airstrikes targeted a number of areas the united nations confirming that up to ten thousand people fled that enclave towards the borders with the israeli occupied golan heights we believe that approximately thirty thousand people remain in this i still controlled enclave we do not know if if if they're being held as human shields or if there is no way out because of the fighting so the displacement crisis really continues and i still has not only been defending its position it has gone on the offensive on on a number of fronts what we understand has taken yet more ground and and laid siege to an area under the control of the rebels close to that i saw pockets so fighting continues and there are problems but most of the southern province is now in the hands of the government we are waiting for buses to rise because thousands of people are expected to be given safe passage to areas in the north of the country those people who do not want to live under president bashar assad's rule.

it's not possible for me to be something that's it's just one of those things that you feel this is yes yes i believe in this. i'm an independent on a mission for america. it's about the idea of the. it's about it's about the believing in your dreams it's about that. as a filmmaker i would want my audience to support that when men begin first as a leader i would definitely want my audience today jumble with it and say yes this is what i want and. i have tried to be very honest with the film the story isn't

mine yes i. repaired off from my sister was a childhood incident she was the one who planted chocolate all of them so i have put an element of my childhood off but i suppose in my influences that i've had. the little incidents that used to take place in my own backyard i have cried a little bit of everything to stay honest to the whole thing but still big the whole even from my point of view. i'm trying to create that language where this kid is a shy kid and he doesn't speak to all that is how i ended up not giving him more. than a word of the need to be i wanted him to express through the i just didn't want to shout and scream and cry just assure that his discipline i wondered something which is very subtle that he expresses but it's very an expression is

a shy kid although he doesn't speak he would still stand up for his dreams but his belief. the nation will give you a lot of difficulty because you know the rules but when it when it comes down the flipping those pages and understanding animation or everything goes for cost at least my first five line drawings following for that off because i don't know what the book like i did and they were not working on though there was this one man that i started to like and i said yes i'm going to go it's really. i can't tell you the number of problems that i i phrased. to bang my head was i would not have been on a mission right when it came to making baghdad on the lake my mind was always walking in one particular direction because i have been born and brought up the those are the images that have come across on the bank so i know what i side with all i ever knew my exposure maybe

a school little that i ended up doing the same bank owns all that by. mixing what that along with digital it gives you more freedom then it kind of gave me the opportunity to relate going forward about going on one on a digital and then who's these are not totally their shows and all luck and knowledge of them and that i'm good an image their lives we do live here. if i have to visualize my kitchen. i don't visualize a dark blue because those are the on those that i haven't been in no make that when i see it i sneered that there could have been a better shot then i could have taken a shot sort of an establishment. you know follow on building the nomination i just wanted to call it what i what my mind makes me think like the immediate damage that comes to my mind is when i will go away.

from this one film because of the kind of film and those and also tell you about the soul of this guy and i just wanted to follow the sort i just wanted to before make break all stuff as if it doesn't have structure i don't mean it's ok and i'm fine with that that are.

welcome back a quick reminder the top stories here this hour nato leaders are gathering for a second day in brussels to discuss ending the war in afghanistan and security in ukraine day one was dominated by donald trump's demands for higher military spending and criticism of germany. israel says it struck three syrian army positions near the occupied golan heights ultra drone flew into israeli territory syrian state media says the israeli missiles cause minimal damage off the air defense systems intercepted them. uncreation football fans are looking forward to the first world cup final after england were beaten two one in moscow it will be an all european clash for the biggest game in football on sunday when croatia plays from its. now taking legal action against the t.v. pirates and legally showing the world cup in saudi arabia viewers are watching games broadcast on the so-called be out q.

channel but the be in sports network in qatar owns the broadcasting rights saudi arabia block the channel as part of its blockade against qatar the governing bodies of world football tennis and formula one are all urging saudi leaders and others allowing the illegal broadcast to support the fight against piracy. now the head of libya's national oil corporation is expecting exports to return to normal after ward cleaver have to handed back control of four paws they were seized by a rival group last month forcing tankers to be turned away after us forces fought to regain the terminals and continue to control libya's oil fields mahmud of the one hand has more from tripoli. after nearly three weeks of blockade by forces loyal to her leave her have libya's warlord has handed over control of oil terminals to the internationally recognized national oil corporation based in tripoli or very

