Weekly Digest: Repressions in Belarus, restrictions on TikTok

Leaders of Tut.by, the largest news site in Belarus, received long jail sentences this week, a culmination of years-long crackdown on the independent outlet. Editor-in-chief Marina Zolotova and general director Lyudmila Chekina were jailed for 12 years. 

Repressions against Tut.by started in 2021, when the Lukashenka regime blocked the outlet in Belarus and numerous journalists were detained. Since then some Tut.by journalists fled the country and rebranded the publication as Zerkalo.io, which continues reporting from exile while being blocked in Belarus.

Zolotova and Chekina “faced charges that ranged from ‘incitement to hatred’ to tax evasion, a popular means of targeting opposition figures”, DW writes. Two other Tut.by employees received ten-year sentences.

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TikTok increasingly finds itself in political trouble in the US and other Western countries as fears over its Chinese control grow among American and European governments.

Most notably, last week reporting indicated that a US government agency had threatened to ban the social media platform in the country if Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell its stake in TikTok. “More than a dozen countries around the world have introduced full, partial or public sector bans on TikTok amid heightened national security concerns”, Axios reports.

Individual media organisations, particularly publicly funded ones, are also increasingly cautious. While the BBC operates multiple popular TikTok accounts, the corporation recently advised its employees against using the app on work devices unless needed for business reasons. The BBC justified the decisions with “concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security”, Press Gazette reports.

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The race between generative AI tools further intensified this week as Google began a limited release of Bard, its AI chatbot. Google’s “new A.I. chatbot will be available to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain and will accommodate additional users, countries and languages over time, Google executives said in an interview”, The New York Times reports.

The move is widely seen as an attempt to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the company’s strategic partner Microsoft. Although Google’s AI technologies are rumoured to be on par or greater than those developed by OpenAI, the public release of ChatGPT and its integration into Microsoft’s search engine Bing have allowed the two companies to get a leg up on Google. 

Such a rapid release of generative AI tools is prompting concerns around the spread of misinformation and other issues. Still, Google is more cautious than OpenAI and Microsoft in releasing its generative AI tools publicly as the company tries to avoid controversy and to preserve its lucrative business model, which relies on search advertising and can potentially be threatened by AI chatbots. 

Bonus — Three more stories you might want to check out:

• Press Gazette: Finkelstein start-up The Messenger buys potential rival Grid ahead of May launch 
• Bloomberg: Spotify Has Spent Less Than 10% of Its $100 Million Diversity Fund
• The Washington Post: Ukraine demotes commander who gave interview about ill-trained troops

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