A teenager has been jailed for at least 35 years for murdering two sisters as part of a Satanic blood pact.

Danyal Hussein, 19, savagely stabbed Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27, to death in a Wembley park in June last year.

The Old Bailey heard he had embarked on a “campaign of vengeance” against random women in a failed bid to win the Mega Millions Super Jackpot lottery prize of £321 million.

Police tracked him down through DNA and uncovered a handwritten pledge to a demonic entity called King Lucifuge Rofocale to kill six women every six months, which was signed in blood.

Hussein declined to give evidence in his trial, claiming he was not responsible for the killings or for writing the pact.

He was found guilty of two counts of murder and possession of a knife.

Following Hussein’s conviction in July, the sisters’ mother, the Venerable Mina Smallman, said she had “never come across such evil”.

On Thursday, Hussein appeared in court by video link from Belmarsh top security jail for “Covid reasons” while the sisters’ family sat in court.

Mrs Justice Whipple sentenced Hussein to life in prison with a minimum term of 35 years.

She told Hussein: “In the early hours of Saturday June 6 2020 you brutally murdered Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry.

“You had found these two women. You were a stranger to them. You surprised them, you terrified them and you killed them.”

She said Hussein had dragged the bodies away and posed them in an embrace to “defile” them in death.

The judge said the lives of his victims’ loved ones had been “shattered”.

She referred to a victim impact statement by the sisters’ mother who described being “haunted” by the knowledge of how her children suffered.

On the pact with the devil, the judge said: “I am sure you performed these murders as part of that bargain for wealth and power.”

As “bizarre” as the pact seemed, it was part of his belief system, she added.

She told Hussein: “You committed these vicious attacks. You did it to kill. You did it for money and a misguided pursuit of power.”

The defendant sat facing away from the court as he was sentenced.

Earlier, prosecutor Oliver Glasgow QC ruled out a whole life order for Hussein because of his age.

Mr Glasgow said there were “significant” aggravating features, included taking a knife to the scene and destruction of evidence.

He said: “His offending is a product of his belief in Satanism and his belief you could enter into a bargain with a devil.

“That belief system is something he researched for some time.”

In preparation for the killing, Hussein bought knives from Asda and a black balaclava on Amazon and signed up to a lottery betting website.

In the early hours of June 6 last year, he stalked his victims as they celebrated Ms Henry’s birthday in Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north London.

Hussein stabbed Ms Henry eight times, before he slashed Ms Smallman 28 times as she bravely fought back.

He then dragged them into bushes where they lay undiscovered for 36 hours.

During the savage attack, Hussein cut his right hand with the 12cm knife, which he dropped in the grass.

Over the next 10 days, Hussein spent £162.88 on lottery tickets and bets – all without success.

On the evening of June 6, the sisters’ worried loved ones reported them missing, but officers were not deployed to the park until the next day.

Before they arrived, Ms Smallman’s frantic boyfriend Adam Stone, who could not believe she would have left their pet bearded dragon unattended, found the bodies.

Officers then carried out a painstaking search and identified the DNA of an unknown male from blood on the knife, bodies and surrounding scene.

On June 30 last year, in a major breakthrough, a DNA familial link was made to Hussein’s father, who had a past caution.

Within an hour-and-a-half, Hussein was identified on CCTV buying knives in Asda and returning home after the murders.

Searches of his bedroom in south-east London uncovered a book of spells, handwritten demon symbols and two blood pacts.

Jurors were not told of the extent of Hussein’s obsession with demons, spells and potions.

He had come to the attention of police aged just 15 over fears he was vulnerable to radicalisation and violent extremism.

Before the killings, Hussein communicated with others about demons and love potions, and carried out online research about the far-right and Norse mythology.

It is believed he was influenced by the work of an American black magician who has links with a British-based Nazi Satanist group known as the Order of Nine Angles.

Last week, Facebook removed his page and Instagram account and YouTube launched a review.

Two police constables have been charged with misconduct in public office after allegedly sharing pictures of the crime scene on WhatsApp, and are due to enter pleas on November 2.

Separately, the Independent Office of Police Complaints concluded its investigation over the response to the initial missing persons reports.

On Monday, the police watchdog found the level of service provided by the Met over the weekend when the sisters went missing was “below the standard that it should have been”.

Social media companies such as Facebook must help tackle online radicalisation to combat the threat of far-right terrorism, a Home Office minister has said.

Security Minister James Brokenshire said the Government should work with tech firms to slow the spread of misinformation online with the upcoming Online Harms legislation aiming to put a duty of care into law.

He told an online RUSI event “twisted perversions of the truth” can take young people vulnerable to radicalisation down a “potential pathway to violence”.

He said: “Of course, investigations by the police and security services are central to their counterterrorism efforts, but a friend or relative or a colleague will often be best placed to spot some of these warning signs and vulnerabilities, at an early stage.

“We also expect social media companies to play a role in identifying and flagging both illegal glorification content, and the potential terrorist grooming of vulnerable individuals.

“That is why we are so concerned when companies like Facebook, take a unilateral decision to apply end-to-end encryption, in a way that wholly precludes any access to the content of users messages.

“These companies must continue to take responsibility in tackling illegal behaviour.

“And we remain committed to working with them to ensure we continue to protect the public, without compromising user privacy.

“And the threat from the far right provides further significance to the need to be vigilant to the ways in which the online space can be misused for radicalisation.”

Facebook has previously announced plans to fully encrypt communications in its Messenger app, as well as its Instagram Direct service, on top of WhatsApp, which is already encrypted, meaning no-one apart from the sender and recipient can read or modify messages.

