EU Crackdowns on Big Tech, After Prigozhin, Two Years of Taliban, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, tech companies rush to comply with the EU's new content guidelines, reports of Prigozhin's death spur questions on Russia's Wagner Group, and Afghanistan marks two years since the last U.S. troops evacuated. It's August 24th, 2023 in time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, I want to start by going online. Back in November, 2022, the European Union enacted what's known as its Digital Services Act, which makes online social media platforms responsible for moderating harmful and illegal content shared by users and advertisers. Tomorrow will be the deadline for major tech companies like Meta, TikTok, Google, and X, formerly known as Twitter, to comply with the EU's new guidelines. Why is the EU doing this and how much blowback are we seeing?

ROBBINS:
So Bob, I think the questions are, not that I would ever disagree with you about a question, are rather given the amount of hate speech, election meddling and false information about vaccines and other maligned content in the not so dark corners of the internet, is this regulation really going to be enough? And why aren't we in the U.S. doing more about these problems? The goal of this legislation is to get the social media companies and search engines and online retailers, Amazon is saying, "Why us?" to clean up their acts or face serious fines of up to 6 percent of their annual global revenue, which really could mean billions of dollars. And under the legislation, the EU has designated nineteen companies to start. These are the so-called very large online platforms or very large online search engines, and you've mentioned some of them. 

And by tomorrow, Friday, they have to submit what are called risk mitigation plans to these regulators. And the risks identified include amplification of illegal content and disinformation, content that can affect freedom of expression to media freedom, content that can affect minor's mental health, content that can promote gender-based violence. These are all things that we have seen out there. We've seen this in the United States, we've seen this in Europe, we've seen this everywhere. The platforms are going to be required to stop targeting ads based on religion and political opinions. They're supposed to make it easier for European users to report illegal content. They're going to be required to disclose information to regulators and researchers on how they rank content. A good part of the secret sauce there, supposedly, they're supposed to inform users of why certain content is being pushed out to them.

And as of yesterday, Wednesday, Meta and TikTok had already begun to make changes to their algorithms. TikTok automatically opted thirteen to seventeen year olds out of personalized ad based on their activity. And Meta is already giving users the option of reverting to a non-algorithmic feed. So what that means is for users in the EU, their Instagram and Facebook feeds can be set up to show only the accounts they follow and when users search, they'll get results based on the words they type in rather than letting the robot overlord decide what they should see. This is a really novel idea.

And despite earlier defiance Musk and X, the company formerly known as Twitter, also insisting that they're going to comply, they even invited the EU's top regulator in for a so-called stress test. And we know X has become a particular black hole since Musk reinstated election deniers and fired a good part of its content moderation staff.

So is it going to work? The EU has done several other of these regulations so far there's been a lot of complaints because the regulation was then, particularly their privacy regulation, was left to the control of the countries where the company headquarters were mainly in Ireland and the Irish regulators were overwhelmed. But this time the regulation is going to be done out of Brussels. And the potential fine is huge there and the potential harms that are taking place. So I think a lot of people are going to be watching very closely.

MCMAHON:
So listening to you spell this out, Carla, it seems like it's the kickoff of a process that will inevitably affect the way these major firms operate outside of the EU in terms of if it's good for the EU, why isn't it good for some other major democracies? Although the EU has obviously very different take on freedom of speech than the U.S. has, and part of that difference has been one of the reasons why social media has come under such fire in the U.S. Because while freedom of speech is not supposed to extend to shouting fire in a crowded theater, it certainly seems like that's been happening quite a bit over social media in the U.S. and maybe it's time for this to be a broad brush that extends beyond the EU.

ROBBINS:
So several things. One is I think we're going to have to watch very carefully to see whether or not this works. And we have some very early tests. I mean there are elections in Slovakia and Poland coming up within weeks and there're going to be fifty elections over the next year or so. And there are already these NGOs that are writing to EU regulators saying, "You got to push them to make sure." And election disinformation is something that we're very sensitive to in the United States having gone through our own. So there's going to be a lot of people in the United States who are going to be watching this saying, how come we're not doing it here? 

The EU has gone through several rounds already. They also have a draft legislation on artificial intelligence. And in the United States, basically we're flailing. Part of it is lobbying from Silicon Valley. Part of it legitimately is because we are much more fiercely committed to free speech and part of it's the U.S. Congress doesn't seem to get technology. So I think people are going to be watching to see whether this one works.

