Welcome back to another edition of The Detour. If you love reading The Detour and want to support independent journalism, please consider pledging a subscription below. Thank you for reading to our award-winning journalism as we continue our mission of covering underreported multimedia stories from around the world.
Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck this week:
🤖 The latest in AI-bot misinformation warfare
💩 France’s great poop protest
🌊 The weird world of rogue waves
But first, here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world lately:
Kelly Kimball for Frame. // Wikimedia Commons
1,214 — The number of public schools currently in Louisiana. The state has been rocked with controversy ever since Republican Governor Jeff Landry signed a law that would require the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom of these public schools come January 2025. But on Monday, a group of plaintiffs (mostly made up of families and parents) filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to block the law, claiming it violates both U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the First Amendment, and “pressures students into religious observance.”
House Bill 71 requires that by January 1, 2025, a poster or framed print of the Ten Commandments will be displayed in every classroom from kindergarten through college at public schools and nonpublic schools that receive state funds. Schools would need to dip into their own funds to provide these posters, or accept donations of the text, as long as the text is “in a large, easily readable font.”
18 — The number of students in Spain’s inaugural class of bell ringers, all of whom graduated last week at the ISCREB theology school in Barcelona, in an effort to restore a key piece of Spain’s heritage. The cohort arrives just two years after UNESCO added manual bell ringing in Spain — a centuries old practice — to its roster of humanity's Intangible Cultural Heritage.
"Since the last generation of bell ringers had died off, the only thing to do was to train new ones in how to toll the bells. And that's where the idea of the school was born," Xavier Pallàs, who taught the inaugural cohort, told the Associated Press.
200 Swiss Francs — The amount Tour De France cyclist Julien Bernard was fined by the International Cycling Union for pausing to kiss his wife and son during the race on Friday. But why? The Union said in a statement that Bernard’s smooch had been damaging “to the image of the sport.”
A screenshot of an X post showing Bernard with his wife and son at the Tour de France. // Source: X
In response, however, Bernard posted a photo of the fine and this statement on X: “I’m sorry for having damaged the image of the sport, but I would pay 200 CHF ($220) every day to relive this moment.”
2024 Tour de France route. // Source: Wikimedia Commons
32 — The minimum number of people that have been abducted in Kenya following a weeks-long period of political protests and civil unrest. Each of the freed abductees claim they were taken by government security forces after they had spoken out against President William Ruto’s proposal to hike up taxes. Initial grumblings toward the bill one month ago have exploded into an all-out movement under the banner #RejectFinanceBill2024, possibly threatening Ruto's presidency. Human rights activists have documented hundreds of arrests and at least 39 deaths at the hands of security forces.
And now onto the main course — Modern warfare is increasingly using a new feature in its playbook: AI bots. The development comes amid ongoing major global conflicts, as the Israel-Hamas war enters it’s 9th month this week, and the Russia-Ukraine war drags well past its second year. To try and understand what’s going on, I’ve broken down a couple of the most recent developments in the AI-driven misinformation landscape:
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said it disrupted a Russian propaganda campaign that used nearly 1,000 AI-generated social media accounts on X to spread disinformation — which is, tbh, nothing new to Russia’s war strategy. The bot accounts posed as real Americans to spread pro-Kremlin narratives and content in support of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The State Department alleges the campaign was organized by an editor at the Russian state-controlled media publication RT.
In March, an Israeli disinformation watchdog found that a string of fake websites connected to an Israeli political consulting firm called Stoic sought to influence American perception of the war in Gaza. Stoic also used OpenAI models to manipulate political conversations online by posting anti-Hamas and pro-Israel content.
Here’s a running tally of some more recent pro-Israel misinformation initiatives:
In January: A news report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz claims the Israeli government bought technology to conduct online “influence” campaigns.
In February: A network of fake social media accounts were found spreading content that attacked the staff of the United Nations agency that assists Palestinian refugees, according to an open source intelligence researcher.
In June:News reports revealed the Israeli government used Stoic to create AI-generated misinformation meant to influence U.S. politicians to support Israel in the war in Gaza.
