Facebook is changing a rule that prohibits users from calling for violence in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The change, which was first reported byReuters, allows people in Ukraine and a handful of other countries “to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion.” People in Ukraine, Poland and Russia are also permitted to “call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.”

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement that the company was "temporarily” allowing some posts that in the past would have been taken down under the company’s rules prohibiting inciting violence. He added that the company won’t allow “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.” The company will also take down specific credible threats against Putin and Lukashenko, according to a memo reported by Reuters.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders,’” Stone said. “We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.”

The change underscores just how much social media platforms are rushing to adapt their content policies amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Facebook has already taken several steps to limit the influence of Russian state media outlets and took down a network of fake accounts boosting pro-Russia propaganda. The Russian government has responded by banning Facebook.

Over the weekend, Riot Games announced it would respond to calls from its community to provide aid during the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Until March 12th, the studio will donate all proceeds from the sale of Valorant, Legends of Runterra, Teamfight Tactics and Wild Rift battle passes, as well as its new Bee skins in League of Legends, to support humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine. Additionally, Riot said it would donate $1 million out of pocket to Doctors Without Borders, the Polish Red Cross and the International Medical Corps.      

"All proceeds from both Riot’s donation and the player fundraiser will directly support humanitarian relief in Ukraine and other affected areas," the company said. The studio joins a growing list of gaming companies that are donating toward humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. On the same day Activision Blizzard said it was halting sales of its games in Russia, the publisher announced it would also match employee donations to relief organizations helping out in the region at a rate of two to one. 

Google has blocked users from being able to edit Maps in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, according to BuzzFeed News. It's also deleting all user-submitted places and contributions, such as photos, videos and business information in those countries made since February 24th. The tech giant came to the decision "out of an abundance of caution" after people claimed across social networks that the Russian military has been relying on pins created by users on Maps to coordinate air strikes on Ukraine. 

As BuzzFeed News explains, there are posts circulating on websites like Twitter with screenshots of Maps showing pins labeled "“ФЕРМЕРСЬКЕ ГОСПОДАРСТВО" or Ukrainian for "farm" in Kyiv. People were reportedly claiming that user-made tags saying "farm" or "agriculture" created on February 28th matched the locations of the missile strikes on cities that include Kyiv and Kharkiv. 

Google told the publication, however, that some of the user edits marking locations in Ukraine as "farms" were made a year ago. Even so, it's disabling user contributions to Maps since the Russian invasion had started. A company spokesperson said:

"Out of an abundance of caution, we are removing user contributions like photos, videos, reviews and business information and all user-submitted places from Google Maps in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus since the invasion began, and are temporarily blocking new edits from being made."

A few days ago, the tech giant also removed live traffic data on Maps in Ukraine, most likely to protect the locations of fleeing locals. It blocked the YouTube channels of Russian state-owned media outlets RT and Sputnik on across Europe, as well, following the European Commission's announcement that it would ban what it calls "Kremlin's media machine" in the EU. Other tech companies had also responded to calls to limit their services in Russia and to block access to its state-owned media outlets. Facebook took down fake accounts spreading Russian disinformation and restricted RT's and Sputnik's access to its platform, for instance. More recently, Apple halted all product sales in Russia and disabled all traffic data in Ukraine after a request from Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. 

Major crypto exchanges including Coinbase and Binance are refusing a request by Ukraine to freeze all Russian accounts, saying that doing so would harm civilians and be counter to their ideals. "To unilaterally decide to ban people’s access to their crypto would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists,” a Binance spokesperson told CNBC. 

In a tweet, Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Federov asked major crypto exchanges to freeze all Russian and Belarus accounts, not just the accounts of sanctioned oligarchs. "It's crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users," he said. 

Such a move would be in line with US and European Union sanctions against Russian banks and leadership designed to cripple the nation's economy. However, freezing crypto holdings could directly impact regular Russian citizens.

Coinbase said it's already sanctioning any persons or entities in Russia as required by law, but won't go any further. "A unilateral and total ban would punish ordinary Russian citizens who are enduring historic currency destabilization as a result of their government’s aggression against a democratic neighbor," it told Motherboard. Binance similarly stated that it wouldn't "unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users’ accounts." 