quickly be out of the i congratulate all libyans for the resumption of oil exporting hopefully it will return with profit for everyone i personally thank all those who contributed to end this crisis especially those who acted rationally and wisely pressure from the u.s. the u.k. italy and france as well as regional powers seems to have force that have to relinquish control he was planning to keep the ports under the supervision of the. corporation which is a lie to libya's rival parliament based in total the handover of the oil terminals and the resumption of exporting operations is opposed for the oil dependent economy some would say the hand over saves it from collapse but it doesn't mean the end of the conflict in eastern libya would have to its enemies remaining nearby the so-called oil crescent who controls libya's oil is questionable because the country

remains divided between two governments one be used in tripoli the other in the eastern city of. the latest conflict started on june the fourteenth when forces loyal to the former chief of the petroleum facilities god a pro him just ran briefly took control of the largest oil terminals sidra and rustler north. at least two oil is torched tanks were set on fire and exports stopped as tankers were turning away from this week tina and her eager terminals the food ports were recaptured by have to his forces reportedly with the help of the egyptian and you airforce despite handing over the poor have to retains control of oil fields the latest fight over the life blood of the exports is estimated to have cost the economy more than a billion dollars previous battle since the death of a model get dirty seven years ago caused production to fluctuate re storing the

full hour put is a top priority boost for foreign customers and libya's national oil corporation which is promising production will be back to normal soon with. tripoli or let's go back to the football world cup now in craters place in the final the winner of england came after croatia's third extra time in a row let's talk to do some nicolas she joins me live from croatia as capital zagreb this is a historic moment for croatia for the first time reaching the world cup final what's the atmosphere like today after beating england last night. today the atmosphere in capital of the croatia is totally different to the one that was last night when everybody was shouting chanting and celebrating deep into the night i mean it's different because it's the morning after that big celebration so everybody still is a sleeve and i think that when they wake up they'll continue with their

celebrations up until the final match against france while they're sleeping obviously the media. very active and they're sending reports from russia and also writing stories about their creation national team and their great success so basically everybody is glorifying the croatian national team and the victory against england and they're saying that they're footballers are heroes and they that they will be welcome to zagreb on a monday whatever they do in the final match against france as heroes so the fans a very ecstatic very happy about what the creation national team did and as i said whenever they wake up to the fans they're going to know where there are celebrations obviously the working days so many of the the day had to go to their work. but everything feels like it's a holiday like it's

a bank holiday everybody is relaxed and everybody knows things only about football and nothing and nothing else you can see around the globe people driving cars carrying creation flags carrying a red and white. jerseys and everything is red and white everybody wears red and white even saw a few few men going to work today wearing gratian jerseys the ministers of the government showed up today to the government's carrying and wearing jerseys of gratian national team so basically everything today is in a sign of croatia national team or football final of the world cup i think nobody. things of creation will lose the final against france everybody believes the creation will win and you go to get a sweet revenge for losing about seventy finally in one thousand nine hundred eighty two fronts the one which was until until now which was the biggest success of gratian football ever all right so good luck for the game on sunday edition

acknowledge that in zagreb no more anti-government demonstrations are being planned in nicaragua and the number of protesters killed during four months of unrest has risen to at least two hundred sixty four human rights groups accuse president daniel ortega of ordering troops to use grenade launchers against protesters minus sanchez has been meeting grieving families in the capital managua. the family of eighteen year old alexander mendes i say he disappeared after taking part in a protest in may his mother might get ten days later she got a call from the coroner's office she was asked to formally identify alexander's body so the world as it was a little is that i never imagined this would happen but i would hear that the doctor told me both he died of natural causes then and that he got scared and had a heart attack. eighteen year olds rarely die that way so my little went to an independent forensic doctor for a second opinion so you know what i fixed. and he said my son was strangled to

death. but he had ito then fire the complaint with me get out was permanent commission for human rights groups say it's been overwhelmed by such reports. on wednesday the organization of american states described the situation in the ghetto well as grave. and. they've been considering the deepening and increasing deterioration of the great human rights crisis in nicaragua the enter american commission for human rights calls on the international community to demand nicaragua immediately puts an end to repression and arbitrary detentions and all other human rights violations. but the new guy now one government dismissed the oas report as biased. nicaragua rejects the report it was rushed prejudiced and lacks objectivity it requires a professional attitude to report the truth about what's going on. the government

says the protests aimed to topple president that they're here at me that i was national university students and other government opponents have been entrenched for more than one month the government accuses them of being subversive a threat to peace. but the opposition accuses police and pro-government paramilitary forces are firing live rounds at protesters this week has seen some of the worst violence since the protests erupted nearly three months ago. we had i was long time precedent that has rejected calls to hold early elections the opposition is just as determined but many here fear what's to come. with more teenagers like alexander are likely to be caught in the crossfire of the country's political crisis. but now when he got out on russia's