The social network has said the changes are designed to improve user privacy on all of its platforms, but law enforcement agencies fear the move will have a devastating impact on their ability to target paedophiles and protect children online.

Mr Brokenshire’s speech on Thursday came as official figures revealed there were a total of 6,287 referrals to the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme between April 2019 and March 2020, up 10% from a record low of 5,737 the previous year.

He said, along with Prevent referrals, authorities must also look at “external factors… that we can and will influence to be able to challenge those false and fake news stories that some will use to justify some sort of narrative, or ideology”.

Earlier this month, the head of UK counter terrorism policing Neil Basu said right-wing extremism is the fastest growing threat, with younger people particularly vulnerable to the ideology.

Ten out of the 12 under-18s who were arrested for terrorism last year were linked to extreme right-wing beliefs, police figures show, with around 20% of all terrorism arrests in the year to June 30 2020 linked to the ideology.

Mr Basu said Islamist terrorism remains the greatest threat, accounting for up to 80% of his workload, while right-wing extremism has grown from 6% to 10% in the past few years

Read More: Younger teenagers being drawn in by right wing extremism

Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad defends his widely condemned comments on attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying that they were taken out of context as he criticised Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.

The 95-year-old sparked widespread outrage when he wrote on his blog on Thursday that “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.

Twitter removed a tweet from Mr Mahathir containing the remark, which it said glorified violence, while France’s digital minister demanded the company also ban Mr Mahathir from its platform.

“I am indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context what I wrote on my blog,” Mr Mahathir said in a statement.

He said critics failed to read his posting in full, especially the next sentence which read: “But by and large Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead the French should teach their people to respect other people’s feelings.”

He said Twitter and Facebook removed the posting despite his explanation, and slammed the move as hypocritical.

“On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Mohammed … and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression,” he said.

“On the other, they deleted deliberately that Muslims had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past”, thereby stirring French hatred for Muslims, he added.

On Twitter, however, that sentence was not deleted. A staff member for Mr Mahathir said the entire posting was removed by Facebook.

Facebook Malaysia said in an email that it removed Mr Mahathir’s posting for violating its policies, adding: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and strongly condemn any support for violence, death or physical harm.”

The comments by the two-time prime minister were in response to calls by Muslim nations to boycott French products after French leader Emmanuel Macron described Islam as a religion “in crisis” and vowed to crack down on radicalism following the murder of a French teacher who showed his class a cartoon depicting the prophet of Islam.

His remarks also came as a Tunisian man killed three people at a church in the southern French city of Nice.

The US ambassador to Malaysia, Kamala Shirin Lakhdir, said on Friday that she “strongly disagreed” with Mr Mahathir’s statement, adding in a statement: “Freedom of expression is a right, calling for violence is not.”

Mr Mahathir has been viewed as an advocate of moderate Islamic views and a spokesman for the interests of developing countries.

At the same time, he has pointedly criticised Western society and nations as well as their relationships to the Muslim world, while he has been denounced in Israel and elsewhere for making anti-Semitic remarks.

Read more: New arrest by French investigators probing church attack in Nice

Demonstrations across France to pay tribute to murdered teacher

New regulations on social media companies should be tightened to include more transparency around how firms target users online, an independent advisory board on artificial intelligence (AI) has said.

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) has urged the Government to also focus on online targeting because the public is concerned about how the technology is being used.

In a new report, it said an analysis of public attitudes on the issue found that many appreciated the value of targeting – where platforms use people’s online habits to target them with content they believe will interest them – but were also concerned about the potential for such data to be exploited.

The CDEI has published three sets of recommendations as part of its research, urging the Government to hold any companies which use online targeting to a higher standard of accountability, as well as calling for transparency of online targeting systems to be increased and more control be given to users to edit how they are targeted.

A number of high-profile internet and social media platforms, including Google and Facebook, use different forms of online targeting to show users adverts or other content which they believe will interest users.

CDEI chairman Roger Taylor said: “Most people do not want targeting stopped. But they do want to know that it is being done safely and responsibly. And they want more control.

“Tech platforms’ ability to decide what information people see puts them in a position of real power. To build public trust over the long term it is vital for the Government to ensure that the new online harms regulator looks at how platforms recommend content, establishing robust processes to protect vulnerable people.”

Last year, a White Paper on online harms published by the Government proposed stricter regulation for internet and social media companies, including a statutory duty of care and measures to increase web safety, particularly in protecting young and vulnerable people from illegal content, while making tech giants liable to fines or criminal prosecution if they breach their responsibilities.

According to the CDEI report, only 29% of people trust platforms to target them in a responsible way, and 61% said they were in favour of greater regulatory oversight of online targeting.

Only around a third of those asked (34%) trust internet companies to change their settings when they ask them to.

Last month, a separate report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists said social media giants should be forced to hand over data and pay towards research into their potential harms.

In response to the CDEI research, Dr Bernadka Dubicka, chairwoman of the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “We completely agree that there needs to be greater accountability, transparency and control in the online world.

“It is fantastic to see the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation join our call for the regulator to be able to compel social media companies to give independent researchers secure access to their data.”

The slide into a bizarre world of believing conspiracy theories and voicing openly toxic and bigoted views took place slowly over the last decade whilst many of us were not able to fathom how quickly and extensively social media had taken charge of our lives. As the Founder and previous Director of Tell MAMA, which supports victims of anti-Muslim hate, the world that I know of today, as someone reaching his fifties, is virtually unrecognisable to the one in which I worked just a decade ago and where there was real hope that levels of racism, prejudice and intolerance were finally on a downward slope.

