YouTube approves disinformation ads in India in run up to election

YouTube approves disinformation ads in India in run up to election
A recent joint investigation conducted by Access Now and Global Witness reveals that YouTube is giving its approval to election disinformation ads in India prior to the country's general election. The investigation "Votes will not be counted", discovered that YouTube is endorsing ads that make baseless allegations of electoral fraud, spread lies about voting procedures, and launch attacks on the integrity of the electoral process. The investigation found that a total of 48 ads, submitted in English, Hindi, and Telugu, were in violation of YouTube's policies on election misinformation. Despite YouTube's claim to review ad content before allowing them to be published, every single ad was approved for publication on the platform.  Shruti Narayan, Asia Pacific Policy Fellow at Access Now and Henry Peck, Campaigner on Digital Threats from Global Witness, and one of the authors of the report are on the show.   

VPNs in run up to elections - keeping voters connected
This year four billion people have the right to vote in national elections in over 60 countries - the biggest number ever and a crucial moment for democracy itself. But many of these elections will be held in countries where censorship and misinformation campaigns have plagued their  government's history and internet access has been denied in the run up to voting. Proton VPN will be providing free access to servers to ensure that people stay connected. Samuele Kaplun and Antonio Cesarano from Proton VPN explain how they are protecting those countries at risk of disruption online.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.     

More on this week's stories:
YouTube approves disinformation ads in India  
Free VPN servers before elections

Chapters

• 3:09 YouTube approves disinformation ads in India in run up to election
• 17:38 VPNs in run up to elections - keeping voters connected

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, I'm Gareth. This is Somewhere on Earth and it is Tuesday the 9th of April 2024. Greetings from our studio here in London. 

00:00:17 Gareth Mitchell 

And joining me for some expertise is the excellent Peter Guest. Nice to see you again, Peter. How's things? 

00:00:23 Peter Guest 

Not too bad Gareth? How are you? 

00:00:24 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm very well. Have you been exceedingly excited by this celestial event that seems to be sweeping people off their feet? 

00:00:34 Peter Guest 

It has been pretty fascinating. You know, I've been watching this kind of absolute fever pitch of coverage, particularly the US, like the eclipse. Yeah, which was yesterday's. 

00:00:38 Gareth Mitchell 

About the eclipse, we should say yeah, but just to speak anyone who's missed it. 

00:00:42 Peter Guest 

Yesterday as we record. Yeah, I think on the one hand, like it's really good that finally, there's this sort of massive public interest in this in astronomy astronomical phenomenon, we're always complaining no one cares about science. But on the other hand, I mean, it's brought out the loonies. I mean, this is obsession on every single news channel. There were live blogs starting 48 hours in advance. Do you think well, what's going to change between now and then? We know it's going to happen. You're just live blogging clouds. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And then it did happen. And then there was lots of coverage about how it happened. Right on schedule. 

00:01:12 Peter Guest 

Exactly. And you know, it's all those those weird moments where you think, yeah, this is fantastic. There's a collective experience on the Internet, but then you read the stories and you think, are we back in the Dark Ages? Are we gonna wonder if the Sun's gonna rise. You know I'm gonna. Yeah. 

00:01:25 Gareth Mitchell 

It was literally the Dark Age for about 3 minutes I guess. 

00:01:27 Peter Guest 

Yeah, exactly. And it's like the, are we gonna put a wicker man up and then film it on TikTok? It's it's. 

00:01:28 Gareth Mitchell 

In various places. 

00:01:33 Gareth Mitchell 

All a bit confusing, maybe for the next total eclipse we can do that. Me and you, Peter, wherever that totality occurs. And though mind you, did you see the map that was doing the rounds? 

00:01:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Showing the cluster of bookings like Airbnb bookings, geographically clustered around and you could follow the arc of where the eclipse is going to be. Not surprisingly, with these pin, you know, pinpricks on the map of the Airbnb bookings 

 00:01:58 Peter Guest 

There were people booking private jets to fly, so they could definitely see it. 

00:02:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Hate those people. Sorry if you're one of our listeners. We hate to diss you. In fact, let's be nice to our listeners with private jets. And can we have a go for the next eclipse, please? That would be very nice. 

