well number one novak djokovic demanded to be sent to a private house and that has been a bit of a bit of chatter from a number of players about the rules the rules apply to them as they apply to everybody else and are all briefed on that before they can and that was a condition on which like and so i went there's no special treatment the people of being traded because of our stuff doesn't treat you specially so i needed to wait. again i'm fully back to go with the headlines on al-jazeera brazil has begun its covert 1000 vaccine distribution program for people in my analysis a gateway to the amazon rain forest vaccinations can't come soon enough the health system there is on the verge of collapse and oxygen supplies are critically low meanwhile china is being criticized by an independent panel sent to uncover what happened in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak it's interim report says officials could have applied measures more forcefully during the initial outbreak

in war. between which finally route west we will be will only be successful who cleans group areas with the following information conway possession of chinese authorities 1st all stories produced in china on the presence of sars school the 2 related genetic sequence sequences in animals. are most certain results in around a problem since there are no sir no holes in the markets and if your girl analysis of genetic data circles. the trump administration has issued a last minute order lifting a ban on travelers entering the u.s. from brazil and most of europe because of concerns over coronavirus but joe biden's incoming team says it doesn't intend to lift the restrictions the restrictions are due to be lifted the week after biden takes office. in indonesia more than

a dozen people have been killed and tens of thousands evacuated after flash floods across the country on monday president djoko we doto visited flooded areas in the province so soft on time about 25 people have been arrested in st petersburg russia after protesters rallied in support of kremlin critic alexian of on the order of earlier in the uk. protesters were taken one by one to nearby police buses now vonnie has been jailed for 30 days for breaching parole conditions the russian opposition politician was arrested at a moscow airport on sunday after returning from germany where he was treated for poisoning those are the headlines coming up next on al-jazeera the stream. talking to owners there are we know sort of tell us are in a case where us are compensated civilians when we listen to the only music you hear

. the most beautiful music in the world and silence we meet with the global news makers and talk about the stories that matter now does iran. have any ok welcome to the strange they is a conspiracy theory that the covered 19 vaccine is in a fairy as a way to microchip people around the world this is not i repeat this is not true but why do people believe conspiracy theories are a more to do about that i am looking forward to hearing your take by joining in on you tube in the comments section this is the only time i'm ever going to be inviting you to the conspiracy theory it's right there in the comments section i live in part of today's show restart with alex kaplan alex is a senior research at the media matters for america. within the past year we've seen

conspiracy theory spread such as chewing on false claims a widespread voter fraud in the 2020 alexion and the claim that a board of r.'s actually will be used to microchip people these are worried me because jurors on which group extensive waves of order in a pandemic is inherently violent it we need more people to extremism she went on and they were actually broken spirited theories undermine democracy and both contributed to the storming of the capitol and the microchip experience it worries me because it's going on one traction and could potentially resign people refusing to take the backseat. so much to talk about i want to welcome the guests that you can to up to than we have spencer we have a mess we have not yet turns out and tell everybody who you are what you do. my name's spencer sunshine i have a ph d. in sociology and i work as a monitor of far right movements it's good to have you a message welcome back to the studio remind everybody he. it's great to be back on

the stream my name is or i'm a strain of us and i'm a professor at u.c.l.a. of the information studies department and i wrote a book about how we restore humanity to a technology called beyond the valley recently. nadia. tell of what he. and i got as i am not embrasure and that's technologist a neuroscientist at harvard studying misinformation. since there is a tweet that said not too long ago which was sort of like at the top sit at 3 or 4 conspiracy theories in the world if you were going to do number one will be at number one as far as you're concerned i think for the last 100 years the top conspiracy theory has been that there's a jewish couple that controls the world that conspiracy theories worked its way around the world and continues to pop up over and over again what's to anon for people who are new to it keep hearing it and then come i understand what that is. q and on as a kind of a medic conspiracy theory it takes other conspiracy theories and absorb it into it

it holds essentially that there's a cabal of say tatic data files that are in washington d.c. in control of the democratic party mesh what makes up a conspiracy thing why would it not be an urban legend an up a myth or just it's fake news misinformation what makes it a conspiracy theory. you know as spencer was just saying there have always you know for such a long time their conspiracy theories have been part of our social fabric i think what's really different that we're witnessing today is how conspiracy theories have become more and more mainstream and have become part of popular and social movements and i think a big reason why is because people have doubts and skepticism about the elite as associated unfortunately with science and technology itself but also our political leaders and our corporate leaders and so on. not you know why would these just because be nice. so we talk about conspiracy

theories as a one tank of false heard or one piece of misinformation landscape and they are distinct and that they have time to explain or nantes ask the speaker to class are powerful people and which stats and apart from other kinds of life that we might see on the internet. i want to play a little bit of an elite audiotape in this he is president just before the runoff senate elections for georgia talking about some of the things that he feels has happened i think nobody thinks it's actually happened but what he wants and he doesn't he's talking to police that they actually have an i don't know i can't tap habits now do you think it's possible that they should read it ballots in palm county because that's what the rumors and on don't let your minions took out machines. that don't mean it is really moving fair to get rid of their.