I think AI in particular has raised for people much more fear than a lot of these other things should have raised. The level of hate speech online in the United States is really, really frightening. And that has opened a bigger conversation already and the White House has convened meetings about it. But I think there's a serious conversation including the notion of creating a digital regulator, which is a serious discussion up on the Hill. So I don't think that we're going to do anything as organized as the Europeans have. They've got a lot of experience already, but I think people are going to be watching this very, very closely.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And you're right to bring up the elections. I think that's going to be a really important test and it certainly will resonate in the U.S. as we have kicked off our own election season just with the debates the other night on Republican side. It is going to be interesting to see also whether we do get some sort of a bipartisan feel. Certainly the early hearings on AI seem to generate bipartisan concern in the U.S. at a time when there's little bit of bipartisan anything. And disinformation has been weaponized as we have seen again and again by especially Russia and China, if not malign actors based in North Korea and so forth. So I am looking very keenly at this and this is one of these deadlines that I think has slipped in a little bit unnoticed by, in some of the other big events going on in the world, but it's going to be really important.

ROBBINS:
And certainly the big companies are aware of it. It's been very interesting to see. Musk was just completely defiant. He opted out of the voluntary regulations, but as this deadline approached, he said to the regulators, "Come and stress test us." Meta and TikTok are already complying with it. And that's because there is a big potential punishment that comes with this, the 6 percent not of their revenue in the EU, but potentially 6 percent of the revenue worldwide. And we know that the EU can hit companies and have hit big companies with billions of dollars in fines. So we watch this space to see whether or not they're going to do it. There's already a lot of lobbying going on to Brussels saying, we're watching closely. You guys, you got to follow through with this threat. So I think the regulators in Brussels are quite serious about this one.

MCMAHON:
Okay, well, let us watch the social platforms and how they maybe morph next week.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, I think very few of us were surprised yesterday by the plane crash in Russia with Wagner Group chief of Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly on board. Although I admit that was a more dramatic and brutal retribution, there were nine other people killed, than Putin's typical poisoning or tossing someone out of a window. The crash came two months after the aborted mutiny and just a few days ago he resurfaced in was a very defiant video, allegedly that was filmed in Africa. But there was still a lot of questions. I mean, are we sure he is dead? A lot of questions about the future of Russia's top military brass. Yesterday, Moscow also announced that Ian's main ally, general Sergei Surovikin, former commander of Russia's forces in Ukraine was removed as head of the Air Force. What's going on here? Is the future of the mercenary Wagner Group, the future of the military brass? Is Putin stronger or weaker today?

MCMAHON:
Those are really good questions, Carla. And I think the context that you're mentioning is really important here because we don't know, and we might never know of any independent confirmation that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on this flight, but the pattern is clear and it fits all sorts of retribution that we have seen from Vladimir Putin against people who he has deemed traitors. And he had deemed Mr. Prigozhin a traitor for his aborted mutiny back two months ago. It was exactly two months to that day. That's a significant event. It had happened on the same day Surovikin was demoted as well.

Putin himself happened to be at a major anniversary event celebrating a Soviet war victory. And as a number of people including U.S. CIA Chief William Burns had pointed out, Putin always responds to such threats and usually as has been repeatedly said, revenge is a dish best serve cold. So not in the heat of the moment, but eventually Putin gets his person.

Now, given the murkiness of this, we don't know. For example, there were some early reports that this plane might've been shot down. The plane was flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, that there might've been some sort of disturbance on it. There was some video that's emerged of the plane just going down, no explosion apparent. But the plane just going straight down in the region of Tver and no survivors and no possibility of survivors. It was a plane in which a lot of Wagner brass were there, including in addition to Prigozhin, Dmitry Utkin who's a Wagner Group commander and several other senior Wagner Group officials.

So in one swoop, it eliminates the crucial leadership of Wagner. It doesn't mean that the group might not still be useful, but as a number of experts have said, Carla, we're probably not going to see Wagner again in the Ukraine theater anytime soon. It had played a role there, including, quite frankly, as cannon fodder its forces as cannon fodder in the grinding out front lines on the southeastern front in Ukraine earlier this year. But it's also played a role in the Middle East. It's popped up throughout sub-Saharan Africa. We've seen the specter of Wagner again in Niger as it continues to deal with its coup crisis. And so it seems like it could be a useful place for black ops to be pursued by Russia, which likes to have this option in its toolbox. So I think some form of Wagner will either be reconstituted or repurposed. 

Prigozhin, if he did survive in some fashion, maybe you do not see him again in person at all, or if he pops up, it would be a very long time away with him substantially diminished as any sort of threat. What's interesting and what's a little bit different than the previous sort of acts in which people were poisoned or disappeared or whatever, is that Prigozhin himself was allied with Putin on making certain events happen in terms of acts that Russia could respond to or that ended up in people disappearing and so forth.

