Society's problem
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- May 27, 2026
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Society's problem
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Mighty Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) defeated Gujarat Titans (GT) on Tuesday to reach the final. It was an incredible performance by RCB. RCB batters started on a very high note from the word go and
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Philippe Alfroy, Agence France-PresseAs soon as he put on his glasses, Indian vegetable seller Tofan Jena knew daily life would never be the same. For the first time, the 49-year-old could see the world around
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The US Navy says it plans to buy 15 hulking “battleships” over the next 30 years. The number of such behemoths it actually needs comes closer to zero. The sooner Congress recognises that fact, the
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Sophie Wingate, The IndependentSocial media "ranks alongside smoking" as a threat to young people's health, a report by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says. The Government's 'Growing Up In The Online World' consultation, which
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Donald Trump has written on Truth Social that negotiators from both sides “must take their time and get it right”. A simple and accurate statement but what is the full story?The only substantial concern is
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Some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social enterprises in India are bridging the gap between legal recognition under the country’s formal e-waste rules and informal waste collectors, according to report by Mongabay-India (MI) report.India is the
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Wall Street is abuzz with next month’s expected blockbuster debut of Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker SpaceX, but few of the biggest IPOs in recent years have paid off for investors who bought in when the deals came to market. A Reuters analysis of the 50 IPOs with the highest valuations in the past five years shows that investors would have been better off buying an S&P 500 index fund about three-quarters of the time. The data underscores the difficulty of finding bargains among companies whose valuations have often surged long before the stock’s debut. An investor who bought each of the IPOs tracked by Reuters would be up an average of 27% through May 21. That compares to an average gain of 53% in the S&P 500 over those same periods. The analysis assumes the buyer would be able to purchase shares at the IPO price - often not possible for a retail investor - or simply buy the broad-market S&P. Historical returns for investors buying during the frenzied first day of trading of a stock fare even worse, the analysis showed. “It’s difficult to make money unless you’re in the early stages of these things and buying these things before the IPO,” said Dennis Dick, a proprietary trader at Triple D Trading. SpaceX’s debut is expected to be followed by OpenAI and Anthropic, tapping into demand for AI-related companies that has sent the US stock market to record highs. Set to trade under the ticker ‘SPCX’, SpaceX filed its prospectus on Wednesday, with a share sale potentially as early as June 11. Founder Elon Musk is making some shares available to retail investors through Robinhood, SoFi and other trading platforms that would allow them to get in at a lower price. The space exploration company is expected to target a $1.75tn valuation that would dwarf all previous Wall Street stock listings, but the Reuters analysis shows that such superlatives are no guarantee investors will make money. University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, who studies IPOs, said that while most public listings underperform the S&P 500 over the long run, companies with particularly high valuations as measured by price-to-sales tend to fare the worst. At a $1.75tn valuation, SpaceX’s price-to-sales ratio would be nearly 100, compared to AI heavyweight Nvidia’s price-to-sales ratio of 24. SpaceX lost nearly $5bn last year. “Every one of these companies where investors are willing to pay a very high price-to-sales ratio has a compelling story for why the future potentially can be really bright,” Ritter said. “But, you know, stuff could go wrong.” Among the IPOs analyzed, AI-related chip designers Astera Labs and Arm Holdings have been the biggest winners. Astera has surged over 700% since its 2024 IPO, while Arm has soared about 400% since its 2023 debut. Both of those performances outpace the S&P. Cerebras Systems, another AI chip designer, soared 52% from its May 14 IPO price; it is down around 27% from its first intraday high. Among the biggest disappointments in recent years, Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2022 following its heavily oversubscribed IPO the year before. Now trading over-the-counter, Didi Global shares are down about 74% from their $14 IPO price. Electric car maker Rivian Automotive has slumped 82% since its IPO in 2021 that briefly made it the second-most valuable US automaker. The company continues to lose money for every car it builds, and is burning around $1bn in cash every quarter. Shares in design software firm Figma nearly quadrupled in their first trading session last July. But with investors worried that generative AI could commoditize Figma’s technology, its stock is down 35% from the $33 IPO price. Even the hottest offerings can lag. Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which Reuters did not include in its analysis, holds the record for the largest US IPO by valuation. Touted as the “Amazon of China,” its shares have doubled since its 2014 Wall Street debut, during which time the S&P 500 has returned over 300%.
