywhere, but the Baltic countries feel that threat acutely from neighboring Russia. We examine a bit of truth-seeking Lithuanian software that's getting ever better at debunking propaganda. And Germany's Green Party recently put forward legislation to put speed limits on the country's Autobahn. It failed completely. Although the measure would save lives, Germans cherish the highway's limitlessness as a thrilling bit of freedom. First up, though, It's a tumultuous time in the Middle East. This week, America celebrated the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But in Iraq, the country where Baghdadi was born and where he terrorized millions, people were too busy protesting against the government to care much. Since the beginning of the month, huge rallies have sprung up in Baghdad and the south. They've been met with violence that has killed more than 250 people. When you come and stand up for your country, it's a great feeling.

Even if it's dangerous, it's a great feeling.

Ali Al-Bermani is an engineering student recovering from being shot in a demonstration. His friend was killed. The protests continue.

They go ahead and go to the streets against the corrupt government because Iraq in the last 16 years from 2003 These days, until now, we don't have any public service.

On Monday, in the city of Karbala, government-backed militias opened fire on protesters. Activists say there was a massacre. The authorities say no one was killed.

We were so afraid.

We were so afraid.

Hana Edwar is a veteran human rights campaigner in Baghdad. She says since the attack in Karbala, rallies have stepped up in the capital.

What's going on now in Baghdad is a carnival. This is—

it's so It's so impressive, not only because of the number of people, but the feeling of happiness.

It's really tremendous of people from all social representing people are there.

Even, you know, after the curfew is being announced, the curfew is not working now.

Ms. Edwar says the protesters want a complete overhaul of the government and electoral system in Iraq.

They want that the government should resign.

As fragile as Iraq, government collapse could be dangerous. But there's no sign that the demonstrations will stop.

The same political class has been in charge of Iraq more or less since America's invasion in 2003.

Roger McShane is our Middle East editor.

And lately, they've had a lot to work with. The country has been relatively calm for the past 2 years. Oil production has ramped up. Revenues are relatively high. Yet the government provides very little for the people. Rebuilding has been slow. People go without basic services. Nearly a fifth of the country lives in poverty. But instead of helping them, politicians appear much more concerned with enriching themselves, with helping their parties or their allied militias. So the level of bitterness and resentment at these guys was growing, and it finally erupted again this month.

And how is the government responding to those protests?

So I think the government is sort of bracing for even more unrest. They've re-raised the barriers around the Green Zone, which is the seat of government. Some of them have called out their allied militias to counter the protesters with violence. In coming days, you may see the prime minister, Adel Abdel Mahdi, go. He's lost the support of the main Shia parties in, in the parliament, but that's probably not going to satisfy the protesters. They, they saw the prime minister as a puppet anyway, and, and it's really not clear what's going to satisfy the protesters or who might convince them to to stop protesting. Senior clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have called for restraint on all sides, but they're increasingly ignored. Part of the problem is that the protests are largely leaderless, so it's not really clear exactly what the protesters want. Many would be happy to see the whole political system fall, but that would likely lead to just more chaos.

But if calls for restraint against the protesters are not being heeded, does that indicate to you that things could get worse? There are already reports of quite a few being killed.

Yeah, I certainly think things could get worse if the protests keep up. I mean, what you've seen in cities like Karbala is protesters actually confronting the militias, confronting their leaders, burning their offices. And in response, the militias are calling their men out onto the streets and firing into the crowds. And so, yes, there's absolutely the risk that you see more of that type of violence.

There are a lot of parallels here with what we were talking about last week in Lebanon in terms of protests against entrenched vested interests and this very same kind of unrest. Are there any connections with what's going on in Iraq?

Yeah, I mean, I think the grievances expressed by the protesters in both countries are very similar. It's not just that the politicians have taken so much and provided so little. In return. There's also a feeling in both countries that the sectarian nature of the political system is a big part of the problem. In both places, government jobs are handed out on the basis of one's religion or sect, not on merit. And that's led to predictably poor governance and widespread corruption. And, you know, in both countries, ministries are treated like ATMs for different groups that control them. So there's also a feeling in both countries that Iran has too much influence in Lebanon. We see that with its support for Hezbollah, which is one of the biggest political parties, but also acts as something like an independent army. And in Iraq, we see that with Iran's support for Shia militias, which are very influential in the government. There's some irony in all this. I mean, Iran, which had its own revolution in 1979 and now claims to want to export its revolutionary model around the region, sees sort of this upheaval in the countries where its proxies are ascendant and all of a sudden thinks revolutions aren't such a good idea.

Well, the question is whether that kind of wholesale government reform would work anyway. I mean, in both countries, the idea is get these— this sort of, uh, sectarian patronage system out of the way and, you know, wholesale changeover. Would, would, would that work?

