harry forsett al-jazeera. before we go north korea's leader has a new title a symbolic vote elected kim jong un as the general secretary of the ruling workers' party although he was already at the top leader of course this title was formerly held by his father and his grandfather they now retain the titles of eternal grand secretary and eternal president. they are on al-jazeera and these are the top stories the united states moving to designate yemen's hooty movement. which controls but the capital and yemen's main aid port as a foreign terror group the us backed saudi led coalition's been fighting the group in yemen since 2015 they accuse the rebels of launching attacks against civilian targets in saudi arabia and of targeting major oil facilities though it is reacted to the u.s.

actions saying it is in fact america that is the source of terrorism in a tweet that said the policies presented by it express a crisis in thinking here's more from tub in the many observers believe that this would for the worse in the humanitarian situation in the torn country especially as according to the united nations over 1880 percent of the country's population now. under the public the line or have been. imposed to the brink of farmer so the many hope that the upcoming administration world would bring warring sides to back to the negotiating table to resolve their differences peacefully u.s. house speaker nancy pelosi says she will go ahead with impeachment proceedings against donald trump unless he's removed from office 1st the 25th amendment allows vice president mike pence to declare trump unfit to carry out his duties and to oust. search and rescue teams in indonesia are working to recover the black box

recorders from the passenger plane that crashed with 62 people on board on saturday the devices are expected to shed light on the reasons behind the sudden plunge into the sea search teams are working to recover hundreds of bodies thought to be trapped under a sunken boat in democratic republic of congo the wooden vessel capsized on friday malaysia is re imposing a 2 week coronavirus lockdown as infection surged to 3000 a day it'll apply to kuala lumpur and 5 of the country's 16 regions on the 1st commercial flight between qatar and saudi arabia more than 3 years has taken off from the bound for riyadh saudi arabia the u.a.e. bahrain in egypt agreed last week to retort to restore ties with carter but the headlines on al-jazeera back in a moment with inside story. suspended

for good donald trump's been banned from a number of social media platforms for breaching their terms of use and many say it's about time believes that a crackdown on freedom of speech and how has social media helped those in power to push their agenda this is inside story. and i'm come out santa maria for years twitter was donald trump's go to platform to promote his policies to attack his critics and to spread misinformation but on friday twitter said enough and permanently suspended his account due to

a risk of further incitement of violence that is the president of the united states banned for encouraging violence in his own country social media platforms were under growing pressure to take action against trump after hundreds of his supporters stormed capitol hill in washington on wednesday more than 50 people are now facing charges for taking part and now with just 10 days left in his presidency trump could become the 1st president to be impeached twice democrats want to hold him accountable for the violence that left 5 people dead including a police officer house speaker nancy pelosi has said if he doesn't resign immediately she will ensure he is impeached but let's not get ahead of ourselves we're focusing on the online aspect here because actually many political leaders worldwide use social media as tools for communication and didn't eat. ganda like rodrigo deterred today in 2015 when he decided to run for president of the philippines he allegedly recruited a marketing consultant to assemble an army of social media activists with

a budget of 200000 dollars the money was used to pay hundreds of prominent online figures to flood social media with comments supporting deter day and attacking his critics he's since taken advantage of the social media landscape which has helped him keep his high approval rating and brazil's president diables an hour away back in july facebook suspended a network of social media accounts it said we used to spread divisive political messages by his employees and 2 of his sons wilson are had also been accused of fraud spreading fake news on social media and coordinating online campaigns to smear opponents during the 2018 runoff election so there is more to the story than just donald trump we're going to discuss all of this with our panel shortly but 1st let's just a submission rules twitter has rules at least on violent content twitted doesn't allow violent threats against an individual or