00:02:12 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, there we go. Umm, well, nothing will eclipse this podcast. Sorry, that was so cheesy. I don't know where that came from. I'm really embarrassed about it. I hope they don't keep it in. But anyway, here we go. Let's let's jump into the show. 

00:02:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright, coming up today. 

00:02:32 Gareth Mitchell 

About half the global population is due to go to the polls this year, so not for the first time. I'm sure we're looking at the issues around free speech, censorship and misinformation. When it comes to the latter YouTube is facing a few tough questions in India over revelations 

00:02:48 Gareth Mitchell 

about how well the platform is or isn't countering election misinformation ads. And elsewhere, a VPN service is providing a free service for citizens who lack unrestricted Internet access. It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:09 Gareth Mitchell 

So as India gears up for its general election to begin next week, it's emerged that YouTube is approving disinformation ads in India. That's according to a joint investigation by Access Now and Global Witness. 

00:03:23 Gareth Mitchell 

The researchers submitted 48 ads in English, Hindi and Telugu. That's the language of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The ads violated YouTube's advertising and misinformation policies. Yet the platform still waived those ads through. After approval though the researchers did withdraw the ads before 

00:03:43 Gareth Mitchell 

any YouTube users saw them. Well, let's hear now from a few of the researchers behind this this work. And let's start with you, Shruti Narayan. You’re Asia Pacific policy fellow at Access Now. So you're one of the authors. 

00:03:59 Gareth Mitchell 

Can you tell me a bit more about what you did in this study. 

00:04:03 Shruti Narayan 

Sure. Thanks. 

00:04:04 Shruti Narayan 

What we just did essentially is to submit 16 ads containing patent election misinformation. A lot of the ads actually mirrored examples of misinformation that are already on YouTube’s misinformation policy page, so it's stuff they're aware of. It's also misinformation that's been flagged by the election Commissioner of India so 

00:04:26 Shruti Narayan 

we tested YouTube's ability to detect this misinformation in advertisements, and as you pointed out, we submitted those ads in three Indian languages, Hindi, Telugu and English, all of which are very prominent. 

00:04:40 Shruti Narayan 

And we found that YouTube approved all of them for publication, and I just want to give you a little context as to why this is so important. As we point out in the report, YouTube has about 462 million active users in India. That's a huge amount obviously. 

00:04:56 Shruti Narayan 

In addition, political parties and candidates have been making YouTube a priority not only for this election, but for the last few state elections. So YouTube is aware that there is a lot of political content and campaigning happening on its platform and they should be applying heightened review standards to the content that goes out. 

00:05:15 Shruti Narayan 

But we found that wasn't the case. 

00:05:17 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Yeah. So you know, you think they'd be more vigilant and to give an example of the kinds of ads that you are submitting these deliberately bogus ads just to check the platforms ability to block them. For instance, though there was this one ‘due to an increase in infectious diseases, all voters will be automatically sent a mail in ballot for the 2024 elections. Stay home and stay safe’.   

Henry Peck of Global Witness, a completely bogus ad there. Henry, by the way, you’re campaigner on digital threats at Global Witness. You're a co-author on the report. I mean, that's just an absolutely bonkers ad. Were you surprised that YouTube waved it through? 

00:05:58 Henry Peck 

Yeah, I was a bit surprised. There were several that were in just sort of that beggared belief in terms of how sort of farcical they were and how clearly untrue they were. I mean, I was surprised, in particular, that YouTube approved all of the ads that were in English because we have run similar studies in the US. 

00:06:18 Henry Peck 

And in Brazil, in the past, in 2022, ahead of the US midterms, we ran a similar test  

00:06:25 Henry Peck 

of election disinformation content in the form of ads on YouTube and YouTube detected all of it. We also ran that same year a test in Brazil looking at election disinformation ads in Portuguese. So around the same time, similar content and in that instance, YouTube didn't detect any of the ads. 