Today’s world is also a far cry from that in which I grew up. As a refugee from Amin’s Uganda in 1972, and having fled a second time from Africa in 1983 because of military instability in Kenya, I suffered at first hand the openly racist abuse meted out to Asians and African-Caribbean communities in Kent where I was schooled. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, that open racism existed, flourished and led to the murder of young black men such as Stephen Lawrence. Such open hatred impacted on many young men and women from BME communities, though the economic boom of that period helped to also temper some of the racist anger and bigotry. Anti-racism work, equality marches and work-based equal opportunity schemes seem to have turned the tide against division that many of us assumed would mean a country more at ease with its diversity.

Whilst the UK is in a far better place than the ’80s, the reality is that, as a country, we have slid backwards towards openly aggressive far-right marches rallying thousands of people, national political instability and a rising sense of mistrust which is acutely felt between BME communities and the two main parties. This, mixed with a recent economic crisis, has created the perfect storm for social insecurity and it is this insecurity that some have played upon in fomenting divisive and openly hostile views toward groups of people in our society. It is also within this environment of insecurity that people have sought comfort within narratives of division that blame others and which provide a sense of meaning to them, however twisted that may be.

For such individuals, conspiracy theories become reality since the world around them is unstable and frightening. Grasping onto something almost tangible, that explains the complexity of life in a simplistic fashion, fills the void that many of us currently feel in an increasingly frightening world. This is why, for example, conspiracy merchants who peddle views of an ‘Islamic takeover’ or of hordes of Muslims outbreeding other communities, manage to find a receptive audience. With less money in people’s pockets, communities aggressively vying for resources in austerity, and a sense of confusion as to where we are heading as a nation, you can see how easy it is for people to believe that there are hidden factors at play. The culprits, in their opinion, are more than likely Muslims, Jews or migrants.

Both Muslims and Jews have felt a sharp rise in hostility towards them and hate crime figures show such a rise over the last five years. Much of this is due to hate online and, furthermore, since 2012, when I founded Tell MAMA, it was clear to me that social media companies would not remove hateful and criminal material, nor would they take down far-right, neo-Nazi or Islamist extremist accounts. Their business model was based on getting traction for their technological revolutions through more accounts opening up. In doing so, they helped create the fog and smoke of disinformation and gave an amplified voice to extremist groups masquerading as ‘free speech’ martyrs. These companies, whilst levelling the playing field for more voices to be heard, also exposed people to views and opinions that would have been marginalised for a reason. Yet their platforms also legitimised toxic views by placing those views into a worldwide market of ideas where extremist groups were better equipped to promote them.

Let me explain. Marginalised, divisive and racist groups by their very nature had to be far more energetic and driven to try to win supporters. Before the advent of social media these people had to host events, print leaflets and remain active at a street level. That all took time and money and, to make it worse, they also looked pretty scary. However, such groups were always driven; they had to be to survive.

Now post their divisive messages on social media with a ‘friendly face’, remove the racist insignia and blame migrants, Muslims and foreigners, and strangely there was a more receptive audience as people’s fears and insecurities rose over the last decade. Additionally, as many of us played catch-up to try to challenge extremist and divisive views, these individuals and groups already had a head start since they were naturally driven and could see the power of the new platforms. It was a toxic, heady mix that was to have a severe impact on our society, as we are now seeing today.

This is why we must mobilise and defend the social values we enjoy in our country, and which are under threat. It is not just those, as this paper has highlighted, who try and divide local communities, who we must challenge; it is also those beyond our shores, who support extremist groups and seek to destabilise our democracy by fomenting instability, whom we must remain vigilant against. If we take our eye off the ball in these crucial years, it is not only our values which may change – it could be our very understanding of reality. Now that truly is frightening.

Social media, including Facebook, must proactively block content inciting hatred and prevent online campaigns which target minorities, such as those undertaken in Myanmar, the United Nations human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking after U.N. experts accused Myanmar generals of “genocidal intent” and said Facebook had allowed its platform to be used to incite violence against Rohingya.

Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” after reviewing the content.

Zeid, whose spokesman said he has met with major tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook and Google, in recent months, was speaking to a news conference before his four-year term ends on Aug. 31.

Zeid said he didn’t feel Facebook took the issue seriously at first but that the company’s attitude began to change after Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, told a Geneva press conference in March that Facebook was being used in the country to spread hate speech.

“But it shouldn’t be because the press or the human rights community highlights the problem for them then suddenly to respond. They should be aware of it ahead of time,” he said.

“So I don’t think they should wait until the crisis begins. They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” he added.

Facebook said on Monday that while it was too slow to act in the case of Myanmar, it was now making progress, with better technology to identify hate speech and improved reporting tools.

However, Zeid said there was a danger that social media could be over-regulated in a way that breaches human rights law including the right to freedom of expression.

Tech giants should “keep the broadest space available and open to the exercise of freedom of expression”, relying on international human rights law for regulation, he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.

Trump’s attack against the Alphabet Inc. unit follows a string of grievances against technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices.

Europe’s new data privacy law has put a small army of tech firms that track people online in jeopardy and is strengthening the hand of giants such as Google and Facebook in the $200 billion global digital advertising industry.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/justice-and-fundamental-rights/data-protection/2018-reform-eu-data-protection-rules_en) brought in by the European Union in May is designed to protect personal information in the age of the internet and requires websites to seek consent to use personal data, among other measures.

The ability to track internet users has attracted hundreds of companies that harvest and crunch user data from websites – with or without the consent of the site owner – to form very specific individual consumer profiles.

GDPR poses a challenge to those groups because they all need consent to use the data. While sites often request consent on behalf of the ad tech firms they use directly, uncertainty over whether every link in the supply chain is GDPR-compliant is pushing some to leave Europe altogether.

