campaign team colluded with russia. who the rebels say the saudi emirates the coalition is continuing to bomb her data despite announcing that it had ordered a pause in the fighting the officials say at least six civilians have been killed in as strikes rebels say they've also launched an offensive against pro-government fights as the outskirts of the port city. palestinians have gathered near the fence marking the border with israel for their thirty fourth weekly rally against the siege gaza's health minister says at least forty palestinians have been injured by israeli fire despite efforts to calm tensions organizers in gaza restraint after a cease fire was agreed between palestinian factions and israel own choose day. police have been called in to sri lanka's parliament off the n.p.t. chaz and walked up to stop a no confidence motion offices trying to separate supporters of mahinda rajapaksa from those who say he's appointed as prime minister was on constitution. there's

a headline stay with us up front it's coming right up. today on up front is it time to log off from an increasingly scandal plagued facebook last iconic tech pioneer jaron lanier and is the crown prince of saudi arabia really going to execute the country's most famous cleric. i made the house and we've all heard about the saudi crown prince is alleged involvement in the murder of a saudi journalist but what about the clerics and activists he's rounded up at home

i'll speak to the son of imprisoned saudi shaykh someone out of but first with facebook in the news again for failing to grapple with russian meddling illegal data sharing and hate speech is it time to just log off the author of the recent book ten arguments for deleting your social media account right now certainly think so this week's headlines from new york all for virtual reality pioneer and iconic computer scientist jaron lanier. jaron lanier thanks for joining me from the new york times just published a bombshell report revealing that facebook knew about russian meddling in the u.s. elections failed to penalize then presidential candidate donald trump for posting racist content compromised its users data privacy and tried to smear its critics as anti semites to quote from the times headline facebook strategy was to delay deny and deflect you know facebook i'm sure you've probably interacted with mark zuckerberg does any of that surprise you what's your reaction to this report. well

. i'm not entirely surprised by the reporter though some of the details are surprising and shocking i think from the facebook point of view and from zucker brooks point of view he is ollie's in what he perceives as a life or death struggle either facebook controls the world or it dies he doesn't perceive any kind in. tween outcome and so therefore there's a kind of an ethic of anything at all is allowed because it's either survival or total domination or total death and so if you perceive this all or nothing world which i think is a false perception then you lose all sense of proportion obviously and given the crises plaguing facebook which you go back to the twenty sixteen us election and beyond zuckerberg the chair and c.e.o. and sheryl sandberg the c.e.o. are they still the right people to be running facebook right now or is it time for them to step aside well one of the peculiarities of facebook is that it's the

only public corporation that's large and is effectively controlled by one person and it in a sense that's an oxymoron a public corporation should have a powerful board it should have power powerful shareholders and the fact that there isn't governance is the first issue that it's a one man shop is really really not ok it's not ok for the world it's not even in the spirit of capitalism i think it's really anti market it's anti-democratic so you should study the side and make it more democratic and capitalist i think it would be good for the world if he stepped aside but the point is that there's no mechanism for him to do so. yeah last year mark zuckerberg said facebook's mission is to give people the power to build a community and bring the world closer together given these recent revelations given your own research in this field do you buy that. well you know from my perspective having participated in the creation of the internet in the first place

it's the internet that brought people together and yet whenever facebook shows up somewhere it seems to incite intercommunal bloodshed because the very way it functions is by grabbing people's emotions and the easiest ones to grab are the negative ones the fight or flight emotions and so it tends to reach passions and then put those reste passions into the cycle until they become ever worse and then you start to have the routing here crisis is crises in south india crises in rural africa so we see bizarre third. powers coming coming into play that are displacing democracy in countries as different as sweden and brazil what else do they have in common other than facebook that you know that that's all they have some of course in britain which is owned by facebook and it's interesting you raise the issue of the rohingya and the ethnic cleansing the new york times did draw attention to that in their piece and say facebook ignored people who warned them about ethnic cleansing and their role in it the twenty

sixteen election of course is really brought this argument to the fore about facebook's role in politics as it were there's been a lot of debate and controversy over facebook say these allegations are untrue they're inaccurate about their role in elections or whether they knew about russian meddling etc do you believe there is evidence to suggest that facebook had a measurable impact on the outcome of the u.s. presidential election on the outcome of the brics referendum that actually change votes i i would say there's enough strong evidence and enough consensus of enough people with enough different well intentioned and well informed perspectives that we should finally to say what the american intelligence establishment has said and what many others have said is that yes yes facebook did change the outcome of the american election and facebook's property wazza did change the outcome of the brazilian election probably. played a role in briggs it probably played a role in many other events in the world in recent years while and it's interesting