a group and also bans the glorification of violent acts that could inspire others to take part in similar ones the consequences of breaching its policy while they depend on the severity of the violation and the previous history of violations 1st breach to require the content to be removed them in temporarily locks the account and if violations continue after a warning well the account is permanently suspended. so let me introduce you to today's panel then social media experts from different fields starting in new york city we've got jim anderson c.e.o. of social flow a company specializing in distributing social media content further north to if we go upstate new york and clearwater the u.s. branch director at 1st draft a nonprofit aimed at tackling misinformation and rounding out the panel in walk in mexico is mark douglas c.e.o. and founder of the ad tech firm steel house so well can to all of you clear i'm

going to start with you i outlined there twitter is rules its policies on violence and it goes on as i was looking in their blog they say we made it clear going back years that these accounts i.e. leadership accounts presidential accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use twitter to incite violence among other things so they're saying what we've been saying this for years i mean i could really should this have happened a while ago. it's very easy with 2020 hindsight to look back at individual tweet and say that showed something heat they should have acted earlier and in fact trump did tweet that the events on the 6 were going to be wild well now we look back at that and say what was that an incitement to violence but it's very difficult to talk about incitement if the violence doesn't happen a lot of this is really subjective so of course as we sit here now and we look at the kind of the way this is escalated over the last 4 years and we look at his

speech we think oh they should have done something but when would have been that moment that they should have done something and you know it would be very difficult to take the u.s. president down as we've seen with the response now which is is this too much so i do have some sympathy for twitter but i mean to see what historians will say in 50 years time you know i'm thinking of one moment that i mean again not that you could just pinpoint on one thing but you remember when the looting shot when the looting starts the shooting starts which i mean that sounds like clear incitement to me yes and there was definitely conversations then which said they should be taken down or should have been suspended should have been totally banned should you know they added we've seen over the last 6 months they started adding more labels they stopped people being able to reach week you can see their headquarters or twitter they kept you know who kept adding different things but yeah i mean history i think will look back and say well hang on why wasn't more done in the summer when we absolutely saw the protests in june president trump tweeting all sorts of things that now in hindsight we probably should have taken stronger action against jim

anderson did twitter in the end just buckle under pressure the results of what we saw of that incitement on capitol hill or was this is clear points out you know and a cumulative thing they started putting the warnings on they gave him a warning then they suspended it was it always was it always going to happen. well come on i think it definitely is a cumulative thing i mean you know everything needs to be looked in context i can't agree more with what claire said i mean all of these things are much easier in hindsight even the phrase when the looting starts the shooting starts you know that that didn't actually directly lead to violence at least not that was you know clearly approved and politicians are masters of words and it's right if you're going to be an effective politician you're going to have to be very articulate and very good with the language and one of the things that donald trump in particular has always said is i'm not that's not what i meant that's not what i said right these are these things are open to interpretation and if you look at the tweet that seems to have finally been the last straw for twitter it was a pretty a knock it was tweet about i'm not going to attend the inauguration i read that i'm

like ok he's not going to be there well twitter looked at it and i think quite rightly said well that could be perceived as an incitement to violence you know by some of his supporters and so wow that's you know that's the territory we're in when a very innocuous tweet like i'm not going to be at the inauguration can very legitimately be viewed multiple different ways that say that's what makes me wonder jim if twitter just said oh my gosh we have to do something now because there is so much and not just with the other ones facebook as well have said you know. what is it 3 strikes or however many strikes it's been and you know. we have to ask yourself what's what's different now what's different when twitter finally made that decision what's different is what happened last wednesday right the incitement to violence at the capitol where 5 people died right then you know so now we do have that benefit of hindsight we can look back and say wow look what happened we can see a very clear path between you know donald trump's sort of invitation to everybody to come to the rally it will be wild and then it was wild in a very negative way and then i think like you said twitter finally said this is

a nothing and we're done with let's bring you in from why was there room to interpret donald trump's tweets in different ways and doesn't give him who did it give him the wiggle room to say oh no no no that's not what i meant. well i think one thing here is business of legal standards for this right so if you were to take those suites and less safe somehow got those in the port for some reason i don't think anyone's going to say those tweets and quite frankly most if not all donald trump's tweets you know are just have average rectally incited violence so these roles are and there's no legal standard for and they're just literally twitter's rules from their lands facebook's rules to their lands and so you know my thought is is you know when the standard on as an object of standard as opposed to the subjective standard which speaks directly to the previous comment as