00:06:46 Henry Peck 

So I thought at least here, you know ahead of a really significant election in India, which of course is also YouTube’s largest market in terms of users, 

00:06:56 Henry Peck 

they would be more attuned to the English language content at least, but the fact that they approved 100% of the ads, all 48 in English, Hindi and Telugu, was quite startling. 

00:07:09 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, absolutely. And I was interested to see if there was any difference between the languages. But you're saying it didn't make any difference whether it was an English, Hindi or Telugu. Just all 48 ads just managed to be approved. 

00:07:21 Henry Peck 

That's right. Yeah. They approved all 48, regardless of language in this instance. 

00:07:26 Gareth Mitchell 

Peter Guest here in the studio. What did you think when you first start, when you first heard about this study? 

00:07:31 Peter Guest 

I mean, I mean, in two places for this. Firstly, you know, it's sad that it didn't really shock me in the way that perhaps that, you know, I wish it had. You know, this is a conversation that we have over and over again. Platforms have responsibilities, they they even state those response responsibilities and policies and then don't necessarily even even follow through on that. And the one thing that struck me here was was actually the type of disinformation that we're talking about, I think. 

00:07:55 Peter Guest 

And we often assume that election related disinformation is going to be pushing one candidate against another rather than what some of these these ads that we've been speaking about have been, which is actually undermining the basic fundaments of democracy by trying to reduce people's franchise. And this is something I don't think we're talking about enough as individuals, but also at the platform level. 

00:08:16 Peter Guest 

Not just in India, this is also a massive issue for the UK and it's a massive issue in the US. You know, if you think that electoral violence was really organised around the sort of big lie that the that about the franchise and about the kind of legitimacy of  

00:08:27 Peter Guest 

elections, and I just think it is kind of shocking to me that a massive platform like YouTube is not so cognizant of this, this early on in 2024 that they're not, you know, systematically dealing with the problem. 

00:08:38 Gareth Mitchell 

And Shruti, has YouTube said anything about this since these results went public? 

00:08:44 Shruti Narayan 

Yes. So we did of course give YouTube a fair opportunity to comment and we included that response in our report and we have rebuttal. So just to sum that up, it's a very technical rebuttal 

00:08:58 Shruti Narayan 

response from YouTube that we don't entirely agree with, which involves basically around the the amount of time that the ads were up in order for them to have sufficient multilayered reviews. Now a point here is that it appears that there was not enough pre publication review at Google's end and Henry can elaborate here. 

00:09:18 Shruti Narayan 

But essentially, the ads were approved for publication, so YouTube's response doesn't answer the question of what would happen if these ads actually went live and people were able to see them. 

00:09:30 Gareth Mitchell 

And just to reiterate, you took the ads down, didn't you? So just in case people are thinking ohh you guys did harm as researchers putting out these bogus ads. Just to reiterate, of course, you immediately took them down. No, as a member of the YouTube community or no viewers, no members, members of the public or voters in India saw these ads. Yeah, but Henry, just elaborate on that response from YouTube if you will. 

00:09:52 Henry Peck 

Yeah, we took great care to make sure that the ads were not seen by any user and and never went live on the platform. 

00:09:59 Henry Peck 

And process the testing involved, putting together short videos containing the content in really clear text. You know black font over a coloured background. So easy for an automated system to detect and very easy for a human reviewer to assess. And we put these up. YouTube says it takes 

00:10:19 Henry Peck 

a day to review content before it is publishable for ads. We left these up for the better part of the day, in which time they were were all reviewed and approved for publication. 

00:10:31 Henry Peck 

And once published, they have potential to cause great harm. As Peter mentioned, you know, this is really undermining the integrity of the electoral process. It's really a an attack on the very sort of system of democracy that uses elections to to function. And so these weren't political ads. 

00:10:51 Henry Peck 

These are more existential ads, you know about the very process itself rather than sort of swaying someone to one candidate or another. 

00:10:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Like another example here from one of your ads, the Election Commission has disqualified the largest opposition parties from standing in the 2024 election and their votes will not be counted. That would have gone through had you not have taken it down yourself. By the way, this podcast approached YouTube for comment. We've not heard back yet. 