Binance, on the flip side, said it has committed to donate at least $10 million in humanitarian aide to Ukraine and launched a fundraiser with the goal of raising $20 million. The company is also currently under investigation by the US government for alleged money laundering and insider trading.

Other exchanges including KuCoin also said they wouldn't go beyond anything required by law. Kraken exchange CEO Jesse Powell said that such a move would violate the company's "libertarian values." 

One exception is Dmarket, a Ukraine-based platform that allows people to trade NFTs and virtual in-game items. The company said in a tweet that it had cut "all relationships with Russia and Belarus due to the invasion of Ukraine." 

Airbnb has pledged to work with Ukraine's neighbors to provide free temporary housing to up to 100,000 refugees who are fleeing the country after Russia invaded. Executives are sending letters to the leaders of several European nations — beginning with Poland, Germany, Hungary and Romania — to offer their support. More than 300,000 people have left Ukraine since the invasion commenced on Thursday, as Bloomberg notes.

The Airbnb.org nonprofit will work with governments and local organizations to support the needs of refugees in each nation, which may include providing longer-term housing. The housing costs will be covered by Airbnb, along with donors to the Airbnb.org Refugee Fund and hosts. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that, while partnerships are being forged with nonprofits in European countries, refugees and asylum seekers can seek help from the UN Refugee Agency

The nonprofit last week announced it has facilitated housing for 21,300 Afghan refugees. It said it would house up to 40,000 Afghan refugees on a temporary basis after the Taliban assumed power. Airbnb.org last week set a target of providing free short-term housing to another 20,000 refugees from Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America and other territories. That goal is separate from the pledge to help Ukrainian refugees.

Facebook has taken down a network of fake accounts attempting to spread Russian disinformation in Ukraine. The company said it had removed about 40 accounts, pages and groups from Facebook and Instagram that were detected over the last 48 hours. The company has also worked to stop hacking attempts targeting Ukrainians military and government officials on recent days.

In a briefing Sunday night, Meta’s Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich said the accounts in question hadn’t yet gained a large following when they were identified by the company’s security researchers. He said the accounts had about 4,000 followers and Facebook and about 500 on Instagram.

The fake personas, which were targeting people in Ukraine, were being used to prop up fake news websites that published claims aimed at “undermining the Ukrainian government and boosting the activities of Russian actors,” according to Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy. “They would publish claims about the West betraying Ukraine and about Ukraine being a failed state,” Agranovich said. “They also claimed to be based in Kyiv, and posed as news editors, as a former aviation engineer, as the author of a scientific publication.”

The company said in a statement that its investigation into these accounts is ongoing but that it has linked the people behind the fake accounts to a previous takedown of fake accounts in 2020. Facebook security researchers at the time said the activity was traced to “individuals in Russia, the Donbass region in Ukraine and two media organizations in Crimea — NewsFront and SouthFront.”

Separately, Facebook researchers warned that a handful of Ukrainian journalists, military officials and other public figures have been targeted with hacking attempts in recent days. The activity, which Facebook is attributing to an entity known to security researchers as “Ghostwriter,” is also meant to spread disinformation. Facebook said Ghostwriter typically uses phishing attacks to take over email accounts and social media accounts in order to post disinformation while posing as public figures.

“We detected attempts to target people on Facebook, and post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including a video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers surrendering,” Agranovich said. Facebook isn’t speculating who is behind Ghostwriter but other researchers have linked the attacks to Belarus.

The takedowns come as Facebook has tried to contain Russia’s ability to wield disinformation on its platform. Facebook said last week that it was forming a security operations center to monitor the situation in Ukraine and help it respond quickly to threats and misinformation. The social network has also encouraged people in Ukraine to lock down their accounts, and Gleicher said Sunday that Facebook would also be enabling its “lock profile” tool in Russia as well.

At the same time, Russia has said it plans to restrict access to Facebook in the country after the company declined to remove fact checks from Russian state media outlets. Gleicher for now the company hasn’t seen signs that its services are being blocked successfully. “We do believe that we’re still accessible in the country,” he said. He also confirmed that Facebook is “fully blocking the ability of a number of Russian state media entities from broadcasting into Ukraine.”

