The Washington Post - USA (2022-03-02)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21

russia invades ukraine

BY RACHEL LERMAN

AND REED ALBERGOTTI

san francisco — Apple said it is
pausing product sales in Russia
and has limited Apple Pay within
the country as pressure mounts
on businesses to impose restric-
tions after the invasion of
Ukraine.
“We are deeply concerned
about the Russian invasion of
Ukraine and stand with all of the
people who are suffering as a re-
sult of the violence. We are sup-
porting humanitarian efforts,
providing aid for the unfolding
refugee crisis, and doing all we
can to support our teams in the
region,” it said in a statement
Tuesday.
The iPhone maker said it has

paused all product sales in Russia

and last week stopped all exports

into its sales channel in the coun-

try. Sales channels include resell-

ers of Apple products, such as

big-box retailers and websites.

Apple Pay and other services have

been limited. RT News and Sput-

nik News are no longer available

for download from the App Store

outside Russia, it said.

Apple has also disabled both

traffic and live incidents in Apple

Maps in Ukraine as a safety and

precautionary measure for Ukrai-

nian citizens, it said. Google simi-

larly restricted its Maps features

this weekend.

Apple’s move came after

Ukraine digital transformation

minister Mykhailo Fedorov sent a

letter late last week to Apple chief

executive Tim Cook, asking the

company to stop supplying Apple

services to Russia and to block the

App Store within the country.

“But we need your support — in

2022, modern technology is per-

haps the best answer to the tanks,

multiple rocket launchers (hrad)

and missiles,” he wrote in the let-

ter.

Apple is the latest company to

impose restrictions in Russia — its

moves came after major social

media companies including You-

Tube, Facebook and TikTok

moved to ban Russian state media

outlets in Europe. Other Western

companies, including Shell and

General Motors, announced plans

this week to end or freeze their

dealings with the country. Compa-

nies are reacting both to comply

with U.S. and European govern-

ment sanctions against Russia, as

well as oppose Russia’s attack on

Ukraine.

Apple has long had a complicat-

ed relationship with Russia and

other countries led by authoritari-

an regimes. In September, Apple

gave in to pressure from Roskom-

nadzor, the Russian censorship

agency, when it removed a “Smart

Voting” app in that country. The

app helped voters opposed to

P utin cast ballots in a way that

would prevent splitting opposi-

tion support among multiple can-

didates and handing victory to the

Putin candidate.

Apple’s decision Tuesday to

stand up to Putin is a rare stance

for a company that usually abides

by local laws, even in countries

where the application of the laws

are criticized by human rights

advocates.

In October 2019, during anti-

China protests in Hong Kong, Ap-

ple removed the flag of Taiwan, a

country China does not recognize,

from the emoji offered in its key-

board and banned the media out-

let Quartz, which had covered the

protests. It also removed HK-

Map.live, which Hong Kong pro-

testers had used to evade police

officers. At the time, Apple spokes-

man Fred Sainz defended those

moves, saying it had heard from

police in Hong Kong that the app

had been used to ambush police.

The nature of Apple’s business,

which requires a physical pres-

ence in many places around the

world, complicates things when it

faces pressure to stand up to hu-

man rights abuses. For instance,

according to Securities and Ex-

change Commission filings, Apple

is supplied by 10 smelters in Rus-

sia, producing gold, tungsten and

tantalum used in products like the

iPhone.

Apple isn’t the largest smart-

phone company in Russia. In

2021, it came in third behind Sam-

sung and Xiaomi, according to

data from market research firm

IDC. Samsung shipped 10.5 mil-

lion phones to the country last

year, while Apple shipped just

4.9 million. Samsung did not im-

mediately respond to a request to

comment.

Heather Kelly contributed to this

report.