machinery you know anything about. because actually all right your money no 1000000 has not moved in the scenery out of palm county were about but don't like him very much if you have them after they moved to the inner hearts of the machines and replaced them with other parts. if you're right and i'm sure. oh i know what is happening yes tensor a mass not s.n.c. you start festival is the golden age of conspiracy theories when the president of the united states carrying them and trying to change the way that a particular state it may well run its elections. well i'm not sure if it's a golden age or not conspiracy theories have come to dominate different societies and governments at different periods in history i think it's certainly the 1st time

in recent history that we've seen conspiracy theories in the united states reach such a high level on how to have such a high platform they've always been around in our country i mean into masonic conspiracy theories started in the 7090s so they're not a new thing here but what's new is how how central they are and how quickly we friends conspiracy theories can move from the margins into the mainstream. it was just going to use it because it's very busy here right now let me let me put this one to you or mast head isham says social media is used by these people to reinforce conspiracy theories education from an early age is needed to develop critical thinking skills so they aren't food where mass. that's absolutely true but i do think that we really need to understand why conspiracy theories and sort of fringe you know groups associated with conspiracy theories have become so much more mainstream have become so much more popular and not just in the united states but

around the world and i think it's because a lot of people feel alienated and left out and you know that idea of place let's ness but social media technologies are an incredible catalyst for promoting and making you know viral many conspiracy theories because they are computationally predicting using incredibly sophisticated amounts of data that are being collected about us that we don't even know anything about they are predicting what is going to grab our attention so as a result a fringe conspiracy theory can become the new normal and we can see president trump building a political coalition on the very basis of bringing together lots of conspiracy theories lots of fringe groups and you can build a coalition amongst an alienated population using that approach it straight out of the neo fascist playbook i in my view the measure of savannah guthrie here is a a us our correspondent and c.

rist to princeton trump during a town who were doing an action season and she says. like somebody is crazy i'm coo not going to say is that can is that a constructive way to talk about people who are sharing conspiracy theories i cannot work out in prison term believe them or not but he think so when talking to someone and. when talking to somebody who believes. a conspiracy theory it's important not to alienate them for example the term crazy might not be the most enduring or empathetic way to go about it social exclusion prevents belief and conspiracy theories. but it is also important to keep realistic expectations in mind because this information is really hard to correct. you know even in the face of explicit debunking messages people continue to make judgments

and behave in ways that are shaped by misinformation and so going about it in an empathetic way and pointing out that you know conspiracies do exist but they tend to be brought to the public eye i whistle blowers or investigative journalists or government investigations and not read it you search for example i suppose a new shoe sheds this my family i see trump supporters on our in denial see ality drives me crazy because it makes me question reality or one more. do with this one this is joe chips conspiracy theories of long existed even before president trump was born or he became president he's kind of exasperation at that this seems to be in a time when we can't get attention to them not even to us in this one yeah so we're living in uncertain times and people are most vulnerable to conspiracy theories when he'll uncertain and lack control they start to speak meaning and

identify patterns and randomness ironically news that leaves only makes us feel less powerful so conspiracy theories are more appealing and they are satisfy but that might explain why now seems to be particularly vulnerable moment. this is just me. jeff loreal ski and he has got our cell of a film called the social dynamic he looks at social media as being quite instrumental when it comes to misinformation and disinformation and you know last week away in a number of people i'm up infiltrating at the council building united states he was insufficient and asked about the role that social media is playing in giving out bad information to people this is what he told a.p. news these things are going to get worse because of social media the trend in the trajectory is for more people to believe more and more and accuracy is more about

information more racist information more hate speech that's going to be the system that's how the system is operating right and if you let that system keep going on autopilot it's going to get worse. and in my mind it doesn't stop here with this event unfortunately right these ideas haven't disappeared from the world and these ideas are only going to continue to foment on these systems and they're going to exponentially grow just like the algorithms push for exponential growth i'm wondering where messages and then spent if this is what is different of cool sci fi conspiracy theories for the yes but social media is doubt what's making it different. i think you have to layer the conditions of alienation that both nadi and spencer have alluded to it people feel alienated they feel let down and we should think about in an empathic way where people are coming from at this time

