Teachers are bring recorded and then reported on a special Telegram hotline in Russia in case they don’t seem to support the invasion of Ukraine. Other civilians are too, but the similarities are chilling.
State controlled tip lines here and in Russia.
Published
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Good.
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The Pilot is just looking for something to be upset about.
There are lots of tip lines that remain private.
‘Crimestoppers’ for example. TSA and the FBI also have anonymous tip lines, Does the Pilot want those messages made public too?
Anyone can send a tip, and probably 90% will prove to be unfounded or even fraudulent.(Little Johnny is pissed because he failed his history exam) Do you want those unfounded accusations published in the paper? Or is it better that they be investigated and only those proven true and relevant become public?
Youngkin is right to keep those tips private until they are vetted.
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The reason I posted these stories is the incredible similarity of reporting citizen thoughts and words to the State for control. Common in dictatorships. We have seen this with Stalin, Mao and the Soviet satellite states. Texas is doing an end run around abortion laws with the vigilante style of enforcement.
You always worry about the slippery slope with gun control. Well, this is a slippery slope in my view.
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“‘Crimestoppers’ for example. TSA and the FBI also have anonymous tip lines, Does the Pilot want those messages made public too?”
There is a big difference between those tip line and the one that Youngkin set up. There is no reason the information being reported can’t be released to the public with all pertinent personal information protected. Also, the tip lines you cite are for criminal activity. Are you suggesting that teachers may be criminals for … teaching?
Youngkin is hiding behind the many loopholes in the Virginia FOIA. I am please to see the media sources are suing for release of the information.
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So, you want false accusations against teachers to appear in the paper, and hope that the damage to their reputations will be corrected when they are proven false months later?
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Actually, I want to know what kind of false information is being posted to the tip line. Where is it coming from, what is the basis and is there an agenda behind the agenda.
False allegations appear all of the time in numerous media sources. They get proven wrong and the news source, if credible, recants.
The entire exercise is what the GOP has been doing for quite a while now. Manufacture a solution in search of a problem.
Our good governor can’t even define “divisive concepts”. It was attempted on this forum as well with no real consensus.
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Here is a compromise. Let everyone know, teachers, parents and students, that anonymity is only for 30 days. After that, complainants can withdraw their names if they so desire or risk publication. Similarly, the teacher involved won’t be named unless the complaint continues publicly.
If a complaint can’t be resolved in 30 days, then we need something more substantial than a hotline for complaints.
My reasoning is that anonymity in a democratically elected government is rarely good except for national security reasons. Stasi loved it, but I would like to think we are better than East Germany was before 1988.
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I would think that comments to such a list should be treated as gossip until substantiated, and there is little to be gained from spreading idle gossip
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RE: “Teachers are bring recorded and then reported on a special Telegram hotline in Russia in case they don’t seem to support the invasion of Ukraine.”
This isn’t accurate. There is no “special Telegram hotiline”. Telegram is a social media platform, much like Twitter, based in Dubai. It is widely used in Russia. User accounts in Telegram are called “channels.”
The Business Insider story explains how a video of Irina Gen, a teacher in Russia, was posted to the Telegram channel Baza and as a result came to the attention of Russian authorities. Apparently Gen’s students made the video and posted it to the channel.
From what I can tell by looking at the channel and machine translating some of the messages, Baza is a current events discussion forum that attracts a young audience.
To contemplate why students might post a video of their teacher on Baza, it might help to read the message currently pinned to the top of the channel:
“From the editors of “Base”.
“Today is the ninth day since the hostilities in Ukraine are going on. From the very beginning of this armed conflict, we tried to be objective, to cover events without shades and conjectures, to show the picture and facts as they are. However, recent events in Russia have forced us to become much more cautious.
“We want each of our readers to understand that for our work we face a criminal case under the article about fakes. An erroneous word or video, an incorrect interpretation of events will easily make it possible to destroy not only our offspring – “Baza” – but also the fate of ourselves.
“It is for this reason that we were forced to become more cautious and calmer. We are balancing on a very thin blade: on the one hand, freedom of speech and breadth of coverage of the topic, on the other, ourselves.
“We continue our work, we do not close the topic of Ukraine to ourselves, as some of our colleagues, whom we fully understand, have done. But now we ask you to understand ourselves. We really want to work as long as possible. While there is still such an opportunity.
“Your base.”
My guess: The students got carried away with patriotic fever.
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“The students got carried away with patriotic fever.”
Reminiscent of the Red Guard in Mao’s Great Leap. It was wrong then and is wrong now. But since the only news the Russians get is official from Putin, the little darlin’s will turn in their own parents soon, if not already.
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RE: “But since the only news the Russians get is official from Putin…”
That’s not true. As I wrote: “Telegram is a social media platform, much like Twitter, based in Dubai.”
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“ During the war in Ukraine, pro-Russian accounts have followed a familiar playbook of flooding Telegram with disinformation and bots. Lately, they have employed fake personas posing as “war correspondents” through an arsenal of Kremlin-friendly channels masquerading as objective reporting. A Russian channel called “The War on Fakes,” which pretends to be a fact-checking service about the conflict in Ukraine, has been spreading disinformation and propaganda to its growing audience of more than 630,000 followers. When Telegram banned official Russian state media accounts for users in the European Union to comply with new restrictions, the Russians simply used “mirror” channels that are more difficult to track, says Jordan Wildon, a senior analyst for Logically.”
https://time.com/6158437/telegram-russia-ukraine-information-war/
Sounds familiar to me.
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Like Twitter, Telegram may be full of unreliable accounts, but that doesn’t mean “the only news the Russians get is official from Putin.”
The Russian government publishes a list of websites that are banned within its borders. I was just perusing a recent copy of the list and didn’t see, for example, WSJ or NYT. While press freedom in Russia is very low, I imagine that access to foreign journalism isn’t unreasonably difficult.
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