00:11:19 Gareth Mitchell 

Of course, if YouTube want to, we're listening and we'll very happily put something out next week if they have anything to say, but nothing heard so far. 

00:11:27 Gareth Mitchell 

So Shruti your report says that the platforms being linked to various harms in India. How exactly? 

00:11:35 Shruti Narayan 

So to build in the example that you pointed out just now, the misinformation about disqualification of political party, obviously that could lead to voter suppression. If you saw that ad and that was the party you wanted to 

00:11:45 Shruti Narayan 

vote for you might not end up going to the polls and spending a day standing in line and voting because you think that the vote, that party is already disqualified and your vote won't be counted. 

00:11:56 Shruti Narayan 

So that's an immense harm to democracy, as Henry mentioned. In addition, we also tested ads that  

00:12:03 Shruti Narayan 

spread misinformation and also incited violence on the basis of that misinformation or incited interference with the election process, so that could be, that could lead to a host of harms. You know, that would also undermine the ability of people to court and the integrity of the entire voting process at a particular booth. And I'll pass to Henry if you want to talk about some of the Global harms that we've seen come out of this. 

00:12:27 Henry Peck 

Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think what's very important for your listeners to remember is that these online harms often don't stay online. They bleed into the real world. And so online harms can lead to offline violence. And we've seen this in India, where communal violence has been whipped up around YouTube videos. 

00:12:46 Henry Peck 

The Washington Post has some done some great reporting on this. 

00:12:49 Henry Peck 

And then we've seen this in a number of other countries around the world, for example, Myanmar and Facebook's involvement there in facilitating attacks on the Rohingya as well as in Ethiopia, Kenya, and then when it comes to electoral harms, we've seen very vividly how the  

00:13:10 Henry Peck 

January 6th insurrection. The the insurrection in Brazil. The Stop the Steel Steel movement - have also been cemented online, and how that's then spilled out. 

00:13:21 Gareth Mitchell 

So, Peter, you were nodding there,  

00:13:23 Gareth Mitchell 

as you're hearing our guests talking about the real world harms that can come from online misinformation. It's a huge issue, isn't it? 

00:13:33 Peter Guest 

It it is and I think. 

00:13:35 Peter Guest 

I was having some trouble with this, but I think you have to think first of all, my understanding is YouTube underpins a bigger information ecosystem in India. You know YouTube videos proliferate 

00:13:43 Peter Guest 

across other platforms there as they do everywhere else, right, something that goes on a platform no matter how long it's there. It goes on to other platforms online and offline. 

00:13:52 Peter Guest 

And I think that means that you have to think about questions of responsibility beyond just compliance with self declared or even as legal standards, right? These companies often seem to take it a compliance approach, like what's legal? What do I need to defend myself for? 

00:14:06 Peter Guest 

But you know you can't look at the context in which they're operating and look at the potential for violence. Look at the potential for political division. And just think, oh, well, I have a, like, a diminished responsibility of what goes on my platform. I just think that washes anymore. 

00:14:19 Peter Guest 

And I think if you were a company, a massive platform and your strategy has been explicitly about growing as big as possible, right, reaching as many people as possible. And let's be honest, that's a commercial strategy, right? They wanted to get big. So they can make money. Then you need to own the consequences of that, right. If you've become the dominant player in political media  

00:14:38 Peter Guest 

in an election year, you own the responsibility for that beyond, I think, just what you can put in your kind of company guidelines 

00:14:44 Peter Guest 

and so on and and we have to figure it out. I mean, every time, you know, we might hopefully be here in four year’s time, but I suspect we'll have the same conversation, right. We go into election cycle and we white knuckle it and say, well, let let's survive this one and hope we've have figured it out by next time, so that's not OK anymore. 

00:14:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and things tend to get even more fraught and more worrying and more harmful as the elections go on. And I I fear that we may be reflecting in a similar vein in four years time. We'll see. So final few words then from Shruti and Henry. 

00:15:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Henry, for you, what would you and I'll get both of you to give a quick final comment on this, what you hope will come out of this report. So, Henry, you go first. And what do you hope will come out of this research. 