because often conspiracy theories are such in some cases that might start with some kernel of of skepticism or some kernel of an actually interesting and important question right like not all vaccines are good for everybody at all times or perhaps technologies could emit radiation but the fact that they amplify they bubble up and they polarize because when we go on social media we generally are in these walled gardens we just see what people we follow have to say the world is presented to us like it's like the real world but it's actually the social media world and we're being fed concept that often reinforces our amplifies our own views or you know creates more sensationalism so as a result our very experience that democracy relies upon that actually quite honestly even our media have let us down with with the fragmentation of fox news versus other channels. that is actually

a huge problem because democracy relies upon people having different opinions but being able to come together in a tolerant and compassionate way to understands and communicate with one another and that is the exact opposite of what is happening via social media so the architecture of social media which is based upon getting people's attention keeping keeping them on the same platform as much as possible and extracting data and manipulating behavior accordingly that is the that is an architecture that is antithetical to democracy so i don't want to state everything is caused by social media but i do want to see the social media at this current moment is an amplification of this polarization crisis and that's why we have to restore it in the image of greater humanity and actual democracy a people's face democracy that's what i believe in why do people believe conspiracy theory. and i'm going to shame peace with our audience from my laptop he says from your facebook page when you speak. cow man as the internet coup attempt was

identified as you and people believed it spent one thing and how is that even possible. well i mean you just say your stenson is not. and. thank you for clearing that up. conspiracy theories you know they answer a psychological need that people 'd have and they are so apt as strong. there's a strong emotional power to them and they act as political mobilize ors and they're also useful to scapegoat different groups that are already sort of marginalized and oppressed in the society sometimes or needs from above they're often sort of groups from below that are already put down on and sometimes are very obscure figures or institutions so i in this case i fit in as the obscure figure i acted as a scapegoat you know this tweet was by winwood who was one of the lawyers pursuing

a crack in lawsuits that the elections were or. were rigged and so he wanted to scapegoat anti far and others for the violence at the capitol you know he's on the far right and he wanted to the far right not to take. take responsibility for that and then he also wanted to scapegoat she went on sherman or cow man as instead of being one of the people of the far right itself as actually belonging to someone else it was a sort of double scapegoat there and that way they don't have to look like and spencer you don't even know what i did and i was about 15 years younger than me so i was actually quite. good and i had 2 of 'd them. so i really i did say to our audience it this is the only time that we can put conspiracy theory to a document section and i will bring them up so high and $0.90 you know speaker something is considered a conspiracy doesn't mean it's not true. ah now we're stuck not right

right because conspiracies do occur we know for example that the u.s. national security agency spied on civilian internet users so sometimes things that sound crazy actually are true and sometimes these dark plots are actually taking place and that's a big red in correcting these beliefs and a big part of a lot of conspiracy theories is that people who try to debunk that must be part of the plot. that makes a really challenging. articulate you know it. yeah you know i really appreciate what both 90 and spencer have said and spencer made a really important point about how those that are most vulnerable and marginalized in our world are not only scapegoated but how this current you know you know attention spectacle fueled way of making conspiracy theories go viral and become the new normal actually often harms people who are already vulnerable and

marginalized and we've seen that around the world and our audience is global and i just want to point out how a company like facebook is not just a social media platform it's the biggest media company in the history of the world's whatsapp has has basically annihilated many local i a species and local kind of technology infrastructure and so in places like my in mar you know in burma in sri lanka in the philippines and many other countries of in the world. those who have perpetrated human rights abuses and genocides in the case of my own mar or pushed and promoted conspiracy theories against minorities like muslim people indigenous people you know activists and so on they have been legitimated by facebook because facebook does not understand the complexities of those countries barely invests in global governance and they have gone viral

because their content just kind of rubble you know kind of rabble rousers and that has resulted in real violence against people who are innocent of any of these suppose it conspiracy theories of culpability and so this is not just a concern about the internet and social media this is a concern about the dignity of people who are already marginalized by our existing systems of power. and you will easily see one ready. yet to be censorious in a lot of those conspiracy theories in the us one of my favorite ones in the last 2 years was by stuart rhodes of the oath keepers there one of the main militia groups and he. claimed that mexican cartels were allowing isis sleeper cells to cross the us southern border into the united states in order to help undermine our nation so there we see a combination of a whole bunch of different kinds of conspiracy theories all wrapped into one and there's one thing i want to add people have sort of danced around this partly in answer to the you tube commentators question about how do we know there are real