to well this week that seem to be the wind that really triggered this seems to be very basic to say i'm not content i'm not going to attend an event it's obviously not an incitement so you've made a really good point there about the legal standing because in the end we're talking about a private company outweight twitter provide a service if you sign up to it and all 3 of us are signed up to it if you do 4 of us i should say i should include myself we abide by the rules and if we don't like it then we leave or we get thrown off i mean. it's just the way it works right. yes well it may us live definitely i mean the 1st amendment of the constitution was really in terms of censorship which obviously people don't like the word censorship but obviously all these companies are engaged in it and whether they think they have a good reason a bad reason they're doing it right and so that that really vision that the u.s. government censoring things like newspapers it didn't envision you know worldwide

global companies essentially censoring u.s. citizens and so i think that you know that something bad to eventually is is that this whole area is i think eventually you have to go to the courts and maybe even to the supreme court let's just pause for a 2nd because i want to read you a tweet is not a don't come too late but it's something i came across in research for this show and it actually comes from alexina valmy who is of course the russian opposition leader and he posted a thread of about 8 tweets about this and i just picked a couple of them out here he said i think that the ban on donald trump on twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship based on emotions and personal political preferences he then goes on to say don't tell me he was banned for violating twitter rules i get death threats here every day for many years and twitter doesn't ban anyone. mark i'll start with you and then i'll come back to the other guests i mean he makes a good point whether you agree with alexina valley's politics or not he doesn't

think good point that there is not stuff going on out there every day and you will see people online complain millet heim saying why is this person not being blocked why are they not being suspended they are actually threatening my life. yeah i mean i want to not get too political and obviously but but you know that the communist party of china their twitter account is that but the present united states. they i mean that think that a lot of that that in terms of the standards now what is u.s. based company based in in california. so you know it gets this is obviously through the lands of the people that work there twitter not to the land of legislation or really any truly impartial and again if you care it was sort sorry mom will bring clear back and was there is there too much

focus on donald trump just because he is the president of the united states and was so prominent on twitter i mean a mention of ali there we talked about both sonora before we talked about to tara take this is not isolated to this one man. no it's not and we're seeing lots of people online saying this is unprecedented and of course there are many people around the well being that know it's not there are being leaders from all sorts of other countries that have had actions taken against them we've seen lots of other moments when content has been taken down but of course these companies are based in the u.s. and therefore donald trump in many ways was a lead everybody was following trump's twitter account and so you can see there's a lot of pressure on silicon valley but i just want to say this content moderation is essentially impossible at scale you know even if we had 99 percent accuracy even if we believe these decisions were objective then not best object of decisions and so alternately at that place i completely agree that there is also lots of content on many social problems every day and i look at them how on earth is that still up

but the amount of content that gets uploaded every single day means that this isn't possible should the platforms be doing much more yes should they be investing much more yes should we as a society be having more conversations about what we think is acceptable or not yes but many of these platforms are less than 20 years old and we're figuring this stuff out and it's really really hard and we're seeing where mistakes are happening . to talk more about it misinformation jim seeing as you specialize in the distribution of social media let's pick up on what cliff said the. stuff is being posted every 2nd every 2nd this so many videos going up on you tube every moment so many tweets so many posts unless we just really chasing our own tail or do we hold each those people politicians world leaders people of influence to be hold them to a higher standard so no you can't do that. well we are chasing our tail to a degree i will agree with claire i mean this is really impossible in scale it is impossible to do perfectly it's not impossible to try and i think we ought to make a distinction it's one thing to not be able to be 100 percent successful it's quite