volume to respond to the expulsion of two of its diplomats from greece they're accused of interfering in the internal affairs of greece undermining a recent deal over the name of its northern neighbor macedonia all the incidents raising eyebrows at the nato summit in brussels and greece is traditionally the most pro russian member reports. diplomatic expulsions are a slap in the face in the midst of an otherwise cordial relationship they haven't happened since the cold war unofficial information suggests the greek government is upset over moscow's efforts to undermine greece's recent agreement with former yugoslav macedonia that agreement settled the name issue that's been separating the two for a quarter century and opens the door for that country's entry to nato as north macedonia but nato has pushed to absorb the balkans has annoyed moscow. whole region of southeast europe is a big question mark for russia in the past few years it clearly doesn't have the relations it had during the communist era situation needs to be resolved soon various states want to be nato and the e.u.

is not pleasing to russia nato and policies in greece bulgarian at their back and countries are not leading people to believe that nato and will benefit their economy and society. sentimental most greeks harbor friendly feelings towards their fellow orthodox russians and consider that true hostility between the two people is all but impossible but politically greece belongs to the west and has to toe the line including imposing sanctions on russia for its annexation of crimea four years ago so even though greece and russia have no tangible common interests here as elsewhere russia tries to exploit cultural bonds to create divisions in the western alliances process soft power. there is the island of course all. this sent off the course while antisense bin laden if you go to. city or four times been a year you can see. going around it but aids we

think the icon of this sense been done it is something common for fork or for but this speaks to the souls of the p.p. it is this kind of influence this soft power that. the orthodox world of good. moscow has watched helplessly as all its previous allies in eastern europe have entered the western orbit bella ruse ukraine and the balkans of the last bits of europe left up for grabs russia intends to fight for them jump zero plus al jazeera athens. part of a quick check of the top stories here on al-jazeera nato leaders are meeting for a second day in brussels to discuss ending the war in afghanistan hoping to put de ones disagreements behind them but our correspondent there says the talks in afghanistan are now running late. china says it's on the right side of history as

the u.s. adds more terrorists than the escalating trade war the trumpet ministration is now proposing a ten percent levy on two hundred billion dollars of chinese goods last week imposed twenty five percent tariff some thirty four billion dollars worth of chinese imports which beijing immediately counted. israel says it struck three syrian army positions near the occupied golan heights crossed into its territory syrian state media says the missiles went to separate different systems and caused minimal damage as more from beirut. the israeli military acknowledging that they were responsible for targeting three syrian army. overnight saying that it was in retaliation for the entering of a syrian thrown into its airspace a few hours earlier this is not the first incident of its kind there has been cross border violence in the past israel has hit syrian army positions israel has hit what it says are belonging to hezbollah in syria as well as iranian targets in

syria. more rebel factions in nearby province have signed up to a surrender deal with the government groups which have held out and the city will hand over their weapons and be given the option of safe passage to the north of syria. the death toll from floods in central and western japan has now reached two hundred within ten feet and water shortages raising new fears of disease a huge cleanup operation is now underway dozens of people are still missing and more than eight million people have been ordered to leave their homes. and creation football fans are looking forward to their first world cup final off to england two one in moscow all european clash for the biggest game in football on sunday when croatia plays france. and taking legal action against the t.v. pirates illegally showing the world cup in saudi arabia viewers are watching games broadcast on the so-called be out cue channel but to be in sports network encounter

broadcasting rights saudi arabia blocked the channel as part of its blockade against qatar blows the headlines continues here on al-jazeera after people in power. because. recent elections most notably vats of donald trump as u.s. president apply logic the role played by social media in spreading malicious propaganda and fake news in this old sense of cyber reality fiction becomes fact lies become truths and political consensus becomes almost impossible to achieve in the second of two special reports. investigates allegations that russia and the far

right have been using the technology to undermine democracy. america's two thousand and sixteen presidential campaign highlighted new threats to democracy posed by social media platforms in the internet. the u.s. congress is investigating how the russians used facebook twitter and google to wage information warfare and a special counsel is looking into whether the russians in the trump campaign actually colluded in their digital strategies. there's also growing concern that the business models and algorithms that drive social media companies are fueling

extreme partisanship and opening up the floodgates to phony news but america isn't alone challenges to democracy posed by social media also surfaced last year in european elections we begin there in the second part of our investigation into why social media platforms are such powerful tools for those who want to spread propaganda and disinform ation we look into the ways automated accounts are known as bots are deployed by russians in the far right to manipulate the public the use of social media to wage information warfare was perfected by the kremlin in the baltic states in ukraine according to the nato strata com center of excellence in latvia genocide says its director saraf excellence is researching the information confrontation comment to wolf i would have done a lot of look at what russia has been doing over the is and we see that a lot of our knowledge is actually were relevant to what is happening in the us because obviously for anybody who's been watching the methodology s.