Concerns about GDPR should, however, benefit Alphabet’s Google and Facebook as their loyal customers are more likely to give consent to carry on using sites, allowing the U.S. giants to keep amassing and analysing vast amounts of GDPR-compliant data that advertisers will pay to use.

Big publishers such as national newspapers are also likely to keep their readers and believe they can benefit by eventually charging advertisers more for online slots in the knowledge they are compliant with the new EU rules.

“It’s challenging for the digital ecosystem,” said Mark Read, joint boss at the world’s biggest ad agency, WPP.

“But if consumers feel confident that their data is being protected and they understand how it is being used and it’s done with permission, ultimately that should be a good thing for clients and for us,” he told Reuters.

TANGLED WEB

From a standing start nearly 30 years ago, the internet has become the largest advertising medium in the world because it allows firms to target consumers with ads based on anything from their browsing history, comments, spending power to location.

Within the tangled ecosystem are multiple firms that help brands and ad agencies connect to sites that fund content with targeted ads. For every dollar spent by an advertiser, about half may go to ad tech groups, according to industry estimates.

When an internet user pulls up a page multiple bid requests are sent into the advertising ecosystem touting facts about the person such as demographics and interests, as well as the nature of the site they are viewing.

That personal data can then pass through a dozen or more ad tech firms before a company or ad agency bids at an auction for space on the website and an advert is loaded. It is that spread of personal data that risks breaking the new EU privacy law.

For example, a firm that provides ads for a website viewed on a mobile phone may use other partners not included in the compliance chain to provide information about a user’s location.

That doubt about compliance is threatening the myriad ad tech middlemen and is also prompting advertisers and publishers to rethink how they share their user data.

“In a world where we are putting the consumer first, there are only going to be so many opportunities for the very colourful ecosystem of companies to obtain consent,” said Andrew Casale, head of ad group Index Exchange (http://www.indexexchange.com).

UNCERTAIN TIMES

In the midst of the disruption, some ad tech groups are pulling out of Europe. Harry Kargman, founder of mobile ad firm Kargo (https://www.kargo.com), told Reuters the company had withdrawn for now because it did not know how GDPR would be applied.

“There is too much uncertainty,” he said. “And I don’t think (that will change) until they apply it in specific cases.”

Verve (https://www.verve.com), a company that helps advertisers target consumers on mobiles based on location, and Drawbridge (https://www.drawbridge.com), a cross-device user data firm, have both stopped operating ad businesses in Europe.

Factual (https://www.factual.com), another company that provides consumer data based on their location, also temporarily scaled back its operations in Europe after realizing the mobile apps it relies on “could not safely claim they were compliant”.

Others groups higher up the food chain have also been hit.

France’s Publicis, one of the world’s top five advertising companies, said it had felt the effect.

“Advertisers were cautious about spending money in supply chains that they weren’t absolutely sure they could target safely or legally,” said Steve King, CEO of Publicis Media.

Kargo’s Kargman expects Facebook and Google to benefit from the uncertainty. The two companies are likely to receive a high ratio of user consent given their loyal customer base while both own high-quality data because users post likes, dislikes and location, or search for areas of interest on Google or YouTube.

The companies also have deep pockets so can ensure they are compliant, throwing engineers and lawyers at the problem and reassuring brands at a time of uncertainty.

But they too have had to make changes.

Facebook lost about 1 million European monthly active users after GDPR and it said a desire by some users to avoid targeted ads is likely to lead to a modest revenue hit.

In response to GDPR, it has asked advertisers to certify they have the proper consent to use any data from third-party brokers, potentially shedding itself of some liability.

Google is also requiring publishers to secure consent when using its ad products on their properties. Marketers and partners also need to now use more of Google’s own services.

It has stopped providing easy access to lists that helped companies evaluate the success of their ads by showing which users clicked on them. Advertisers must now use Google’s Ads Data Hub application to measure the effectiveness of campaigns.

Google declined to comment for this article. It has previously said GDPR is a big change and is working with partners on compliance.

GOOD NEWS FOR PUBLISHERS?

Of the more than 20 executives spoken to by Reuters, from ad bosses to publishers, tech groups, brands, lawyers and consultants, all expect the supply chain to thin out – leaving publishers to potentially receive a greater slice of ad revenue.

“Given the number of actors it could take some time though,” said Phil Smith, head of UK advertiser trade body ISBA (https://www.isba.org.uk).

Leading British sports website GiveMeSport (https://www.givemesport.com) is one publisher hoping the biggest overhaul of data privacy laws in more than 20 years will challenge the system.

“There are too many middlemen and they’ve been eating the cake,” General Manager Ryan Skeggs said. “We’re hoping GDPR will help weed them out. The sites that do well, theoretically speaking, should then make more money.”

Three of the leading UK newspaper groups – Rupert Murdoch’s News UK (https://www.news.co.uk), The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com) and The Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk) have joined forces in the Ozone Project to sell their online inventory, or ad space, together, offering advertisers access to 39 million users.

Project leader Damon Reeve said publishers had lost control of their data to tech vendors. By compiling only quality inventory, he hopes marketers and publishers will start sharing user data directly – making them less reliant on third parties.

That should provide a boost to the newspaper industry which is still grappling with the shift online, where ad rates are far lower than those charged for a space in a physical edition.

“By 2020, Ozone could add circa 30 million pounds ($38 million) per annum – not a trivial contribution to a national newspaper newsroom,” said analysts at consultancy Enders Analysis (https://www.endersanalysis.com).

Adam Smith, a director at WPP’s media buying arm GroupM (https://www.groupm.com), agreed the focus on user compliance was likely to cut the amount of available inventory. “That feeds into price inflation for the sought after inventory,” he said.