you say that the problem is much broader than facebook it's social media itself you say that there are ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now that's the title of your book so we don't have time to get into all ten what do you know top two arguments for why people watching to get off of social media. well i would say first of all there could be some good form of social media the problem with social media right now is that it's designed to manipulate you and so if you enjoy free will if you enjoy being an honest person in the world you should not be using present day social media the business model of face work in other companies like twitter is any time you connect with another person that's financed by some third party you don't know about he's trying to manipulate you in some sneaky way so it's this giant manipulation machine by design every penny they earn was earned because somebody thought they could manipulate somebody else another one is the tenth argument which is the spiritual one which is there's effectively

a new religion that's being promoted by facebook and some of the other tech companies which is that people are just information machines were modules and were all being connected together into a giant computer through these companies and this giant computer will be this super intelligent ai that will be better than humanity and will inherit the world and so it's essentially a new kind of religion and if you practice an existing religion or if you're an atheist whatever you are you're gradually being sucked into this other tech religion and it's a crappy religion i mean it's a silly religion and you might not be aware of it because it happens gradually and so i'd ask you to examine very carefully with your buying into this this bizarre new way of thinking and if you want to learn more about that you can find it in the book and just to check geron do you practice what you preach do you participate in any social media yourself oh god no i would never. have an accountant one of those things i do fine without any account on facebook or twitter or any of the rest of

them you actually don't disappear if you delete your accounts some people might say that if everybody in the arab world for example had listened to your advice in two thousand and ten two thousand and eleven and deleted their social media accounts we would have had some of the revolutions in the middle east we may have had the arab spring because in many ways those revolutions in egypt in tunisia they've been dubbed the facebook revolution the twitter revolution that's what they've been called yeah so he hears what happens every time somebody uses platforms like facebook and twitter to effect. positive social change where they're saying well we can make our country better we can we can achieve this or that the algorithms in the background take whatever those people have done and they broadcast whatever information those people have given the text the images everything and they're looking for engagement from the broad population and what they do is they discover where the most engaged print is and the most engaged is inevitably with those people who are inflamed by it and then those people who are angry and and irritated scared whatever the zoom in on them and then they'll incited incite it

introduced them to each other and then the whole tool will refine itself for the most engaging it which inevitably is with the people who are the most angry the most in secure the most jealous the most afraid and then it becomes a tool for those people and certainly what you have is a might be a recruitment tool for isis so you start with something that helps the arab spring you end up with something that's optimized for isis you say that these are not just social media companies they are behavior modification empires and that when he uses behavior is turned into an empire for rent a lot of people say you basically are questioning free will you're saying that we actually lost our ability to make free choices we've been so do you is there actual evidence for that because a lot of people say well actually no it's fashionable to say we're addicted we're not really addicted to social media research is that unicef research as oxford university said you know we're actually not addicted to social media in the way that you say we are in your book. well the last person who can recognize an

addiction is the addict right and so from a technical point of view social media addiction is similar to gambling addiction and if you've ever talked to somebody with a gambling addiction you'll see the same things are i'm not addicted i just know how to be lucky i have a system. and it's a very similar process facebook's own published research that went through academic peer review shows that they can alter people's emotions so that the people understanding and being able to be consciously aware their face what did it to them there was a famous study in which they made masses of people sad without those people's consent and nobody understood that it was happening to them to say that you can be aware of that is a fool's game you cannot be we know that you cannot be and just to be clear of the five big tech companies google facebook i was on apple microsoft you say it's google and facebook that are doing the most damage to our behavior and our lifestyles not amazon which has been in the news this week for lots of criticism

over the way it's got money out of government apple microsoft you say it's google and facebook is that right. well look there are plenty of reasons to criticize microsoft and facebook and for full disclosure i have a relationship with microsoft now and for even full disclosure i've sold a company to google i actually really like big tech companies i'm not tired of anti-corporate or anti tech companies however what distinguishes google and facebook is that they rely almost solely on the manipulation machine for their money they don't have any diversification they're absolutely addicted to it like petra states are addicted to oil and so it does in my view corrupt them now the things i'm talking about these when appeal ations are all the tech companies engage in them to some degree but not totally so there might be additional reasons to criticize the other tech companies there probably are but it's where is this particular issue of running a mass mental manipulation machine for profit that's really google and facebook and

then. and you know you make me feel good or you make the argument very strongly in your book you're making the argument very eloquently today but do you worry that your connection to microsoft which you said full disclosure of being a research remarks didn't undermines your argument you're part of one of the quote unquote rivals your part one of the companies you're saying isn't as bad as google and facebook does it undermine you in some way. well i love silicon valley i'm a creature of it and i want us to be better and i feel that being a loyal opposition being able to say what we're doing is wrong we need to change is my duty. its it some and i used to be rather lonely doing this there weren't too many others but in recent years it's actually become much more acceptable and common for people in the tech industry to criticize the tech industry and i think it's enormously healthy so . i don't think we should rely on people like me who are within the tech industry