In response to aggression, Apple halts sales and limits services in Russia

BY STEVEN MUFSON

The International Atomic En-
ergy Agency announced it would
convene an emergency meeting
Wednesday as fighting closed in
on the largest of Ukraine’s func-
tioning nuclear plants.
Six of the country’s 15 reactors
have been disconnected from the
electricity grid to reduce cooling
needs, according to the State
Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate
of Ukraine. The 15 Soviet-era
reactors had provided half of the
nation’s electricity in normal
times.
Both sides vied for control of
Ukraine’s biggest nuclear power
complex Monday. Russia’s De-
fense Ministry was quoted in
state-run media as saying its
forces had taken control of “the
territory around” the nuclear
power complex in Zaporizhia.
“The plant personnel are con-
tinuing to service the site and
control the radioactive situation
as usual. Background radiation
levels are normal,” the Defense
Ministry said.
However, Ukraine’s state-
owned firm Energoatom said the
Russian claim was false. The
International Atomic Energy
Agency said that “additional in-
formation” from the operator of
the reactors confirmed Russian
forces were “operational near the
site but had not entered it.”
While a direct attack on
Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure
seems unlikely, experts raised
the alarm that an inadvertent
strike by a missile or air attack
could trigger a disaster.
“It is extremely important that
the nuclear power plants are not
put at risk in any way,” said the
IAEA’s director general, Rafael
Mariano Grossi. Without naming
the catastrophic Chernobyl acci-
dent, which took place four dec-
ades ago, Grossi said that “an
accident involving the nuclear
facilities in Ukraine could have
severe consequences for public
health and the environment.”
The Zaporizhia complex, 140
miles up the Dnieper River from

the Black Sea, has six reactors,

more than any other location in

Ukraine’s nationwide fleet.

Three of those are among the

reactors disconnected from the

grid.

Nuclear experts also said they

feared fighting might accidental-

ly damage the pools used for

cooling spent fuel, posing a

greater danger than any poten-

tial threat to the well-construct-

ed vessels designed to protect the

reactors’ cores. The open pools,

which resemble regular swim-

ming pools, are inside buildings

that are not as robust as other

structures.

“The largest radioactive inven-

tories remain the spent fuel

pools,” said Mycle Schneider, a

Paris-based consultant and a

member of the International

Panel on Fissile Materials.

Operators often disconnect re-

actors to reduce the amount of

heat they generate. Frank von

Hippel, a senior research physi-

cist and professor of internation-

al affairs emeritus at Princeton

University’s program on science

and global security, said that

“when a reactor is operating,

each ton of fuel is generating

about 30 megawatts of heat.”

Disconnecting it decreases the

generated heat to about 300 kilo-

watts, lowering the required

amount of cooling water by a

factor of a hundred.

But disconnecting reactors

from the electricity grid does not

guarantee safe conditions and

does not eliminate the need for

electrical power, experts cau-

tioned. If the grid is damaged or

fails, the reactors must turn to

standby diesel generators.

“All reactors need power to

stay safe. That does not stop with

the disconnection from the grid,”

Schneider said. “Residual heat

remains enormous in the core.”

“We’ve never seen a full-scale

war in a country that operates

nuclear facilities,” he added. “You

can’t just decide to shut them

down.”

Edwin Lyman, director of nu-

clear power safety at the Union of

Concerned Scientists, said, “It’s

in no one’s interest to have any of

those plants damaged, but some-

times things spiral out of con-

trol.”

Earlier, Russian forces had

seized control of the decommis-

sioned Chernobyl nuclear com-

plex just six miles north of the

capital, Kyiv, and 10 miles from

the Belarus border.

A meltdown took place at

Chernobyl’s Unit 4 in 1986,

spreading radiation across a

swath of Belarus, Russia and

Ukraine and ultimately leading

to 28 deaths in four months and

the eventual evacuation of hun-

dreds of thousands of people

from an 18-mile exclusion zone.

The last of the four reactors there

was shut down in 1999.

But the pools are still used to

cool Chernobyl’s spent fuel rods,

including 20,000 fuel assemblies

that are being transferred from

storage pools to more protective

double-walled dry storage canis-

ters designed to last 100 years,

according to the U.S. Nuclear

Regulatory Commission. Lyman

identified those pools as the area

“that would need a relatively

high degree of attention.”

Other parts of nuclear reactors

can withstand substantial im-

pacts.

The IAEA said Sunday that

missiles hit the site of a radioac-

tive waste disposal facility in

Kyiv overnight, but there were no

reports of damage to the building

or any indications of a release of

radioactive materials, Grossi

said in a statement. Staff mem-

bers at the facility were forced to

take shelter during the night.