When asked if Facebook was considering blocking Russian state media globally — following an EU ban on two prominent outlets — Gleicher didn’t rule out the possibility. “Given the situation and how quickly things are moving, we're continuing to evaluate a full range of options.”

On Saturday morning, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its third day, some of the country’s official government websites went down following a series of alleged cyberattacks. Among the sites that aren’t accessible as of the writing of this article include that of the Kremlin and the country’s Ministry of Defence. Several Twitter accounts claiming affiliation with Anonymous say the international hacking collective is behind the attacks.

“Faced with this series of attacks that Ukraine has been suffering from the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, we could not help but support the Ukrainian people,” said one account. At the start of the conflict, the group said it would launch a “cyber war against the Russian government.” However, the Kremlin has denied Anonymous is behind the attacks, according to CNN.

It’s believed Anonymous is also responsible for hacking several Russian state TV channels. People have uploaded videos showing those channels playing Ukrainian music and displaying images of the country’s flag and other nationalistic symbols. 

The collective has also pledged to “keep the Ukrainian people online as best we can,” even as the invasion takes a heavy toll on the country's internet infrastructure. While there hasn’t been a widespread blackout, some parts of Ukraine, particularly those areas where fighting has been the most intense, have seen greatly diminished access. That's something that has prevented people from staying in touch with their loved ones.

Twitter has temporarily paused ads in Ukraine and Russia, one of several steps the company is taking to highlight safety information and minimize “risks associated with the conflict in Ukraine.”

“We’re temporarily pausing advertisements in Ukraine and Russia to ensure critical public safety information is elevated and ads don’t detract from it,” the company wrote in an update that was also shared in Ukrainian. Twitter also said it’s temporarily halting the recommendations feature that surfaces tweets from accounts users’ don’t follow in their home timelines in order to “reduce the spread of abusive content.”

Twitter didn’t indicate how long these measures would be in place, but said it was part of its ongoing work to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “We’re actively monitoring for risks associated with the conflict in Ukraine, including identifying and disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information,” the company said.

The company added that it’s directing users to Moments and Events curated by its editorial team in order to provide additional context about what’s happening in Ukraine. Researchers have warned that misinformation and disinformation about Ukraine will continue to flood social media platforms. 

Twitter said it’s also working to keep “high-profile accounts” safe from hacking attempts. “We’re actively monitoring vulnerable high-profile accounts, including journalists, activists, and government officials and agencies to mitigate any attempts at a targeted takeover or manipulation.” The company’s move comes one day after Facebook announced it was enabling its one-click “lock profile” tool for people in Ukraine to help users there safeguard their personal information.

Russia is responsible for the cyberattacks that took down the websites for Ukraine's government agencies and major banks back in January, according to The White House. Anne Neuberger, the administration's deputy national security adviser, said the government has "technical information that links the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU" to the hacks. Neuberger added that "GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine based IP addresses and domains."

According to AP and Reuters, Britain has also publicly attributed the incident to Russia, saying that the country's GRU military intelligence agency is almost certainly involved. While the attacks managed to take down the targeted Ukrainian websites, Neuberger said they had "limited impact," thanks to the the country's officials that quickly secured and restored them. 

Ukraine's defense and foreign ministries were among the affected websites, and a message in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish left by the attackers on the latter translated to: "Ukrainians! All your personal data has been uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore them." The message also referenced the "historical land" and showed crossed-out versions of the Ukraine map and flag. 

The Ukrainian Information Ministry said back then that there were early indications Russia carried out the attacks. In addition, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy also suggested that references to Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups were merely an attempt by the Russians to mask their footprint. 

Neuberger said the White House is publicly calling out Kremlin, because "[t]he global community must be prepared to shine a light on malicious cyber activity and hold actors accountable for any and all disruptive or destructive cyber activity." Although the attacks had "limited impact," the White House believes Russia could carry out more disruptive activities in the future followed by an invasion of Ukraine. President Biden has announced on Friday that the US has obtained intelligence showing that Russia's Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine in the coming days. 

Feeding the planet's 8 billion people is challenge enough and our current industrialized commercial practices are causing such ecological damage that we may soon find ourselves hard-pressed to feed any more. For decades, scientists have sought out higher yields and faster growth at the expense of genetic diversity and disease — just look at what we've done to the humble banana. Now, finally, researchers are working to revitalize landrace and heirloom crop varieties, using their unique, and largely forgotten, genetic diversity to reimagine global agriculture. 