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Sudan’s civil war has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. Since fighting erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), tens of thousands have been killed, millions displaced, and warnings of atrocity crimes and genocidal violence have intensified, particularly in Darfur. Yet the war has unfolded alongside another conflict: a vast online struggle over narrative, legitimacy, and visibility.For years, social media companies have claimed they are doing a lot to tackle disinformation, and bot networks (or electronic flies as we call them in the Gulf). Networks are supposedly identified, exposed, and removed. Yet a recent investigation I conducted as a UNESCO Fellow into influence operations surrounding Sudan uncovered something troubling: a sprawling bot and sockpuppet network that has operated across the Middle East for years, surviving suspensions, adapting to platform changes, and shaping political discourse across multiple countries and conflicts.The operation consisted of hundreds of core sockpuppet accounts supported by thousands of auxiliary bots producing more than 170,000 posts across multiple languages over several years. Its activity stretched across Sudan, Yemen, Tunisia, Mauritania, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf - including Qatar. Sudan sat at the centreof the network’s activity.The findings suggest these networks increasingly function as parallel media infrastructures. They do not simply spread isolated pieces of false information. They sustain broader political narratives through repetition, selective omission, coordinated amplification, and the simulation of public consensus. Collectively, they manufacture the appearance of organic political sentiment while concealing the centralised and inauthentic nature of the operation itself.The network’s activity closely tracked developments in Sudan’s civil war. As violence escalated following April 2023, Sudan-related content surged dramatically. The operation overwhelmingly promoted narratives aligned with the RSF, portraying the group as humanitarian, peace-oriented, and legitimate, while assigning responsibility for civilian suffering, famine, and instability almost exclusively to the SAF and alleged Islamist actors.This framing extended well beyond ordinary wartime propaganda. The RSF leadership was repeatedly associated with diplomacy, civilian protection, and humanitarianism. Reports of abuses attributed to the RSF were systematically ignored, denied, or reframed. The result was a highly disciplined narrative environment in which one side of the conflict was persistently rehabilitated while responsibility for violence was externalised elsewhere.These dynamics matter because information manipulation directly affects how conflicts are understood internationally. In atrocity contexts, coordinated influence operations can muddy attribution, distort public understanding, weaken the visibility of credible reporting, and interfere with humanitarian and diplomatic responses. Sudan’s war has already suffered from limited media access, fragmented reporting, and competing geopolitical interests. Large-scale influence operations further degrade an already fragile information environment.One of the most striking findings in the report concerned the structure of the network itself. Rather than functioning as a single unified cluster, the operation was organised into regional “cells.” Different groups of accounts posed as users from specific countries, often using local flags, dialects, imagery, and national symbols to enhance credibility. Tunisian-focused accounts interacted heavily with other Tunisian-focused accounts. Sudan-focused accounts clustered around Sudanese themes. Mauritanian-focused accounts amplified Mauritanian content.Longitudinal analysis, however, revealed repeated interaction with the same low-salience “filler” accounts focused on entertainment, viral videos, and generic social media content. These auxiliary accounts acted as connective infrastructure linking otherwise separate regional clusters together. What initially appeared to be dispersed online communities increasingly resembled a coordinated transnational influence architecture.Temporal analysis also exposed patterns inconsistent with authentic geographically distributed behavior. Accounts claiming to represent users from multiple countries such as Libya or Tunisia displayed similar posting rhythms aligned with Gulf-region working hours. The further the claimed location was from Gulf Standard Time, the more pronounced the discrepancy became.Perhaps most importantly, the network adapted over time. Accounts were suspended, repurposed, renamed, and replaced. Narratives shifted in response to regional developments. More recently, the operation appears to have incorporated AI-assisted accounts, synthetic personas, and increasingly automated forms of engagement. Some accounts displayed homogenised language patterns, repetitive slogans, and coordinated interaction structures characteristic of emerging AI-enabled influence operations.This persistence is significant. The dominant assumption surrounding online influence operations is often that they are temporary campaigns tied to specific events or elections. What emerged in this investigation was something more durable and infrastructural. The network operated across years, multiple countries, several languages, and different political contexts while maintaining broad narrative consistency and operational coordination.The broader implications extend well beyond Sudan. For years, discussions around coordinated influence operations have focused heavily on Russia, China, or Western elections. Yet the Middle East is one of the world’s most sophisticated environments for digital authoritarianism, computational propaganda, and coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Governments, proxy actors, political networks, and commercial operators across the region have developed increasingly advanced methods for shaping online discourse and manufacturing legitimacy at scale.At the same time, social media platforms continue to struggle with systematic enforcement, particularly in Arabic and other non-English contexts. Many of these networks persist for years despite public exposure. Verification systems designed to enhance trust can instead be exploited to increase visibility and perceived legitimacy. Indeed, 40 of the accounts in this network had verification status, but were entirely fake.The consequences may extend even further as AI systems increasingly retrieve and synthesize information from social media ecosystems. Coordinated influence operations don’t just shape what users encounter online, but they also shape the informational environment from which AI systems generate knowledge itself.While disinformation is a central issue, perhaps more worrying is the emergence of durable influence infrastructures engineered to manipulate visibility, simulate public consensus, and shape political reality across entire regions over long periods of time.• The writer is an associate Professor of Media Analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, a Unesco Fellow, and author of several books including Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East.