00:15:24 Henry Peck 

I think what should come out of this research is a real prioritisation of building in safety and human rights by design into these major social media platforms that have the potential to reach such huge numbers of users, and that's focusing on and not just content moderation, but actors and behaviour too. 

00:15:48 Henry Peck 

Also speaking to what Peter was saying about the profit motivations, putting people over profits, so really investing in trust and safety teams, adding friction into some of the processes that have been made so seamless in order to encourage advertisers. But putting in a bit of friction in that review process in order to make sure these companies are doing their due diligence. 

00:16:11 Henry Peck 

And then with YouTube and many of the other platforms, just doing a wholesale review and evaluation of this ad approval process, making sure their ads’ transparency centres provide an archive for all advertisements so that the public and researchers can see what's going up there. So that there is transparency in terms of who's actually putting ads onto these onto these sites. 

00:16:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Thank you, Henry. What about you then? Shruti Narayan of Access Now what do you hope to come out of this? 

00:16:45 Shruti Narayan 

Absolutely. In addition to everything that Henry mentioned, engagement with civil society organisations or groups that are on the ground and can track misinformation trends or are interacting with people who are affected by this misinformation, social media platforms really need to conduct sustained multi layered 

00:17:05 Shruti Narayan 

engagement processes with civil society organisations and stakeholders, well in advance of elections in order to see where the gaps in their processes are and to implement some real safeguards 

00:17:17 Shruti Narayan 

that can be meaningful for the elections that are coming and and we do have multiple state elections coming even after the general election in May. And those are all opportunities for platforms to improve their engagement and transparency. 

00:17:31 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. We'll leave it there. Thank you very much. Shruti Narayan of Access Now and we've also heard there from Henry Peck, who's with Global Witness. Thank you to you both. So in this bumper year for democracy, one VPN provider is doing its bit to make things as democratic as possible for citizens who might otherwise be denied fair democracy. 

00:17:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Proton VPN is laying on free servers in countries holding elections where censorship hampers citizens unfettered access to the Internet. I'm joined by Samuele Kaplun and Antonio Cesarano from Proton. Nice to have you both on. Let's start with you then, Samuel. Just tell us a bit about Proton VPN. Who you are what you do. 

00:18:11 Samuele Kaplun  

So myself, I'm engineering director of Proton VPN. So I'm a software engineer by study and practise. 

00:18:19 Gareth Mitchell 

So you're VPN provider, but you're kind of not you're you're regular VPN provider is what I'm fishing around for. So just give a sense of what you do and how you're different. 

00:18:27 Samuele Kaplun  

So our VPN aims at leaving the Internet a better place than how we found it, basically. So of course we are a company, so we are having a business, but we want to try to prove the world that we can build a business in an ethical way in a way that protects privacy that respect users and actually in the case of partner VPN specifically 

00:18:51 Samuele Kaplun  

we really like think that the access to the to a free Internet unfiltered is a human right. So what we are doing is actually building a product that allows for free to people that cannot afford to pay for our service. It it still allow to them to access a free Internet and unfiltered, subsidising this through uh added services that uh people who can pay are are willing to pay for. 

00:19:17 Gareth Mitchell 

And Antonio Cesarano, by means of making the Internet a better place and giving people more equitable access, well, you're playing quite a role here where you intend to during the election by providing free access. Tell me more. 

00:19:32 Antonio Cesarano 

In the past years, we've been observing quite a rise in in censorship around the world. With our Proton VPN observatory, we've been looking at the different spikes that we've been having across different countries. 

00:19:46 Antonio Cesarano 

And we've been able to link those to certain events happening in those countries. Let's say that wherever we've seen some elections, disruptions, scoops, even natural phenomenons like in in Turkey, when the earthquake happened in February 2023. 

00:20:06 Antonio Cesarano 

Governments that are taking more the authoritarian aspect, let's say, of the of the situation, are applying as a playbook. Censorship over the Internet in order to control the communication? Right. So. 

00:20:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So, OK, so we know that authoritarian regimes are doing that and we can talk about a few other countries as we go along. But just go, I suppose, of getting to the point of what's going on with this election cycle. Then how are you setting out to help people who live in countries where there might not be a particularly a free or unfettered access to the Internet? 

