only a small number of people who play digital and video games would develop a mental health disorder but early warning signs can help prevent it and while the makers of fortnight are expected to earn more than four billion dollars this year addiction to gaming the screeding gaming addiction treatment programs which may even be more lucrative for insurance companies and health care providers now that gaming addiction is considered a mental health disorder. why do smartphones social media and computer games keep us hoked well they're designed to the tech industry uses human psychology and calls it behavior design or persuasive tech companies don't conceal this apple readily admits its products are addictive it's even designing an app to help you use your phone lest the average person checks their phone one hundred fifty times a day psychologists though are beginning to describe the deliberate engineering of

addiction as an unethical practice and some within the tech industry want higher standards too but in the meantime for a tech company in the attention economy the more time a user spends online equals more money from ad revenue that revenue hit a record eighty eight billion dollars in two thousand and seventeen well joining me now from london is dr jamie woodcock jamie is a research or at the oxford internet institute good to have you with us so first of all how is human psychology used in digital design. well i think what we've seen is many attempts to introduce ways as you as you mentioned to capture people's attention and i think it's no surprise really that these kind of psychological aspects of being included but i think one of the ones we have to point to as being particularly problematic is the use of gambling or gambling like aspects in in video games for example to get users not only hooked but also it can cost

a lot of money to give us some examples of how popular apps and social media platforms use psychology than other than the gambling games you've referred to i mean i think many of these are around feedback loops that are introduced into into these platforms these build on well known affects about you know. communal loops and so on that you you know you get a rush with a particular kind of interaction and i think many you know many software platforms but many games as well try to mobilize this to keep users on the platform and ultimately this becomes not so that you share information or you communicate or you get time to play but to keep people hooked on a platform to make money from it you're in the university are all students people being taught how to use human psychology and some of these techniques that you're talking about. so i'm i'm a sociologist by training so i think one of the things that we try to teach students is a critical approach to these kinds of forms of media that perhaps we can look

beyond these kind of psychological aspects but i'm the only time when i was a very lame you personally but i mean generally in institutions educational institutions and universe is that where it starts that people are taught these techniques. i mean i think so and i think you know one of the aspects that we really need to talk about is game if occasion and this is where you know psychological understandings of these feedback loops are being introduced into more and more aspects of our lives it's no longer just on social media or just when you're playing video games you know these are used that work or they're used to keep you exercising and i think we need to ask questions about you know is it right that these things are used to to convince us to do things is the ethical i think this is a this is the big question right now isn't it how i think illicit and i think you know in a way many of these kinds of platforms and kinds of games can be incredibly persuasive

. but in a sense for a company making these products of course they're going to do this you know it's been a long history of trying to make buying products from a company persuasive i think what we have to do is have conversations about. how manipulative these things can be and particularly when it involves money and i think part of this as an academic is teaching people to think critically about the way they use these kind of platform rather than teaching people how to think critically i mean now the w.h.o. talk about mental health issues should there be regulation so i mean i think that you know there were already is regulation of various kinds and particularly does there need to be video games sometimes and i mean i am a different level now in many ways. yeah i think in many ways this is kind of it's a new story but it's also an old story so when we have you know new forms of media that are being used by children that perhaps their parents don't understand or didn't use themselves we often get these kind of moral panics you know today it's

fortnight you know in previous years it was you know staying up watching t.v. all night or you know watching online videos or reading books with you know trashy content or whatever it is and i think one of the biggest biggest things we could do to move this debate forward is you know rethink the relationship that technology plays between between families so if parents are worried about for time perhaps they should play it with their children to get an experience of it because it's not that the media itself is inherently problematic it's that there are problematic uses of it so this should be a sort of family level regulation you don't see a role for the industry itself i don't know psychologists getting involved in sort of the programming design stage and that sort of thing i mean i think there's one aspect that does need regulation and that's the use of gambling in video games for the use of loot boxes or other techniques. involving gambling being targeted at

people who are under-age who might not understand the risks of gambling but that's something where you know we have the regulation for this it's just a matter of the regulation being applied properly or we're talking about some of these terms like lew boxes and feedback loops and what sort of negative side effects are they producing in human behavior let's explain them to demystify some of these terms and little bit. so i think you know with with feedback loops this is something that's not necessarily a problem this is something where somebody's gain some kind of enjoyment and they're able to go through that process so it's you know it's going on twitter and finding that you will your tweet has been light and retreated a whole number of times or it's you know winning in a in a video game so these things are not that's not necessarily problematic but i think when these things are tied into gambling aspects so look boxes essentially reward in a video game where the contents of it is randomized and some people don't know what

