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Tech Firms Remove Social Media Accounts of a Russian Drone Factory after an AP Investigation

Parts of downed Shahed drones launched by Russia are piled in a storage room of a research laboratory in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Parts of downed Shahed drones launched by Russia are piled in a storage room of a research laboratory in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
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Tech Firms Remove Social Media Accounts of a Russian Drone Factory after an AP Investigation

Parts of downed Shahed drones launched by Russia are piled in a storage room of a research laboratory in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Parts of downed Shahed drones launched by Russia are piled in a storage room of a research laboratory in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia's Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow's war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under US and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and "after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant's management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan's cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its "audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.

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Inside the Underground Lab in China Tasked with Solving a Physics Mystery

A view of the soon-to-be-completed and sealed central detector at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), during an organized media tour by the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Kaiping, Guangdong province, China October 11, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of the soon-to-be-completed and sealed central detector at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), during an organized media tour by the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Kaiping, Guangdong province, China October 11, 2024. (Reuters)
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Inside the Underground Lab in China Tasked with Solving a Physics Mystery

A view of the soon-to-be-completed and sealed central detector at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), during an organized media tour by the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Kaiping, Guangdong province, China October 11, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of the soon-to-be-completed and sealed central detector at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), during an organized media tour by the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Kaiping, Guangdong province, China October 11, 2024. (Reuters)

A giant sphere 700 m (2,300 ft) underground with thousands of light-detecting tubes will be sealed in a 12-storey cylindrical pool of water in coming months for an experiment that will shine new light on elusive subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

After years of construction, the $300 million Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) in China's southern Guangdong province will soon start gathering data on neutrinos, a product of nuclear reactions, to help solve one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics.

Every second, trillions of extremely small neutrinos pass through matter, including the human body. In mid-flight, a neutrino, of which there are three known varieties, could transform into other types. Determining which types are the lightest and the heaviest would offer clues to subatomic processes during the early days of the universe and to explaining why matter is the way it is.

To that end, Chinese physicists and collaborating scientists from all over the world will analyze the data on neutrinos emitted by two nearby Guangdong nuclear power plants for up to six years.

JUNO would also be able to observe neutrinos from the sun, gaining a real-time view of solar processes. It could also study neutrinos given off by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium in the Earth to better understand mantle convection driving tectonic plates.

Due to go operational in the latter half of 2025, JUNO will outpace the far larger Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) under construction in the United States. DUNE, backed by the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) under the US Department of Energy's (DOE) top particle physics laboratory, Fermilab, will come online around 2030.

The race to understand neutrinos and advance the study of particle physics, which has transformed medical imaging technologies and developed new energy sources, intensified when the DOE abruptly cut funding for US institutes collaborating on JUNO. It instead focused on building DUNE, which has since been plagued by delays and budget overruns, with costs skyrocketing to more than $3 billion.

"China had supported Fermilab's LBNF at the time, but later the cooperation could not continue," Wang Yifang, chief scientist and project manager of JUNO, told Reuters during a recent government-backed media tour of the facility.

"Around 2018-2019, the US DOE asked all national laboratories not to cooperate with China, so Fermilab was forced to stop working with us."

The DOE, the largest US funding agency for particle physics, did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Sino-US tensions have risen sharply over the past decade. A trade war erupted during the Trump administration and President Joe Biden later cracked down on the sale of advanced technology to China.

In August, a bilateral science and technology cooperation pact signed in 1979 lapsed, potentially pushing more scientists to seek alternative partners, creating duplication in research and missing out on collaboration that otherwise might have led to beneficial discoveries.

In the 2010s, the countries jointly produced a nuclear reactor that could use low-enriched uranium, minimizing the risk of any fuel being weaponized.

China's foreign ministry said Beijing was "in communication" with Washington about the lapsed science agreement. The US State Department did not comment.

SOLE US COLLABORATOR

Institutions collaborating on JUNO hail from locations including France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the US, and even self-governed Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory.

Neutrino observatories are also being constructed in other places.

"The one in the US will be six years behind us. And the one in the France and in Japan, they will be two or three years later than us. So we believe that we can get the result of mass hierarchy (of neutrinos) ahead of everybody," Wang said.

So far, real-life neutrino applications remain a distant prospect. Some scientists have mulled the possibility of relaying long-distance messages via neutrinos, which pass through solid matter such as the Earth at near light speed.

Researchers are keeping their distance from politics to focus on science, although they remain at the mercy of governments providing the funding.

One US group remains in JUNO, backed by the National Science Foundation, which recently renewed its funding for its collaboration for another three years, the group's leading physicist told Reuters.

In contrast, more than a dozen US institutes participated in the predecessor to JUNO, the Daya Bay experiment, also in Guangdong.

"Despite any political differences, I believe that through our collaboration on this scientific endeavor, we are setting a positive example that may contribute, even in a small way, to bringing our countries closer together," said J. Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of California, Irvine.

DATA INTEGRITY

The passage of neutrinos from the two power stations will be logged by JUNO's 600 metric ton spherical detector, which will immediately transmit the data to Beijing electronically. The data will be simultaneously relayed to Russia, France and Italy, where it can be accessed by all of the collaborating institutions, said Cao Jun, JUNO's deputy manager.

Data integrity has been a concern among foreign companies in China since a law was enacted in 2021 on the use, storage and transfer of data in the name of safeguarding national security.

"We have a protocol to make sure that no data is missing," Cao said.

For data on the more crucial aspects of the experiment, at least two independent teams will conduct analyses, with their results cross-checked.

"When these two groups get a consistent result, we can publish it," Cao said.

US-based Ochoa-Ricoux, who previously collaborated on China's Daya Bay experiment, will lead the data analysis for JUNO. He will also be involved in the DUNE data analysis.

"We welcome the Americans," said Wang, also director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, the Chinese counterpart of Fermilab.