00:20:40 Antonio Cesarano 

Exactly. We're providing a number of paid VPN connections and servers for free to people that are going through elections. So we have the whole calendar of elections happening around the world that you mentioned at the beginning of the of the podcast, 50% of the of the population of the world is going through the polls this year and 

00:21:03 Antonio Cesarano 

this means that there's going to be a huge amount of people in a short amount of time connecting to our service because they want to make sure that they have access to the unfiltered Internet, and in order to better support these people, we are making sure that they get the most support that we can give them. 

00:21:22 AD – Everyday AI: Keep up and get ahead by making AI work for your business... 

00:22:09 Gareth Mitchell 

And what will that support look like? Let's come to you, Samuele then. So how is that happening? Do you do you send people like a an information and a sort of connection pack or a list of instructions, or you've just opened up your website so people can apply? How does this work in practise? 

00:22:28 Samuele Kaplun  

So well, we we try to make a VPN that is easy to use right. So by default when our user starts to use Portal VPN, they can create an account and then can just hit a button called Quick Connect. Let's say that allows them to connect to the closest and fastest server. Now, during normal times we only offer internal three countries across the world to allow users to try the service and also to have a minimal access to the Internet. That is good enough for accessing the web. 

00:23:00 Samuele Kaplun  

Writing emails etcetera in in in three countries. But during this election, what we are doing is setting up specific countries to make them available to the people. Let's say now there there is an election in that there has been planned in Togo. 

00:23:18 Samuele Kaplun  

So what we are making available is a server available to people from Togo, a set of servers that is going to be physically located outside of Togo but behaving like if it was in Togo, which means that users are connecting outside their border, therefore, there they should not be subject to the censorship that might going to happen in specifically in Togo in this case, and we've seen that election by election, typically Twitter is censored, the Facebook, all the social media gets censored usually. 

00:23:54 Samuele Kaplun  

So they would connect outside of Togo, but to a server that has, uh, that looks like it's in, it's in that country, which allows them to afford to also access the local websites that they might need for their normal life. 

00:24:11 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. OK. So which is, it's great to get that explanation of it's such a lovely clear explanation of how VPN works. I found that massively helpful, but just before I come to Peter, I just wanted to see 

00:24:21 Gareth Mitchell 

how this is going to help you know, how somebody who lives, for instance, in Togo and is struggling to get free information or the kind of free Internet access that somebody like me might enjoy here in London, do they get a discount code or how do they apply? Or is it's it just kind of happens just by dint of where they are? Just a brief answer then we’ll come to Peter. 

00:24:41 Samuele Kaplun  

Yeah, it's it's for free basically. So they just need to set up an account with the, they need an e-mail address or we we even provide the e-mail address because our sister product, ProtonMail, makes also emails. But yeah, they just need to set up an account for free. And that's it. Yeah. 

00:24:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, OK, I've got it. Simple as that. So, Peter, there you go. You must have some thoughts. I bet you've used a few VPN's in your investigative work in various places around the world in your time then. 

00:25:08 Peter Guest 

Yeah. No, I mean, obviously I'm, I'm primed to be interested in this kind of initiative. I mean, I think I think we've covered this a little bit before on the podcast when we've talked about blackouts. 

00:25:18 Peter Guest 

Something I come across quite in in my work is that the mechanisms for blackouts have become a lot more complex and subtle over the years. So so 101, 5 years ago when I first covered my first blackout, which ages me. But you know, that was in Egypt, where the government literally pulled the plug. They pulled the electricity from from the 

00:25:38 Peter Guest 

the data centres and the Internet went down and over the last sort of decade we've seen much more targeted technological mechanisms for for censorship, you know, cutting off individual geographies, cutting off mobile networks, cutting off certain servers, 

00:25:51 Peter Guest 

you know, it's all in India, just people pulling bits of the Internet out for specific parts of Delhi where protests were taking place. And and what's powering that, it seems to me at least, is that it is a kind of a commercial business around around censorship, right. You can almost off the shelf buy the tools that a country like Russia or Egypt uses to censor certain bits of the Internet. 