they're going to get when they open it up and often this can become problematic because people can then buy additional attempts to win what they want and that is a way of mobilizing that feeling of winning something of some positive feedback and tying it into small purchases or keeping people on the game which is what i don't do it what is it doing to people or is it simply that it's keeping people glued to their phones or is it doing something deeper to human psychology so i think you know there are arguments that you know the use of these new kinds of media are changing the way we think or attention span or so on but you know the way technology has always had this kind of a face it changes how we think and it changes what we do and what i worry about is you know that we think that the entire media form is a problem you know it's true there are cases where people are becoming addicted to

these these games and so on but the vast majority of the use is not like that so i think we have to be careful in kind of you know over kind of. generalizing the right use of these forms of media and i find a lot about you know the shift towards artificial intelligence is something that you know we're all talking about and i'm wondering whether technology will be even more able to manipulate human psychology in the future because of artificial intelligence for a profit of course. so so then this is a really interesting question you know president you know artificial intelligence has been used in a whole number of new domains you know looking over legal documents in medical uses and so on psychology remains quite a difficult thing to program because people are contradictory and have conflicting emotions and all these manner of things i think really the question we need to be asking is if it's likely that i could be used to manipulate people why

are we not having a larger conversation about what i could be used for that could benefit people because i think it's quite a dystopian future way i is used to trick us and convince us to spend more money and so on when we could be using technology for for much better things interesting thanks so much for your thoughts on that. apple's been fined six and a half million dollars for misinforming a strain in customers about their faulty i phones the tech giant refuses to fix phones and i pads that have been serviced by third parties but it failed to tell a stranger and customers about the policy apple admitted misleading hundreds of them after thomas' in sydney with more. this was an issue that affected five thousand people in australia in twenty fifteen or twenty sixty they had. downloaded the latest software only to find that immediately generated an error fifty three message which stopped their device from what when those people took their products

into an apple shop like this one they were told that they'd go the error of fifty three messages because it revealed that they had taken a device at some point so an unauthorized repair of an apple said that as a result of that they had no obligation to repair it or replace the australians can see regular said no just because somebody. on the parent is not invalidating right it's been seen over text messages like the apple as a result all the broken phones and nine million australian dollars and that's about six million us dollars well this was an issue that affected people all over the world so australia is unlikely to be the last place by such a fine. and finally recycling firms in thailand are importing more electronic waste than they're allowed to and processing it in illegal factories scott high blow reports from bangkok. police officers gathered at

a factory just outside bangkok they sent up a drone to take a peek. before scaling the wall and going yes this is the latest in a series of raids on electronic waste factory for the past month the authorities have been cracking down on illegal operations and investigating imported ways. some companies are bringing in more than they're authorized to import and using illegal factories like this one. it's the largest raid of its kind yet police estimate that there are six thousand tons of illegal waste in the sprawling compound all these seven company can you but now we found out that. not directly to factory but to another in the gun factory importers have now had their license is suspended for a year intelligence gained on previous raids led police here to this plastic facility it's not even registered to do this kind of work now this is

a stack of old router fronts now there are thousands of stacks like this on this facility and it's clear that this particular one came from overseas on the back of them there's a sticker with an american customer service number on it customs officials say that the import of plastic material for recycling including waste totals two hundred thousand tons for just the first five months of this year that's double the amount for all of last year i believe that it resolves the ban from china in that country so. ten to five. countries to send to and thailand. those countries. environmental group greenpeace also thinks the chinese ban has led to an increase they're concerned with the contamination electronic waste causes heavy metal in water and soil and airborne toxins but the more immediate concern there's no

specific law that deals directly with the waste management. dumping up. and we don't have to do that he says there's a domestic to keep the current businesses open so there's no economic reason for thailand to take in other countries. show for this remember you can. twitter the hash tag a j c t c when you do drop us an email. address is more for you on line. that'll take you straight to our page which has individual reports links and the entire episode for you to catch up on. this edition of counting the cost. for the whole team here thanks for

joining us. and monday pointed on. u.s. and british companies have announced the biggest discovery of natural gas in west africa but what to do with these untapped natural resources is already a source of heated debate nothing much has changed they still spend most of their days looking forward to full dry river beds like this one five years on the syrians still feel battered or even those who managed to escape their country haven't truly been able to escape the war. eighty percent of the visually impaired could be cured without access to treatment. and where there is a will there is a way of training state of the. covering over seventy seven countries how many of these patients be seen today every writer and in pakistan.