The incident came a day after

an electrical transformer at a

similar facility near the north-

eastern city of Kharkiv had been

damaged, but there were no

reports of a radioactive release.

“Such facilities typically hold dis-

used radioactive sources and

other low-level waste from hospi-

tals and industry,” the IAEA said.

Nonetheless, Grossi said,

“these two incidents highlight

the very real risk that facilities

with radioactive material will

suffer damage during the con-

flict, with potentially severe con-

sequences for human health and

the environment.” He said that

“once again, I urgently and

strongly appeal to all parties to

refrain from any military or

other action that could threaten

the safety and security of these

facilities.”

Before Russia’s attack,

Ukraine had explored having

U.S. firm Westinghouse build

four more nuclear reactors.

Westinghouse has already been

providing some nuclear fuel, pre-

viously supplied by Russia.

“The lesson from this is that

these facilities are different and

more complex than other sources

of electricity generation,” Lyman

said, “and they do have addition-

al risks.”

Decades after Chernobyl, fears rise over nuclear plants

GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS

The decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear complex is seen in Ukraine in April. A meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 s pread radiation across a

swath of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, leading to 28 deaths in four months and the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.

BY WILL OREMUS

AND JEREMY B. MERRILL

With the Ukraine war unfold-
ing on social media, parsing fact
from fiction has never been tricki-
er — or, for those involved, more
urgent.
Are those air raid sirens just a
test, or are they real? Are Russian
fighter jets flying in formation
over Kyiv, or is a mysterious
Ukrainian ace shooting them
down? And is that an Air India
flight headed straight for the con-
flict zone?
Over a year ago, Twitter
launched a pilot of an ambitious
project that was meant to harness
the wisdom of crowds to answer
just these sorts of questions on its
platform, potentially across coun-
tries and languages, in near real
time. Called Birdwatch, it lets
volunteer fact-checkers add notes
to tweets that are going viral,
flagging them as potentially mis-
leading and adding context and
reliable sources that address their
claims. By crowdsourcing the
fact-checking process, Twitter
hoped to facilitate debunkings at
a greater speed and scale than
would be feasible by professional
fact-checkers alone.
Yet after 13 months, Birdwatch
remains a small pilot project, its
fact checks invisible to ordinary
Twitter users — even as its volun-
teer contributors dutifully contin-
ue to flag false or contested tweets
for an audience of only each other.
That suggests that either Twitter
hasn’t prioritized the project

amid internal upheaval and pres-

sure from investors to grow faster,

or that it has proved thornier than

the company hoped.

A Washington Post analysis of

data that Twitter publishes on

Birdwatch found that contribu-

tors were flagging about 43 tweets

per day in 2022 before Russia’s

invasion of Ukraine, a microscop-

ic fraction of the total number of

tweets on the service and prob-

ably a tiny sliver of the potentially

misleading ones. That’s down

from about 57 tweets per day in

2021, though the number ticked

upward on the day Russia’s inva-

sion began last week, when Bird-

watch users flagged 156 tweets.

(Data after Thursday wasn’t avail-

able.)

Twitter said it has about 10,000

contributors enrolled in the pilot,

which is limited to the United

States. (One of the authors of this

article, Will Oremus, joined the

Birdwatch pilot so that he could

report on how the project operat-

ed.) But its data indicates that just

359 contributors had flagged

tweets in 2022, as of Thursday. For

perspective, Twitter reports that

it is used by 217 million people

worldwide each day.

Asked why it hasn’t launched

Birdwatch publicly, and whether

it has a timetable for doing so,

Twitter spokeswoman Tatiana

Britt did not answer directly.

“We plan to scale up as we’re

able to do so safely, and when it

can help improve learning,” she

said in an emailed statement.

“Our focus is on ensuring that

Birdwatch is something people

find helpful and can help inform

understanding.”

That would seem to imply the

company has not yet figured out

how to scale up Birdwatch safely

or how to ensure it’s helpful. Twit-

ter indicated it will have more

information to share about it

soon.