00:26:11 Peter Guest 

And to get slightly philosophical about it, I think what it shows is that the Internet isn't really a static thing that we've got used to where everyone just works for its overhaul, coherence or integrity, right? There's a lot of people out there, 

00:26:22 Peter Guest 

some of whom are making the money off this, trying to undermine that integrity and split it up into different internets. And so that kind of constant technical back and forth is a thing that, you know, we have to kind of consider when we think about blackouts and and think about the Internet as a, as an object. So going around a long winded way around it is that it is great to know that there are people out there trying to you know,  

00:26:66 Peter Guest 

on the on the light side, shall we say, trying to defend that integrity and offer opportunities for people to have the Internet as we first experienced it, right, there's an open thing. 

00:26:50 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, no sure thing. And well, of course it reminds me of that programme we did recently about the undersea cables, where it was to me just I I really loved making that programme because it was about the physical infrastructure, the pipes, the tubes of the Internet. And as you've said, very articulate, articulately there, Peter. Yeah, people can plug things out of server racks or put spades through the ground through fibre, and other people will lose Internet access. So. 

00:27:17 Gareth Mitchell 

So let's get final comments from you, Antonio and Samuele. We’ll carry on in the podcast extra, by the way, but finally from you, Antonio then. What do you hope is going to to come from this? What kind of take up are you hoping for from this free server venture that you're offering? 

00:27:35 Antonio Cesarano 

The hope is that people gain more awareness around the risk and the threats of the Internet, that they understand that they have to be prepared for this to happen and we see this is happening over time so people are downloading and installing a VPN before things happen. It is important to educate people. It is important that people understand that not all the VPN's are equal. There are some VPNs that are, let's say, a trap. 

00:28:05 Antonio Cesarano 

Put there, put there from the government to actually spy on people that want to bypass the censorship. So education is super important awareness. And if we spread the word around what is happening, the hope is really the one that we will join forces. All the actors that are against censorship. And we'll try to keep the Internet private and accessible to everyone. 

00:28:29 Gareth Mitchell 

And there's a bit of an engineering angle here as well. Samuele, we're relying on you and your engineering team to keep all this working. I know you're going to answer yes. Well, everything will go fine, but how is it gonna go? Some you, you you might get quite an uptick in traffic. Here are your servers up to the job. 

00:28:44 Samuele Kaplun  

Well, yes. 

00:28:47 Gareth Mitchell 

I thought you might say that. 

00:28:48 Samuele Kaplun  

Yeah, we we we plan for it. So we we want, yeah, to sustain the the sufficient quality of service for our for our users and the future users and yeah for for citizens around the world. So yeah. 

00:29:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Ok. That's good. Sorry if that was a bit of a non question to finish with, but I just wanted to kind of finish on something relatively uplifting there. So I thought I'd just give you that one for free Samuele. 

00:29:11 Gareth Mitchell 

Thank you for joining us. More from you, both by the way, in the podcast, extra. So don't go away quite yet. Samuele Kaplun and Antonio Cesarano with Proton VPN. 

00:29:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Just a few little points of business to wrap up with, but not before we've had a final word from Peter. Do you want to add anything on what we just heard there Peter? 

00:29:30 Peter Guest 

I mean save it for the extra, but I mean I I have to say, I'm just gonna say the only thing I've I've gone my mind about this is actually I think it's gonna be a really interesting year for VPN's. It’s just it's probably not often said, because you know, it's not just the countries that we see as authoritarian, talking about blocking services, you know, look at the US who blocked TikTok. 

00:29:35 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, we can do it in the extra if you want to, yeah. 

00:29:49 Peter Guest 

And if that happens, you know it'll have to be enacted somehow technically, which means you've got this weird, weird world where the US and U.S. companies are working on technology to try and stop US users seeing something. I mean, it's not totally new, but it does feel a bit like a Rubicon to cross. 

00:30:07 Peter Guest 

Yeah, I I have heard reports. I can't back them up that you know, downloads of VPN's among American teens have been increased. 

