Coda Story Launches New Channel Covering ‘Authoritarian Tech’
19 February, 2019
New York, NY, and Tbilisi, Georgia — CODA STORY announces the launch on February 18 of its new channel ‘Authoritarian Tech.’ The foundation Access Now has provided pilot funding for the channel.
Surveillance, privacy, information, control: Coda Story provides global reporting on how governments abuse and distort the power and potential of emerging technologies such as AI, facial recognition, digital tracking, and social media and will explore how these technologies are strengthening autocratic regimes and stifling dissent.
Text pieces, videos, and other reported content in the new authoritarian tech coverage compliment Coda Story’s ongoing coverage of disinformation campaigns and will be distributed on Coda Story’s website and in collaboration with Rappler in the Philippines and Coda’s other editorial partners..
“New technologies are having a huge impact on how both democratic and undemocratic governments around the world control their populations. We hope our new channel shines a light on some of the darkest corners of the world’s authoritarian processes,” said editor Burhan Wazir, who will oversee the new edition.
Coda Story will leverage its expertise in developing stories filed from around the world to provide a dedicated platform of complex storytelling around authoritarian tech. Since its founding in 2015, Coda has covered LGBTQ rights in the former Soviet Union, Germany’s migration crisis, and Russian disinformation and its effects. The launch of the new Authoritarian Tech channel is a logical expansion of Coda’s disinformation coverage.
“The technologies being deployed by authoritarian regimes to control the public square piggyback on the same platforms used to disseminate disinformation,” said Ilan Greenberg, Coda Story’s publisher and editorial director. “Coda’s mission is to not only illuminate the overarching storylines of our times — like disinformation and authoritarian technology — but to also show how they are interconnected.”
With its authoritarian tech coverage, Coda Story broadens its geographic scope but continues to adhere to its mission: to stay on the story, to cover the world’s overarching storylines, going beyond the headlines to track an issue from its high-level power struggles to its impact on society’s most marginalized.
“Authoritarian technology straddles countries and industries, connecting Uzbekistan and Israel, China and California, and a web of like-minded technologists. Coda’s multimedia coverage will aim to reveal these hidden connections, explain context and show how abuse of technology is changing the societies we live in,” said Natalia Antelava, Coda Story’s CEO and editor-in-chief.
The managing editor of the authoritarian tech coverage is Burhan Wazir in London, burhan@codastory.com. The associate managing editor of the authoritarian tech coverage is Eduard Saakashvili in Philadelphia, eduard@codastory.com.
Discover more about Coda Story’s authoritarian tech here.
Sign up for our Authoritarian Tech newsletter here.