provides free treatment for over one million patients and yet the cure revisited al-jazeera conservation is helping kyrgyzstan to recover its snow leopard population to see the results i traveled up to the remote nature reserve of saudi chat at a touch camera traps have identified a healthy population of up to twenty snow leopards as the technology improves who are finding all these ways in which our guesses are are getting corrected the latest evidence suggests they're more cats than previously acknowledged but the snow leopard trust believes it's premature to downgrade the cats on the international list of threatened species. demain the intersection of reality and comedy and post revolution tennessee our. mission to entertain

educate and provoke debate through satire how weapon of choice. and internet look at what inspires one of tennessee is most popular comedians to make people laugh. miten is the hack on al-jazeera. this is al jazeera. blog so robin this is the al-jazeera news our life my headquarters here in doha coming up in the next sixty minutes. with one safety in a country we want strong borders the u.s. president uses a parade of people affected by crimes committed by migrants to decide his hardline

immigration stand and i've been photographing along the border and immigration issues now for ten years we talk to the man behind the image flashed around the world of a migrant child at a u.s. border also. here in accuses venezuela's government forces of killing hundreds of people in pawn neighborhoods under the guise of fighting crime and. people flee a yemeni port city as the u.s. and u.n. the saudi amorality coalition to call their battle for control. welcome to the news hour a defiant donald trump is sticking to his zero tolerance policy on immigration but the effect his stand is having on young children remains in the spotlight two days ago the u.s. president signed an executive order to stop separating them from their parents at

the border but there's still confusion on how to reunite an estimated eighteen hundred children alan fischer reports now from washington d.c. . for one mother the pain of separation over seven year old darwin was taken from beata. the border in arizona. we come from guatemala no after more than a month you could finally hold them again she said the government for some to turn and one day. i started crying when i saw him because he's the only child i have i think god because i have him here with me he's now said but nobody's going to separate us again. but the donald trump signed an executive order halting the separation of children from the families those and still face the pain of separation and no one noise when they will be reunited the executive order president trump does not solve the problem we still face the reality of at least

twenty three hundred of these young children who have been separated and there's nothing he said nothing about what we're going to do to reunite them or to take care of them during this period of time thought chum started the day with a series of tweets arjan republicans to ditch plans to pass new immigration legislation saying republicans should stop wasting their time on immigration until after we elect more senators and congress men women in november this just days after he demanded congress sort the problem out. then removed that so-called angel families people who had relatives killed by undocumented migrants these are the american citizens permanently separated from their loved ones highlighting he's not backing away from his hard line immigration stance one central square one safety in a country we want strong borders we want people to come in but we want them to come in the proper way. on friday protesters surrounded the home of homeland

security secular christian nielsen and put a full volume recording of children after they've been separated from the parents at the border. it's been a difficult week for donald trump but with no deal immigration in sight a new clarity of what needs to happen on the border next week isn't looking good either alan fischer washington. speak to immigration attorney alan or in new york he's a member of the executive committee of the american immigration lawyers association good to have you with us live on al-jazeera seven how flawed is the thinking i mean where is the evidence that everyone crossing to the u.s. is a criminal. there is no evidence i mean as a matter of fact people are crossing asking for asylum is a legal way to enter into the united states it's one of the many options for becoming part of the fabric that make america great so they're not illegal and and alan for asylum is not illegal asking for asylum is not illegal so none of those

individuals who are now categorized as a legal illegal intending immigrants are illegal right now they're all seeking asylum indeed of course instead of sort of capitulating president trump sort of counterattacks and the arguments he has been sort of in this particular case finding families of those killed by undocumented migrants as a way of sort of justifying his position as horrible as their experiences of as families have been is sort of a grotesque way of not really wanting to lose the argument well it's more the theater of our president more of this sort of reality show television it's basically a study because in these cases those individuals who have lost a loved one are victims and those individuals at the border are also victims but in this case it is the president who is making the individuals at the border victims by separating the families and not allowing them to come into the united states using the asylum system alan just bear with us for a moment because i want to just bring in a little bit more of what the president had to say at that press conference with the angel sound allays let's just listen in to what he had to say these are the