How long the initial impact of GDPR will last, though, is not yet clear as many consumers – tired of the constant permission pop ups – are just giving consent to access sites. Prosecutors are also yet to bring any cases for data breaches.

But GDPR has ramped up the speed of change in what has been such a fragmented industry. “This kind of consolidation is natural in most maturing industries,” Enders analyst Matti Littunen said. “GDPR has just accelerated it.”

Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc. collectively removed hundreds of accounts tied to an alleged Iranian propaganda operation on Tuesday, while Facebook took down a second campaign it said was linked to Russia.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the accounts identified on his company’s platform were part of two separate campaigns, the first from Iran with some ties to state-owned media, the second linked to sources which Washington has previously named as Russian military intelligence services.

Officials in Iran, where it is a holiday to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival, were not immediately available to comment. Moscow has repeatedly denied using hacking or fake social media accounts to influence foreign elections. The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move by Facebook and others is the latest attempt by global social media giants to guard against political interference on their platforms. It comes as concerns are rising about foreign attempts to disrupt the U.S. midterm elections in November.

The United States earlier this year indicted 13 Russians for alleged attempts to meddle in U.S. politics, but the latest alleged Iranian activity, exposed by cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. suggests the problem may be more widespread.

“It really shows it’s not just Russia that engages in this type of activity,” Lee Foster, an information operations analyst with FireEye, told Reuters.

FireEye said the Iranian campaign used a network of fake news websites and fraudulent social media personas spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus and YouTube, to push narratives in line with Tehran’s interests.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

The activity was aimed at users in the United States, Britain, Latin America and Middle East up through this month, FireEye said, and included “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes” as well as advocacy of policies favorable to Iran such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.

FireEye said the Iranian activity did not appear “dedicated” to influencing the upcoming election, though some of the posts aimed at U.S. users did adopt “left-leaning identities” and took stances against President Donald Trump.

That activity “could suggest a more active attempt to influence domestic U.S. political discourse” is forthcoming, Foster said, but “we just haven’t seen that yet.”

‘DISTINCT CAMPAIGNS’

Facebook said the Russia-linked accounts it removed were engaged in “inauthentic behavior” related to politics in Syria and Ukraine. It said that activity did not appear to be linked to the Iranian campaign.

“These were distinct campaigns and we have not identified any link or coordination between them. However, they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook last month removed 32 pages and accounts tied to another misinformation campaign without describing its origins, but which U.S. lawmakers said likely had Russian involvement.

Microsoft said this week that hackers linked to the Russian government sought to steal email login credentials from U.S. politicians and think tanks, allegations the Russian foreign ministry described as a “witch-hunt.”

FireEye said the U.S.-focused Iranian activity ramped up last year, just months after Trump took office, with websites and social media accounts posting memes and articles, some of which were apparently copied from legitimate U.S. and Iranian news outlets.

In some cases, the domains for the fake websites like “US Journal” and “Liberty Free Press” were originally registered years before the 2016 election, in 2014 and 2013, but most remained inactive until last year, FireEye said.

Arabic-language, Middle East-focused websites appear to be part of the same campaign, the company added.

The technology companies variously said they linked the accounts to Iran based on user phone numbers, email addresses, website registration records and the timing of account activity matching Iranian business hours.

FireEye expressed “moderate confidence” about the Iranian origins, but said it has not been able to tie the accounts back to a specific organization or individuals.

Hundreds of thousands of people followed one or more of the Facebook pages implicated in the campaign, Facebook said.

It shared examples of removed posts, including a cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier executing a Palestinian and a fake movie poster showing President Trump embracing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Postings cited by FireEye expressed praise for U.S. politicians and other Twitter users who criticized the Trump administration’s decision in May to abandon the Iranian nuclear pact, under which Iran had agreed to curb its nuclear weapons program in exchange for loosening of sanctions.

Some Twitter and Facebook accounts were designed to appear as if they were real people in the U.S., Britain and Canada, according to FireEye. The accounts used a combination of different hashtags to engage in U.S. culture, including “#lockhimup,” “#impeachtrump” and “notmypresident.”

Twitter, which called the effort “coordinated manipulation,” said it removed 284 accounts.

Facebook said it removed 254 pages and 392 accounts across its flagship platform as well as its Instagram service. Some of the accounts had events and groups associated with them.

The accounts spent about $12,000 to advertise through Facebook and Instagram using a variety of currencies, Facebook said. The company said it had notified the U.S. Treasury and State departments of the purchases, which may potentially violate sanctions.

Alphabet, which includes Google and YouTube, did not respond to a request to comment.

In April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. The situation was dire.

Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”

Four months after Zuckerberg’s pledge to act, here is a sampling of posts from Myanmar that were viewable this month on Facebook:

One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya. That post went up in December 2013.

Another post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication about attacks on police stations by Rohingya militants. “These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water and our ethnic people,” the user wrote. “We need to destroy their race.” That post went up last September, as the violence against the Rohingya peaked.

A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote. The post appeared 11 days after Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony.

The remarks are among more than 1,000 examples Reuters found of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week. Almost all are in the main local language, Burmese. The anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim invective analysed for this article – which was collected by Reuters and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law – includes material that’s been up on Facebook for as long as six years.

The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated. The material also includes crudely pornographic anti-Muslim images. The company’s rules specifically prohibit attacking ethnic groups with “violent or dehumanising speech” or comparing them to animals. Facebook also has long had a strict policy against pornographic content.

The use of Facebook to spread hate speech against the Rohingya in the Buddhist-majority country has been widely reported by the U.N. and others. Now, a Reuters investigation gives an inside look at why the company has failed to stop the problem.

