Category: Новини

Jenny Chan strode through central London on a late summer Saturday afternoon, heading for the South Bank Lion statue opposite Big Ben.

There, by the River Thames, the 57-year-old mother and her two children joined a group of fellow Hong Kong expats who had gathered to sign a banner for Anson Lo, a 26-year-old singer with Hong Kong boy band Mirror.

About 200 people, most wearing clothes in Lo’s signature pink, wrote messages on the giant scroll. The banner had been hauled to the United Kingdom by Mirror fans, and its London stop on Sept. 25 was just one of many scheduled for outposts of the global Hong Kong diaspora. Its final destination is Hong Kong, where it will be presented to Lo himself.

The 12-member Hong Kong boy group Mirror originated in 2018 on the first season of King Maker, an elimination-style talent contest produced by Hong Kong’s ViuTV. The producers hand-picked contestants to form a boy band around the winner, Keung To. Mirror’s first release, roughly translated as One Moment in Time, debuted in November of that year.

Mirror’s trajectory — from its emergence before Hong Kong’s massive pro-democracy protests of 2019 to its superstar status in the Cantonese-speaking world — has made listening to the band “a type of resistance,” wrote Mary Hui on Quartz, as China cracks down almost daily on Hong Kong’s civil society.

Inspirational lyrics

Mirror members are identified more by their signature colors — Keung To’s is peach — than their politics. But it was widely reported via Facebook that former journalist and activist Gwyneth Ho, detained on a national security charge and facing the possibility of life imprisonment, cried upon hearing their song Warrior, which includes a line that translates to “I’d rather die / And I won’t retreat.”

 

Such lyrics help explain why Mirror is now a common thread among those fleeing China’s repression in the once freewheeling former British colony. Today, wherever Hong Kongers gather, Mirror provides the soundtrack, with hits such as Ignited and Boss.

 

Howard Chan, 23, and his sister Maggie Chan, 16, were studying in the United Kingdom when Maggie discovered Mirror late in 2018 on a show streaming online. She was drawn by the Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong. VOA is using pseudonyms to ensure the safety of Chan family members as China tracks people overseas under Hong Kong’s national security law.

Through the band, the younger Chans told VOA Cantonese, they have connected with old friends in Hong Kong and friends who had moved to Australia.

Maggie Chan, a high school student, said she persuaded her brother, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering at a U.K. university, to join her in binge-watching Mirror’s ViuTV shows.

Howard Chan became a Mirror fan.

Their mother, Jenny Chan, moved to London in August 2019 to take care of her children. She continued watching a daily sitcom on TVB, a Hong Kong station often labeled pro-China.

Her children pushed her to quit TVB, but she resisted until the COVID-19 lockdown, when she started watching ViuTV.

Jenny Chan became a Mirror fan in part because “they’re handsome.”

The U.K. Chans rely on Thomas Chan, a 60-year-old patriarch and an executive with an international company in Hong Kong, to collect Mirror-related material and send it to them.

When he visited in July, he pushed through jet lag by binge-watching Ossan’s Love HK, which features Mirror’s Edan Lui and Lo.

The 15-episode series is a remake of a Japanese “boys love” drama. ViuTV’s Cantonese version is the first of the genre to air in Hong Kong.

Thomas Chan became a Mirror fan.

 

Mom worries about band

Despite Mirror’s popularity, Jenny Chan worries about the band’s fate given China’s targeting of effeminate male celebrities.

Her favorite, Lo, is known for his androgynous style.

Described by her son as politically liberal and open to new ideas, she also worries that the band’s influence may upset authorities.

When hundreds of fans attended a Hong Kong birthday event for Lo in July, they ignored police orders to disperse, instead waiting for a pink double-decker bus proclaiming “Happy Birthday Anson Lo” on its side.

“I believe China would feel afraid, as a group of people gathered, and they were not scared (of the police). We were worried (about Mirror),” she told VOA Cantonese.

She is relieved the semiofficial Hong Kong Tourism Board recently invited Lo and fellow Mirror member Ian Chan to appear in a promotional advertisement.

The U.K. Chans attend fan-hosted events in the London area, the most recent on Oct. 3. Howard Chan told VOA Cantonese that the events help maintain a Hong Kong identity.

“We live in London and often see many Hong Kongers. But for some who live quite far away, there is barely any chance to speak Cantonese. These events are something where we can get together,” he said.

Howard Chan recalled attending London marches supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement with his sister before the pandemic. Those felt similar to Mirror fan events, he said, in that both attracted Cantonese-speaking people to a common activity.

“When I see someone with an Asian face, I don’t even have to think or ask in English whether they are Hong Kongers. I can just speak Cantonese,” he said of the marches and Mirror events.

Jenny Chan, who said she could tell her son felt heavy-hearted at the protests, likes seeing him relaxed at Mirror events. “It was like going to therapists, helping him to release his emotions and get happier.”
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Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.

Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.

 

More — about 6 in 10 — are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.

