Blogs
on September 24, 2025
For Wahhab Hassoo, a Yazidi activist who has campaigned to hold social media firms accountable for failing website to act against Islamic State (ISIS) members using their platforms to trade Yazidi women and girls, Facebook's moves are deeply troubling.
Some Russian media have alleged Wagner's involvement in the July 2018 killings of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group's activities there.
In November 2022, a video surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor Hamadi Bouta, a Syrian army deserter, getting beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was recaptured.
Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas, but presents this it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
The court heard in the early hours of that morning Williamson's phone was used to access YouTube videos including one called: 'Spoon is used to remove man's cyst' by Dr Pimple Popper and another called 'Large blackhead abstraction'.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
March 19 (Reuters) - The Philippines´ presidential candidates debating on Saturday agreed on at least one thing and that was the need to hold social media firms liable for the spread of disinformation as the country prepares for elections on May 9.
The Wagner Group has taken an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine as regular Russian troops suffered heavy attrition and lost control over some previously captured territory in a series of humiliating setbacks.
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.
With the coronavirus pandemic disrupting traditional campaigning, candidates and supporters are increasingly turning to social media to reach voters, prompting concerns about online hate speech and disinformation.
The terrifying group went viral in 2022 after a video of members beating a deserter to death with a sledgehammer spread online, has allegedly offered to help Haiti's embattled government take on violent gangs, the documents detailed.
In December 2021, the European Union accused the group of 'serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,' and of carrying out 'destabilizing activities' in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
"Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity," said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organisation that helped arrange the rescue mission.
Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer from a Ukrainian NGO called Regional Centre for Human Rights, told the briefing they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented return of the Ukrainian children.
A 2017 video posted online showed a group of armed people, reported to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting his head before mutilating and then burning his body.
'This is a very interesting sign that there's a degrading of their capabilities,' Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times.
"Under no circumstance is promoting violence and hate speech on social media platforms acceptable, as it could hurt innocent people," said Nay San Lwin, co-founder of advocacy group Free Rohingya Coalition, who has faced abuse on Facebook.
UKRAINE/BELARUS BORDER, April 8 (Reuters) - More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.<img src="https://yewtu.be/gA0fcpGeMAI"; style="max-width:410px;float:left;padding:10px 10px 10px 0px;border:0px;" alt="Why I Love Online Tutoring| Vermont Online Reading Tutor" />