For years, Facebook – which reported net income of $15.9 billion (£12.5 billion) in 2017 – devoted scant resources to combat hate speech in Myanmar, a market it dominates and in which there have been regular outbreaks of ethnic violence. In early 2015, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese reviewing problematic posts. Before that, most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.

To this day, the company continues to rely heavily on users reporting hate speech in part because its systems struggle to interpret Burmese text.

Even now, Facebook doesn’t have a single employee in the country of some 50 million people. Instead, it monitors hate speech from abroad. This is mainly done through a secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur that’s outsourced to Accenture, the professional services firm, and codenamed “Project Honey Badger.”

According to people familiar with the matter, the project, which handles many Asian countries, hired its first two Burmese speakers, who were based in Manila, just three years ago. As of June, Honey Badger had about 60 people reviewing reports of hate speech and other content posted by Myanmar’s 18 million active Facebook users. Facebook itself in April had three full-time Burmese speakers at a separate monitoring operation at its international headquarters in Dublin, according to a former employee.

Honey Badger employees typically sign one-year renewable contracts and agree not to divulge that the client is Facebook. Reuters interviewed more than a half-dozen former monitors who reviewed Southeast Asian content.

A Facebook official said outsourcing its content monitoring is more efficient because the companies it uses are specialists in ramping up such operations. He declined to disclose how many Burmese speakers the company has on the job worldwide, saying it was “impossible to know, to be definitive on that.”

“It’s not enough,” he added.

For many people in this emerging economy, Facebook is the internet: It’s so dominant, it’s the only site they use online. Yet, the company ignored repeated warnings as far back as 2013 that it faced trouble.

Researchers and human rights activists say they cautioned Facebook for years that its platform was being used in Myanmar to promote racism and hatred of Muslims, in particular the Rohingya.

“They were warned so many times,” said David Madden, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Myanmar. He said he told Facebook officials in 2015 that its platform was being exploited to foment hatred in a talk he gave at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. About a dozen Facebook people attended the meeting in person, including Mia Garlick, now the company’s director of Asia Pacific policy, he said. Others joined via video. “It couldn’t have been presented to them more clearly, and they didn’t take the necessary steps,” Madden said.

In a statement, Garlick told Reuters: “We were too slow to respond to the concerns raised by civil society, academics and other groups in Myanmar. We don’t want Facebook to be used to spread hatred and incite violence. This is true around the world, but it is especially true in Myanmar where our services can be used to amplify hate or exacerbate harm against the Rohingya.”

She added that Facebook is focussed on addressing challenges that are unique to Myanmar “through a combination of people, technology, policies and programs.” The company also said it has banned several “hate figures and organizations” on Facebook in Myanmar.

Facebook’s struggles in Myanmar are among much broader problems it faces. Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony in April primarily focussed on the company’s mishandling of user data, whether it censors conservative views and Russia’s exploitation of Facebook to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Of all of Facebook’s travails, though, Myanmar may be the bloodiest. The Myanmar military stands accused by the U.N. of having conducted a brutal campaign of killings, mass rape, arson and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. The government denies the allegations.

The social media giant doesn’t make public its data on hate speech in Myanmar. It says it has 2.2 billion global users and each week receives millions of user reports from around the world about problematic content.

In compiling examples of hate speech for this article, Reuters found some that Facebook subsequently removed. But the vast majority remained online as of early August.

After Reuters alerted Facebook to some of the derogatory posts included in this story, the company said it removed them. “All of it violated our policies,” it said.

Reuters itself sometimes flags to Facebook threats posted on the platform against its reporters. These include the Burmese journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who are on trial in Myanmar on charges of violating a state secrets law. The two were arrested in December while reporting on the massacre of 10 Rohingya men and have received a deluge of death threats on social media over their story. Facebook has removed such content several times at the news agency’s request.

‘SENDING FLOWERS’

Myanmar emerged from decades of military rule in 2011, but religious violence has marred its transition to democracy. In 2012, clashes in Rakhine State between ethnic Rakhine, who are Buddhists, and the Rohingya killed scores of people and left 140,000 displaced – mostly Muslims.

Facebook’s extraordinary dominance in Myanmar began taking root around the same time. But not by design.

As recently as six years ago, Myanmar was one of the least connected countries on earth. In 2012, only 1.1 percent of the population used the internet and few people had telephones, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. The junta that had ruled the country for decades kept citizens isolated.

That all changed in 2013, when a quasi-civilian government oversaw the deregulation of telecommunications. The state-owned phone company suddenly faced competition from two foreign mobile-phone entrants from Norway and Qatar.

The price of SIM cards dropped from more than $200 to as little as $2 and people purchased them in droves. By 2016, nearly half the population had mobile phone subscriptions, according to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry’s trade association. Most purchased smartphones with internet access.

One app went viral: Facebook. Many saw it as an all-in-one solution – offering a messaging system, news, and videos and other entertainment. It also became a status symbol, said Chris Tun, a former Deloitte consultant who advised the government. “If you don’t use Facebook, you’re behind,” he said. “Even grandmas, everyone was on Facebook.”

To capture customers, Myanmar’s mobile phone operators began offering a sweet deal: use Facebook without paying any data charges.

“Facebook should be sending flowers to me, because we have been an accelerator for bringing the penetration,” said Lars Erik Tellmann, who until July was chief executive of Telenor Myanmar, part of Norway’s Telenor Group. “This was an initiative we took fully on our own. And this was extremely popular.”

In Myanmar today, the government itself uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the president in March.