have been more or less there for some time according to the nato strike come center use of social media as a military tactic as part of the so-called draw some of doctrine named after the current chief of russia's general staff the goal is permanent and rest in chaos within an enemy state achieving that with information warfare rather than military engagement is a preferred way to win it gives you a plausible deniability and. it was quite a significant change i think in that mix because typically russian theoretical thought was more about traditional military conflict rather than this what does it mean to have information campaigns at the center of military strategy this was the first sold troll factories running the shifts of people whose tosk is using social media to micro target the people and spreading fake news and then in different countries they tend to look at what their vulnerabilities is that

minority isn't migration is a corruption is a socially quality and then you go on exploited and increasingly the shift is towards the robot is ation of the trolling. the use of automated social media accounts to interfere in elections and we can democracy has become more advanced in recent years we found that out when we stopped by the two thousand and seventeen riga conference last september thank you for coming to this very special three sixty zero s breakaway and we'll be focusing on elections and how bots and this information being utilized to create tensions in our society the workshop was sponsored by the atlantic council's digital forensic research lab to talk journalists and researchers how to recognize social media manipulation techniques at the very basic level of books is a social media account preprogrammed to do certain things that people pressing about and there are plenty of good bots out there like made robots with sham poetry what we focus on particularly is malicious thoughts which are used to distort

conversations online then memo the information defense fellow for the council specializes in tracking malicious bots on twitter is a lot of the bot activity today coming out of russia yes i've seen a lot of bot nets from the us for example that there are but nets which exclusively post for example far right content in the us but nets are groups of fake accounts that can be automated to. like in post together you can tell a boat by looking at the three a's activity and an image see an amplification on that is if there's an example here whose handle is dreamed of dust which appears to be a u.s. based account it's fifteen months old in those fifteen months it's posted three hundred nineteen thousand tweets per day you have the activity that's a ridiculously high figure in terms of anonymity the avatar picture is a cartoon image not a real person and the biography is just

a collection of program phrases and then if you look at the amplification all you see is it's sharing stories to it's two thousand six hundred followers neemo also showed us what appeared to be a commercial bot for hire screen name is something like you did you did you it's a it's a random scramble of lettuce which is often a sign that you found a bot the account was part of a larger commercial but now under the law just bought and i've seen one hundred eight thousand accounts in it and you quite often find that what these are doing is drowning out the middle ground and they're trying to normalize a situation in which hatred and abuse. ah just the standard way of going the danger is that real users will get sucked into that emotional swirl and they'll join in. or also used to try to silence political opponents and journalists so this is i mean with me being that i wasn't too upset by this because i happen to know that i was alive at this point but it's clearly an attempt to intimidate and it's another way of saying look we can get right into your face we can tell people your dad but

using bots to get hashtags the trend on twitter is one of their most effective uses for russians and far right operators in recent elections this tactic was used to support donald trump. marine le pen in france and the alternative for germany party you can think of it like herding sheep you have a group of shepherds and these are real human beings they're real users who plan an online campaign they all agree what's that hash tag going to be they'll prepare means they'll coordinate what time they're actually going to launch their campaign then you get what you might think of as the sheep dogs these are also human uses they will read tweet them they'll amplify them they'll copy the meetings and then around that you'll have the bots they will then we tweet all shepherds and all the sheep dogs and then they'll start we tweet each other and so a group of may be a dozen people can create the impression all anything between twenty and forty thousand tweets and they can then push that hashtag into the trending list and so it throws a smokescreen over the whole idea of one man one vote somebody who controls ten

thousand votes or one hundred thousand votes controlling one hundred thousand voices and they distort the debate. to disturb in use of twitter to mislead the public was demonstrated after a mass shooting in las vegas last year and another at a texas church. google searches prioritised false stories spread on twitter and facebook that the shooters were progressive democrats. most of them converts and members of anti for her radical anti fascist group all of the social media portals that we're speaking about are intimately connected in terms of how information flows. occur across all of the platforms and bought siri a bill to sort of manipulate this flow of information sam will use head of the digital intelligence lab at the institute for the future and was research director for oxford computational propaganda projects his work with colleague douglas demonstrates that particularly those tweeting trump related hashtags played an influential role in the two thousand and sixteen election what we found was that