So this time he had stepped too far and he is diminished. Putin is seen as stronger at this point. Remember two months ago there were a number of commentators saying this undeniably weakens Putin, this rebellion. He came out of this looking very weak. Well, he's looking like he's grasping very strongly the reins of power. There's an interesting conversation that our affiliated publication, foreignaffairs.com put up just yesterday with the Russian expert Tatiana Stanovaya, in which she said in the end, this fits Putin's pattern and that he's going to be able to consolidate power while still working to play off some of the elites against each other.

There's still a lot of agitation, let's say, reportedly among Russian elites who have suffered either their own personal riches or in other ways their ability to travel because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That has been a real disaster and that seems to be stalemated. Latest reports that came out in the past week said the casualty total overall was something like 500,000 with 130,000 or so deaths attributed to the Russian side and a high number of injured. And so this is a real disaster. It's not going away anytime soon and we're going to have to see to what extent Putin changes any sort of tactics to move the needle on Ukraine front.

ROBBINS:
I am not a Russia expert and I've written a reasonable amount over the years about it, but I'm a little surprised by two things. One on the Prigozhin front, which is why would he have been flying around in Russia? I mean, did he, given all of his experience with Putin and we're never going to be able to explain this to arrogance, stupidity, whatever. Why did he not expect this one to come? So there's no answer for this. This is just a rhetorical question.

But the other question, which is why did it take Putin so long to fire Surovikin? I mean that to me doesn't seem necessarily like strength. Is he afraid of his own military brass? This is a guy who, granted, he was the first one to speak out and denounce the mutiny, but everybody knew he was a longtime Prigozhin ally and everybody was sitting around wondering, he was on a long rest, I think was the term that they were saying with him. But it took an awful long time to oust this guy, which would suggest that he had strong ties among other military brass. So are we expecting a wider purge? Is Putin not in as much control of the military brass as one might expect? One wonders. I think this is a remarkable delay on this one.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And we're still going to see this play out. I think we're going to be watching closely to the extent you can rely on some of the reports coming out of Russia, which are more and more challenged because there are very few outside independent news sources anymore and a lot of media are now looking for their favorite Telegram source to see who's doing what. For example, there were some initial outpourings of grief at the reported death of Prigozhin by Wagner Group people, and we saw those on Telegram, no place else. But what will Sergei Shoigu say, the defense minister, or Gerasimov, the army chief. Do they stand in a stronger position now even though they've been widely seen as having bungled the Ukrainian campaign. And Surovikin was kind of the strong arm person who was brought in to knock heads together and make things happen.

He was sort of put under watch after the mutiny that played out. And I don't know whether this is part of a classic Putin choreography where he wanted his removal and the plane crash to happen on the same day just to emphasize a point, it's not clear. But a lot of this is speculation, but there does seem to be, as a number of commentators have said, Carla, that there's a bit of a mafia aspect to Russia at the moment where violence is used to deal with troublemakers and it's a particular kind of violence that we've seen over again and again in Putin's term now of almost a quarter century. And this does seem to fit a pattern. It's just a real question of is there any sort of material change in the Ukrainian campaign and to what extent is there anybody who has leveraged Putin at this point from the reformist side, shall we say, or from the ultranationalist side, which has now been stung recently?

Well, Carla, I want to take us to Afghanistan where a rather grim anniversary is marked, which is the departure of U.S. forces and the revival of Taliban leadership in the country. In the last several days, we've had the marking of two years of Taliban rule. It's been particularly difficult for women and girls in the country who have just seen a number of rights that they had gained under twenty years or so of U.S.-led occupation completely curtailed. The country's economic problems are mounting. It is in extremely bad shape. So what are we looking for in year three of the Taliban rule?

ROBBINS:
Nothing good. There was a time when the Taliban was claiming they were changed men and they of course are all men. But once the last American troops were pulled out in the end of August of '21, they quickly returned to their old really horrifying ways. Since the takeover, they've resumed public floggings and executions. Girls can no longer go to school beyond the age of twelve. Women have been banned from attending universities. Universities have been ordered not to even give graduates their transcripts or their diplomas.

On Wednesday, Taliban authorities stopped a hundred women from flying to the UAE where they had received scholarships from a local billionaire to attend university. Nearly all women outside of teachers and those in healthcare have been barred from working outside of the home. And if they even want to leave the house, women have to be accompanied by their husband or another male relative. Last December, the Taliban barred women from working with international NGOs, leading many large organizations including the IRC and CARE temporarily shut operations and protest. The Taliban, seeing the pain since made some deals and more limit operations have resumed, but the blanket restrictions remain.