‘GENOCIDE ALL OF THE MUSLIMS’

In the fall of 2013, Aela Callan, an Australian documentary filmmaker studying at Stanford University, began a project on hate speech and false reports that had spread online during conflicts between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims the prior year. In June 2012, at least 80 people had died in riots and thousands of Rohingya were moved into squalid internment camps. Anti-Rohingya diatribes appeared on Facebook. One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.”

In November 2013, she met at Facebook’s California headquarters with Elliott Schrage, Vice President of Communications and Public Policy. “I was trying to alert him to the problems,” she said.

Emails between the two show that Schrage put Callan in touch with internet.org, a Facebook initiative to bring the internet to developing countries, and with two Facebook officials, including one who worked with civil-society organizations to assist the company in coping with hate speech.

“He didn’t connect me to anyone inside Facebook who could deal with the actual problem,” she said.

Asked for comment, Schrage referred Reuters to a press person at Facebook. The company didn’t comment on the meeting.

Matt Schissler, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, said that between March and December 2014, he held discussions with Facebook officials in a series of calls and online communications. He told them how the platform was being used to spread hate speech and false rumours in Myanmar, he said, including via fake accounts. He and other activists provided the company with specific examples, including a Facebook page in Burmese that was called, “We will genocide all of the Muslims and feed them to the dogs.” The page was removed.

Schissler belonged to a private Facebook group that was set up so that Myanmar human rights activists, researchers and company employees such as Asia Pacific policy chief Garlick could discuss how to cope with hate speech and other issues. The activists brought up numerous problems with Facebook’s multi-step reporting system for problematic content. As one example, they cited a photograph of an aid worker in Rakhine State in a post that called him “a traitor to the nation.” It had been shared 229 times, according to messages reviewed by Reuters.

One of the private group’s members had reported it to Facebook as harassment of an individual but later received a message back: “We reviewed the photo you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.” After multiple complaints by activists over six weeks, a Facebook employee finally explained to the activists that the takedown request was rejected because the photo had been reported, but not the comment above it. It eventually was taken down.

In March 2015, Schissler gave a talk at Facebook’s California headquarters about new media, particularly Facebook, and anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar. More than a dozen Facebook employees attended, he said.

Two months later, Madden, the tech entrepreneur, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters about tensions and violence between Buddhists and Muslims. He said he showed a doctored picture that had spread on Facebook of the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is Buddhist, wearing a Muslim head scarf. The image, Madden said, was meant to imply she was sympathetic to Muslims – a “very negative message” in Myanmar.

“The whole point of this presentation was really just to sound the alarm, to show very vividly the context in which Facebook was operating, and already the evidence of how it was being misused,” he said. He left the meeting thinking his audience took the talk seriously and would take action.

Madden had founded a technology hub and start-up accelerator in Yangon called Phandeeyar. He said he and others involved with the venture interacted with Facebook “many dozens” of times over the next several years, including via email, in the private Facebook group and in person, showing how the network’s systems for detecting and removing dangerous content were ineffective. He isn’t sure what steps the company took in response. “The central problem is that the mechanisms that they have to pull down hate speech in a timely way, before it does real world harm, they don’t work,” he said.

Madden and Jes Kaliebe Petersen, Phandeeyar’s chief executive, said Facebook was still relying too much on their group and other volunteers to report dangerous posts. “It shouldn’t be incumbent on an organisation like ours or people who happen to be well-connected with folks inside Facebook to report these things,” Petersen said.

In April, shortly before Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony, Phandeeyar and five other Myanmar groups blasted him for claiming in an interview with Vox that Facebook’s systems had detected and removed incendiary messages in September last year. “We believe your system, in this case, was us,” they wrote. Zuckerberg apologised.

Back in 2014, tech organizations and researchers weren’t the only ones sounding alarms with Facebook. So was the Myanmar government.

In July of that year, riots broke out in the central city of Mandalay after false rumours spread online, on Facebook and elsewhere, that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist woman. A Buddhist man and a Muslim man were killed in the fighting.

The Myanmar government asked Tun, then a Deloitte consultant, to contact the company. He said he didn’t succeed at first, and the government briefly blocked Facebook.

Tun said he eventually helped to arrange meetings between the government and Facebook. “What they promised to do was, when you spot fake news, you could contact them via email,” Tun said of Facebook. “And they would take action – they were willing to take down pages after their own verification process.”

The government began reporting cases to Facebook, but Tun said he quickly realized the company couldn’t deal with Burmese text. “Honestly, Facebook had no clue about Burmese content. They were totally unprepared,” he said. “We had to translate it into English for them.”

‘I DON’T KNOW THE LANGUAGE’

In August 2013, Zuckerberg announced a plan to make the Internet available for the first time to billions of people in developing countries.

“Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” he said. The company would now work, he added, to make “internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”

But in Myanmar, the language barrier would cause trouble. Most people here don’t speak English. Although Myanmar users at the time could post on Facebook in Burmese, the platform’s interface – including its system for reporting problematic posts – was in English.

Making matters worse, the company’s operation for monitoring content in Burmese was meagre.

In 2014, the social media behemoth had just one content reviewer who spoke Burmese: a local contractor in Dublin, according to messages sent by Facebook employees in the private Facebook chat group. A second Burmese speaker began working in early 2015, the messages show.

In Manila – the original site of the outsourced Project Honey Badger – there were no content reviewers who spoke Burmese. People who reviewed Myanmar content there spoke English.

“In cases like hate speech where we didn’t understand the language, we would say, ‘I don’t know the language,'” said a person who worked there. “So the client had to solve that,” the person said, referring to Facebook.

By 2015, Facebook had around four Burmese speakers reviewing Myanmar content in Manila and Dublin. They were stretched thin: that year Facebook had 7.3 million active users in Myanmar.