Well, I certainly think some change is needed. I mean, There was good reason for devising the political system in both Lebanon and Iraq in this way. Lebanon fought a 15-year civil war, fought largely along sectarian lines, and that finally ended in 1990. And Iraq was thrown into disarray first by the American invasion in 2003, then by the rise of Islamic State, and sectarian tensions was always part of the fabric there. So in both cases, there was a compelling argument that you needed a political system that ensured that every religion and sect got a piece of the pie. And for a long time, the, the former warlords who still hold sway in Lebanon and the politicians who have long run Iraq, they argue convincingly that it was either this type of system or chaos. But I think a lot of people now consider that a false choice. They believe that the system has led to such bad outcomes that they're willing to risk the unknown.

Thank you very much for joining us, Roger.

My pleasure. The fake news right here.

Fake news. Fake news.

Alternative facts.

Fake news. They're fake news.

There's a lot of rhetoric about it, but fake news is real. As are the concerns about the damage it can do. The spread of misinformation has been blamed for destabilizing democracies, dividing nations, and eroding trust in the media. Now, though, fake news has a new adversary in the form of some innovative software developed in Lithuania and supported by an army of truth-seeking elves.

On September 25th, there was a report that emerged on a Lithuanian website claiming that 22 German soldiers stationed in the country had desecrated a Jewish cemetery in the town of Kaunas.

Benjamin Sutherland writes about technology and defense for The Economist.

That was very quickly identified by software known as Demaskwalk, which flagged it as likely fake news.

So what is Demaskwalk, the software, and who's behind it?

Demaskwalk is software developed by a Lithuanian-based media group named Delfi. And they got some money from Google and used some of their own money in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, to develop software that would facilitate the hunt for news items that were likely to be fake and which basically should be researched to determine if they were indeed fake.

And why is it in particular that a Lithuanian company has been charged with this?

Well, Lithuania, along with the other Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, have been essentially under a barrage of Russian disinformation, which has really intensified since 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine. And so efforts there have picked up to better detect these news stories and try and debunk them as fast as possible.

So how does Demaskwalk actually work? What's it looking for?

First of all, it's looking for language that triggers emotions. Essentially, disinformation doesn't work very well if it doesn't trigger emotions. The idea is essentially to trigger outrage, whereas kind of in the old Soviet days, A lot of the propaganda was essentially trying to build pride and support for the communist system. That's kind of shifted to more efforts to kind of sow distrust and division in Western societies. So they're looking for articles and news items that don't contain financial data. Terms based on finance and the stock market are considered to be kind of more boring and not likely to trigger outrage. They're looking for subjects, topics dealing with rape, murder, crime, deceit, disintegration of Western societies, accidents, scandals, gossip, that kind of thing.

So is the software looking exclusively at, let's call it, excitatory language?

Well, it's not just looking at that. It's also looking at who connects to a news item, who links it, who's hosting it. They look at the reputations of those websites and those organizations that are doing that, and that provides some additional clues. They're also taking a look at how the news item progresses. Fake news tends to be spread or passed along faster than the legitimate sort. Even the timing of a news item is important. Fake news is disproportionately sent out on Friday evenings when a lot of debunkers and other people are out for drinks or partying.

And the fact that these stories move more quickly is an effect rather than a cause, right? They've been designed to do so.

Yes, that's exactly it. But they have the support of Kremlin mouthpieces who are working on the project together, and they're helping each other and pushing the campaign. So it starts off with an advantage of a certain number of Russian trolls working on the project.

But fake news and misinformation and disinformation is very much a global problem. In America, for example, as much as the Baltics. Surely there are lots and lots of efforts going on to tackle it.

Well, there are a few efforts. The European Union has been pouring money into research for, notably, a program known as WeVerify, essentially software to better detect fake news. But that's kind of specifically looking at has an image been Photoshopped, has video been modified to deceive. But a lot of this software really isn't out there working yet. I think we're going to see a number of programs arrive on the market or in use within the next 2 or 3 years, but it still is really early days.

So how accurate is the software?

So the software actually works surprisingly well. About half of the items flagged end up turning out to be disinformation. The software is actually also learning kind of like a cyborg system from its human users, because each time a user confirms that a story is true or false, it notifies the software and that helps the software get better the next time at figuring out what is and what isn't fake.

So who are the humans that are helping the software along?

There are about 20 news outlets, think tanks, universities, and other organizations that are allowed to use the software. In June, there was a nonprofit set up by Delphi to further the technology. They have wanted to restrict the number of people who can use the software, partly because they're worried about cyberattacks from Russian hackers. Those users include a group of volunteer Lithuanians known as the elves. Now, the elves are volunteer fact-checkers. There are more than 4,000 of these elves in Lithuania. About 50 of them are allowed to use the software.