And This May, this is sort of extraordinarily petty, the Taliban officials told media outlets not to produce content about women's hygiene issues. Then in July, the Taliban gave all beauty salons a month to close operations. These were mainly women run businesses and one of the few places where women could gather outside the home. Taliban said they offer services forbidden by Islam and cause economic hardship for groom's families during weddings. And when dozens of Afghan women protested this beauty salon ban, security forces incredibly used fire hoses and stun guns and shot their guns into the air to turn these women back.

Taliban meanwhile have resisted all international pressure. The regime is yet to be recognized by any country and its under incredibly tough economic sanctions. Although donors really struggle with this, including the U.S., which has been the main donor of humanitarian aid because they're caught not surprisingly between this fierce desire not to enable this repression by the Taliban. And the reality that the people of Afghanistan, as you said Bob, desperately need outside help. According to the UN and other aid groups around two-thirds of the population is, quote, "food insecure," which means their access to food is limited or uncertain. And 80 percent of those are women and girls. The UN has requested $3.2 billion in aid for this year, but as of June, donors have given or pledged less than 15 percent of this. People are really fed up with the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan are paying the price for it in all different ways.

MCMAHON:
Carla, you're right, meet the new Taliban, same as the old Taliban in many respects. But I recall covering them during their previous period of rule. It was noted that Taliban rule was kind of a fishy thing, that there were some places where they seemed to be pretty hard and other places it was pretty loose. There was the Mullah Omar brand of leadership based in Kandahar that was tight-fisted and then there were looser rule in, let's say, the north or even the west. And that allowed some UN agencies to function, including using women in certain roles and distributing food and healthcare and so forth. This just seems very different now. This just seems like even though it's a younger generation, it's more hardcore. Is that what you're seeing?

ROBBINS:
Well, I think that there is, as far as we can tell, less regional competition. That's one thing. I do think that they have cut deals. Different NGOs and international NGOs have cut deals regionally precisely because people are hurting so badly. But the UN has been told, originally it was just international NGOs that were told women couldn't work and then the UN was told to apply to them as well. And there are places in which women... And that's part of this ban of women can work in education and healthcare, but they can't educate privately. So they're there participating in a very limited way.

So I think in particular villages have they cut deals and some regions have they cut deals because they so desperately need this aid. But I think you're right. I think that the control they've maybe learned from the past or maybe there's less competition, but they seem to be really solidifying power. We talked about, and we've talked in the past and a lot of other people have talked about could they even hold onto the country because we know there's ISKP and other groups challenging them, but they seem to have really, despite some really horrific bombings, they seem to have really asserted control over the country.

MCMAHON:
No, it's really important to note that. And I'm also watching their relationship with Pakistan, which does seem very different from the previous Taliban's relationship, which had very much been nurtured by and enabled by Pakistan. Now, there seems to be a bit of blowback that Pakistanis have been resentful of the fact that it seems like Afghanistan has used as a haven by Pakistan's own Taliban to plan and launch attacks in Pakistan. So if they run afoul of the military security establishment in Pakistan, that's also going to make things extremely difficult for them to function.

ROBBINS:
I'm not sure how different that is from what it was before, which is that Pakistanis were always playing this double game and Pakistan was a launching pad mainly for attacks inside of Afghanistan. But every once in a while there would be blowback. But we did have this incredibly horrific bombing in late July, which killed more than fifty people and ISKP claimed responsibility for it. And it was intended, this wasn't an accident, it was intended to be an attack on Pakistan because it was a political rally of a group that they didn't like. And top Pakistani officials have since accused the ruling Taliban of not doing enough to control the movement of armed groups. I mean, there is a certain, shall we say, irony to that since it was always the complaint that the Pakistanis weren't doing enough. But Pakistan itself is unraveling politically and who knows how much control they can assert. But you're right, there is a certain irony to this, but it's a tragedy as well.

MCMAHON:
So as you say, the deals are being struck on some local levels, but it's looking like hard to reach any sort of leverage from the international side on making this ease up at all.

ROBBINS:
Well, the U.S. is sitting on a lot of money. They've got, it's three and a half billion dollars of humanitarian aid frozen funds from the Afghan central bank. And there was the first meeting between U.S. officials and Taliban officials in the beginning of August. And the Taliban clearly wants that money. The U.S. said that they pushed on the human rights issues, on women's rights issues, on girls' education and all of this, and the State Department said they're open to continued technical talks and economic stability. But who knows? I mean the fact that they're going to continue to push and mainly continuing to push because they really are trying to figure out whether there's any leverage at all and they do hold this money. So we'll see.