they were successful in spreading their messages to people at the highest levels of power in the united states so people from major news networks journalists politicians other pundits all kinds of people like this were tweeting and messaging bot content and we showed that absolutely people like hillary clinton and like donald trump were actually spreading the content that bots were sharing online you think a lot of donald trump's followers on twitter are bots yeah that's right and the thing about the boss that follow donald trump is that they're typically active he's an incredibly active twitter user bots are used to spread those tweets and they're used to amplify those tweets like throughout the campaign we saw that and continuously we see that. during the campaign bots were also loose to spread damaging information the russians hacked from the democratic national committee and one study showed they generated twenty percent of all the political traffic on twitter during the first second and third debates were overwhelmingly used at

a sort of rate of five to one in support of donald trump compared to hillary clinton when it came to swing states we saw that bot usage was an all time high bots are being used to spread fake news stories in ways that we've never really seen before are bots to use on facebook as well as twitter facebook has to come clean for instance during the election there was actually a real protest that happened because of fake profile pages that were automated on facebook and so bots are absolutely a problem on facebook. tourin the founder of you bought studio is well versed in the ways but so you. used on facebook his software is one of many turn key systems to pop up in recent years than make it easy to build a new xbox on social media platforms and they're cheap you can buy one for three hundred dollars or less we call this the you about playground and we make it really user friendly in the way that anybody can just jump right in what we do here is we have a bunch of clones of common types of sites so that people can play around and get

to know you by turn says you bought has hundreds of applications from advertising jobs to pumping up celebrity popularity it can also be used to spread in amplify a political message real or fake you have twitter on there yeah i mean there's a lot of different things you can do while he warns users against it turn is well aware his software can be used for so-called black cat purposes tasks that violate a platform's terms of service are illegal clo wiki about you can actually create random usernames and passwords and you can use those to create accounts but if you need a bot to make that many accounts for you then there's a good chance that you're doing something twitter doesn't want to do once you have accounts you can use a bot to do it likes to do follow those shares to do read tweets all of the above. yeah absolutely and if you'd like i can show you a more black cat example using entirely fictional account and the program's

practice id showed us how you bought might be used to spread this information on facebook through friend requests so this is a fake account that we have and let's say that we want to. get some idea out there let's say that we want people to believe that. or. another modified. so corgis are dogs right yes so this is some fake news just. going to post that on my wall. and now i can run this and clicking this add friend button. and that it is just going out there and it's clicking add friends at random exactly endlessly and looks like and what's going to happen is these people when they get that friend message they're going to come back to tyrone's profile and they're going to try to figure out what it is and when they do that they're going to see that message boards are genetically modified and if

the message is something that people are curious about we're going to start talking about it and possibly even believe it to be true turn explained how bots can also be used to lure people to pages like heart of texas which were created by the russians to incite divisiveness in protests in the u.s. so instead of saying cordy's are genetically modified sausages we might just post a link to the page or the group that we want to advertise for and there's a chance that they're going to click it and there's a chance that they're going to like it and if you want to enhance the appealing credibility of pages and disinform ation there's a wide range of offerings from black cat bot operators turn doesn't sell the products but he showed us some examples of what's available online you page likes at a dollar per thousand likes you can get facebook followers a dollar and a half per thousand you can also buy twitter followers twitter likes to read tweets

for thirty cents you can buy a thousand read tweet yeah you can have people share your you tube video and there's also facebook accounts for sale here yesterday we can purchase fully filled accounts the way personal photos cover avatars timeline posts for five dollars apiece we could have accounts that are friends with them already you can buy everything yeah pretty much in the words of one body builder that i spoke to it's like the wild west they said that they can do anything in terms of political political outreach political columns put all the advertising. and it's really hard for them to get caught. and it wasn't just russians who skillfully use bots during the two thousand and sixteen presidential campaign so did extreme conservative white nationalist the so-called all right i think the all right was very successful at using these tools has been whole hand books written by the all right on how to use social media to manipulate public opinion there's there's and those are all

born out of a lot of the traditions that we've seen in russia the handbooks posted to online forums encourage all right activists to do whatever it takes to attack the opposition. followers are prompted to steal people's online pictures and impersonate them. and there are instructions on how to use bots to spread fake stories and mislead journalists the out right has the playbook on this and they've shown no hesitancy to use the most manipulative nefarious tools to get their message across to people to better understand the scope of far right to simper mission in propaganda we travel to harvard law school to meet with your high bank or director of the brooklyn klein center for internet and society for this particular study we started rolling the tape for may of twenty fifteen all the way to election day bank learned his team identified about two million stories that mention one of the candidates and more than seventy thousand online news sites ranging from blogs to mainstream media they then digitally mapped how often the

