Business and Technology
Pyramids Become Show "Props"
Egypt is using the ancient grandeur of its pyramids as a backdrop for modern pop concerts and fashion shows, hoping to boost its image, tourism and the luxury brand sector beloved by its moneyed elite.
French fashion house Dior debuted its latest collection Saturday at the Giza pyramids, after Italian designer Stefano Ricci held a show at Luxor's dramatic Temple of Hatshepsut in October.
Dior CEO Pietro Beccari told AFP the fashion house chose the pyramids as far more than "just a useless background", drawing on Egyptian astrology for the collection named "Celestial".
Before that, American pop bands Maroon 5 and the Black Eyed Peas performed at the Giza Necropolis, where contemporary art was also recently shown at the latest Art d'Egypte exhibition.
The modern cultural push is a new direction for Egypt's image.
Showcasing Egypt's heritage in a new context "will encourage other brands and international cultural figures to come to Egypt," said art historian Bahia Shehab.
Fashion photographer Mohsen Othman agreed that such glamorous events are "vital".
Big brands like Dior "come in with a huge budget," employ local talent and "support young creators who can put Egypt on the global fashion map."
Iman Eldeeb, whose agency cast two Egyptian models for Saturday's show, told AFP it was a "long-awaited step for the fashion world in Egypt."
Egypt's bubble of super rich has helped create a home-grown fashion design scene whose pioneers have recently ventured onto the catwalks of Milan and Paris.
At this year's Paris Fashion Week, Cairo-based luxury brand Okhtein showed a resin-made bustier that evoked Egyptian alabaster at French fashion house Balmain's show.
It was a rare success story for Egypt's creative sector, where "most people are self-taught, working hard with scarce resources to try and meet international standards," said Othman, the photographer.
Ismail said the country's luxury clothing and jewelry market "has gone from under 100 Egyptian brands to more than 1,000 today", fueled by "a huge pool of young creative talent".
International events offer rare exposure, but getting them to the country is still a challenge.
"It is a big step for the government to authorize Art d'Egypte and Dior to organize events at the foot of the pyramids," the art show's curator, Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, told AFP.
Red tape and tight restrictions can still get in the way, she suggested, conceding that "the legislative framework is complicated."
Long a cultural powerhouse in the Arab world, with wildly popular singers and movie stars especially in its heyday in the 1950s-70s, Egypt has set its sights on its ancient heritage to attract the global spotlight once more.
A harbinger of the new embrace of ancient culture and history was a "golden parade" last year of 22 pharaohs that crossed Cairo from an old to a new museum in a carnival-style grand spectacle.
It was part of a push by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government to revive tourism, which accounts for 10 percent of GDP and some two million jobs but has been hammered by political unrest, economic upheaval and the Covid pandemic.
Shehab, the art historian, said many realise that Egypt, known for its timeless architectural marvels in the desert, needs to project an updated image of itself.
"There's more and more awareness about the need for soft power and for culture as a representation for the country," she said, cautioning however that Egypt still requires "better infrastructure" to make this happen.
She even dared dream that Egypt could draw in Hollywood productions, if it only starts granting permits.
"We have lost count of the number of international productions that have resorted to shooting in Morocco, Jordan or Saudi Arabia," she said.
The latest Egypt-themed production was a Disney+ TV miniseries, Marvel Comics' "Moon Knight," for which two entire Cairo city blocks were built from scratch -- on a set in Budapest.
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Meta Closes Monitoring Tool for Disinformation, Fact-Checking
WASHINGTON—A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.
The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to.
For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year -- a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.
"In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms," Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP.
"It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency."
Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.
It's a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.
"It's an entire new muscle" that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman told AFP, calling for "openness and transparency."
'Direct threat'
In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.
By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.
In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them "quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression."
The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.
Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.
"Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle's core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency," said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.
The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a "direct threat" to the integrity of elections, it added.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter's claims are "just wrong," insisting the Content Library will contain "more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle" and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.
'Lot of concerns'
Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.
Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.
Meta's decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.
CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped "hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies," Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told AFP.
Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta's third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, will have access to the Content Library.
But other researchers and nonprofits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives. Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.
"While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it's not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle's functionality — will," Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita, told AFP.
"It has generated a lot of concerns."
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