So if the whole process depends on there being a human hand in it, how do we know that the elves are on the level?

Well, the elves have all been vetted. Up until a few years ago, they were in very large groups of several hundred. They changed that policy because someone did in fact infiltrate the group and there were problems from that. So now they're in groups of about 10. Each of them knows the other members very well, and the only new elves that are admitted into this work are people who had personal introductions from existing club members, if you will. So it's quite tightly controlled.

I mean, there is something of an arms race, a cat-and-mouse game that goes on with this stuff. Whatever it is, whatever secret sauce it is that, uh, that this software discovers, won't the people who are trying to propagate misinformation, disinformation, sort of learn what that is and work around it, essentially defeat the software at its game?

Yes, that is happening. One of the problems with the software is that disinformation campaigns can figure out what the software is doing and game the system to a certain to some extent, but not entirely. If they get away from the themes that have been working for them, denigrating democracy and so forth, they may have disinformation that's a little bit harder to detect, but it's also going to be less effective.

Benjamin, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

The autobahns of Germany are mostly known for two things: they inspired the mid-1970s electro-pop hit by musical pioneers Kraftwerk, and secondly, they're exceedingly rare in that many have no speed limit. Earlier this month, Germany's Green Party tried and failed to introduce a speed limit on the roads. It seems that Germans aren't willing to give up the experience of flying down the Autobahn full throttle.

I was a passenger in a car on the Autobahn just south of Berlin, driving with a friendly Slovenian called Jan, who owns a limousine company in Berlin.

Tom Nuttall is The Economist's Berlin bureau chief. And he recently took a spin at speed.

We started off driving at a conventional speed, I suppose, 130 kilometers per hour or so, obeying the speed limit. Then when it fell away, he put his foot to the floor and we went up to sort of 220, 230 kilometers per hour.

But nervous types outside Germany might suggest that that doesn't sound very safe at all.

Yes, and there are plenty of people in Germany who make the same suggestion as well. It's sort of difficult to model the consequences of the imposition of a speed limit because you have to make all sorts of assumptions about what it does to driving behavior in traffic. But there's one estimate: if Germany were to impose a blanket speed limit of 130 kilometers per hour across the Autobahn network, and that's what the most recent attempt tried to do, you might save somewhere between 80 and 140 lives per year. The other main practical argument for doing so is a climate one. You might reduce annual emissions from cars of around 2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

So why is it that these Autobahns don't have a speed limit?

The first government to abolish speed limits was actually the Nazis before the Second World War, although they did, before war broke out, they did impose a speed limit. After the war, when West Germany was under Allied occupation, the first government of the Federal Republic got rid of speed limits and never really reimposed them. There have been various attempts over the years to do something about it. Most notably, after the oil crisis in 1973, there was a speed limit imposed across the Autobahn network of West Germany, but it lasted for about 4 months. And the transport minister who was responsible for putting it into place didn't last much longer than that either, because it was so unbelievably unpopular. And essentially, that's still where we are today.

So how do the German people feel about this, this absence of speed limits?

Most opinion polls do find a slim majority in favour of imposing a speed limit on the Autobahn. But for those who resist it, and there are a lot of them, I don't think it really has a lot to do with the sort of practical case of safety or climate or whatever else it might be. I think it's a sort of a cultural thing. Some people compare the debate in Germany over speed limits on the Autobahn to debate in America over gun laws. It's to do with a certain idea of freedom. And in Germany, which is a very sort of overregulated place, typically it's a sort of place where you can get a fine for putting rubbish in the wrong kind of dustbin or whatever. Then I think for a certain sort of German, the freedom to drive at these extraordinary speeds on wonderful autobahns in beautifully engineered cars is a sort of a last bastion of freedom. And they will do everything that they can to avoid a situation where the government tells them how fast they can and they can't drive.

But if you say that polls suggest a small majority of people would be in favor, is it just that that hard-driving minority is very vocal? Is that it?

It's to do with the politics of the thing, basically. The main problem is that the Social Democrats, who are the junior coalition partner in Germany, I think on balance, they probably would also be in favor of a speed limit. But their coalition partners, the Christian Democrats and the Christel Social Union, the center-right parties who are very strongly opposed to it, they get their way when the argument takes place inside government. So right now you can't find a majority for it in Parliament. But I think that's going to change. After the next general election, the Green Party will almost certainly enter government. That will ensure that they are liberated to vote for the imposition of a speed limit. And so one way or another, I think a speed limit is probably coming to Germany's Autobahn network.

Tom, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks very much indeed.

And godspeed. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.