If any of these misinformation plays sound familiar, it’s because they are . In 2019, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on Russia’s leveraging of social media to “use [it] to sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” As the U.S. presidential election approaches in November, historians and election security experts are hoping that old playbook won’t rear its head any time soon.
Throughout history, misinformation has been a reliable means for bad actors to manipulate perception. But the challenge this time around, according to experts, is that AI is making this manipulation faster and more difficult to discern than ever before.
“In the last few years, we in America are having to defend assaults on our elections from both domestic and foreign forces. We just don’t have the infrastructure or the history to do it at scale because we’ve never had to face threats this severe in the past,” Nick Penniman, CEO of the political reform and election integrity organization Issue One, told NBC news.
Starting this week — The stage production of the 2006 rom-com hit, “The Devil Wears Prada”, premieres at the Theatre Royal Plymouth in London’s West End. The actress, Broadway maven, and the first Black woman to receive the Miss America title back in 1984, Vanessa Williams plays the production’s immensely quotable villain, Miranda Priestly. Read all about the book-turned-movie-turned-stage-production here.
On Thursday, July 11 — USAID’s Isobel Coleman ends her visit to Guyana. Top on her docket while she’s there is to discuss achieving climate adaptation and resilience in the Caribbean region by 2030. Small nations like Guyana are among the most vulnerable countries to the knock-on effects of climate change, such as sea level rise and coastal erosion. Come November, the UN will host its next international climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the plight of smaller nations will likely be top of mind. Here’s a piece we published last year, in partnership with Channel 4 News, on how the island nation of Tuvalu is preparing for its potential erasure from rising sea levels.
During the week of Monday, July 15 — The Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo may bathe in the Seine river to prove a controversial point: After centuries of being too toxic to swim in, the Seine river is undergoing an intense clean-up process to the tune of $1.5 billion USD. The Parisian government hopes the water will be clean enough for the city to host open water swimming events during the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Dive into France’s mass-pooping movement: French citizens have been skeptical of Hidalgo’s claim — so skeptical, in fact, that when Hidalgo announced she would dip in the river back in June 23, an elaborate mass-pooping protest spread like wildfire across the internet:
A website mapping out where and when French citizens can participate in the #IShitInTheSeine protest. // Source: #IShitInTheSeineOnJune23
Alongside a viral hashtag, #IShitInTheSeineOnJune23, wherein protesters planned to poop in the river on the date Hidalgo claimed she would swim in the river, a creative French protester made a website that would calculate where and when would be the best day to poop for optimal timing.
Now Hidalgo has postponed the swim, she says, because of the French elections, and has said she will swim in the Seine before the Olympic Games kick off on July 26th.
Why have French protestors staged such a strange display of civil unrest? Many are upset at the massive cost to clean the river, and enraged by the strain on public transportation and security risks brought by the Olympic Games. These same protestors fear the country is facing mounting threats to its democracy from a growing far-right movement.
Also on Monday, July 15 — Elections occur in Rwanda. New research done by two University of Antwerp professors has found that over the course of 30 years since the devastating genocide in Rwanda triggered by violent ethnic tensions, the country’s Hutu majority now feel more represented by government despite it being largely made up of a Tutsi ruling elite. Dive into their own analysis of their work here.
There’s a rare and strange phenomenon in oceanography called rogue waves. These are waves that are more than twice the height of surrounding waves. They can reach up to 100 feet and last for several minutes, sometimes ramming into boats or shorelines and causing extensive damage.
Here’s one pretty intense video of a rogue wave hitting a U.S. military base in the Pacific Ocean in January 2024:
Rogue waves are formed by a combination of factors, one of which is constructive interference. It’s when the order of crests and troughs of swells line up in such a way as to form a kind of "mega wave. They’re rare, with researchers suggesting that around three out of every 10,000 waves in the ocean become rogue waves.
Rogue waves remind me of other odd phenomena that exist in nature, from water spouts to fallstreak holes, and how sometimes the rare and random can help us appreciate the wonder and power of the natural world, and learn about the science that animates it.
— Ben
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