Twitter itself sometimes ap-

pends fact-checking labels to a

few limited categories of mislead-

ing tweets, including misinfor-

mation about the coronavirus and

voting in elections. Its curation

team, a small editorial division

within the company, occasionally

highlights debunkings of viral ru-

mors within Twitter’s “trending”

features. Last week, during Rus-

sia’s invasion of Ukraine, that

team created a “moment” — a

curated collection of tweets —

focused on correcting or contex-

tualizing misleading tweets about

the conflict, such as tweets pur-

porting to show an ace Ukrainian

fighter pilot nicknamed the

“Ghost of Kyiv.” (Some of the vid-

eos were actually taken from a

simulation game.) In August, the

company announced its first part-

nerships with professional fact-

checking organizations, belatedly

following the approach rival Face-

book pioneered in 2016.

The Birdwatch project, which

launched as a pilot in January

2021, was hailed by some as a bold

and creative approach to the

problem of addressing misinfor-

mation on a vast public platform

that serves as a critical news con-

duit for many in the media and

politics.

Others raised the concern that

delegating fact-checking to the

public would create new prob-

lems, such as groups of activists

working together to flag tweets

they simply disagree with. With-

out professional oversight,

crowdsourced fact-checking is

“far too easy for bad entities to

hijack,” said Brooke Binkowski,

managing editor of the fact-

checking site Truth or Fiction.

In the Birdwatch pilot, contrib-

utors must register with a verified

email address and receive approv-

al from the company to join. As of

November, they can hide their

identity from one another and

from the public by using an alias.

Any contributor in the program

can append a fact-checking “note”

to any tweet. Other contributors

are then asked to rate that note’s

helpfulness, using criteria such as

whether it cites reliable sources,

uses neutral language, provides

important context and directly

addresses the tweet’s claims.

Those notes and ratings are

available to the public in spread-

sheet form, and they’re visible to

Birdwatch contributors on Twit-

ter itself. For the vast majority of

Twitter users who are not part of

the Birdwatch pilot, however, it

might as well not exist: The notes

are not visible in the main Twitter

feed, and they have no effect on

the algorithm that decides what

tweets each user sees.

Crowdsourcing fact checks can

be dicey if not done carefully, said

Joshua Tucker, co-director for the

NYU Center for Social Media and

Politics. He co-authored a recent

study, published in the Journal of

Online Trust and Safety, which

found that people struggled to

identify false news stories, per-

forming no better than random

guessing in many contexts. The

study did not attempt to replicate

Birdwatch’s approach, which re-

lies on self-selecting volunteers,

but it did indicate that certain

more sophisticated approaches to

crowdsourcing might have some

potential as part of a larger fact-

checking project — especially if

that project includes professional

fact-checkers, which Birdwatch

so far does not.

A review of some of the tweets

flagged on Thursday, the first day

of the invasion, turned up a mix of

dry factual corrections, helpful

debunkings of tweets that mis-

leadingly presented old images or

videos as new, and a few notes

that focused more on ideological

disagreements than factual accu-

racy.

For the most part, the fact-

checking notes rated “helpful” ac-

tually did seem potentially help-

ful — that is, if they were incorpo-

rated into Twitter in any mean-

ingful way, which they aren’t.

A video of a dramatic explo-

sion, tweeted with the text “Mari-

upol” — the name of a Ukrainian

border city — had been flagged by

two Birdwatch users who correct-

ly pointed out that the same video

had been posted to TikTok

months earlier. Another viral

tweet, which showed the flight

path of a lone Air India aircraft

headed straight for the conflict

zone, had been flagged by a user

who cited a reputable source

showing that it actually flew

around Ukrainian airspace, like

all other commercial air traffic.

Some other notes visible under

the “new” tab of the Birdwatch

feature seemed, let’s say, less help-

ful. One note appended to a tweet

on Monday read simply, “baba

booie.”

Twitter’s fl edgling f act-checking project, Birdwatch, still missing in action

“We plan to scale up

as we’re able to do

so safely, and when

it can help improve

learning. Our focus

is on ensuring that

Birdwatch is

something people

find helpful and can

help inform

understanding.”

Tatiana Britt,

a Twitter spokeswoman,

w hen asked about the

Birdwatch launch