MCMAHON:
Okay, another trouble spot to track.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week, which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Bob, our audience selected, "Iranian Foreign Minister Visits Saudi Arabia." So these are historic rivals, which is a nice way to describe the level of hostility between these two countries. And a lot of people, including me, weren't sure how seriously to take it when they restored diplomatic relations earlier this year. So how goes the rapprochement?

MCMAHON:
Well, they're saying the right things even though they're sort of saying them carefully. For example, just to quote a few things said by the Iranian foreign minister during the visit, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said of the meeting with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, our meeting today is a, quote, "continuation of the steps taken towards implementing the agreement to resume diplomatic relations, which represents a pivotal platform in the history of the two countries and the path of regional security."

ROBBINS:
So clearly they need better PR. Somebody's got to do a better job of writing their statements, okay.

MCMAHON:
And it gets better. He also said, quote, "We believe that the idea of achieving security and development in the region is an idea that cannot be fragmented." Once you get cut through the careful language, it basically seems like there might be some practical strain running through them that has guiding this. And again, reminder, this is brokered by China, this latest run of negotiations that result in the agreement to normalized diplomatic relations. We'll have to see how this really plays out in the field. 

And what is the field? Well, the field includes places like Yemen where Iran supports the Houthis rebels and Saudi is opposed to them and supports forces opposed to them. The poor Yemenis have been trapped in the middle and there have been peace talks going on with the Houthis, I think in April there were talks, Oman was involved, there were some prisoner swaps, talks going on and so forth. And the Saudis are trying to help rebuild the Yemeni economy. If that is sustained, that's a very important development. If the normalization of diplomatic relations leads to some further chance for economic ties, which is what the Iranian foreign minister seemed to be hinting at, that would be very interesting as well.

Now, this is playing out at a time of very interesting developments in the region involving other countries, especially the United States. The U.S. is prodding the Saudis and the Israelis towards normalization, for example. That's very interesting, and I encourage people to listen to our affiliate podcast, President's Inbox in which Jim Lindsay and Steven Cook talked about the prospects for that normalization to happen.

There's also the U.S. Iranian talks that have clearly picked up, and there is a deal in the works in which the U.S. is freeing up $6 billion. You mentioned the U.S. holding of Afghan assets. Well, the U.S. holds a great deal of Iranian assets and $6 billion of those could be freed up in the next few weeks if a group of prisoners, I think, five overall are released and that process moves forward. It also seems to be tied to a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal process in which the Iran nuclear deal would be revived in some way and Iran would freeze its nuclear program and allow for inspections and so forth. There's a lot of wariness about that, including in the U.S. Congress among Republicans in particular and some other actors.

But the Saudis have been, by what I've seen, relatively muted about that and might also be kind of encouraged to see that move forward. The Saudis, of course, have their own interest in a nuclear program and might be moving forward in that and confident in their own ability to sort of set that process going. So a time of great interest in the Middle East. And it's interesting that our audience did choose this as the figure, though, the Iranian foreign minister, because I think they're seeing that this is moving forward despite huge skepticism.

ROBBINS:
So one of the things the Saudis reportedly been asking for as part of the price for potentially normalizing relations with Israel is they want a civilian nuclear program and they want access to the fuel cycle. And we all know that that potentially could give them a backdoor if they want to cheat to having a nuclear weapons program. The Iranians maybe want nuclear weapons because of Israel and the United States. But the Saudis have always wanted nuclear weapons because of Iran, as far as I can tell. Are we looking at potentially a major arms race in the region or is this rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia are going to lessen those chances?

MCMAHON:
I think that's one of the hopes. And just to add to your security calculation, and the Iranians kickstarted their nuclear program because of the Iraqis, because they were developing one and the Iraqi program was dealt a big blow by the Israelis. So there's a bit of a cyclical nature here as you're seeing, but it also points out to the fact that this is a very small neighborhood and it's a great deal of concern if you're seeing the ability to weaponize nukes development in multiple countries, let alone Iran.

And so I think that, yeah, things are moving forward very carefully in this front. I think you might see other carrots emerging ahead of any kind of nuclear carrots on the U.S.-Saudi side of this equation, Carla, but it's not clear. I think it would be weird for the U.S. to finally restore some controls or at least freezing for a time the Iranian program, and then turn around and open up a deal for the Saudis. But it's the Middle East, so there's a lot of horse trading going on.

And that's our look at the wild and willy World Next Week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Gabon holds its general election. The United States marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement's March on Washington. And, China's Council for International Cooperation on environment and Development meets in Beijing.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye, and be careful out there.