Accenture slowly began to hire more Burmese speakers. With the help of volunteer translators, Facebook also introduced a Burmese-language interface.

By 2016, the Honey Badger project had moved to Kuala Lumpur after Accenture convinced Facebook it would be easier to recruit Burmese and others to work in Malaysia’s capital than in further-off Manila, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In an office tower in Kuala Lumpur, teams of content monitors are assigned to handle different Asian countries, not just Myanmar. They are paid around $850 to $1000 a month and are often employed by temporary staffing agencies, according to ex-employees and online recruitment ads.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve chosen to work only with highly reputable, global partners that take care of their employees, pay them well and provide robust benefits – this includes Accenture in Asia Pacific.”

A spokesperson for Accenture confirmed it partners with Facebook. “The characterization of our operations as ‘secretive’ is misleading and confidentiality is in place primarily to protect the privacy and security of our people and the clients we serve,” the spokesperson said.

THE COMMUNICATIONS MAN

Former content monitors said they often each had to make judgements on 1,000 or more potentially problematic content items a day, although the number is now understood to be less.

Facebook’s complete rules about what is and isn’t allowed on its platform are spelled out in its internal community standards enforcement guidelines, which the company made public for the first time in April. It defines hate speech as “violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation” against people based on their race, ethnicity, religious affiliation and other characteristics.

In response, Facebook said: “Content reviewers aren’t required to evaluate any set number of posts … We encourage reviewers to take the time they need.”

A Facebook official also told Reuters the community standards policy is global, “but there are local nuances,” such as slurs, that content reviewers who are native speakers can consider when making decisions. But former content monitors told Reuters the rules were inconsistent; sometimes they could make exceptions and sometimes they couldn’t.

Former content monitors also said they were trained to err on the side of keeping content on Facebook. “Most of the time, you try to give the user the benefit of the doubt,” said one former Facebook employee.

The ex-monitors said they sometimes had as little as a few seconds to decide if a post constituted hate speech or violated Facebook’s community standards in some other way. They said they didn’t actually search for hate speech themselves; instead, they reviewed a giant queue of posts mostly reported by Facebook users.

Many of the millions of items flagged globally each week – including violent diatribes and lurid sexual imagery – are detected by automated systems, Facebook says. But a company official acknowledged to Reuters that its systems have difficulty interpreting Burmese script because of the way the fonts are often rendered on computer screens, making it difficult to identify racial slurs and other hate speech.

Facebook’s troubles are evident in a new feature that allows users to translate Burmese content into English. Consider a post Reuters found from August of last year.

In Burmese, the post says: “Kill all the kalars that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive.”

Facebook’s translation into English: “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar.”

In response, Facebook said: “Our translations team is actively working on new ways to ensure that translations are accurate.” The company said it uses a different system to detect hate speech.

Guy Rosen, vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post on Facebook in May about the problems the company faced in identifying hate speech. “Our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams,” he wrote.

Facebook officials say they have no immediate plans to hire any employees in Myanmar itself. But the company does contract with local agencies for tasks unrelated to content monitoring. One is Echo Myanmar, a communications firm whose managing director is Anthony Larmon, an American.

Larmon has expressed strong opinions on the Rohingya. Toward the end of 2016, the Myanmar army launched an onslaught across some 10 villages after Rohingya militants attacked border posts. At the time, a U.N. official accused the government of seeking “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya.

In November 2016, Larmon wrote that an article about the U.N. allegation was “misleading.” He cited what he said were claims by multiple “local journalists” that the ethnic minority “purposely exaggerate (lie about)” their situation to “get more foreign aid and attention.”

He also wrote: “No, they aren’t facing ethnic cleansing or anything remotely close to what that incendiary term suggests.” He said he later removed the post.

A Facebook spokesperson said that Larmon’s post “does not represent Facebook’s view.”

Larmon told Reuters: “It was overly-emotional, under-informed commentary on a highly nuanced subject that I do regret. My view on the Rohingya, same today as then, is that they should be safely repatriated and protected.”

The platform on which he aired his views about the Rohingya? Facebook.

Apple Inc. said on Wednesday that an app belonging to popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones remains in the company’s mobile App Store because it has not been found to be in violation of any content policies.

The Infowars Official app has become the App Store’s third most-downloaded news app this week after Apple removed access on Sunday to some of Jones’ podcasts from its digital store. Apple had said the podcasts violated the company’s rules against hate speech.

The company had not explained why the app remained available until issuing a statement on Wednesday.

“We strongly support all points of view being represented on the App Store, as long as the apps are respectful to users with differing opinions, and follow our clear guidelines, ensuring the App Store is a safe marketplace for all,” Apple told Reuters in a statement.

Jones’ podcasts differed from the Infowars app in a key way. The podcast app allowed access to an extensive list of previous episodes, subjecting all of those past episodes to Apple’s content rules.

The Infowars app contains only rebroadcasts of the current day’s episodes, subjecting a much smaller set of content to the rules. Apple said it regularly monitors all apps for content violations.

“We continue to monitor apps for violations of our guidelines and if we find content that violates our guidelines and is harmful to users we will remove those apps from the store as we have done previously,” Apple said.

Google parent Alphabet Inc, Facebook Inc and Spotify Technology SA also removed some content this week that had been produced by Jones. Google has not said why the Infowars app, which offers live streams and articles, was not removed in its app store as part of the actions.

Twitter has drawn public outcry for not removing Jones’ account. The company is responding by expediting a review of its content policies, according to an internal email that Chief Executive Jack Dorsey shared on Twitter on Wednesday.

The message noted that Twitter would have taken action against Jones had he posted the same content on its service as he had on Facebook and YouTube.