In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to preserve and restore them. In the excerpt below, Saladino takes a look at all-important rice, the cereal that serves as a staple crop for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing

Excerpted from Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Saladino. All rights reserved.

Whereas the global Green Revolution was largely steered by American science and finance, China’s push for greater food production was more self-contained. Both efforts happened more or less in parallel. Mao’s attempt at rapid industrialization, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s, forced farmers off their land, leading to famine and the death of millions. Soon after, an agricultural researcher, Yuan Longping, was given the task of helping China’s recovery by increasing the supply of rice. Based in a lab in Hunan, Yuan, like Borlaug in Mexico, spent years working with landraces and crossing varieties in meticulous experiments. By the early 1970s, he had developed Nan-you No. 2, a hybrid rice so productive it had the potential to increase food supply by nearly a third. Farmers were told to replace the old varieties with the new, and by the start of the 1980s, more than 50 per cent of China’s rice came from this single variety. But, as with Borlaug’s wheat, Yuan’s rice depended on huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and lots and lots of water.

In the 1960s, in another part of Asia, a team of scientists were also breeding new rice varieties. What became known as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was funded by the American Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The IRRI’s plant breeders also made a breakthrough drawing on the genetics of a dwarf plant. This new pest-resistant, high-yielding rice, called IR8, was released across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1966. Using the Green Revolution package of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides, IR8 tripled yields and became known as ‘miracle rice’. As it rapidly spread across Asia (with the necessary agrichemicals subsidized by Western foundations and governments), farmers were encouraged to abandon their landrace varieties and help share the new seeds with neighbors and relatives in other villages. Social occasions, including weddings, were treated by Western strategists as opportunities to distribute IR8. A decade later, rice scientist Gurdev Khush, the son of an Indian rice farmer, improved on the ‘miracle rice’ (IR8 wasn’t the tastiest rice to eat and had a chalky texture). A later iteration, IR64, was so productive that it became the most widely cultivated rice variety in the world. But while most of the world was applauding the increase in calories created by the new rice varieties, some people were sounding a note of caution about what was also being lost.

In July 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled ‘The Genetics of Disaster’. As the world’s population was increasing faster than at any time in history, Harlan said, crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. ‘These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,’ he argued. ‘In a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on these materials.’ Bad things can happen at the hands of nature, Harlan reminded his readers, citing the Irish potato famine. ‘We can survive if a forest or shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice, or maize were to be destroyed? We are taking risks we need not and should not take.’ The solutions being developed in the Green Revolution would be as good as they could be until they failed – and when they did, the human race would be left facing disaster, he warned. ‘Few will criticize Dr. Borlaug for doing his job too well. The enormous increase in . . . yields is a welcome relief and his achievements are deservedly recognized, but if we fail to salvage at least what is left of the landrace populations of Asia before they are replaced, we can justifiably be condemned by future generations for squandering our heritage and theirs.’ We were moving from genetic erosion, he said, to genetic wipe-out. ‘The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner, and the public is unaware and unconcerned. Must we wait for disaster to be real before we are heard? Will people listen only after it is too late?’ It may be nearly too late, but, fifty years on, people are listening to Harlan.

One of them is Susan McCouch, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and an expert on rice genetics. Her research includes the less familiar aus rice which evolved in the Bangladeshi delta. ‘It has the most stress-tolerant genes of all the rice we know,’ says McCouch. ‘It grows on poor soils, survives drought and is the fastest species to go from seed to grain.’ And yet aus is endangered. Most farmers in Bangladesh have abandoned it and switched to more commercial varieties. Only the poorest people have saved the rice, farmers who couldn’t afford to buy fertilizers and build irrigation systems. Its genetics are so rare because, unlike japonica and indica which travelled far and wide, aus stayed put. ‘The people who domesticated it never left the river delta,’ says McCouch. ‘They weren’t empire builders, didn’t have armies and never enslaved populations.’ But by bequeathing the world aus, they have left their mark.