another to just not try it all throwing up your hands and saying sorry is too hard is clearly not an answer but i want to disagree with what marc said when he talked about you know is it ok for the chinese communist party to be on twitter but the president the united states to not be i think that's framing the issue the wrong way it's not a value judgment about the president of the united states as a position or a value judgement about the chinese communist party communist party it's a judgment about the behavior about what specifically was tweeted and when twitter finally took the step you can agree whether that should have been the last straw or not but it was based on a specific set of actions a cumulative set of thousands and thousands of tweets and behaviors and it wasn't a value judgment on the presidency of the united states it was a judgment about the behavior of the current president of the united states marc. well i mean. i i i see i don't totally disagree with the point i mean i think the thing is is that should these companies engage in

censorship or not for example we didn't mention parlors so parlay has been essentially it's been taken out of google app store the apple app store out of amazon web services you know it's facing attempt to completely shut it down so the company will relaunch probably a week from now but now with all their service hosted outside the united states and you know with the web version and things like that so having u.s. companies be making these judgments in any means i think personally you know the communist party should be on twitter as well as donald trump as well as i don't think any of these companies should be engaging in any form of censorship if these platforms are being used for violence we have the department of justice in the united states of america to deal with that we don't need twitter apple amazon and facebook to be trying to serve that world ok as i see it we've got 2 issues here we've discussed obviously the issue of an inciting violence which is what brought

us to this conversation today but clear all of bring you in because well your job is to fight misinformation and you look at the misinformation or shall we just say lies which have been put out by president trump by. any number of prominent people on social media. is that a punishable offense can you make that a punishable offense because you were saying earlier the only things can be quite subjective as well. yeah and misinformation is a form of illegal speech so sometimes people say we're close surely this stuff should just be taken down but that is likely to be really a slippery slope because a lot of this is is a gray area a lot of the most effective misinformation is based on a kernel of truth so one of my concerns as i look at many of the people that were caught up in the events on wednesday is you had their friends and family now say they were radicalized i got to stop talking to my for the last 2 years they've been completely lost in an alternative reality so this is bigger than just talking about oh there's some rumors and conspiracies online there are people who are completely

locked into this alternative information ecosystem so there's a lot for us to think about and i think in many ways we've been shot i mean deeply shocked by what happened on wednesday but how did we get there and i think many people just recognize we were having these conversations about free speech which of course all of us on this court support but what we don't have is long to choose to say what does it mean if you see this content every single day so yes in a private what i want to waste perhaps a whatever they want but i again i keep coming back to historians in 50 years time that we're going to look back at this period of times like oh my god they will end everything go and lead to i mean i want to be a father but a collapse of democracy is a really difficult week but i do think we have to recognize what these kind of speech patterns have led to in terms of people's belief systems but you're absolutely right i mean history's going to judge this period very well maybe harshly or interesting that at least jim i want to come back to you as well. should we be concerned i mean we've been discussing the issue of the companies here twitter of facebook google. should we be concerned that so few companies are now

really controlling you know what we what we say what we read or at least having so much of a say in it. yeah i think we should i mean and obviously i disagree with mark on a couple of those points but i think you know the idea that a few big tech companies have so much control over our lives as individuals or a company parlor was the example he used i think is a topic for discussion i happen to think in the case of parlor in the case of our current situation where violence is being promoted and people are organizing with the idea of committing violence and all those big companies are caught between a rock and a hard place to use the phrase i mean what are they supposed to do just sit back and and like mark suggest let the justice department take care of it i do not believe history would judge that very well you see that kind of behavior going on you need to take action but we do have a very few companies apple google amazon you know the 3 of the largest companies the world they make a decision about your company your platform or maybe you as an individual there's