stories that democrats and people that are weak on immigration they don't want to discuss they don't want to hear they don't want to see they don't want to talk about. no major networks send cameras to their homes. or display the images of their incredible loved ones across the nightly news it don't do them they don't talk about the death and destruction caused by people that shouldn't be here. in this particular case pulling on the heartstrings of the american public with regard to angel's families but also sort of also indoctrinating to a certain extent the sea effect the issue that. the country should be afraid of what's going on at the border as well or afraid of intending immigrants which shows that basically people who are either first generation immigrants are first generation americans from members or immigrants themselves

have a lower crime rates of those statistics just aren't true based on history and all of the studies that are out there from a conservative liberal group all the way to you know pretty progressive groups those numbers just don't bear out but more so what's important about sort of having these families there are they probably did get some news stories but wasn't what was wasn't part of the story was that these factors of the immigrants involved in the accident because it wasn't here to the crime and there are cracks that every day people are shot and robbed every day there's nothing intrinsic to any of these crimes that is specific to someone who is from a foreign country so therefore why should that be part of the story is no different than if it was a man or a woman that creek created the crime so i think that's a little bit over glossing what the issue is but in the story today that you're sort of covering and they were looking for a solution for the many undocumented individuals that are here the dhaka population the students in order for them to qualify for daca they have to have had no criminal record at all so why are we not talking about that class of individuals that are here that deserve a remedy under due process of our laws but of course what president trump does say

really disappear to his base does it knowlton then. just really trying to keep his base happy or if he's still genuinely trying to bring the whole country even if a large majority of his own supports it isn't really. well i think it's once again i think it's just really theater to sort of make people feel a certain way and to polarize the country because one of the things i don't agree with is that the president's executive order really solve family separation it does it if you sort of read it what he does is he punted back to the judiciary in the united states to say please change a ruling that you had about keeping kids for longer than twenty days so in nineteen days from today we'll decide if this executive order really did something right that did nothing at all and now we just that damn lee jails where they're holding people indefinitely against the law of the land currently under the floors agreement so i think that it's just part of theater keeping people polarized while he under undergird is all of immigration with these sort of while variants of

saying you know you're more likely to be hit by an immigrant for a crime they're bad they're coming here to take things you know if you were to sort of look at now be interested to know today how many of those victims that he had today in his room were actually victims of women and children small children that were actually behind the crime that was committed will be interesting certainly. going away for some time for the moment a little a new york times thank you let's cross over to a correspondent deborah he's in brownsville in texas on the border with mexico he's outside what the government calls a scent of ten dead age children infants of two years old and younger even horrifying reading that gabriel to be honest with you that full the children that young could be incarcerated and while the political arguments continue about children being separated from the parents really she perhaps is about the psychological damage that they're experiencing while less separated from the

parents. yeah we all remember that audio that came out that was so powerful where you heard the children screaming out for their parents. and calling for mother calling for their dad crying that really goes to the heart of what a lot of health officials are saying will be very psychological traumatic health problems for these children going forward it all started when they were crossing the border with their parents seeking asylum just that process of crossing the borders not necessarily anything that's very easy it's a difficult process you know of itself but what makes it even worse is when they were did cross into the u.s. they were at least with their parents the family unit was together but then with this new zero tolerance policy that went into effect in late april early may border patrol agents were taking the parents and literally just taking them away from the children right there and that's where the trauma according to health officials

really began and that it now only compounds itself that many of these children as young as eighteen months old. are now for days some for weeks have been separated from their parents and don't have any sort of that connection which is really going to lead to long term health ramifications not necessarily physical but mental health that of occasions that a lot of people say are going to be compounded the longer this goes on while the president and lawmakers make their decisions in washington d.c. thousands of miles away. one wonders what the government response is on the ground way you are in terms of the condition of these children sort of health professionals be able to get access to them because at the moment it sounds like it's just sort of government officials in charge of this whole process. yeah it's government officials and it's private private shelters run by private companies like this one behind me but they are overseen by the health and human services department which is the u.s. government listen i mean they've let some people inside some congressmen have

toured inside these facilities of children and they do this and they've released some video that it was shot by the government because what the government's trying to say is listen these are not detention facilities they say that they are just shelters where the kids have beds they have hot meals warm showers and in some cases play rooms and video games and sometimes even getting books and getting a teacher to teach them to study ok that's what the government saying they are saying and there are some commentators here in the u.s. on cable news that have actually made comments so it's almost like a summer camp well i guess it's all how you see it but the bottom line is these are kids no matter what help they're getting inside these shelters these children they are still away from their parents don't know what has happened to their parents in most cases haven't spoken to their parents and they can't leave they're essentially in shelters.