00:30:12 Gareth Mitchell 

Right, which would figure already. Yeah. Yeah, with the TikTok. Yeah, maybe they're using Proton VPN. We shall see. Alright, well, thank you very much indeed for that, Peter, for your thoughts. So I did mention that there'll be more in the podcast extra and to access that you probably know the sctick by now, but it depends on your podcast provider, but there's usually like little kind of padlocky thing that you can visit or you see on your podcast provider and you just kind of follow that and then follow the instructions to give us, very kindly ten U.S. dollars a month or pay us I should say, not just giving it to us. You are paying for a service that we will provide and and it will be extra content for you, 

00:31:02 Gareth Mitchell 

and podcast exclusive material and and it also keeps the lights on round here and pays for the VPNs as well. So we very much appreciate that. Also I do need to put something right that went a little bit wrong the other day where we had a bit of an issue with SUDs the the committee where we allocate listener , or I should say, subscriber numbers and well it it got a bit embarrassing because Martin from Mozambique was granted listener number or subscriber #17 and there was a bit of an error because it turned out that listener 

00:31:36 Gareth Mitchell 

Troy already had that number and we heard from Troy saying I have to say I was distressed after listening to last night's podcast as I'd asked for this number 17 back in December here on Facebook and and I was even the first one to ask. However, I most definitely don't want to deprive a fellow listener who also wants that number. So if it's available, I'll take the #816 in honour or 816 really, in honour of the area code of my chosen hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. 

00:32:08 Gareth Mitchell 

And Troy goes on to say, yes, this is all said slightly tongue in cheek and I'm glad you pointed that out Troy, because I had a horrible thing I'd massively hurt your feelings there and but you'd have been forgiven for being a little bit kind of disgruntled by the double numbering. 

00:32:22 Gareth Mitchell 

So there you go. It's settled. Martin's going to stay on the subscriber #17. Troy, we're giving you 816. We'll give a free number out to a family member or close friend as just a favour for being so nice to us and moving to a different number. So let me know if you want to propose propose a number for somebody close to you in your life, and we'll just waive that through because I think we owe you a bit of a favour. Very sorry about that. What else do I need to tell you? Also in the news, in the podcasting news, Google Podcasts have closed down. 

00:32:56 Gareth Mitchell 

And our listener numbers have gone down slightly as a result. So we seem to have lost a few people who have listened on Google Podcasts. So obviously those people cannot hear me talking unless they've gone over to another podcast provider. So if you know somebody who listens via Google podcast, could you just call them up or drive around to their house or whatever and just tell them to use a different pod catcher. So yeah, thank you, Google for taking away a load of our listeners, but I guess it's their service they can do what they want with it, but it's just a bit sad for people who relied on that. 

00:33:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Also rather sad news. In fact, very sad news to finish with in this edition. We've just heard during our recording here on Tuesday early evening UK time that Peter Higgs, the physicist who discovered the Higgs Boson, has just died at the age of 94. The Nobel Prize winning physicist showed how the particle helped bind the universe together. He died at home in Edinburgh. And the existence of the mass giving field all right there at the heart of the model of physics. The existence of this mass giving field the Higgs Boson. It was actually confirmed in 2012 experimentally at CERN, but Peter Higgs proposed that that particle, obviously named in his honour. And sad news on which to end. There we are, other Peter here in the studio, still very much alive. It's been lovely. Thank you very much today.. 

00:34:23 Gareth Mitchell 

And we're obviously just bitter that we missed the eclipse. But if by the way, dear listener, you want something a little bit kind of cerebral, theological combined with AI, there'll be more of that next week. Next edition. Join us for that, but in the meantime, from all of us here in the studio, thanks for listening from Kaziah Wenham Kenyan, who's doing the engineering here today with Callum Swingler. 

00:34:05 Gareth Mitchell 

The production manager is Liz Tuohy. The editor is Anita Lichtarowicz, and if it sounds lovely, this podcast of course it does. You can thank all the engineering and all the studio facilities here at Lansons Team Farner. There you go. That'll do. See you next time. Bye. Bye. 

 ENDS