stories we don't link to shared or tweeted on facebook and twitter each of these no's represents one biggest source. the way their color represents the attention of audiences to their bank lose analysis reveal two separate media ecosystems in america one grounded in the established mainstream media and the other insights dispensing propaganda from the far right breitbart right wing web site that was run by steve benen donald trump's campaign strategist and former white house advisor is a central place in the map and the result is a remarkably clear image with a very distinct insular right wing and a fairly mixed race what role did the right play in this right wing media ecosystem it's fairly clear that they played a significant role in generating memes and ideas and framings but what's critical here is that you have these major sites in the middle that offer translation

service if you will sites like breitbart and the generalize and normalize for the population and so when you look at the actual stories and you try to see how is breitbart talking about immigration it's in terms of terrorism in terms of bringing diseases into the country in terms of criminals so you have this extraordinary right framing but without the explicit white supremacy so that they become in some sense more accepted. you couldn't have had this right wing ecosystem without social media could you i think it would be hard certainly social media allowed all of these very extreme views and disparate groups to find each other and create more power and more influence could you tell whether there was more misinformation and disinformation the liberal side versus the right wing side you know what this shows

you is that a lot all that recreating a lot of facebook sharing all of these sites true speed gateway pundit that our theory systematically generating false claims and conspiracy theories are very prominent in the i don't really have a parallel to this on the propaganda theory or disempower mation theory says that if more outlets share the same information that that is translated to people as being more credible that's exactly right but credibility is gained from the fact that the same audience reads and recreates and facebook shares the same set of sites what does it say about a society that has two separate media eco systems and i think it presents a real challenge because of while the center and the center left and the left are all us they'll organize roughly around for additional media organizations and

science the right seems to have created for itself its own universe of. the sort of tribal knowledge productions where everything is just whatever my people say is true whatever those people say schools and korsakov. this is a profound break in our ability to have anything like reasoned policy and reasoned political engagement. what matters now is like how are we going to react to it how are we going to combat this because i believe that people who believe in reason and the truth and and facts. can we now and then the day kicking good is a partner at revolution messaging was the director of digital advertising for democrat bernie sanders two thousand and sixteen presidential campaign how important were the use of social media platforms to bernie sanders success in two thousand and sixteen very important only three percent of americans knew who he was and. without social media i don't think people would know who he is now.

so candidates such as bernie don't have to go through the traditional gatekeepers whether the party or whether in the media and you're able to build popular support in a way that has never been done before but there are real challenges that social media platforms present to democracy are there you know europeans see populism as a bad thing in the u.s. i think if there is enough groundswell for for good things to happen that people can unite using these tools and accomplish them. that you use bots on facebook or twitter in the twenty sixteen alexion now i think that there is an interesting future in terms of people who want to get information from a campaign a lot that's going to get them information i think that's really useful in terms of spreading misinformation i think it's a bad thing and something that we have stick seriously do you think the russian information campaign aimed to exacerbate social division in the united states donald trump well or both both and you need to recognize that there are people who

are disingenuous in mind whether it's russia other countries corporations in america and if they succeed in that then then we're giving them a lot more power than they should have what did you think of the albright's efforts to use social media platforms to help trump and twenty six. disagree very strongly with with the all right. but they are using tactics that are successful in terms of propaganda in terms of lack of conveying an emotional connection with their base now i'm someone who thinks that we shouldn't be distorting facts lying to people but. we have to learn from what they were doing and do it better the left doesn't have that playbook they're not using that yet and i hate to say it but i think that if the left and did start using it then what we'd see was just even more noise and spam we've got to figure out how to address the issue of bots and the issue of fake news and all of this junk content that's spreading over social media without fighting fire with fire so what do you think the solution is i think that the first

thing that we need to have done is to have some way of authenticating users knowing who is who on the platforms at the verify that the person that we're talking to is not using automation to bolster their their presence online and that's as simple as having a little marker on the page that says this profile is highly automated and what it also does for twitter for facebook or for another social media company is it tells them that hey because this is a highly automated profile we need to keep it out of our algorithm that determines trends. twitter google and facebook declined our requests for interviews in the u.s. congress is considering legislation that would require them to make reasonable efforts to ensure that no foreign national buys ads to influence u.s. elections but the companies are spending millions on lobbying and say they can be trusted to regulate themselves efforts to hold them accountable for the spread of dissin from ation on their platform which may be more successful in europe the european countries have a healthy resistance to big rich american tech companies write that they're not