to be the sole critics or the sole agents of change that would be a problem but i think it's crucial that there be people inside the industry willing to call the truth but i think it is i mean we saw it as an industry insider as someone who was there for the start of the internet and you say you love silicon valley you want to see improve on the one hand some people say your supporters will say see even john lennon is saying this and he was there from the beginning he's he knows it inside out others might say hold on that makes jaron lanier a hypocrite because he made his name in this field he made his money out of it and now he's criticizing everyone else who's still in the business you know i was one of the earlier people to criticize what we're doing i started writing critical essays about this i wrote an essay in ninety two saying if we keep on going we're doing there might someday be these bots that would do battle with each other to influence people and could throw an election so i mean i think about this for a long time does that make me a hypocrite for sticking with it possibly but you know what if that's so use what i'm saying to your benefit see read the arguments if they're helpful if you find

any power from them use and i really don't like whether i'm like who cares if i'm a hypocrite i'm just one person and i'm not running for office i'm not asking you for anything what i can give us a perspective that you won't get from many other places of how an inside. make these terrible mistakes. after you jaren i mean we'll have to leave it there thank you so much for joining me on outfront. thank you so much for having me. the new york times reported this week that shortly after journalist jamal khashoggi was assassinated in turkey a member of the saudi killed team instructed the superior over the phone to tell your boss but bosses believed to be saudi crown prince mohammed bin salam who back at home continues to crack down on his critics one such critic is the prominent muslim cleric. who's been held in solitary confinement for opposing the government and is now facing a possible death sentence joining me to discuss his situation is some a louder

a saudi citizen who is now living in the united states and fears returning he's a senior fellow at georgetown university center for muslim christian understanding . for joining me from boston the saudi authorities had your father in prison last year and charged with over thirty five different crimes including corrupting the land connection to a terrorist organization and offending patriotism what's your response to the saudi authorities and to those charges well it's the same operation are going on is going on actually for dissidents brode for those who disagree at home for journalists economists public figures in general so my response is that the charge is actually represent how the state would crack down on any different view and on any person who disagrees and sadly

prosecuted in september of this year called for your father's execution to do you think they're serious about that that they would really execute a cleric as prominent as your father salma out well do you think those who went to the saudi consulate were so. to take the liar for the prominent journalist and veteran. i mean it's the same mentality it's a pattern it didn't it did not start with my father did not start with it's a pattern that we have is worth we have seen through the past twenty and a half since the crown prince came to power they did everything in their power to just silence others to crackdown on dissent to just do impulsive policy usage of power some might say yes it is

a power and your father was arrested imprisoned published by the saudi authorities in the past too in the one nine hundred ninety s. when he was a quote unquote islamist rabble rouser his critics said many would say why he's being imprisoned with m.b.a.'s the saudi government under any prince or king has always taken a very dim view of people who oppose the government is that so it's rotarian is always tyranny. trying to ask and demand political reform is never something that you should be punished for political reform that my father and other spoke for. is actually the solution is actually the path towards civil liberty will come back to the political reform in a moment just to confirm many say your father was arrested in september twenty seventh because he refused to publish a tweet to his fourteen million followers at the request of the saudi government that supported the saudi led blockade of qatar which full disclosure owns this channel owns al-jazeera english is that true it's

a trigger it's true because after he tweeted when he when he heard about the consultation between the qatar and saudi government he tweeted a lot between their hearts for the better of their people few hours after that tweet. he was arrested that was the trigger that's of course the direct reason that he was arrested in september two thousand seventy but there is a long yes yes history and relationship and just to be clear before we get to that long history with your father being paid by the qatari government or anyone else in qatar because that's another accusation sometimes thrown against him by supporters of the saudi government has never paid and you know what if they if he was in any at any point paid by their government or was conspiring by any conspiring with any foreign agent they would have a lot of evidence to prove they would show it in this state they have all his evidence they didn't show anything and if you if you read the just

a number and i'm against him of the charges it's very prosperous you know when muhammad been so mom told bloomberg last month that one thousand five hundred saudi citizens were arrested over the last three years because he the crown prince was trying to quote get rid of extremism and terrorism without a civil war a lot of people especially in the west will hear that and say he's got a fair point they've seen hate preachers extremist clerics coming out of sober for years and they think very often the prince wants to lock some of these people up to try to shut down extremism what's your response belongs to all that says it's not accurate he is tail and he's attacking the very moderate voices that actually spearheaded the campaign against terrorism for the past two decades my father for example was the one who are. called called a spade a spade he pinpoint terrorism and he called it and he did band justice against terrorists in saudi arabia he was actually spearheading the