very little recourse and so in the case of carter is in many ways a good example it's going to be very difficult for them to continue as an ongoing business certainly at the level of success that they had been adding in the level of growth and it ultimately i think ends up being an antitrust conversation as much as anything do we want as a society you know in the u.s. in the u.k. different you know geographic sort of entities have their own regulations there but i think there's a very definite conversation about how big is too big you also have something in the united states called section 230 this is off the communications decency act in front of our viewers who don't know this a decides how. allows the companies to decide how they moderate the content and be protect them from liability from what users post jim donald trump is railed against that among many other things. but again is this some some some logic to the idea that actually that needs to be reviewed. well the great irony with you know donald trump did rail against you know section 230 tried to insert it in

a not unrelated defense spending authorization way though. it was kind of crazy because the great irony is if we had repealed section to 30 like he said his account would have been taken down almost immediately because you don't know all the twitter it would have been liable for what he said and so the violence that ended up happening you could have made a case and said well twitter you're liable for the violence because you didn't moderate or censor affectively enough so the great irony is some of the loudest voices about repealing section $230.00 the logical consequence of that would be tech companies taking an even bigger set of responsibilities about what we can say or see or do online and so when i think we really get into a more substantive and less emotional debate about section $230.00 and the u.s. congress at least i suspect you're going to see republicans and conservatives actually say that wait a minute not so fast we're not in favor of censorship which you know repealing or modifying section to 30 would be in fact encouraging more tech moderation or if you think it's censorship that most do you see what do you see as being the future of

something like section $230.00. well i think that was a really good point that was just made. so that section 230 can go both ways so i think it kind of really centers back to having universal standards if we are going to lie rules. have universal standards and big ones one interesting thing is the phrase misinformation was used earlier a lot or alter alternate information a lot of what people think are aunts and in fact alternate information or just some kind of perspective and i think that's where things are really making people upset is just that one person just simply has a different perspective on something than another person calling that alternate information and think that's what was being said but that's what i think is happening and so i think that's that's something that that really has to be looked at in terms of $230.00 i think something is going to happen there you know it's

just it's it's going to you know really take a lot of discussion in congress and and the senate and possibly even like i said involve the courts to to really sort out what these companies should be doing this year and what they should be doing folks are starting to run down the clock sort of want to get one final thought and then i'll put it to you claire the idea that was we're all one of us have all been up in arms about this and i was tweeting about it the other day as well and saying you know isn't it concerning about this regulation or concerns of a free speech on a colleague of mine tweeted back and said well actually has an information always been regulated in one way or another even by and i'm using the word loosely here the so-called mainstream media who put out news and sort of decide what people can consume encompasses just an evolution of but a very fast evolution of that. yeah absolutely it's an evolution and it goes back

to my point which is as a society we should be having these conversations because i feel deeply troubled that some people in silicon valley in making these decisions and there's absolutely no oversight no transparency no other body or agency organization that can be part of those conversations and these decisions are just being taken and it's content it's been taken down so i keep talk about historians a lot of this content is disappearing we can't even look at it so i guess it's an evolution but we have to start thinking about what is the oversight mechanisms for these decisions that being taken by these private companies jim do you think in the end the events of this past week and not just what happened on capitol hill but what's happened on social media will serve as a warning in the end that others might actually look at it go we really do have to play by the rules here by twitter's rules by facebook's rules because well them's the rules. yeah without a doubt i think it the new standard has been set you know there's going to be post what happened when president trump's twitter account was banned and pre and clearly

you know one of the legitimate criticisms has been of social platforms you know if you can't clearly define where the line is right your standards keep moving you you have an even enforcement you play different you know different rules for different people and that's not that's not fair well clearly now there is a line that you can go across and twitter has has shown where that line is at least in this case what one of the things about us mainstream media is that we are limited in our time occasionally and that's just what's happened here so i want to thank you jim anderson in new york clear. and in our pleasure having all of you on inside story and thank you to you for watching as well remember there's always plenty more online at al jazeera dot com 1st of all that's where you can see this show and any of our previous editions again we also encourage plenty of smart respectful discussion at facebook dot com forward slash a.j. inside story on twitter at a.j. inside story and i'm at age 84 i've always got something to say most of it intelligible from the whole inside story zain thanks for joining us with the against.

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