For Carmen Speller, a 33-year-old graduate student in Lexington, Kentucky, the divisions are evident when she’s discussing the coronavirus pandemic with close family members. Speller trusts COVID-19 vaccines; her family does not. She believes the misinformation her family has seen on TV or read on questionable news sites has swayed them in their decision to stay unvaccinated against COVID-19.

In fact, some of her family members think she’s crazy for trusting the government for information about COVID-19.

“I do feel like they believe I’m misinformed. I’m the one that’s blindly following what the government is saying, that’s something I hear a lot,” Speller said. “It’s come to the point where it does create a lot of tension with my family and some of my friends as well.”

Speller isn’t the only one who may be having those disagreements with her family.

The survey found that 61% of Republicans say the U.S. government has a lot of responsibility for spreading misinformation, compared to just 38% of Democrats.

There’s more bipartisan agreement, however, about the role that social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, play in the spread of misinformation.

According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation.

And that type of rare partisan agreement among Americans could spell trouble for tech giants like Facebook, the largest and most profitable of the social media platforms, which is under fire from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike.

“The AP-NORC poll is bad news for Facebook,” said Konstantin Sonin, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who is affiliated with the Pearson Institute. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin — even when Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.”

 

During a congressional hearing Tuesday, senators vowed to hit Facebook with new regulations after a whistleblower testified that the company’s own research shows its algorithms amplify misinformation and content that harms children.

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Democrats and Republicans ended the hearing with acknowledgement that regulations must be introduced to change the way Facebook amplifies its content and targets users.

The poll also revealed that Americans are willing to blame just about everybody but themselves for spreading misinformation, with 53% of them saying they’re not concerned that they’ve spread misinformation.

“We see this a lot of times where people are very worried about misinformation but they think it’s something that happens to other people — other people get fooled by it, other people spread it,” said Lisa Fazio, a Vanderbilt University psychology professor who studies how false claims spread. “Most people don’t recognize their own role in it.”

Younger adults tend to be more concerned that they’ve shared falsehoods, with 25% of those ages 18 to 29 very or extremely worried that they have spread misinformation, compared to just 14% of adults ages 60 and older. Sixty-three percent of older adults are not concerned, compared with roughly half of other Americans.

Yet it’s older adults who should be more worried about spreading misinformation, given that research shows they’re more likely to share an article from a false news website, Fazio said.

Before she shares things with family or her friends on Facebook, Speller tries her best to make sure the information she’s passing on about important topics like COVID-19 has been peer-reviewed or comes from a credible medical institution. Still, Speller acknowledges there has to have been a time or two that she “liked” or hit “share” on a post that didn’t get all the facts quite right.

“I’m sure it has happened,” Speller said. “I tend to not share things on social media that I didn’t find on verified sites. I’m open to that if someone were to point out, ‘Hey this isn’t right,’ I would think, OK, let me check this.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

At a ceremony in Oslo, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair Berit Reiss-Andersen announced the winners, saying, “Ms. Ressa and Mr. Muratov are receiving the Peace Prize for their courageous fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines and in Russia.”

In a statement, the committee said Philippine journalist Maria Ressa is being recognized for her fearless use of freedom of expression to expose abuse of power, use of violence and growing authoritarianism in her native country. As an in investigative journalist and co-founder of the digital media company Rappler, Ressa focused critical attention on President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial anti-drug campaign. 

Ms Ressa and Rappler have also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents, and manipulate public discourse.

 

The committee honored Russian journalist Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov for his decades-long defense of freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions. In 1993, he co-founded the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and has been its editor in chief since 1995. It is considered to be the most independent newspaper in Russia today, with a fundamentally critical attitude towards power. 

The committee said the newspaper’s fact-based journalism and professional integrity have made it an important source of information on censurable aspects of Russian society. It has published critical articles on subjects including corruption, police violence, unlawful arrests, electoral fraud and the use of Russian military forces both within and outside Russia.

The two journalists will share a $1.1 million cash prize.

The Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, and literature have also been awarded this week. The prize for economics will be awarded Monday.

The awards will all be formally presented in December. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the academy announced this year’s ceremony will be a mixture of digital and physical events. Laureates will receive their Nobel Prize medals and diplomas in their home countries.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his body of work detailing the refugee experience and how colonialism shaped African culture.

At a news conference at the Swedish Academy’s headquarters in Stockholm, Permanent Secretary Mats Helm said Gurnah received the award for “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Gurnah, born in 1948 and raised on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, arrived in England as a refugee himself in the late 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories.

In its statement, the academy said, “In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books.” The statement said that quality is as evident in his latest novel, 2020’s “Afterlives,” which he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.

The academy went on to say Gurnah’s writing is “striking” for its dedication to truth and “his aversion to simplification. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

Gurnah will receive a $1.1 million cash prize, but for writers, the prize also adds prestige and publicity by exposing their work to much wider audience. 

The Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were awarded earlier this week, with the Peace Prize to be awarded Friday, and economics on Monday.

The awards will all be formally presented in December. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the academy announced this year’s ceremony will be a mixture of digital and physical events. Laureates will receive their Nobel Prize medals and diplomas in their home countries.

Some information in this report comes from Reuters. 
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