campaign really along with the state at the time of the state benefited from the old his campaign and his. firsts your father has spoken out against terrorism as you say including against the nine eleven attacks against osama bin laden himself but the fact is that he was once a. good lardons the late al qaeda leader even fighting your father's farm on the outer as his ideal personality you praise your father for in lightening muslim youth you accept surely at the very minimum that whatever he says now he was once a quote unquote extremist well you know where in the eighty's bin laden light so much of their oil family and he was very close to them those who actually gave all the platform those who push the jihadi agenda at that time those who run who ran the show at that time those who should be responsible my father was a popular cleric he was admired by everybody the royal at that time he was

respected by the royal family by the people but just in time a lot of hours just to be fair and get our facts right when billard turned against the saudi government when he'd already carried out the world trade center attacks and he published his famous fatwa against americans and foreign invaders etc in the mid ninety's he was still praising your dad no he's not he's actually just use in my father's popularity to get into his audience as your father was never a fan of below no he was never a fan of that he did not even consider bin laden a scholar or a shit but he clearly has evolved in his views over the years i think it's fair but he was never violent while we were violent but he's evolved his views let's say in this very crude words from a more conservative position to a more liberal position i think westerners would put it as special and socially socially so for democracy or not muslims around sectarianism or his attitudes towards gay people is it fair to say that if your father was left undisturbed by the government unable to preach unable to talk to his fourteen million followers

and tell about history news he could actually have. a more reformist impact on the saudi population the muhammad bin so much yes vitriol and that's why i haven't said man attacked him because he could pull the wrong end under the quote unquote reformist agenda it could expose so the reformist agenda that the state now is saying it's pushing for so on muhammad been sold out on jamal khashoggi and his gruesome death at the hands of this team of saudi assassins in istanbul do you believe m.b.'s mohamed bin psalm on the saudi crown prince gave the order to kill jamal khashoggi. well you know what paul gave the attorney general the order to seek death penalty against my father for similar views of that of g.'s whole actually there are reports even of death and the torture in so did prison while i'm speaking right now turkey and just said it was reportedly dad ended

torture into arabia. semana do we she's also reportedly dad but we're not sure why you believe the crown prince is responsible for these deaths and for jamal khashoggi deliver order that whoever so that will actually will be responsible for the death of jamal khashoggi of dylan jamal khashoggi was on the show a lot from back in march he said he didn't quote want to be the next fall model i would i'm referring to your father being in prison at the time tragically ended up meeting a fate worse than your father's dare i asked do you know worry what will happen to you how much of a threat do you think there is against you as a saudi citizen now living in the us criticizing the saudi authorities while well as some point i thought it's very difficult for the state to use the long arm to reach dissidents approach and those those who just did not present themselves as

dissidents. g. and me. but now after what's happened. i think everyone is i mean the message actually the states sent is that everyone is threatened everyone we can we should be one everywhere so it's very very dangerous and we have seen you have to do i get threats like every hour every day on twitter i get threats from different parties yeah and you i believe you have more than a dozen members of your family inside aruba who've been banned from traveling as true so they can come and see you and you can go and see them yes. one last question abdulla you've been here in the u.s. since the summer of twenty seventeen before your father's arrest back home in saudi arabia do you have any message for donald trump for jared cushion of john bolton for these hardcore supporters of m.b.a.'s and the saudi government here in washington d.c. well if we want to perpetuate a good relationship that lasts longer and for the best interest of both parties we

should do that with the saudi people with the saudi institutions if one individual was impulsive one is really down juris there are many alternatives we have seen that even within the royal family there are so many royals who could or could understand the reformist agenda the real reformist agenda could allow for a margin of freedom for the people could could protect the basic rights of the saudi people so what's what the n b n b a said gender and his team is it producing is actually the environment that establishes that could establish. an environment for terrorists or flourish and to live up to the louder we'll have to leave it there thank you so much for joining me on that front that's our show up

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we've had many proud moments around the world and in the sky and now starting from october twenty ninth turkish airlines will be taking off from the new radiation center of the world for a new church. out on a clock in london with the top stories here on al-jazeera the turkish presidency says that reza typo to one and us president donald trump have agreed in a phone call that no aspect of jamal mudda should be left uncovered the texas newspaper who yet says it's tacky has an already a recording of a saudi team discussing how to murder the journalist before he entered the consulate in istanbul and that suggests the killing was.