conspiracies and how do we know is that inspires your theories are very well structured the structure of them hundreds of years ago looks pretty much the same as they look now and they act in a pool of other all the conspiracy theorists tend to get together and they work on the conspiracy theory and they create little permutations of it and they develop it over a long period of time and that's one that's one way we know how something is a conspiracy theory or not to see i think just the same can you can you briefly strip it down if you see these and this and this in that story it's a conspiracy theory that family her and stripped down will be a small group of generally secretive people and that they're pulling the strings of various problems of the causing various problems in society that's the basic narrative. early respect to make west here is a return investigate and deep bunker conspiracy theories and we talk to you about see what do we do if conspiracy theories are right now not strange then mainstream

and being. this miss his suggest. i think the 3 aspects to helping people are down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole in the 1st one is just to keep talking to people and try to understand what they believe and why they believe it and try to keep it polite and respectful without necessarily agreeing with and make sure they understand that you have good intentions here the 2nd is to give people useful information show them where they are wrong show them things that made a mess and show the broader context that is useful and thirdly you need to give it time new can't expect it to work straight away you've got to get it i might say daisy daisy might take weeks but you can actually help people out spencer did you manage to convince people that you were not anti fair and that you hadn't still the capital. well i think i convinced my friends but no i don't think i convinced very many people about it maybe when i read

a story in the daily beast about it and maybe one or 2 people saw that and were no longer convinced but the conspiracy theory actually spread on i became a cia agent and i became arrested so people not just didn't you know not just abandon the belief but they developed it further wow messy i know this is what the you were doing some of it upfront and some of the is behind the scenes about what to do when conspiracy theories become mainstream share something yes yes absolutely i think what that one of the issues that's at play and in spencer story is how once this once this happens and it goes viral in many cases it's too late you know the pain and suffering has already like harmed you know maybe not spencer directly but others and so my entire advocacy at this time is to ensure that our technology companies also serve the public interest because they

are monetizing our political lives i mean people go to twitter and facebook and youtube and so on to get all their information to get their news to communicate with one another but of those technologies are completely polarizing us because of because they are not trying to polarize us on it as an intentional design strategy but they are designed to optimize to keep our attention and glue a scent which is ending up polarizing the larger environment so if you're making money out of people's personal intimate political even kind of behavioral lives and you're not dedicated to some public principles of accountability and i would also argue regular regulation down you are actually harming society in a deep way and i believe that folks in the technology world. need to come to the table in a real way to have real collaborative real collaboration and regulation occur and

that's what i've been kind of hustling behind the scenes you know i've been trying to do everything i can to write about this but i guess my goal is not to vilify anybody even those that might even create these conspiracy theories based on their feelings of alienation my goal is collective empathy and for us to all come together in the idea of a real democracy where we have different opinions we have different views we have different backgrounds and our media support that and i believe that technology companies which are the wealthiest companies in the history of the world can still do plenty well if they adhere to some elements of democratic and public interest well phil i wanted to bring in tack on the station so most of the end not what i want to face which is break you are looking at shands concerned see theories or fake news misinformation the most it tends to be people who are assessing needs c.d.'s perhaps if we spent more time with asked seniors and talked to them unpacked on days that would make

a difference now yeah. so one of the things that could make a huge difference in terms of preventing our older family and friends coworkers from sharing rescued from a nation what and all things like. helping them to understand why these you know content algorithms are high and the content. what does a share and i am eyes agree matt it's not clear that older users understand all of i do think it's very meaningful and important and. impactful to have those conversations or gold or people are right. what's today's conversation has proven to me spencer mash and melodies that people now are talking about conspiracy theories we do any tile we come to and i'm sure people wouldn't be bored chivas thank you for sharing your conspiracy theory it could be any time you're allowed to do it spreads and not. packing what is going on one night was convinced

it's risk of becoming so popular and this is the invitation at 1st sight when you see him next time that's what you like. the health of humanity is at stake a global pandemic requires a global response. w.h.o. is the guardian of global health delivering lifesaving tools supplies and training to help the world's most vulnerable people uniting across borders to speed up the development of test treatments and a vaccine keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the wood and in the lab now more than ever the world needs w.h.o. making a healthier world for you. that everyone. feels

and for me to the point is good because the renowned for their courage on the far. one i want to east finds out what it takes to join the elite brigade. on al-jazeera . anti fascist anti establishment and. despite the recent official disbanding of its militarized wing a basque separatist movement just found alive and well on the terraces of the bill found stadium. a place where political revolutionaries share a platform an ideology with football hooligans. read all death on al-jazeera.

al-jazeera. every. where the health system overstretched and almost collapsing brazil's covered 19 vaccination campaign finally gets underway. they are watching al-jazeera live from doha with me fully back also ahead the world health organization's independent panel criticizes china's handling of the coronavirus saying more could have been done to contain the outbreak. 18 days prime minister just epic on day 5 to save his government does a vote of confidence is about to be held in the senate and a court in thailand sentences this woman to

a record 43 year prison sentence for insulting the king.