impressed they're constantly debating and pushing forward on stronger privacy protections or data protections they are very aggressive in competition policy and force and so i look to europe as the only place where you can have a healthy debate about the dangerous power of facebook and the russians meanwhile have learned a great deal in recent years about how to use social media platforms to undermine democracy that has been achieved by the kremlin and its actors is definitely marking and turning point american standing in the world has been on the mind. election. so the next challenge now is europe and the question is will we lose our society to fictional reality describing architecture by russia or will we in fact making people more a sense of this information and better trained and equipped to be skeptical some of the fake news alternative facts are coming out and come together in common cos and

stand up against it i think the core requirement is a lot more transparency and public accountability for what's going on i think the companies have much too much ability to risk contain the information and not share it with any kind of public body that would review what they're doing how do you think this is going to play out or social media platforms are going to be seen as a force for positive change or as an instrument contributing to democracy is the mice i think the solutions will be fought out based on who wins or who loses the next few election cycles i think that's true in europe and it's true in the u.s. so as long as trump and the republican party keep winning there is a strong feedback cycle and these techniques prove themselves then you can see real destabilization of the democratic system so we're going to need a broad spectrum of approaches to deal with the problem but at the end of the day

you need the population to actually decide that it doesn't want to believe in the nonsense it's about winning elections and then changing the incentives to use these dissin from asian systems. in iran waste inefficiencies in a growing population have led to twin living water supplies. trueman to extract water from enforced awesome will this is what you see as the results now of the country's future it's. attitude to change and innovative solutions are being found . people in power investigates iran's water crisis on al-jazeera. business updates brought to you by. going places together.

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to school in the. home. team. dennis coming up in the next sixty minutes discomforted disunity among nato

allies as member states discuss defense spending. disappearances torture death amnesty international says what happened in yemeni prisons on the u.a.e. control should be investigated as war crimes. the future of iran's oil economy evidence that the international markets a shunning tehran following u.s. pressure to find other suppliers. i was at the celebration croatian football fans in russia to as their team reaches the world cup final for the first time ever. there has been a fractious meeting to say the least of nato in brussels leaders were hoping that the disagreements of yesterday wednesday could be replaced with a more unified position today thursday that doesn't appear to have been the case

instead the round of the defense spending has deepened u.s. president donald trump rattled is allies with demands that they increase their defense spending to four percent of national income now most european nato members and not even meeting the current two percent demand. let's go live now to the summit in brussels our diplomatic editor james base is there and james that has become the central issue has an auv this nato summit in the issue of what they call burden sharing. oh. absolutely that is become the big issue for the second day they thought they dealt with defense spending on the first day but president trump has brought it up again completely disrupting the schedule at this summit this is what we know there was a meeting trump was late for it with the nato countries and also ukraine and georgia when it got his turn to speak president trump spoke and spoke very strongly

about how he felt the u.s. was paying too much at that point the sacred general of nato u.n. stoltenberg stopped the meeting and said ukraine in georgia going to have to leave this is internal nato stuff what then was said by president trump among the twenty nine allies there is some dispute about some quote saying the president said if they didn't reach that two percent threshold of g.d.p. straightaway that was originally a target for twenty twenty four then he would have to go his own way others though who were in the room saying that he didn't explicitly say that the u.s. was threatening to pull out of nato but really explosive stuff and i can tell you the nato leaders really were not expecting this on the way in battle who is the prime minister of luxemburg talked about a much better mood at the dinner they had last night he was in a good mood he said europe was

a continent that he appreciated and then the prime minister of luxembourg added but of course he has wife eye on the plane so they thought he was going to bring up the fence spending again but when we saw president trump arrive here late he came he walked through the corridors on his own he looked grim and clearly he was preparing to raise the issue again as you heard he wants a four percent of g.d.p. from all the nato countries an amazing increase which none of them could afford which would mean doubling or tripling the size of nato as armies. it's worth noting that the u.s. did sign on to a joint communique this is the end of play. last night here at the summit and that talks still about two percent it repeats that two percent figure more information coming in to you. trump is to speak to reporters shortly after the summit that is coming from the white house spokesman sara

saunders so expect to hear president trump's account of this chancellor merkel has also been speaking to german reporters in the last few minutes she said there was a disagreement but she's certainly playing down the divisions once again clearly some of the nato allies if there really is a threat to the alliance it's something they want to play down and try and sort of behind the scenes all the other business of this summit that was supposed to take place has been canceled or postponed and it's worth telling you that there were reporters in a room to talk about afghanistan. but with this meeting got extended to talk about spending but there are all sorts of people there including the swedish prime minister which is not he's not in nato but he's a partner in afghanistan the outgoing general in charge of troops in afghanistan general john nicholson the political head of the united nations rosemarie de carlo they're all waiting to start the meeting on afghanistan a meeting that looks like it will never take place all right thank you for now