In 2018, McCouch, along with researchers from USDA, released a new rice called Scarlett. It was, the team said, a rice with nutty rich flavors but also ‘packed with high levels of antioxidants and flavonoids along with vitamin E’. To create it, McCouch had crossed an American long-grain rice called Jefferson and a rice that was discovered in Malaysia. The reason the new rice was packed with nutrients and called Scarlett was because the Malaysian plant was a red-colored wild species. One person who would have been unsurprised at the special qualities of these colored grains was Sun Wenxiang, the farmer I had visited in Sichuan.

Inside a room on his farm, Sun was packing up small parcels of his special red rice to send to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou. They order his red mouth rice on WeChat, the Chinese social media app used by more than a billion people across Asia that is part Twitter and part PayPal (and so much more). Some have told him they buy it for its taste or intriguing color, but most buy it for its health properties.

For farmers such as Sun working to save China’s endangered foods, help is at hand at the Centre for Rural Reconstruction, a modern day iteration of a movement founded a century ago to empower peasants and revitalize villages. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals and smallholders set up the original Rural Reconstruction Movement to develop farms, improve crops, establish co-operatives and sell more produce in China’s towns and cities. After the revolution, and during Mao’s rule, it disappeared, but in the 1990s was resurrected. A former government economist named Professor Wen Tiejun believed rural communities across China faced serious decline as manufacturing boomed and millions of people migrated from thousands of villages. By 2010, the country had experienced the largest and most rapid rural-to-urban migration ever witnessed in human history. Professor Wen began to ask what this meant for the future of China’s small-scale farmers and the food they produced and, as a result, he launched the New Rural Reconstruction Movement.

The garden surrounding the two-story training center 50 miles north of Beijing is a statement of intent: its raised beds are fertilized with night soil, the nutrients processed from a row of eco-toilets (an ancient technique, as Chinese farmers enriched their fields using human and animal waste for thousands of years). The idea came from a book written a century ago, not by a Chinese agricultural expert, but an American one. Farmers of Forty Centuries by Franklin Hiram King has become essential reading matter for some students at China’s Centre for Rural Reconstruction.

In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the United States Department of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansion the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientists in Washington, King left the United States in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia. ‘I had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese farmers,’ he wrote in the book’s introduction, ‘to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.’ King died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next twenty years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour. The farmers who visit the Centre for Rural Reconstruction and come across King’s book, will read an account of how food was produced in China’s villages a century ago. Crops grown then, now endangered, are also being resurrected.

Inside a storeroom at the center, now a bank of some of China’s rarest foods, I was shown boxes full of seeds and jars and packets of ingredients all produced by farming projects in villages supported by the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. All were distinctive products that were helping to increase farmers’ incomes. There was dark green soy from Yunnan in the south; red-colored ears of wheat from the north; wild tea harvested from ancient forests; and bottles of honey-colored rice wine. And among other varieties of landrace rice was Sun Wenxiang’s red mouth glutinous grains.

‘When we lose a traditional food, a variety of rice or a fruit, we store up problems for the future,’ Professor Wen told me. ‘There’s no question China needs large-scale farms, but we also need diversity.’ With 20 per cent of the world’s population, China encapsulates the biggest food dilemmas of our times. Should it intensify farming to produce more calories, or diversify to help save the planet? In the long run, there is no option but to change the system. China suffers from wide-scale soil erosion, health-harming levels of pollution and water shortages. As a consequence, land has become contaminated, there are algae blooms around its coastline and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

There are signs of change. In September 2016 China ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Among the specific targets it set was zero growth in fertilizer and pesticide use. To conserve more of its genetic resources and crop diversity, China is one of the few countries investing heavily in new botanic gardens to protect and study endangered species. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has also built a collection of half a million samples of landrace crops, varieties now being researched for future use. This is what Jack Harlan might have called the genetics of salvation. It’s a long way from King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, but there is clear recognition that China’s current food system can’t go on as before.

‘We need to modernize and develop, but that doesn’t mean letting go of our past,’ said Wen. ‘The entire world should not be chasing one way of living, we can’t all eat the same kind of food, that is a crazy ideology.’ And then he shared the famous quote attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.’ ‘Well,’ said Wen, ‘we have woken up and we’ve started to eat more like the rest of the world. We need to find better ways of living and farming. Maybe some answers can be found in our traditions.’