james and you just alluded to the fact that we're awaiting president trump that's the podium where he's due to appear as soon as he does come up of course we'll go straight there so we can get done with donald trump's impression of how he feels this contentious summit has gone so stay with us here at al-jazeera for that in the meantime though we're looking at another major story and that is that russian forces are on the verge of entering their are city in southern syria zana hunter is our correspondent who's following all developments in syria from neighboring lebanon she's in the capital beirut and this is significant the fact that russian troops are about to get into that our city which has up until now had being a stronghold of rebel fighters. martin we can now confirm that the syrian army as well as the russian military police are and hide and there are fifty. and that they've pushed the the syrian flag close to the mosque in the old city which really

is a very symbolic move because in march two thousand and eleven this is where it all began the protest movement people taking to the streets calling for reforms they weren't calling for the downfall of the regime as of yet they were calling for reforms and we were there and we saw that for selves and a lot really has happened since now there is a full of blown a conflict now the rebels losing the southern half of the last city which they've controlled since two thousand and twelve the rebel factions inside the city where the latest to surrender since friday we have seen rebel factions surrender weapons and territory to the government one after another much of that out province in the south of the country is now in the hands of the syrian government clearly a major blow to the opposition a very strategic area for the syrian government to return to the jordanian borders which will allow it really to gain international legitimacy it will allow it to

revive trade but like i mentioned this is not just a strategic win for the government this is a symbolic blow to the opposition which is really now confined to the northern part of the country and what happens now to those rebel fighters who surrendered and indeed to the civilians so many thousands of them have fled their homes and their massing on the vet on the border in various pockets can they now return home. well there have been so-called reconciliation deals with a number of rebel factions some of them have agreed to surrender and reconcile with the state under security guarantees given by the russian military but many others are afraid to stay behind they don't want to live under president bashar assad's rule and they are demanding safe passage what we understand is that they will be given safe passage to go to rebel controlled areas in the north of the country but when will this happen it is still not clear you mentioned tens of thousands of civilians yes tens of thousands have returned to their homes but many others are

wanted by the government simply because they engage in some form of opposition activities and these people are worried because for them russian guarantees are just not enough they need international guarantees so they do not want to stay behind what they want is also to be given safe passage and leave there are we've seen this happen in the past in eastern aleppo those who don't want to reconcile with the state they're almost like banished to the north of the country so even though the government is now in control of sixty percent of syria there is little peace and reconciliation in that country. in beirut thank you very much indeed though israel says is targeted three syrian army positions after a drone crossed into its territory the missiles were launched into connecticut a province that's very close to the occupied golan heights syrian state media says the rockets were intercepted by defense systems near the town of hadera and cools little damage well israel's foreign ministry has summoned. the senate is in

dublin voted to ban imports from illegal settlements israel says it's a dangerous development the palestine liberation organization welcomed the block from all of territories worldwide including illegal israeli settlements the house of parliament still has to approve the ban which would be unprecedented in the european union. the evidence of prisoners being killed tortured and disappearing from secret jails in southern yemen has been published by amnesty international the rights group says what's happening there could amount to war crimes the u.s. has denied previous allegations some are child free reports. al-jazeera obtained a voice recording late last year of a man who said he'd been held prisoner in southern yemen operated by so which is from the united arab emirates. there are various methods such as the use of electric shock waterboarding as well as forcing detainees to strip naked this is

how they torture us in different prisons they use different methods amnesty international says evidence from more than seventy families government workers and prisoners all show crew and unlawful practices in prisons run by amorality and yemeni forces some of these detention facilities are not actually official. what we and others have in our investigations is that there is a network of secret detention. the most egregious violations are actually. a coalition of countries led by saudi arabia and the united arab emirates has been fighting heathy rebels for more than three years to back the government of president or hearty the who has created a humanitarian crisis and pushed millions of yemenis to the brink of starvation secret unknown you even detention centers in five governorates in southern yemen are detailed by the report says they say there are credible allegations of deaths

in custody of missing detainees of torture and what's described as egregious detention related violations which cannot be justified under any circumstances other rights groups have made similar allegations and all of the warring sides are accused of human rights abuses. saudi arabia has just announced pardons for troops disciplined for their conduct in yemen saudi state media didn't specify their crimes amnesty is calling for suspected criminals to be put on trial and for the united states to suspend cooperation with the u.a.e. including ending weapons sales america choudhry al-jazeera. now this is the scene in brussels this is what we're waiting for we're waiting for president trump to come out and make his remarks about what has been a very fractious nato summit where he has gone about with his normal direct and rather robust to.